In case you missed Steve Lopez’s column yesterday, it’s a good one. Here’s how it began:

“What is it?” Kelly Charles asked as he walked to his job as a custodian in downtown Los Angeles and gazed up at a rather odd construction project. “A roller coaster?”

As I wandered the neighborhood, other guesses were:

A ski jump.

A toboggan run.

A water slide.

What’s got everyone talking is the odd-looking tower that rises 140 feet above the 101 Freeway, directly across from the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. The futuristic metallic edifice, with a wraparound spiral Dr. Seuss would love, is not part of a theme park. It is the signature adornment on a new arts-oriented public high school that will cost roughly $230 million.

(Most everyone I know guessed an escaped ride from Six Flags Magic Mountain.)

Evidently the high school was going to be an ordinary campus until Eli Broad decided it should be a state of the art design monument, as the Times and the Daily News reported in 2003. To that end, Broad hooked the district up with his friend the $800,000 designer. And pretty soon the water slide wonder tower (or whatever) was in the works.

All of this would have been fine if Eli was footing some of the bill. But he wasn’t. (He offered to loan the district some money, which is not exactly the help that was needed.)

Still, way back then the Superintendent Roy Romer said that the school would still just cost the approved $73.2 million.

And then the cost ballooned to $230 million.

The tower rises from a 950-seat performing arts theater, and this part of the project alone is priced at $49 million, writes Lopez.

Soooo-o-o-o-o-o. in an era when neighborhood schools are badly in need of repair, classes are catastrophically overcrowded, and the state is planning to slash 10 percent out of public education across the board, the district is spending an extra $100 million for this fancy design?

This is not giving us confidence in the Sup and the LAUSD board. Priorities, people!

As Lopez points out, the toboggan run school design boondoggle is not David Brewer’s doing. But he has done nothing to fix or ameliorate the situation.


Calling Ray Cortines. We are ready for some sane and sensible leadership.

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Yesterday, another horrifying report came out about urban graduation rates. This particular report, put out by a Washington DC-based nonprofit named America’s Promise Alliance, looks at the graduation rates for the main school districts in America’s 50 largest cities and finds that only half of our kids are managing to get diplomas.

As bad as that 50 percent figure is, it is the average—-meaning that, for a lot of urban school districts, the graduation rate is much, much lower.

For instance, LAUSD comes in 9th from the bottom out of the 50 with a graduation rate of 45.3 percent, according to the study. (Here’s the LA Times take.)

And for all those about to scream that our nation’s schools are going to hell in a hand-basket because of illegal immigration, don’t bother. Out of the 50 cities, the top of the heap in terms of graduation rates is Mesa, Arizona, a city with immigration issues up the wazoo. Nonetheless, Mesa’s biggest urban district is graduating 77.1 percent of its kids, as compared with Detroit, which graduates…..(honestly, it’s hard to believe I’m reading this right)….24.9 percent. In other words, three-quarters of Detroit’s kids drop out of school between 9th grade and graduation.

Good lord.

The bottom ten are, in descending order:

Oakland - 45.6
Los Angeles - 45.3
New York 45.2
Dallas -44.4
Minneapolis - 43.7
Columbus - 40.9
Baltimore - 34.6
Cleveland - 34.1
Indianapolis - 30.5
Detroit - 24.9

In all the cities mentioned, suburban school districts in the same area seems to do almost twice as well as their urban counterparts.

America’s Promise Alliance is an interesting organization. Its Board of Directors is led by, among other people, Colin Powell and his wife Alma Powell.

The stated purpose of the AP Alliance is to focus attention on what they call the Five Promises that kids need if they are to be successful in life. They are:

Caring Adults, Safe Places, A Healthy Start, Effective Education, Opportunities to Help Others (A good, balanced list, I thought.)

The APA folks go on to cite figures showing how many American children and adolescents do not have these five needs met.

For instance, according to the APA:

Between one-fourth and one-third of all young people “never” or only “sometimes” feel safe at school and in their communities.

