FUNERAL MARCH FOR LAUSD BY CHOPIN
LAUSD is dying.
Will no one shed a tear?
For 30 years, the nation's second largest school district with 700,000 ill-served students has suffered a fatal disease but somehow survived against all odds, against all the hopes and efforts of so many to put it out of its misery. Our misery really.
But the death vigil has started. Besieged by charter schools in every direction, the district that spent more than $20 billion overbuilding mammoth schools -- one alone that cost more than $400 million -- now knows small schools work better.
The district that survived because of the tenacity of its bloated bureaucracy has lost even the support of the teachers' union, which for lack of an alternative strategy, became complicit in its failure.
A nearly unbroken stream of school board members and superintendents without talent or imagination has lost the confidence even of those with real power in L.A. who had strived to reform it. And the current superintendent has been stripped of authority and left dangling in the wind.
LAUSD is dying of a thousand blows.
The latest came today with its director of innovation, the woman who left the private sector to take charge of the construction program when it was in chaos a decade ago, is joining the California Charter Schools Association.Kathi Littman, who had served as LAUSD's executive director of innovation reshaping the district into small manageable academies, is jumping the sinking ship to become senior vice president for intergovernmental affairs for the charter school movement.
Given her background in construction and reforming LAUSD, Littman is positioned to help tear apart the mammoth district school by school and accelerate the takeover by charters which already is well under way despite the stonewalling and resistance of the entrenched education establishment.
She also is well-connected with strong credentials with the two men with clout who have worked for years to turn LAUSD around without much success -- billionaire Eli Broad and former Mayor Richard Riordan.
"We're delighted that Kathi Littmann is joining our team where she will play a key role in reaching policymakers and influential stakeholders throughout California and nationwide," said Caprice Young, president and CEO of the California Charter Schools Association. "Kathi's leadership and experience will help to ensure equity and quality for our state's charter schools."
Noting LAUSD has more charters than any other district in the country, Littmann said she believes charters can "partner" with the public school sysem.
"Charter schools are the most promising path for public school reform. I'm eager to join Caprice and her talented team during this exciting time when innovative and high quality programs are raising the bar and redefining the public school system here in California."
The language is polite but the menace is real.
Steve Barr from Green Dot Charters is gaining significant turf in the toughest parts of town and if he succeeds with his takeover of Locke High in Watts, he will be able to make the case that LAUSD no longer should exist except as a shell for a limited number of basic services -- not as an education provider.
Other charters all over the city are demonstrating that when teachers are empowered, parents involved and the leadership is strong, students succeed.
LAUSD has proven itself incapable of achieving any of those three necessary requirements.
Let it rest in peace.
"We're delighted that Kathi Littmann is joining our team where she will play a key role in reaching policymakers and influential stakeholders throughout California and nationwide," said Caprice Young, president and CEO of the California Charter Schools Association. "Kathi's leadership and experience will help to ensure equity and quality for our state's charter schools."
Noting LAUSD has more charters than any other district in the country, Littmann said she believes charters can "partner" with the public school sysem.
"Charter schools are the most promising path for public school reform. I'm eager to join Caprice and her talented team during this exciting time when innovative and high quality programs are raising the bar and redefining the public school system here in California."
The language is polite but the menace is real.
Steve Barr from Green Dot Charters is gaining significant turf in the toughest parts of town and if he succeeds with his takeover of Locke High in Watts, he will be able to make the case that LAUSD no longer should exist except as a shell for a limited number of basic services -- not as an education provider.
Other charters all over the city are demonstrating that when teachers are empowered, parents involved and the leadership is strong, students succeed.
LAUSD has proven itself incapable of achieving any of those three necessary requirements.
Let it rest in peace.
Ron Kaye is the former editor of the Los Angeles Daily News where he spent 23 years helping to make the newspaper the voice of the San Fernando Valley and fighting for a city government that serves the people and not special interests.
Twice in recent years, Los Angeles Magazine listed Kaye among the city’s most influential people, specifically in the area of politics. Kaye has been variously described in the media as the “accidental anarchist,” “the Patrick Henry of the San Fernando Valley” and a “passionate populist.” He is now committed to
carrying on his crusade for a greater Los Angeles as an ordinary citizen. Previously, Ron worked at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner,
Associated Press, Cleveland Plain Dealer and The Australian as well as papers
in Fairbanks, Alaska and Yakima, Wash. He also wrote for Newsweek magazine, The Guardian in London and the National Enquirer.
Besides shouting that the world is coming to an end, what are you doing to solve the problem?
Logrolling on the sidelines with the doomsayers chorus is just too tedious. Get in the game! Get involved! Then pop off...
You'll win a lot more converts -- including those of us who really believe the system is broken and needs to be fixed with more action and less overheated but empty rhetoric -- if you start acting a lot less like the Hare and a lot more like the Lion.
Do I get to make another comment?
