THE BULLIES AND ROGUES OF THE COMPTON UNIFIED SCHOOL BOARD
The drama of the hoped for “Parent Trigger” transformation of Compton’s McKinley Elementary School was covered quite well by Patrick Range McDonald at the LA Weekly late last year and early this year.
In case you don’t know, the so-called parent trigger gives parents the power to decide how to change or restructure failing California schools by petitioning the relevant school district to “trigger” one of four possible strategies: firing the school principle, shutting down the school altogether (allowing students to transfer to nearby school), starting over with a new staff, or converting the school into a charter.
Parents at Mckinley Elementary School in Compton petitioned to go the charter route. But the Compton school board was unwilling to relinquish control.
The LATimes Jim Newton is doing a series of op eds on education, and in Monday’s paper, he takes on the Compton/parent trigger fight, and does so with a fury. Here’s how it opens:
The struggle for equal educational opportunity is the great civil rights imperative of our time. It pits those who demand a decent education against an educational establishment that often blithely ignores them. The victims are overwhelmingly poor minorities, and the clash is nowhere more important than here in Los Angeles. Next week, I look forward to profiling some of the heroes of this struggle, the inspiring young women and men brought together by Teach for America; first, however, a look at the defenders of a corrupt status quo and the lengths to which they will resort to defend their position at the expense of poor children, most of them black or Latino.
This particular band of obstructionists is, in one sense, an unlikely group of civil rights villains: They are the members of the Compton Unified School District board, every one of whom is black. But they are rogues nonetheless, as witnessed by their stunning unwillingness to heed the call of parents who want nothing more than to improve the lives of their children.
The clash in Compton is between the board and the parents of McKinley Elementary School, a tragically underperforming school just off Rosecrans Avenue. At McKinley, parents, guided by the pro-charter reform group known as Parent Revolution, took advantage of the state’s so-called parent trigger law to try to help their children. Under that law, when a majority of parents at a school defined as “failing” sign a petition, a district is required to replace staff or teachers, close the school or give it over to a charter operator. In this case, the parents of 275 of McKinley’s 442 students signed petitions asking for a charter.
The Compton school board could have acknowledged the aspirations of those families and heeded their pleas, or it could have defensively retrenched. Guess which it did?
WOULD JERRY BROWN’S NEW PROPOSED CONTRACT WITH THE PRISON GUARDS’ UNION HAND OVER HUGE AMOUNTS OF POWER TO THE CCPOA?
A Sunday editorial in the Sacramento Bee takes a very harsh and sobering look at Governor Jerry Brown’s proposed contract renewal with the state’s most powerful union— the CCPOA. If it is as the Sac Bee suggests, then Brown has some serious explaining to do, and the state legislature should separate this contract out for close review and refuse to let it move forward without huge changes.
Here’s how the editorial opens:
While he was governor, Gray Davis approved a plum contract for the state’s 30,000 prison guards that effectively gave the California Correctional Peace Officers Association management control over the state’s prison system.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger worked to wrest back control of the prisons from the CCPOA. But now that he is governor, Jerry Brown is reversing those hard-earned reforms on behalf of a major campaign contributor.
If this were a movie, we’d call it “Contract Giveaway: The Return of Gray,” starring Jerry Brown.
Given that the state’s corrections system is a major driver of state spending, the stakes are immense in any new contract for prison officers. Yet the Brown administration has released a 218-page proposed 2011-13 contract document that is loaded with barely legible handwritten notes and cross-outs. Whole swaths of the corrections system, such as parole, remain to be negotiated. Estimates of costs are woefully inadequate. The Legislative Analyst’s Office admits that its one-week review of this “extraordinarily complex” document is not enough to determine full costs to taxpayers.
Read the details here.
REPORTER FINDS HERSELF COMPELLED BY THE FAMILY STORY BEHIND A VERY ORDINARY DEPORTATION HEARING
The proceedings in the removal of Jose Raul Cardenas from the United States began at 9:37 a.m. on Tuesday of last week in a Denver Immigration Court. it is an ordinary illegal immigration case that is duplicated many times over each day in Southern California immigration courts as well.
This time, however, Denver Post reporter Linda Griego was in the courtroom and found herself emotionally affected by the case.
Here are a couple of representative ‘graphs from her story:
About 30 supporters sit behind the family. Twenty are Unitarian Universalist Church clergy who left a retreat to attend the hearing. “People are in denial that our system could possibly be unfair,” one of the ministers tells me.
As I sit among them, I realize that in all the years I’ve been writing about immigration, I have never been in immigration court. I’ve never been witness to a decision that might separate a father from his children, a wife from her husband. For the life of me, I cannot see what such a thing has to do with justice.
Read the rest.
It would seem as though our state would greatly benefit from the passage of a bill requiring an evidence based program for reducing the prison population as this has seemed to work for the states that are succeeding with this, as indicated by the PEW report. It disappoints me to hear that Brown is relinquishing more control to the CCPOA as this would certainly compromise any action that may assist in California’s failure to launch with any proactive prison intervention. It is unlikely this union has any investment in reducing prisoner numbers. What events make clear is that the state with the most prisoners also has the largest prison union hence is the slowest to reform.