More than 40% of young people ages 8-21 say they want more adults in their lives to whom they can turn for help.

Interestingly, 94 percent of young people want to help make the world a better place, but only 50 percent see a way to do so.

There’s more and it’s worth checking out. We simply can’t talk about these issues too much.

PS: Yesterday, NPR had a worthwhile discussion (about the graduation study and the No Child Left Behind policy) that featured my favorite education blogger, Andy Rotherdam of eduwonk.

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FINALLY….SOME GOOD NEWS

Yesterday I was critical of what appeared to be one more gang report, this one ordered by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. Like most gang policy watchers—I’d reached a state of near apoplexy regarding the plethora of expensive reports, and the absolute dearth of real action resulting from them. Thus I found the idea of one more plan/report/audit entirely maddening.

But after I posted I got an email from attorney Susan Lee from the Advancement Project who told me very nicely that I’d gotten it wrong. This wasn’t just another report at all, Lee wrote, but a set of specific recommendations designed to get LA County to actually take some of the steps that we’ve be clamoring for.

Here’s the deal: One of the things that all the previous reports have made clear is that the only long term solution to LA’s gang violence is to change the community ecology in which the gangs exist. To put it another way, if we really want to get the upper hand on gang violence in a given area we have to change everything: the schools, access to services, the mental and emotional health of the families, the neighborhood. And we have to add new elements to the mix: mentoring, jobs, parenting classes, mental health treatment, youth development sites that feature recreation, arts, job training, and sports….and on and on.

Do we have the money or the organizational wherewithal to make those kinds of changes in LA’s poorest and most gang-fraught communities? Of course not. At least, not right now. (We can’t manage to get our urban schools to work. for God’s sake.)

BUT, what we can do-–as Susan pointed out when we talked later in the afternoon—is to “lay the tracks” for such an endeavor, and from there make changes by increments, but with an uber strategy in mind—instead of the ineffective piecemeal chaos we’ve got now. (That last was my phrasing, not hers.)

It sounds daunting. Okay, it is daunting. But the County plan awaiting approval is designed to pick out several “demonstration sites,” do a comprehensive “needs assessment” in those communities, and then get to work. Once the Board of Sups gives the go-ahead, the ball will begin rolling.

The idea is not without precedent. Probably the closest existing analogue is the Harlem Children’s Zone project in New York which aims to blanket all the kids in a particular low income area with tightly linked services throughout their childhoods into young adulthood, and thus change their ability and opportunity to succeed.

There will be no overnight miracles. This is an in-it-for-the-long-haul deal. And, as Susan said, given the fiscal realities, in the next year everybody’ll be mostly be laying track.

One small reason to be hopeful here is the fact that LA’s most essential players have bought in to the plan and have agreed on the broad strokes planning—namely Chief Bratton, Sheriff Baca, LAUSD’s David Brewer, Jeff Carr from the mayor’s office, Connie Rice, plus the big county health agencies and more.

It is also cheering that LA County CEO Bill Fujioka (the former LA City CAO) is the person chosen to integrate the best elements of past reports and form them into plan of action. Fujioka is an extremely smart dude who is very skillful at finding the hidden money lurking in any given budget and “re-prioritizing” it to meet a pressing need.

Alright, here’s the bottom line: While City Hall remains bogged down in turf battles, the main players have clustered around the County figuring it was the place they might cut through the crap and get something going.

With any luck, a month from now, that’s exactly what will happen.

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Now that California’s education budget is sliding toward the abyss, a local activist asks WWFDRD? What would FDR do?
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According to Friday’s San Francisco Chronicle, 10,000 California teachers expect to get pink slips in their mail boxes in the next couple of days warning of layoffs due to the governor’s pending budget cuts that include 10 percent whacked off the state’s education budget.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell painted an even darker picture on Friday by saying that when librarians and other educational support staff are added in, the layoff warnings sent this past Saturday total 20,000.

(Yep. You read right: twenty thousand.)

