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.

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.

The New York Times editorial pages are praising a new system for teacher evaluation that the New Haven school system has tentatively worked out in cooperation with The American Federation of Teachers. In other words, unlike, say, UTLA and LAUSD, which appear to get nothing done in this realm, in New Haven the union and the district have stopped squabbling and have, instead, tossed out the old rules and have come up with a new method that everyone seems to think will benefit both students and teachers. (Whatta concept!)

Here’s a clip from what the NY Times had to say:

To improve the quality of schools, districts need a rigorous system for evaluating the quality of teaching — rewarding teachers who do their jobs best and retraining or removing those who fail their students. The city of New Haven and the American Federation of Teachers deserve high praise for the new teacher training and evaluation system they unveiled earlier this week.

[SNIP]

In most schools today, teacher evaluations are not worthy of the name. An administrator typically observes the teacher at work once or twice during the year. Nearly every teacher passes — even at the most dismal schools. Struggling teachers rarely get the help they need to improve. Once they are tenured, it is nearly impossible to dislodge them.

The New Haven system would completely rebuild the evaluation process. Instructional managers, mainly principals and assistant principals, will be assigned to teachers to help them lay out academic goals and development plans. These managers will then meet with the teachers throughout the year to give detailed feedback.

At the end of the year, teachers will receive a rating, on a 1-to-5 scale, based on how much students learn, how well teachers do their jobs and how well they collaborate with colleagues.

There’s lots more so read the rest.

22 LAUSD SCHOOLS GIVEN TO LA TEACHERS TO RUN—HIGH PROFILE CHARTERS COME UP EMPTY

At LAUSD school board meeting Tuesday In a large win for UTLA, the teachers’ union, 22 schools were handed off to the districts’ teachers to reorganize. That was 22 out of the 30 that were that were up for grabs as part of the controversial school choice plan. Three of the 30 were given to the mayor’s group to reorganize and another three were given to charters, with one last school given to some kind of partnership between teachers and charters and—I don’t remember who else..

And a most perplexing decision, three charter school operators were yanked completely out of the mix: the Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools and ICEF Public School—and Green Dot (which only bid for one school). In other words, the charter companies that are best known for their success in running schools in Los Angeles County.

“We missed an opportunity to make bold change today,” the Daily News reported that school board member Yolie Flores said grimly. Flores, who was the one who authored the district’s School Choice plan, was not a happy camper. “Clearly, there is a line of board members that are still beholden to unions. I am beholden to children.”

Howard Blume at the LA Times has the best account of what was evidently a very wild, very woolly day.

Hey, we all hope for the best.

Photo by Brian Vander Brug for the LA Times

On Monday, California lawmakers saw their pay cut by 18 percent. Instead of earning $116,208 a year, they will drop to $95,291.

It was a move that our dear legislators did everything they could to keep from occurring, including pleading with State Attorney General Jerry Brown to declare the cut illegal. (He wisely and correctly declined to do so.)

This brings us to this past Tuesday when the LAUSD board threatened cuts closer to home. The board told the LA’s public school teachers that either 5000 more jobs would be slashed from the district payrolls in the next two years, OR the teachers could take a more than 11 percent drop in pay.

It hardly needs to be said that, if LA’s teachers take the proposed wage hit, they will NOT be grossing $95 grand as their remaining take home.

On the Huffington Post, impassioned Venice High English teacher Dennis Danziger takes a look at the brand new unholy choice of LAUSD cuts from a perspective other than purely fiscal: He sees the cuts as a civil rights issue.

Here, in part, is what he writes:

I stood in a crowd of four or five hundred red-shirted fellow teachers outside Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters near downtown LA late this afternoon. Inside the LAUSD Board was debating, and would later vote on a budget plan which called for a 12% teacher pay cut; plus they’d consider tossing in a few furlough dates just for good measure. All totaled, the package, if approved, would amount to just under a 15% pay cut.

There goes cable TV. Christmas gifts to everyone on my list. The photographer at my daughter’s upcoming wedding. Hand sanitizer. July, August and September rent. Abbot Kinney pizza. The 3,000 mile oil change. Bully sticks for my dogs Leo and Soni. And the land line.

[SNIP]

More disappointing than imagining my shrinking paycheck was the Board’s lone alternative to the proposed pay cuts. In lieu of a pay cut we teachers could vote to have 5,000 LAUSD employees, including 1,400 of our fellow teachers, canned. Kind of a Sophie’s Choice move by the Board. Your money or your colleagues’ jobs. You choose.

This year the LAUSD booted 2,000 teachers off its payroll, and the English classes I teach at Venice HS jumped from 27 students per class in 2008 to 37 students per class this year. Another round of teacher cuts and my classes will be so packed they’ll be in violation of city fire codes. Oh well.

We few hundred protesters milled around in the cold shouting the same old lame union chants: “Enough is enough. Enough is enough.” And the old reliable United Teachers of Los Angeles chant, “U-T-L-A! U-T-L-A!”

Someone with a microphone shouted, “Louder, so they can hear you upstairs!”

Maybe if the 48,000 UTLA members who stayed away from our demonstration had showed up, the people upstairs would have heard our voices. Would have thought twice before threatening our livelihoods, trashing our profession, before threatening to turn a second-rate school district into little more than storage units, holding facilities for the poor. Because that’s what the LAUSD is fast becoming.

Check out the LAUSD website and you’ll learn that over 90% of its students are non-white and the vast majority of them are poor.

So I don’t take the Board’s proposed pay cuts, furloughs and layoffs personally. It’s not that the Board hates teachers. Heck, I figure they could care less about us one way or the other.

