THE OBSTRUCTIONISTS

Once again, California lost out in its bid to win a share of the $4.35 billion in federal education grants under the competitive Race to the Top program. Several of those involved say that, despite what has been announced in public, it was the state’s biggest teachers’ unions failure to cooperate that ultimately sank California’s chances.

Race to the Top requires states to demonstrate that they are making large strides in instituting aggressive education reform in order to be eligible for the money. Had it been chosen, California stood to get as much as $700 million. LAUSD alone would have gotten around $120 million of that money.

Race to the Top’s admitted strategy has been to use the carrot of federal $$ to break through the logjam of politics that often keep states from reforming their failing educational systems.

California is a prime example of why the ploy is needed. We have bottom-feeding test scores, a lousy drop out rate, yet for several decades we have been hog-tied by special interests, and partisan wrangling, any time real reform is proposed.

On Tuesday morning, when state education officials got the bad news that California was not selected to get the grants, the reason why was portrayed as fairly simple, as someone close to the process explained to me.

“They said, ‘You don’t have the union buy-in, and we don’t feel you’re going to get it.”

In fact, just one-third of the active unions in the state signed on to California’s Race to the Top application. Neither of the state-wide teachers’ unions participated. The most notable and likely the most damaging regional hold out was UTLA—the union that represents the teachers of LAUSD, the nation’s second largest school district.

The issue of Race to the Top was so contentious an issue in the state’s education circles that for a while California wasn’t even going to apply for the second funding round. But Secretary of Education Arnie Duncan reportedly made a special plea to Governor Schwarzenegger to go for it.

And so the state gave it the best shot they could, given the political limitations, as Howard Blume reported for the LA Times:

The California superintendents told evaluators that they thought they could bring local unions on board, and, if they could not, they were prepared to return federal dollars accordingly. L.A. Unified has moved on that front in the last few days, with union officials signaling a willingness to negotiate over the possible inclusion of test scores as part of a reshaped, multifaceted teacher evaluation.

California’s plan focused on strategies favored by the Obama administration, such as placing the most effective educators in struggling schools and improving instruction through the improved use of data.

The state blueprint also embraced the federal endorsement of aggressive remedies, such as replacing the staff at a poorly performing school and converting it to an independently run charter school. Most charters schools are non-union, another arena of discomfort for teacher unions.

But the evaluators simply didn’t believe the state’s hopeful promise that the unions would jump aboard later, if California got the money. The official message was that the union non-participation was not the deal breaker. But in less public communication, said an insider, state officials heard that UTLA and CTA’s refusal to play ball effectively torpedoed the state’s application.

“We heard over and over again, that we had to have union buy-in,” said the insider. “And, at the end of the day, we didn’t have it.”

The fact that right before the selections, UTLA’s A.J. Duffy had such a loud and public fight with the LA Times over the Times’ series on value-added teacher evaluations, likely did not help matters, the insider added. “We keep having all these fights on the national stage. That isn’t exactly lost on the people in D.C.”

“I have always said that this race was not just about the money” said Senate Education Chair, Gloria Romero in her statement following the news. “It was about a vision for public education that is best for our children. The status quo is entrenched in our public school system. We made Herculean strides to even be able to compete and I am proud that we did not abdicate on this responsibility. But the Obama Administration’s decision today demonstrates that we need to demand even bolder changes in order to enter a new era of education renaissance in California.”

That’s a nice way of putting it.

EDITOR’S NOTE: I was glad to see the LA Times’ analysis of teacher performance published Sunday morning (led by Times education writers Jason Felch and Jason Song), and was deeply annoyed by the angry posturing and threats from UTLA prez, A.J. Duffy in response to it.

But, as Monday wore on, I heard from an increasing number of teachers who objected to the Times’ methodology in a big way, and were particularly horrified when one of the low-rated teachers was pictured in the article as he taught.

Among the angry educators I heard from was my friend, novelist/teacher and WitnessLA contributor, Dennis Danziger—whose opinion I respect a great deal (even if we occasionally disagree on a few of the finer points of school reform—and school reformers).

Danziger’s point of view on the Times’ analysis seems to be representative of that of a lot of devoted teachers, thus is important to hear. After all, these are the talented men and women in the trenches with LA’s kids. In other words, they are the experts.