In Los Angeles, LAUSD’s Sup of Ed, Admiral David Brewer, has promised not to layoff certificated teachers if at all possible, but has sent out layoff notices to 3,000 administrative staff members. (Yeah, we’ve got a bloated administration at Los Angeles Unified but what do you want to bet that it wasn’t the upper level, highly paid folks getting the old heave ho, that it was instead the school psychologists and the college counselors.)

Special ed, music, arts, athletics, library, AP classes, tech classes….and anything else considered an “extra” is likely to take a hit said O’Connell on Friday.

Governor Arnold said that he hoped layoffs would be carried out only under a “worst-case scenario.” In other words, the 20,000 educators getting the layoff warnings, don’t know whether or not they’re really going to lose their jobs. Maybe, yes, maybe no.

Of course, unless the Republicans in the California State legislature agree to raise taxes, the worst case scenario is precisely what will occur this June.

Arnold made the “wost case” remark when he was in Santa Monica on Friday announcing the results of…..and I am not kidding about this….his Governor’s Committee on Educational Excellence Report, a study three years in the making that suggests ways to fix California’s troubled schools.

The report calls for, among other things, an additional $10 billion for education. Instead, our state’s schools have been handed a 4.4 billion dollar cut.

That’s a $14.4 billion discrepancy between what our schools actually need in order to gradually bring them out of the basement of the nation in terms of test scores and graduation rates—and what they’re going to get.

Local education activist, Scott Folsom (who puts out the newsletter and blog 4LAKids) has reacted to California’s latest education agonies and ironies by asking what Franklin Delano Roosevelt would do if faced with our budget shortfalls.

Folsom’s imagined answer is after the jump:

Read the rest of this entry »

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Remember that Assistant principal who made news for his alleged kidnapping and rape of a 13-year-old student at Markham Middle School a week ago?

At first we’d heard that the AP, whose name is Steve Thomas Rooney, had been moved from his previous school administration gig at Fremon High School because he’d pulled a gun on parent.

(Gee, at most jobs I know, pointing a firearm at the client or the client’s parents gets you fired. But, hey, I guess LAUSD is a little more flexible.)

Turns out there was more to that story. When the cops investigated the gun charge, they uncovered evidence that Rooney had been having sexual relations with a 17-year-old student for a YEAR. It was the girl’s (understandably angry) step father who was the object of the alleged gun-waving incident.

Because the girl turned 18 during the investigation and declined to press charges, the whole thing went nowhere—-criminally that is. But Rooney went somewhere. He got transferred to another school. With younger kids.

The LA Times has more:

Los Angeles Unified School District officials declined to comment Wednesday about how Rooney had been reassigned to Markham last fall, saying they are conducting an internal investigation and citing a policy barring them from speaking publicly about cases under those circumstances.

Yeah, I’ll bet they declined to comment.

LAUSD is notorious for their habit of rotating, not firing, their administrative lemons. (Although the Rooney case takes the proverbial cake). For instance, you may remember the issue with the principal at Santee High School whom I reported on here and at the LA Weekly last summer. (He has since been removed). That principal was bounced from school to school after complaints at each of his jobs postings. (And when word got around that I was writing about him, I got a flood of calls and emails from people who’d worked with the guy at other schools, and they told me some pretty damning stories.) But, knowing all this, the district continued to removed him from one school, and just send him to another until he landed at Santee and finally somebody complained to the press (that would be me).

One of Rooney’s colleagues at Fremont High School where he used to work made an interesting point:

“I can’t believe he was put in another school,” said Jenna Washington, Fremont’s magnet coordinator. “It was hard enough for us at Fremont. In South Los Angeles, the district knows a lot of parents are not going to complain. They wouldn’t have placed him in a West Los Angeles school or a Valley school. Or they’d have parents out there picketing.”

Inexcusable.