This is a civil rights issue. What the Board is doing, if they impose these cuts, is making sure that LA’s poor and working class children don’t stand much of a chance when it comes time to compete for college slots. When it comes time for these kids to enter the workforce.

What the Board will insure if they pass these cuts is that the status quo will prevail. They’ll make sure the tech schools and the military fill their quotas. Make sure there’s another generation of cheap labor. Bus boys, car wash attendants, people who can answer phones, vacuum office floors, deliver pizzas, rake leaves, change diapers, stock shelves and check the oil…..

Read the rest here.

Okay, before we get to the INCREDIBLY STUPID executive bonuses part of the story, first things first:

The LA Times Pressroom employees are holding what they are calling a Rally for Workplace Justice at 11 a.m. today, Monday, February 23, in front of the Los Angeles Times building at First and Spring Streets, downtown.

It seems that the Times’ pressroom folks have been working to unionize for almost three years and have finally ratified a contract this past December.

This rally, they say, was organized to call attention to “… flagrant anti-union tactics that management has used against us…”

In response to us exercising our federally protected rights to organize our pressrooms, management has retaliated by intimidating, unjustly disciplining and spying on union members; demoting union members for supporting the union; and, threatening to lay off 63 full-time pressroom employees, thus potentially creating an unsafe and demoralized work environment.

Our union lawyers have recently filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board requesting that it prosecute the company for using these tactics against the hard-working men and women of our pressrooms.

The press workers release makes it clear that the protest is “not a call for anyone to stop working for, or doing business with, the LA Times.”

But, they said, the “pressroom employees and their families have been through enough!”

**************************************************************************************************************

Now if the pressworkers were not already extremely unhappy at what they see as management’s deliberate attempt to spike their union, there’s this:

As the LA Times makes plans for yet another round of news room and press room layoffs, Ed Padgett at the Pressmen’s blog notes that the Times’ parent corporation, Sam Zell’s Tribune Company (which, lest we forget, is in the midst of bankruptcy reorganization) has just won the right to….I’ll bet you can guess it…..pay executive performance bonuses!

$8.8 million dollars worth of the things.

(Insert sound of hysterical, maybe even dangerous-sounding laughter.)

So, yeah, if you’re anywhere in the vicinity of First and Spring Streets in downtown LA Monday morning, say at around 11 a.m., show the press folks your support.

They deserve it.

Late in the afternoon on Thursday, the Los Angeles Unified School Board voted to put a $7 billion school bond on the November ballot. If the voters pass the bond, the money will be designated to both build new schools and to revamp old schools into smaller, kid-friendlier campuses. It is the largest local school bond in Los Angeles history.

But although the school board members unanimously approved the measure, the response among many of interested parties was not exactly upbeat.

On Wednesday, the Daily News ran a cogent and highly critical editorial stating that, unless the district can better explain why exactly it needs the $7 billion, the voters shouldn’t hand over the money. The DN also pointed out that the LAUSD folks still have quite a bit of money left over from the last building fund.

When some folks balked at such an amorphous goal for so large an amount of cash, school officials came up with a more concrete-sounding plan. Kind of. The bond money, they said, will be for charter schools. A clever pitch, this, since everyone seems to love charter schools and hate the district, which is why thousands of students are abandoning traditional campuses for charters every year.

But even then school officials wouldn’t say how much of that bond money would go to charters. Worse, they would give no written guarantees of anything.

Nevertheless the approval sailed through at around 4:30 p.m. with only a minor amount of pre-vote wrangling. Of the $7 billion, the board voted to give charter schools $450 million or around 6.4 percent. (This was up from the $300 million proposed earlier.)

So were people happy with the outcome? I asked some of the key players what they thought of the vote. Here are their reactions:

A.J DUFFY, UTLA President

“I’m never happy about money going to charter schools. I don’t think voters are going to like it either. This is essentially going to hit homeowners who are about to lose their homes. People are hurting. I think they’re going to look for any excuse to vote it down.”

MONICA GARCIA: School Board President

When I mentioned AJ Duffy’s remarks about voters not being eager for a new property tax burden, Garcia shook her head.

Read the rest of this entry »

And book a seat for Bill, too.

Dear Honorable Mayor V:

I’m one of the few people in Los Angeles who are happy you’ve been out of town so much this year. I applauded your efforts on behalf of Hillary. It’s important to get a Democrat in the White House to reverse years of neglect of urban problems and mass transit needs. And I even buy your justification for the quarter-million-dollar junket to Israel.
So, as a supporter of your travels, I am hoping you can squeeze in one little in-state trip to the capitol of your dreams this Tuesday. That’s right. Get yourself to Sacramento in time to testify before the Assembly Public Safety Committee on behalf of Gloria Romero’s bill that would end our secret police state. We want to restore some degree of openness to LAPD misconduct hearings. To make it easy for you, I’ve listed Southwest Airlines early-morning flights and provided the link to online reservations. Also, this is not the first time I’ve nagged you about this. I pestered you here and here. So get packing!

Happy travels, Mr. Mayor.

Los Angeles to Sacramento:
2625 6:00am 7:15am Nonstop 1:15 $149 $134
2284 7:45am 9:00am Nonstop 1:15 $149 $134
2357 9:40am 10:55am Nonstop 1:15 $149 $134
328 11:55am 1:10pm Nonstop 1:15 $149 $134

Go online and book your flight: /www.southwest.com/cgi-bin/showItinerary

Very Truly Yours,
L.A. Sniper

And here’s her gay son, Mr. Christ!!

Come Judgment Day, many denominations surveyed about gay marriage by the Pew Forum on Religion and Tall Tales, or something like that, will be in a heap of trouble. My theological advice to them: Repent, renounce your damnable, intolerant, anti-human positions or surrender your tax-exempt status.

The survey is here.