Okay, here’s Dennis (and he’s pretty mad at his hometown newspaper):

The LA Times Blame Game

by Dennis Danziger

Ahh, the LA Times, a newspaper that for the past few decades keeps losing readership, firing staff and being fumbled from one ineffective owner to another has found a group to look down upon: incompetent public school teachers.

And who better to point out failure than a newspaper whose readership is about half of what it was in the 1990s? Who better to examine the LAUSD’s failures than The Times whose parent company filed for bankruptcy in 2008 when they were carrying a debt load in the billions?

The Times knows failure. And with those credentials why not believe them when they jump on the President Obama, Secretary Duncan, Mayor Villaraigosa bandwagon and simplify the failure of America’s public school crisis to this: it’s all the fault of bad teachers.

It’s not class size. It’s not the economy. It’s not hunger. Or broken homes. Or kids who come to school from foster homes. Or kids who barely come to school at all. It’s not living in violent neighborhoods. It’s not screwed up parents. It’s not limousine liberals, religious fanatics, wacko home schooling parents, and your every day racists who bailed out of the public schools decades ago. No. It’s none of that. It’s all about those bad LAUSD teachers and their oh-so-powerful unions who protect the rotten apples among them.

I’m an LAUSD teacher, an 18-year veteran, and I want The Times to know that they can count me in when it comes to hiring energetic young teachers and booting out the old, ineffective ones.

I’m all for streamlining the firing process to rid our classrooms of crummy teachers.

I’m all for rewarding tenure after seven years instead of two.

I’d even support our mayor taking over not just a handful of schools but every school in the District.

Heck, I’m even for merit pay.

There’s just one thing I want to know, and that is this:

What system would The Times and our educational reformers use to prove which teachers make the grade and which don’t?

A standardized test and nothing else? That seems to be their sole measurement.

And, honestly, that’s what worries me.

Let’s use me as an example.

For 14 years, from 1995 – 2008, I taught English at Palisades Charter High School; in those years it was an LAUSD school. This past June I attended PCHS’ graduation where I saw many of my former 10th grade honors English students cross the stage. Those kids, come fall, will be attending Wellesley, Vassar, Sarah Lawrence, Kenyon, University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin (two on full academic scholarships), USC (a full academic scholarship), Wake Forest, Tufts, UCLA and UC-Berkeley.

Trust me, these kids are bright and know how to bubble in the correct answers. I’ve seen them do it.

One week earlier I attended graduation at Venice High School where I have been teaching for the past two years. Of the 87 students crammed into my two classes of senior English this past semester, 29 did not graduate because they just quit coming to my class; another nine didn’t graduate because they didn’t do enough work.

Of these 87 kids, 38 didn’t graduate, and few of these kids test nearly so well on standardized tests as did my former students. I’m pretty sure at least part of the reason is because some of my students at Venice HS and their parents do not consider regular attendance in school a high priority.
But here’s what I need to know from The Times and their education reformer consultants:

Am I a brilliant teacher who inspired and shepherded my students into some of our nation’s most prestigious colleges?

Or am I a lug, deadwood, a card-carrying AARP and UTLA member whose teaching style is so ineffective my students drop out by the busload?

Oh yeah, there is this: Last May, within a three-day period, one of my current students at Venice High won a prestigious city wide creative writing contest and a $1,000 college scholarship; while two of my former VHS students were sentenced to jail. One convicted of armed robbery (13 years) and another for attempted murder (22 years).

So what is it, LA Times? I’m dying to know if I’m in line to be lauded and receive merit pay or if I’m the next guy whose picture will be featured on your front page with the word: INCOMPETENT emblazoned beneath my photo.

SHOULD OBAMA VETO SCHOOLS FUNDING BILL IF RACE-TO-THE-TOP $$ ARE SNIPPED?

In its Monday editorial, the LA Times says: NO.

But I’m not so sure. I think it’s a mistake to begin nicking away at Race to the Top, which is successfully incentivizing education reform in a way that is desperately needed.

On the other hand, the Times has a point in saying that the cuts are not even close to fatal to Race to the Top so, in essence, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, fiscally speaking.

On the other, other hand, Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said that the administration understands the need for cuts, but that these aren’t the right cuts. So he wants Congress to go back to the….you know...chalk board—or whatever it is one goes back to these days.