UPDATE: The ever-excellent Patt Morrison had this to say (among other pithy comments) on today’s Times Opinion blog:

Where have we heard this management technique before? Let me think … oh yes: from the Catholic Church. Priests accused of molesting young parishioners were often transferred from parish to parish, where all they did was … molest more parishioners.

This tactic has cost the Catholic Church hundreds of millions of dollars in payouts, and incalculable damage to the church’s reputation.

Yeah, the LAUSD can sure afford to take those kinds of hits.

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I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog railing about the problems and failures of our public schools in general, and LAUSD in particular.

Writer, radio commentator, and pal, Sandra Tsing Loh, has done something else. Rather than throwing brickbats, she’s doing all she can to make her local schools better. Whenever Sandra speaks or writes on the subject it’s always worth our attention.

On an earlier thread commenter Reg pointed out that there was a new Sandra article in the March issue of the Atlantic Monthly. It wasn’t online at the time, but it is now. Here’s a representative couple of clips:

Beating up on public schools is not just our nation’s favorite blood sport, but also a favorite conversational entertainment of the well-off—like debating the most recent toothsome plot twists of Big Love—who, of course, have no dog in the fight. And who adore a tragic ending. In my Los Angeles, everyone agrees that public education is a bombed-out shell, nonnegotiable, impoverished, unaccountable, run in Spanish. I wept over [Jonathan] Kozol’s books for years, but I myself am no freedom fighter. If I could have afforded either a $1.3 million house in La Cañada or $40,000 a year to send my two girls to a private school (that is, if we’d gotten into said school; I confess that, even though I described my older daughter as “marvelously inquisitive” when we applied, we were wait-listed) I wouldn’t waste two minutes on social justice. Let them spell cake! (Which is to say, let them spell it “kake.”) We tried to flee to the white suburbs, but we failed, and in failing, we seem to have fallen out of the middle class, because today my daughters attend public school with the urban poor….

….Our eldest daughter is the only blonde in her class of 20, her grade being about one-third English-learners.

Read the whole thing.

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The fever among frustrated parents and educators to break free from huge, dysfunctional school districts is not limited to Los Angeles.

In Denver, eighteen principals of eighteen Denver schools have decided screw the centralized system. As an alternative, they intend to try to build an “autonomous school zone” with the idea of tossing overboard the union and district rules they feel are “bureaucratic barriers to improving student achievement,” according to the Denver Post.

Principals from the 18 schools want to create a “zone of innovation,” giving them control over their budget, the educational program in the schools, staffing and incentives.

They want their own human resources department, a budget support office and an enrollment center to help schools balance populations — sending more students to schools with empty classrooms and alleviating crowding in others.

“We’re talking about putting an umbrella out here to make sure our kids get help,” said Ruth Frazier, principal of Greenwood School that serves kindergardeners to eighth-graders. “We’ve come together as a region. . . . This zone is to create a new operating system.

According to a second Denver Post article, several of the schools are making solid progress.

A few weeks ago, the Chicago Tribune reported an equally creative and drastic move in which Chicago officials proposed an overhaul of a cluster of failing schools that involved firing the staffs of eight schools and replace them with better qualified educators. Nay sayers say the move is something of a gamble, that it will require “an almost perfect alignment of stellar principals, committed teachers and re-invigorated curriculum and programs to succeed.”

It’s an enormous gamble. No school district in the nation has yet managed to pull off such a feat.

But, evidently in Chicago the mood of ABTT—Anything’s Better Than This—is winning the day.

We understand. Oh, how we understand.

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FYI: Interestingly, the link to the article about the Denver plan was originally sent to me by Green Dot CEO, Marco Petruzzi, in an email with a subject head that read: The Revolution Spreads.

Yep. Seems so.

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(photo of student at Aurora’s William Smith High by Kathryn Scott Osler, The Denver Post)

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No, this is not one more sneaky pitch for Barack Obama...but there is an old guard versus new guard, past versus future spin to the subject.

While Dem candidates continue to battle for the lead in the neverending presidential primary season, the city’s teachers union, UTLA, is in the midst of its own election fever, which even includes a series of debates, the last of which is tonight.

