Even as Los Angeles Unified keeps hiring more bureaucrats and fewer teachers -- and the disparity in their pay keeps widening -- the massive school district is disintegrating under an assault from the charter school movement.
On Wednesday, ICEF Public Schools, which operates 13 charters with 3,000 students in South Los Angeles, will announce it's adding 22 new campuses in what it calls the "Education Corridor" - the 45-square-mile region bound by the 110, 105, 405 and 10 freeways.
It should more aptly be called the "Dropout Zone" with half the students quitting school witihout a diploma. With Green Dot already running many schools in the area and having taken over troubled Locke High School, the area will be getting free of LAUSD's stifling bureaucracy, its can't do culture and its 30-year record of failure.
Mostly serving African-American students in one of the city's poorest areas, the Inner City Education Foundation boasts that all its graduates go to college, two- or four-year.
"The lack of prepared youth is preventing South Los Angeles from creating a sustainable middle class," ICEF says.
Actually, most of L.A. suffers from the sane problem caused by LAUSD's inability to educate children who come from low-income families and the $19 billion invested in new and upgraded school buildings has produced only marginal improvement
Very little of that bond money has gone to charters and only a small fraction of the $7 billion bond issue on the November ballot will fund facilities for charter schools although there's no comparison to the educational outcomes being achieved by the charters compared to LAUSD.
Better than the new bond issue would be a ballot measure breaking up the district entirely except for a small core of administrative functions and putting the responsibility for educating the children in the hands of charters that empower teachers and provide strong campus leadership.
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.
Ron, this is a very interesting story about the schools. I wonder if they will have their own school board. Do you know? If they will, it would start the ball rolling toward a breakup.
The biggest single tool charters have in improving student performance is the ability to kick out students completely. While that artificially makes things look better by raising the median score, it probably also improves the actual educational experiences for students on the margins who are distracted by the bad apples. Opportunity transfers in LAUSD just shift around the problems. My bet is LAUSD's success would match charter school's successes if principals had similar powers. The question, though, is whether LAUSD has the political will to do so and where those kids would go if they did. As long as LAUSD is being used as a safety net for charters, then it's apples and oranges in comparing the two systems.
Charters are a good way for truly professional, highly skilled and highly educators to take control of a school or an area, but if you have a charter school being run by people who don't know what they are doing or, worse yet, are in it for only the money, then any charter can fail just as easily as any overly large school district can fail.
That happened to a charter school in Pasadena last spring. It was opened with high hopes but poorly managed and the place ran out of money before the school year was over.
There are other stories all across the nation of charter schools not producing the results people had hoped for.
I know there are some fantastic charter schools in L.A. but their strength does not lie in the magic word "charter". Their success lies in highly educated, skilled supervision and usually a core group of parents and teachers who can get the place off to a strong start.
I would have liked to have seen LAUSD break up into 5 or 6 completely separate districts many years ago. It would have been the best thing for the students and the parents, teachers, and administrators could have gotten used to it.
Our school principal is trying to make our school a charter. The problem is she and other administrators are covering up a case of Embezzlement and Fraud. Thousands of dollars
stolen out of Student Fundraisng Funds. We have a bad situation we are having trouble getting help for. We have gone before the LAUSD School Board Twice. Now this controlling principal, with bad Ethics will, run the school as a Dictatorship, with no one holding her accountable.
Lydia, you need to go to the District Atty.