In any case, we’ll see how this game of legislative chicken plays out as the Congress returns from its 4th of July break.

MEANWHILE, THE OTHER BIG MONEY PLAYER IN EDUCATION FUNDING IS PUSHING FOR SIMILAR REFORMS AND SOME PEOPLE DON’T LIKE IT

Monday’s Washington Post has an article on the influence of the Gates Foundation on education. The Gates folks, writes the WaPo, use their grant giving capabilities as a way to push many of the same education reforms that the Obama administration favors and some critics think that Gates and company have too much power and too little understanding of how education works.

The biggest critic is education historian, Diane Ravitch, who writes in her bestselling, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,’’ that Gates and people like LA’s Eli Broad, and their “current obsession with making our schools work like a business, threatens to destroy public education.’’

Yes, well, business-as-usual was already doing a pretty good job of it.

Stay tuned.

I’ve been meaning to mention this….

From now until June 15, Taco Bell and the Mark Wahlberg Youth Foundation will be raising money for programs that lower the youth school drop out rate—-as part of a two year partnership.

Since one in three American kids don’t graduate, the issue needs all the help it can get..

Wahlberg was a dropout and up to no good himself before he found a focus in music then acting. He says he knows how crucial mentorship can be for a kid who is floundering.

Yep, we’ll cosign on that.

And speaking of help and mentorship, if we can just get the Taco Bell folks and Mr. Wahlberg to also put some of their fundraising muscle behind Homeboy Industries.

How about it guys?

Here is The Filter’s full show, which features interviews with Carly Fiorina and Tom Campbell among other elections-related segments. (Did you know that Tom Campbell was okay with gay marriage because he’s “anti big government?” No? I didn’t either. Logical consistency in the realm of politics is startling wherever you find it.)

In any case, VOTE!

And, whatever your leaning—right, left, or center—I urge you to strongly consider voting for Gloria Romero for CA Superintendent of Public Instruction.

I’m genuinely shocked that the LA Times has chosen to recommend a career school district bureaucrat over reformer Romero. (Bad LAT, no cookie!!)

Okay, as promised, here’s your print out-ready voter guide:

WITNESSLA’S JUNE 2010 ELECTIONS RECOMMENDATIONS

PROPOSITIONS

13 – YES
14 – YES
15 – YES
16 – NO
17 – NO

---

CANDIDATES

Governor:

Dem: Jerry Brown
Repub: Steve Poizner

Lieutenant Governor:

Dem: Gavin Newsom
Repub: Albert Maldonado

Attorney General:

Dem: Kamala Harris
Repub: Steve Cooley
(or John Eastman if you want a good protest vote.)

Insurance Commissioner:

Dem: Dave Jones or Hector de La Torre.

(I’m going for Jones. But they’re both good)

Repub: Mike Villines

State Superintendent of Public instruction:

Gloria Romero. Period.

JUDGES

Judicial: Office 28 – Mark Ameli or Randy Hammock (Both are good. I’m voting for Hammock.)
Office 35: Soussan Bruguera
Office 73: Laura Matz
Office 107: Stephen Bolinger
Office 117: Alan Scheider
Office 131: Maren Elizabeth Nelson

MEASURE E - NO (see below)

UPDATE: it has come to my attention that I neglected to post about LAUSD’s Measure E.

Here’s the deal: Measure E is a limited parcel tax that will, for the next four years, impose a $100 tax per parcel per year on all property owners in the areas that LAUSD covers.

If passed, LAUSD expects to raise around $93 million per year from the measure.

All well and good. We know the district is in terrible trouble, what with all the state budget cuts and all. How great that we can help it out and get more teachers rehired, more art programs kept in place, more librarians saved from layoffs, right?

Well, maybe. However when asked directly what they intend to do with the funds, LAUSD honchos have been remarkably un-forthcoming.

This past semester a student of mine spent quite a lot of time trying to get someone—anyone—at LAUSD to tell her how the money would be spent. She’s a smart reporter and was quite resourceful and persistent in bugging administrators and board members. But, in the end, all anyone was willing to say amounted to little more than “trust us, we know how to spend it.”

Others have tried as well and have gotten from Superintendent Ray Cortines only that out of the $93 million that the measure will raise yearly, $27 million of that will go to neighborhood schools to save teachers, librarians etc.