As expected, incumbent prez A.J. Duffy is running again. But frankly, it’s time for him to go. For one thing, he’s been stubbornly unwilling to play nice with charter schools, despite repeated approaches from Steve Barr’s Green Dot. He has also been notably obstructionist in the face of other innovations that he perceived as threatening the union’s control—which at times seemed to be nearly everything.

Linda Guthrie, the union’s VP who is challenging Duffy for the presidency, is tough, respected but much more willing than Duffy has been to embrace a future featuring cooperation rather than intractability.

In fact Guthrie comes right out and says that she’s in favor of charters, and seems to believe that the best of them are not only healthier for students, but also better for teachers in that they accord instructors more control over what they teach than one generally finds at LAUSD. Guthrie wants the charters to be unionized, of course, but she has a bunch of smart and forward-looking ideas as to how to work out deals with the charter operators.

I know Guthrie, and one of the things I like best about her is her clarity about the fact that it’s the well-being of the students, not just the well-being of the union, that ought to be driving the discussion.

In short, for my money, a vote for Linda Guthrie and her slate is a no brainer.

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In a provocative editorial this morning the LA Times talks about what I’ve been saying for six months, which is the fact that LAUSD is in the midst of a slow motion break-up from within.

But the Times goes much further and suggests that, rather than feeling threatened, maybe the district should make a deal with some of the successful charter school organizations and other outside innovators:

Right now, the district is staggering under multiple burdens. It’s considered a failing district under the No Child Left Behind Act. Its middle schools pass kids along even if they have little grasp of the required material; its high schools are too big and unsafe, and they lack qualified teachers in math and science. Far too many students drop out, and far too many of those remaining get low test scores and graduate unready for work or college. Its disadvantaged students need more resources in a state that spends less money per student than most.

Here’s one possible scenario for the district: Invite charters and other groups to take over your struggling middle and high schools and infuse them with new energy as well as private money. Focus instead on what you do well: educating young children.

Read the rest.

It’s not a bad idea.

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In that I was teaching all day yesterday, education’s on my mind. So while the presidential primary and caucus dramas rage on, take a look at this:

On Thursday, Los Angeles gazillionaire philanthropist, Eli Broad, gave another big chunk of bucks, $23.3 million to be exact, that is to go toward opening seventeen new charter schools in Los Angeles County. Broad has already given over $10 million to the Green Dot Charter schools, and another $6.5 million to another respected charter group. This latest grant brings Broad’s donations to charters to nearly $60 million.

This morning’s LA Times editorial suggests that this newest pile of Broad money is a sign that the loss of faith in the Los Angeles Unified School District’s ability to reform itself has reached a tipping point, and that now LA’s main education reformers are putting their money and efforts elsewhere:

[Broad’s newest money grant] signals to the Los Angeles Unified School District that local education leaders have changed their thinking about the floundering public schools. They’re tired of saying that the time for change is now. Instead, they’re saying the time for change has passed. Having run out of hope for swift reform within L.A. Unified, they’ll make it happen without L.A. Unified.

[SNIP]

….L.A. Unified’s efforts have been so small, and so slow to get going, that the big money has largely been betting elsewhere. Years of ineffective leadership by the school board stymied innovations. The board then fended off Villaraigosa’s effort to govern the schools and hasten the pace of reform. The new, mayor-backed board majority has not yet been the force for reform the district so badly needs. The pace continues to plod.

The union role in this cannot be ignored. Green Dot earlier negotiated with the district on a plan to operate Locke High School as an L.A. Unified charter. Talks fell apart when United Teachers Los Angeles was unwilling to liberalize its work and tenure rules. So, with the support of a teachers’ petition, Green Dot simply took over the school, and now the union loses those positions altogether

PS: On that last point, lets hope that in the upcoming union elections the smart, progressive candidate for UTLA president, Linda Guthrie, is able to wrest the control of the union away from A. J. Duffy and his faction.

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