When I first came to town, the big issue was forced busing under court order intended to integrate the schools.
Roberta Weintraub and Bobbi Fiedler on one side hollering about preserving neighborhood schools. Jackie Goldberg and Rita Walters on the other yelling about racial equity.
It was the start of “white flight” from the schools — and the city — that now, 30 years later, has become “middle class flight from the schools and the city.
We’ve spent billions and billions of our money to build new schools and fix old ones. We’ve ended forced busing and brought back neighborhood schools and pretty much ended year-round calendars.
Yet, most schools are racially impacted and outcomes in terms of test scores and dropout rates are abysmal and many parents are choosing to transport their kids to schools outside their neighborhoods in hopes of getting them a better education and keeping them safe.
We’ve gone through close to a dozen superintendents. We’ve tried school-based management and LEARN and gone back to top-down management. We’ve created mini-districts and dissolved them. We resisted independent charter schools and then embraced them as a means of breaking up the mammoth and dysfunctional district school by school.
And now we’re giving parents the rights to close down failing schools and rebuild them the way the want and opening the door to teachers, non-profits and everywhere else with an educational theory to start their own public schools.
Maybe the problem isn’t governance, as a friend of mine who’s closely followed the devolution of LAUSD has long argued. Maybe it’s a teaching and learning problem and somethiing more.
The something more was visible in Howard Blume’s story in the Times today about how LAUSD laid off thousands of teachers and other employees and still overspent its budget for salaries by an astonishing $200 million.
What’s even more incredible is that the army of bureaucrats in LAUSD don’t know how they did that and apparently didn’t want us to know since the internal audit was completed a month ago and probably wouldn’t have come out at all without the efforts of a good reporter.
Superintendent Ramon.Cortines offers little insight beyond “we’re cleaning it up.”
Inspector General Jerry Thornton is somewhat more helpful.
“The system is broken,” he said. “We really don’t have adequate position control and we don’t know
where our funding comes from for all these positions.
“There’s no suggestion of impropriety or fraud. We didn’t see people being paid who aren’t working or who aren’t there.”
There it is, the smoking gun. Incompetence is the problem and all the experiments, all the money haven’t fixed it.
That’s why parents rights, charters, anything that frees parents, teachers and principals from the reign of incompetence seems like a step in the right direction.
I spoke with a principal recently whose grade school test performance has soared from the mid-400s to over 800 in the last 10 years and heard how creating a shared vision and empowering teachers and supporting them was responsible for the improvement.
That’s the heart of the matter as far as I’m concerned. It’s what makes any enterprise successful: Shared beliefs, individual empowerment, strong leadership.
I call it democracy and I don’t see why those with power in LA are so afraid of it, so resistant to embrace what makes America what it is — or at least what it was.
New Year’s Resolutions for LAUSD
http://www.examiner.com/x-3311-LA-Public-Education-Examiner~y2009m12d29-New-Years-Resolutions-for-LAUSD
Kaye….you continue to understand democracy and education better than those elected or tasked with leading both of those civic institutions. Isn’t about time we start putting some of the elected and tasked officials on milk cartons with the old “missing” label?
OK guys. Are we the only ones who get it? The problem IS teaching and learning in the classroom. And the so-called leadership has no idea what that should look like. I hate to say it, but private school parents and home-schoolers know what it should look like- and it isn’t incessant testing or the “sink or swim” culture of failure curriculum- it’s enriched experiences and hard lessons in the good ol’ “if at first you don’t succeed…” paradigm. I only hope that the parents and new school operators will soon understand this.
Jumping through a test score hoop really isn’t that hard- that’s why they’re all chomping at the bit for the Race to the Top funds. But if all they want to do is raise test scores without a revision of the curriculum and standards, then it’s all just Money for Nothin’.
I think public education is what your child makes of it no matter where it is or how bad the teachers are. Parents have to enrich their children at home and not expect LAUSD to do it completely. LAUSD must stop practicing what will be on the standardized testing and how to fill in the bubbles and how to guess. Parents must be involved. LAUSD is too big and needs to be broken up. I don’t care about the schools we have in LAUSD that aren’t in Los Angeles.
I agree with Beverly Hills. If you want your kid to go to school there, buy or rent there. We guarantee an education. We don’t guarantee that it will be at X school. So Ron, I think you’re off on that argument. Our tax dollars will be paying for the education and part of Beverly Hills’ issue was that they were going to have that state funding cut. Why should they pick up the tab for kids who don’t live in Beverly Hills? They shouldn’t. They should just allow the kids who are already in high school to finish and that is what they did. Junior high should be able to finish and then move on to their neighborhood schools. Same with K-6.
Parents need to stop pretending their kids are gifted. You look vain and silly. Drop the magnet programs. Just admit that they replaced busing and you’ll solve 90% of your problems.
Maybe the test scores went up because the test was watered down from what it was 10 years ago. $200 million was paid out in salaries that shouldn’t have been, but nobody knows how that happened. Of course someone should be fired for that, but no one is accountable.
Great article. All true.
How much of this is due to the court decision that banned the use of local taxes for local schools? The California Supreme Court said that was inequitable: so it might have been, but it worked well. Kids were more literate then. Better behaved. Teachers were better. People raised money for schools. The schools were theirs.
That decision stripped local financial control and accountability. It marginalized the parents. Especially the well-off ones that visit the school and see things. That aren’t afraid to complain. Deprived of a material role, they left. They took their money and participation to private schools. The state and big collectiosn of officials replaced them. The schools became a big welfare project. We’ve seen the result.
Appropriate, intelligent leadership free from politics is the key to cleaning up LAUSD. Sadly, I don’t think it will happen in my lifetime. I really don’t. Unless they choose to hire a TON of out-of-towners to run their departments; people who can go back to their old jobs in their hometowns after they fix LAUSD. I just don’t think the district will ever get the radical truth it needs from its insiders.
And consultants have proven to be pretty much worthless. They charge too much and get too little done. They are not a good value.
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