Well I did the math, and if the $27 mill is divided between all the district’s schools, that’s $40,000 per school, which isn’t enough to do much. You can maybe hire one teacher’s aide.

As for where the other $66 million would go, the district has turned on its vague-ifiers. It would be used for “programs.”

Right.

Right now my thinking is as follows: until LAUSD can tell us that it is going to use our money for something other than yo no se que, I’m reluctant to hand over any $100 per parcel.

Maybe by the the time I vote I’ll be in a better mood about all this. But for now, I’m voting NO.

How are you voting?

In 2007, the Los Angeles Urban League began a project that, in theory anyway, is exactly what LA needs.

The Urban League’s idea is to fundamentally transform the 70-block neighborhood surrounding the campus of Crenshaw High School.

The center of the transformation is to be the high school itself. But there is much more to the concept. One could say that the larger purpose is to recalibrate the educational outcomes for Crenshaw’s students by remaking the ecology of the community itself.

The notion that a host of social ills—failing schools, gang violence, public health challenges, unemployment, lack of low-cost housing, prison reentry—should best be viewed and solved, not separately, but as pieces of an interdependent system, is a concept that has been gaining currency over the last decade.

However, the ecological theory of community problem solving is one thing; putting it successfully into action is quite another.

Geoffrey Canada’s now famous 100 block Harlem’s Children’s Zone is the best known example of the concept in action.

The Urban League is trying it’s own version—the hope being that, if their model is successful, it can be replicated around the city, and beyond.

Three years into the project, the staff of Annenberg’s Neon Tommy has done a multi-faceted interim assessment of progress made. The Neon Tommy reporters ask what has been achieved? What remains to be done? Overall, how well is the project working?

Neon Tommy gives the Urban League’s Neighborhoods@Work endeavor mixed reviews. But the news is not altogether unpromising.

To give you a small taste of some of the anecdotal stories in the package, here is an excerpt from an article by NT’s Olga Khazan, who examines how Crenshaw students and teachers manage to achieve despite high levels of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder among both the student and the faculty population.

(Olga’s video above features Raheem Giddens from Crenshaw High.)

During a mid-morning break between classes at Crenshaw High School, a senior named Patricia was showing Sybel Stanley pictures of a prom dress on her phone. Earlier in the week, another girl at the school had told her friends that the dress in question, clearly a store-bought number, had been special-made for her by a designer. Patricia was speaking in the outraged tone of a sassy high schooler-cum-prosecutor, and Stanley, whether in earnest or in a convincing show of support, was shocked as well.

“Well, would you look at that,” Stanley said. Sybel Stanley is a parent-resource coordinator at Crenshaw, which essentially means she makes sure students are doing well enough at home to do well enough at school. Her round frame barely breaks 5 feet, and she has a gap-toothed grin that she’s quick to flash anyone who needs it.

“She’s gonna show up at the prom, and someone else is gonna have her same dress on!” Patricia said. Patricia’s bobbed black hair is straightened and pulled back in a pink headband that matches her shirt. Everything about her appearance is carefully coordinated, from her purse to her phone cover.

“I mean, it’s a dress. Why would you lie about that?” she concluded emphatically. After all, nothing is sacred in high school if not prom.

“Well, you know how tight money is for everyone these days,” Stanley said.

Suddenly Patricia remembered something on a more serious note.

“Oh Granny, you don’t even know,” Patricia said. “My momma broke down this morning.”

Patricia, like many of her Crenshaw peers, was accepted to college. But her mom, like many Crenshaw moms, was having trouble paying her initial deposit. That morning Patricia was faced with the reality of the financial pressures when she saw her mother crying….

Read on.

Then read wonderful articles by Neon Tommy editor,Callie Schweitzer, and Andrew Khouri and Shirin Parsavand and Catherine Cloutier and LeTania Kirkland.

It’s all very good stuff. Enjoy!

And a big thank you to Neon Tommy for doing an important series of stories that most other major LA news outlets have somehow managed to ignore.