How can I help speed it up? I go back to when Georgeanna Hardy was a member of the school board and I have watched and waited for this moment. Remember her? Instead of following the law the Federal Government passed in 1965 (and before that in 1865) this schoolboard decided to bus children all over the city, away from their homes, away from their friends, away from their home schools. I watched those poor kids get off and on the school buses that took them to school and then for miles and even on fwys. back to their Moms. Did anybody get to do anything with anyone else so that they could get to know each other as people? NO. The buses were waiting.
That school board and the one today are of the same mentality. No one listens to the one or two individuals on the board who ask questions and try to find solutions. They know best for all the rest of us.
Do we have to wait until next year? I think petitions to break up the school district circulated now would be signed sealed and delivered by every group in the city that realizes that there is no education going on. We would qualify for the first election in 2009 for sure. Imagine, school districts that would be accessible to parents, teachers and volunteers!
Hmmmmm. Maybe we ought to circulate petitions to unseat our City Council and Mayor like we did Gray Davis as well. Law suits have a way of dragging on and on, whereas an election is yes or no proposition.
Theodora "Teddy" Howell, West Hills
Dear "Teddy" -- I wholeheartedly agree with you. Thank heavens I was at the end of my high school years when "busing" started because heaven knows how kids do anything but learn to be more isolated from society by spending hours of the day "commuting." The school board is a mere stepping stone to higher elected offices. Where is the integrity in elected officials when it is for their own betterment, not the betterment of their constituents, that is their focus?
Watching LAUSD flounder is kind of like watching the USSR go down. You know it's coming. It's just a matter of time as to when.
It seems to me that the most likely way the LAUSD will die a slow death is if existing schools started to convert to charter status en masse. Brand new charter schools are too small, too uncertain, and too starved for space by LAUSD. I could, however, see large chunks of LAUSD enrollment disappear if existing schools converted to charter status (e.g., what Westwood elementary and Pali High did on the westside and what Locke appears to have done in South LA). It doesn't make schools small and it might not even allow them to be selective, which is how most charters make their academic gains, but it would free them from some LAUSD bureaucracy and get parents and teachers to "own" their schools.
The question then is not why charters have grown so much, but why so few existing schools have converted (relatively speaking). Can someone remind me what happens when an existing school converts to Charter status? Doesn't it have to continue to accept students zoned for that school (or is that something that is just negotiated in the charter agreement)? Does it lose Title I funds for the students who qualify? What constituents have to sign on to the conversion? If teachers were on board, it seems like much of this would happen. So, what is the roadblock to existing schools converting? Are teachers worried about losing union protections negotiated with LAUSD or something like that, or are principals concerned that funding problems will be exacerbated by the conversion? It seems like if you could identify that stmbling block issue(s) and resolve it (either globally or school-by-school) then the domino effect would occur and LAUSD would indeed topple by default as it loses the funds to pay for its administrative girth.
It kinda sounds like LAUSD is dying a slow death by cannibalism, one bite at a time by the charters.
Let the feasting continue until LAUSD is no more and we can start over with a clean plate, or if you're into chalk...a clean slate.
Oh for heaven's sake...LAUSD is dying a death of a thousand cuts because of hundreds of thousands of non-English speaking, illiterate (in their own language), illegal immigrants from Mexico!
The population of LAUSD is dwindling...expected to be down 100,000 in two more years...and yet the village idiots are squandering BILLIONS on NEW schools!
The basic problem is not 'Charter v. LAUSD'...the problem is Mexico v. the USA! Our taxpayer money has been SQUANDERED, and OUR kids are being forced into expensive private schools because of the chaos created by bi-lingualism and socio/cultural/and economic differences.
As far as LAUSD is concerned...break it up, burn it down...I don't care! Just don't ask me for more money!!! Personally, I don't care what happens to hundreds of thousands of illegals and gangbangers that are destroying my city!
Maybe we should turn LAUSD into prisons...not Charters!
My gosh, do you seriously believe that Kathi Littmann was overcome by conscience and then decided to join the California Charter movement? Come on!!! She was canned. Our new LAUSD Real Superintendent is cleaning house, non-ethnic cleansing. Charter Schools picked up the debris.
Expect more LAUSD house-cleaning to occur. You can't expect every LAUSD position to have two staff doing the same job, as is with the Superintendent's position.
it is so nice to know that some things never change. eventhough you no longer have a paper in which to vent your spleen, the magic of the internet allows you to keep whinning and blaming the big, bad, evil folks "DOWNTOWN" for all the evils that you see in the world. god forbid you do something to help...
No, we are not whining, we are finally being heard. The LAUSD has been inferior for generations of students. My children do not live in Los Angeles but within a one hundred mile radius where schools are managed like school districts should be managed. My grandchildren are or have been educated.
You must never have worked in classrooms, as a roommother, in the library or as a volunteer teaching as a tutor. You learn a lot just by being over at the school. And the teachers nod their heads quietly. The school board? They are SO BUSY AND HAVE NO TIME TO DISCUSS ANYTHING WITH A PARENT. REMEMBER, WE PARENTS ARE TO BLAME FOR ALL THE PROBLEMS. Oh? I do not think so.