At Tuesday’s LAUSD school board meeting, the first since the newly-elected Reform Three, plus new board prez, Monica Garcia, were sworn in last week, the newbies went about passing resolutions at a hyperventilated speed.
Here’s how the LA Times’ Howard Blume put it:
…the Los Angeles Unified School District has new initiatives aimed at measuring student performance, paying employees on time, decreasing the dropout rate, helping English learners, building smaller schools, recruiting new employees, training principals and increasing parent involvement.
For new board President Monica Garcia and her three allies — who are backed by L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa — the meeting was nothing less than change on the march.
Well, maybe, maybe not. Initiatives come and initiatives go—often with little in the way of concrete accomplishment left in their wake. But the intentions are good. Plus the way in which the reform block hung-together to get things passed left control-addicted board member Marguerite LaMotte harrumphing furiously about “pressure” and “jamming” things through.
But what could have been the real swing-out-on-a-limb moment was on a motion that the board has cautiously elected to delay for a vote until August: Specifically, new board member Richard Vladovic introduced a motion that would mandate an up-or-down vote by the board on the the Locke/Green Dot charter petition. (The back story on that little issue can be found here and here.)
The vote next month is made a bit more….piquant….by the fact that, on Monday, Green Dot’s Steve Barr announced that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was giving the organization a $7.9 million grant specifically earmarked to help the charter school group create 10 high schools out of the existing Locke High School. (Here’s the Daily News story on the press conference.)
This puts the board in a rather intriguing position. Will they continued to say no to the conversion of one of the most troubled of their bottom-of-the-barrel high schools now that a big chunk of the cost is Gates financed? Or will they do the right thing, and for once—just once—relinquish control.
Just to make sure that everyone understood the stakes, Barr reeled a few of Locke’s statistics— things like the fact that the school takes in 1,300 freshmen every year. But, by the next year, only 500 of those kids return as sophomores. And out of the kids who stay at Locke, three in 100 go on to four-year colleges.
Oh, yeah, he also mentioned that Green Dot graduates 80 percent of its kids and, according to Barr, close to 90 percent of those graduating seniors go on to four year colleges.
I would gladly relinquish control of this mess to anyone who wanted to help.
P.S. I hope Bill Gates money for the school does a better job than it did with its new operating system Vista. We wouldn’t want to find out that the new charter schools were just a Beta version.
[Warning this comment could be trash ‘n hash. If it is, hopefully, Celeste will kill it as an abomination of speech, and let me try again. Here goes…]
There is a story on the LA Times’ website today (also available yesterday) about Locke. See, Locke High’s weary teachers face a hard multiple-choice test.
One of the anecdotes revealed in the piece was of an angry exchange between two teachers, and it affirms the fear I had when LAUSD stepped in to block the charter by offering teachers the opportunity to re-vote their positions on Green Dot.
The article reveals some of the positions teachers have taken on the proposed conversion of Locke to Green Dot. I would hope that the majority of those who are uncertain about Green Dot aren’t as nakedly self-serving as this:
Hot diggity! I’m finally getting the hang of html tags. Whew!
Good link, Listener. And congrats on your new HTML mastery!
The Locke conversion, if it happens, is in no way a risk-free solution. (Nothing is, I suspect, at this point.) I watched the same dynamic play out at Jefferson—right down to almost the exact same verbiage from the two teacher camps. Much of the issue is that union came in and scared people to death. Plus you have the very real dilemma for older teachers with a lot of time in, that Green Dot’s union contract won’t guarantee them lifetime benefits.
But no one’s really sure where LAUSD is going to get the money to fulfill the lifetime benefits clause in the contract.
(All the other job protections are adequate under the Green Dot union contract, despite what UTLA says.)
I think with a lot of teachers, its a case of The Devil You Know…
In the end, however, I think it has to be about the kids. When you’re talking about schools who only graduate a third of their kids, to my way of thinking, nothing else can possibly be more important to the health of the community and the city than changing that dynamic.
And despite years of promises, the change in Locke just hasn’t happened under the district. At all. Even if they have gotten more computers or whatever. Their stats remain as ghastly. And Green Dot takes much of the same demographic and does a gazillion times better because of their small schools structure etc.
How they will do if and when they have to take every student from Locke, remains to be seen. Quite honestly, I think there will be problems.
But again….ABTWWG—Anything’s Better Than What We’ve Got.
Old Dog (me) and New Tricks (html). I’ll tell you, watching an old dog learn new tricks could be the subject of a comic video.