I was on NBC’s The Filter on Wednesday night. As usual, we talked very speedily about a list of interesting issues:

1. The first and the silliest had to do with a giant kerfuffle involving a couple of seniors at Paramount High School, both of them guys, who, when they were onstage for a school event, suddenly decided to doff their clothes and dance about in their undies, or what turned out to be Speedos, to the delight of fellow students. When the video of said dance turned up on YouTube and got a zillion hits (it’s since been taken down), then the school board freaked out and began disciplining the stripping boys and the adults who were present but did not intervene. Three students were suspended for a couple of days. One school administrator was put on administrative leave. A teacher resigned and there is an ongoing “investigation” about the incident. An overreaction? Y’think?

2. The second topic was also school related. Santa Ana College will dedicate a scholarship for undocumented immigrant students in memory of 27-year-old immigration activist named Tam Ngoc Tran who was killed in a car crash. Tran was an outstanding young woman by anybody’s standards. She graduated from UCLA and was headed to Brown to get her doctorate, was an activist for the Dream Act (she testified before Congress). But she was in the US illegally. The child of Vietnamese parents, she was brought to this country at age six.

I thought the scholarship was a fine idea for reasons that I articulate on camera. As you will see, however, my co-commenter, Megan Barth, who works and blogs at RedCounty.com, was not in the least enthusiastic.

3. Topic three was expungement. The Filter producers liked Wednesday’s post on WLA so decided that it merited further discussion. And so discuss it we did.

But then came a perfectly appalling moment in the show.

It seems that, on Wednesday, MSNBC ran a list of questions that would be new Americans are asked on their citizenship exams. Wouldn’t it be fun……Fred Roggin and the show’s producers thought….if we asked Megan and Celeste a few of those questions.

So they did. With no advance warning. On live television.

Now please understand that while I have as wide a base of knowledge in certain areas as the next person, maybe even wider than the next person in some areas, I am not the person you want on your team for trivial pursuit. Really. I would be your last draft choice.

Charades are fairly okay with me, as long as the answers involve only movies and books (and as long as said charades are not on, you know, live television).

But, back me into a corner on something that requires a quick one-word factual answer, and my brain is likely to lock all the doors, pull every blind, arm the burglar alarm and decline to come out, no matter how much I plead with it.

I also hate games.

“It’ll be fun!” said Fred.

(Whenever anybody says, “it’ll be fun,” you know for sure that it’ll be anything but.)

In any case, here’s the video of our “fun” Citizenship game.

It used to be that it was conservatives who railed about public schools— asking for vouchers, wanting to break up big unwieldy districts, furious at the teachers’ unions.

They didn’t really get anywhere.

But in the last few years another kind of push for reform is starting to smash through the calcification that has put US student performance in the bottom third of developed nations. And those doing the pushing are a loose coalition of progressive reformers, high profile charter school founders, like Green Dot’s Steve Barr, a few big, adventurous philanthropists like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and others like Teach for America’s founder, Wendy Kopp, the New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein—and the Obama Administration’s Arne Duncan.

(A list of conservatives are on board too.)

One of the things the reformers want in this movement spreading across the country, reports Steven Brill in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, is “to hold public-school teachers accountable by compensating, promoting or even removing them according to the results they produce in class, as measured in part by student test scores.”

What reformers have come to believe matters most is good teachers. “It’s all about the talent,” says Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan.

However, America’s teachers unions, long the stalwart base of the Democratic party, are the main opposition to such reforms.

For instance, Brill writes:

In Tennessee, Gov. Phil Bredesen, also a Democrat, pushed the Legislature to pass laws allowing more charter schools and making student test scores 50 percent of annual teacher evaluations. The statewide teachers’ union ended up supporting both bills.

Bredesen explained the new politics of education in his state this way: “For me there’s a little bit of a ‘Nixon goes to China’ feel about it, because I had done a lot of things that teachers were quite happy with over the years. My argument to them was that this is coming from a Democratic administration. This is not a Republican idea anymore. I told them that I know this goes at the core of what you and your colleagues have been protecting over the years,” Bredesen continued, referring to how he broached the subject of teachers being evaluated and paid based on individual performance ratings. “But now, we’re all going to have to evolve. It’s coming, and you can either help to structure it, or you can fight it, and it won’t be as good.”

Read the rest. It’s one of the best stories I’ve read in some time on the education reform that has exploded in proportion and influence in the last five years. I think you’ll find it worth your time.

Hi Freshman! Welcome to the University! Now give us your DNA!

Usually, UC Berkeley helps induce a bonding experience between the members of its freshman class by having them all read the same book.

But that’s just so dead tree-based.

So this coming fall, in order to foster a sense of communality, Berkeley is asking its incoming students to swab up and hand over some samples of their DNA. (I mean how cool and bond-y is that!)

The DNA fork over is voluntary, of course.

Once the confidential (and voluntary) DNA sample is sent in and tested, KTVU.com reports that the results will “show the student’s ability to tolerate alcohol, absorb folic acid and metabolize lactose.”

(Oh, okay, they’ve got a point there. Testing one’s alcohol tolerance is indeed a time-honored form of freshman bonding. Can’t say as much for that that folic acid thingy though.)

Look, privacy is a thing of the past. We get that. And the university folks say the IDs of the students will be protected. (And I’m sure that database could never be hacked.)

But, at the risk of sounding boringly Luddite-ish, could the already suspect UC administrators possibly have found a more intrusively creepy way to say Welcome to Berkeley?”

I’m just sayin’.

Here’s what Discover Magazine and the NY Times have to say on the matter.

When LA Times writer Joe Mozingo came to guest lecture at my Annenberg class last fall, he mentioned that, for months, between other assignments, he’d been working somewhat obsessively on a story about his personal heritage. Joe had taken it into his head to find out the origin of his last name, Mozingo, which his dad had always told him was Italian.

The search seemed fine as a personal journey but not terrible promising as a work of journalism.

But then Joe told us some of the rest of the story—like his discovery of the part of the family history that had long been deliberately buried, and that some branches of the family were not delighted to see uncovered.

The result is a terrific three-part series that began on Sunday, with additional parts Monday and Tuesday.

(My bet is that it will be up for prizes come next awards season.)

Here’s a clip from the beginning to give you the flavor.

I set out last year to learn our story, traveling from the Tidewater of Virginia to the hollows of Kentucky and southeastern Indiana and beyond. At times, I struggled to absorb what I was finding, and I met Mozingos who were skeptical of it, or ambivalent, or fiercely resistant.

I learned that our early ancestry reflected not so much a quirk of American history as the messy start of it, seeding a furious internal conflict that continues today.

With us, the whole battle was embodied in a family — and a name.

Read on.

NEW REPORT SAYS JAILS & PRISONS ARE AMERICA’S MAIN PSYCH HOSPITALS

The National Sheriff’s Association along with the Treatment Advocacy Center has just released a report showing that Americans with severe mental illnesses are three times more likely to be in jail or prison than in a psychiatric hospital, according to “More Mentally Ill Persons Are in Jails and Prisons Than Hospitals: A Survey of the States.”

“America’s jails and prisons have once again become our mental hospitals,” said James Pavle, executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit dedicated to removing barriers to timely and effective treatment of severe mental illnesses. “With minimal exception, incarceration has replaced hospitalization for thousands of individuals in every single state.”

The odds of a seriously mentally ill individual being imprisoned rather than hospitalized are 3.2 to 1, state data shows. The report compares statistics from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Bureau of Justice Statistics collected during 2004 and 2005, respectively. The report also found a very strong correlation between those states that have more mentally ill persons in jails and prisons and those states that are spending less money on mental health services.

Of course we already know that LA County jail is the largest mental health facility in the U.S. But evidently the trend is not limited to our fair state.

THOUSANDS OF CHILD ABUSE REPORTS IN LA GO UNINVESTIGATED

The LA Times’ Garrett Therolf reports that DCFS-–the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services—has a backlog of more than 18,000 tips of child abuse that have not been investigated within the mandated 30 days, leaving children potentially dangerously at risk.

Read the rest here.

WHO CAUSED THE GULF OIL SPILL DISASTER?

Two segments on Sunday’s 60 Minutes were devoted to the catastrophic oil rig explosion in the gulf, that killed 11, causing the ongoing oil leak in the waters off of Louisiana. The story centers around the experiences of a crewmember on the rig Deepwater Horizon and his account of how the disaster had been building for weeks in a series of mishaps—yet that BP management adamantly declined to act.

60 Minutes also reported they have learned from a second BP insider, who said that there is a new worry about another BP facility in the Gulf, the platform “Atlantis,” which the insider is said—if certain safety fixes are not made— is a far greater threat than the Deepwater Horizon.

Watch the video.

Read the transcript.

Photo by Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times