I could sympathize with some of those ‘established’ teachers if I thought they were at least as willing to be fearful for the kids, who are among the ‘disappeared,’ as they are for themselves. Honestly, there are times when the only moral imperative is to survive. And, I suspect some teachers would not see the Green Dot takeover as life-affirming. But, this is where the district could step in and bridge the divide – not that I have hopes that they would. So much of LAUSD’s approach seems to be obstructionist at its very core.
Imagine if LAUSD were to get behind Green Dot, and offered to help the teachers who were x-some years from retirement re-locate to a different school in the district. (Yeah, yeah, I know… how do you decide the cut, etc. Try to imagine anyway for the sake of argument.) Based on what I’ve read, young newly minted teachers, don’t necessarily see themselves in the profession for the long haul. That is, they don’t expect to retire as teachers. There must be some mechanism by which the district can accommodate both groups by allowing some teachers who want to remain union, to change with teachers who aren’t necessarily planning on retiring anytime soon. Like other civil service type jobs,it seems possible that teachers could absent themselves from direct LAUSD oversight for a period of time, and then be reinstated later with the opportunity to recover former rank/grade, and buy back the years they weren’t contributing to the retirement kitty. My point being there are management strategies available to bridge the gap if LAUSD were so inclined, and the teacher’s union were willing to enter the 21st century.
Since all lives are time limited, there are always trade-offs. Because that time limit is unknown, there is always uncertainty. And, where there is uncertainty, there are always risks. Within any group you have those who are more risk seeking, and those more risk adverse. That often follows age, but not always. The trick for the district and the union, were they so inclined, would be to match up those who are willing to take the risk at Locke, and reassign those who want the same-old same-old. It would be unfortunate that the same-old couldn’t be at Locke, but that’s the trade off against keeping their union benefits intact and seamless.
Yup, “obstructionist to its core” about sums up the LAUSD, from Brewer and Kanter to the rank-and-file teachers mentioned here.
A one-third retention rate is appalling, but I wonder how much of that comes just from the physical/emotional dangers of going to school in that environment? Is there a war between black and Hispanic kids, all others at mercy of both, like at some schools?
While I think retention rate is significant, I’m really not a fan of ranking kids in terms of how many go to 4-yr-colleges. With it being so much harder to get into top schools, and so much more expensive, than it was 20 or even just 10 years ago, why urge kids with no motivation to go and take up these spots? If community college or trade school serves their purposes, more power to them. If a kid stays in high school, and learns a trade partly in school and partly thru apprenticeships, that is so much better and cost-effective all around.
There is a shortage of LPN’s, which takes only a year or two, or X-ray technicians, and there are few plumbers, carpenters or any fine tradesmen of the sort we had just a generation ago, and which they still have in Europe. We live in a society where even apprentice haircutters and chefs have their own survivor-style reality shows, and many of these people make more than college graduates.
It seems the system of “tracking” kids to college prep or non went out the window as non P C., but I’ll bet a lot of inner-city kids would choose mechanics or woodshop over Shakespeare, and stick to it.
For the rest, the kids who do want to excell at academics, there should be emphasis on Honors and AP classes at every school, not just the magnets. And they need help with college applications, even knowing what colleges are out there and can be a good match for their needs. That means more guidance counsellors. Lots of these kids don’t even take the courses they’ll need to apply, and knowing what to take starts in freshman year. Again, another reason to ask the kid what his/her goals are, college or tradeschool.
From the standpoint of a student or a parent in the Locke community there is only one right thing to do. I mean, nobody but nobody who works at Beaudry would ever in a million years put their own kid in that school. So it is appalling to me that there is even debate about giving someone other than LAUSD a shot at running that school. It would also be heartbreaking, but I take some consolation in the incredible courage of teachers such as Bruce Smith. No doubt he is paying a tremendous personal price for his honesty. But at least he can sleep at night with a clear conscience (or deserves to anyhow). Anyone who isn’t willing to take the kind of leap Mr. Smith advocates is either unspeakably selfish or just really, really out of touch with what it is like to be a parent or a student at a Locke or a Jefferson.
I thank professor x for her or his kind comments. Correct, I have so far paid a considerable financial price for having supported this transformtion, but have also received support and praise from many like the professor. I do sleep well at night and believe that the future will be much brighter. Those interested in our progress may wish to attend Senator Romero’s investigation at the Watts Community Center (I’ve forgotten the precise name)on 24 August and the upcoming school board votes on 28 August and 11 September.