But now a huge threat has emerged to this picture of academic progress — one that could drop the graduation rate to 25 percent in the nation’s second-largest school district. It’s a 2005 policy adopted by L.A. Unified’s board that required that beginning in 2017, degrees would only go to students who had a C average or better in 15 college-prep classes. The “A to G” program, as it’s known, is emerging as a huge hurdle for most students. In May, Los Angeles Unified board members heard a staff presentation in which officials estimated that three-quarters of current 10th graders would not be able to meet this standard.

As a result, the LAUSD board is meeting Tuesday to discuss how to weaken the rules. Two changes appear likely:

• Allowing a D to be considered a satisfactory grade for graduation in the 15 college-prep classes.
• Allowing students to keep taking classes in LAUSD so they can keep trying to meet graduation retirements until their 22nd birthday.

Change would seemingly eliminate point of 2005 reform

The first change is much more significant than a similar proposal that board member Monica Ratliff suggested last month: Allowing LAUSD students to graduate if they averaged a C grade in the college prep classes. It would effectively overturn the key goal of the 2005 reform: making a high school degree a far more significant academic achievement. Instead, a student would continue to be able to graduate by avoiding an F in any mandatory class.

Yet at least one school board member says these changes don’t really amount to reversing course. Here’s what Steve Zimmer told KPCC:

Zimmer said the recession and district budget cuts created large class sizes and a lack of tutoring and other services to support students toward graduation. The proposals would ensure that enough resources are provided to help students succeed, Zimmer said. … Students in the class of 2016 and 2017 would not be required to meet the C requirement, if the changes are approved.

 

Zimmer doesn’t see the changes as rolling back academic standards.

‘Reform fatigue’ vs. ‘reform abandonment’

Educators have often talked about “reform fatigue,” as school districts frequently tinker with or make major changes in their policies to try to improve academent achievements. “With each reform, teachers and administrators have lost a little more trust in the city, state, and federal officials setting the agenda — not to mention a lot of their time,” noted a March piece on education reform in Slate. What L.A. Unified’s board looks poised to do is more like “reform abandonment.”

Board member Ratliff, however, said last month that she simply didn’t believe the A to G program was fair.

“Of course, I don’t want our graduation rates to plummet but this isn’t about that,” Ratliff said on KPCC’s Air Talk program.

The board meeting starts at 1 p.m. Audio and video streaming are available here. The proposed changes in the A to G program are the 39th item on the agenda and will be discussed after several public hearings on reauthorizing certain charter schools, so it’s unlikely to be taken up until well into the meeting.

This is from the latest coverage this week by the Los Angeles Times:

The Los Angeles Board of Education on Tuesday approved a $1.1-million plan to provide a longer school day, additional classes and tutoring to Jefferson High students who lost instructional time as a result of widespread scheduling problems this semester.

Officials also announced that the Los Angeles Unified School District would audit other high schools to find additional students who might have been similarly shortchanged.

An Oct. 3 piece had more details on the nightmare.

Civil rights organizations asked a judge Thursday to order the state Education Department to remedy problems at Jefferson High School in South Los Angeles, where attorneys say some students have languished for nearly eight weeks without the appropriate classes.

The Alameda County Superior Court judge is expected to make a decision Monday.

The request stems from a lawsuit brought earlier this year that alleges the state has ignored its obligation to ensure that all California students receive a minimum level of instruction. Attorneys say the state is primarily abandoning its responsibility to students who are minorities and from low-income families.

The lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, Public Counsel and others, contends the lack of quality learning time for these students is in violation of the state Constitution’s equal protection guarantee because the state does not ensure that all students have access to an adequate education.

Last month, hundreds of students at Jefferson walked out of class to protest the scheduling snafu and what they contended was inept management by administrators that had severely interrupted their education.

Some students have been assigned classes they do not need or have already passed, others have multiple free periods, or are given administrative tasks rather than courses with instruction, according to the lawsuit. Others are simply sent home. Some classes have up to 50 students, the lawsuit said.

Same equal-protection argument made in Vergara

The same argument that minority students were not receiving an adequate education was made in the Vergara case. Here’s the background.

When Treu wrote that the treatment of minority students “shocked the conscience,” that struck some people as a little over the top. If the Jefferson case doesn’t “shock the conscience,” I don’t know what would.

The Jefferson student body is 93 percent Hispanic and 7 percent black. It’s in a particularly impoverished area of downtown L.A. The idea that what happened at Jefferson could have happened at a middle-class LAUSD school — many students going nearly two months with little meaningful academic instruction — is ludicrous.

Even after Vergara, the people running Jefferson High didn’t think anyone would be paying attention to how they were brutalizing their students. Thankfully, this time at least, they were wrong.

But this in some ways is a sad day for the good guys. To a degree that many didn’t expect, Deasy has taken on the United Teachers Los Angeles, the union chapter that is so powerful that it dominates the broader strategic thinking of the California Teachers Association, the most powerful force in Sacramento. And it is the UTLA, not Deasy, that is primarily responsible for the long list of scandals and anti-student spectacles in Los Angeles Unified.

There could be 15 entries. But here’s the top three:

1. The Vergara case. In June, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge who analyzed the effect of teacher tenure laws on education in LAUSD’s struggling schools concluded that they resulted in treatment of minority students that was so unacceptable that it violated California constitutional guarantees of access to a quality education. The neediest students, Judge Rolf Treu held, usually had the weakest, least experienced teachers.

Minority mistreatment, as it turns out, is a theme …

2. The Mark Berndt debacle. The veteran white teacher at a 99 percent minority south Los Angeles elementary school was caught in 2011 feeding semen to his students, but the district had to pay him $40,000 to get him to resign — thanks to extraordinary job protections the UTLA demanded and won for teachers.

3. The L.A. Times’ expose — which came out two years before the Berndt scandal — of all the teachers who not only didn’t get fired but stayed on the job even after their depraved behavior was exposed.

Taunting a suicidal student? What’s the big deal?

The anecdotal lead on the first story in the expose was absolutely wrenching:

The eighth-grade boy held out his wrists for teacher Carlos Polanco to see.

He had just explained to Polanco and his history classmates at Virgil Middle School in Koreatown why he had been absent: He had been in the hospital after an attempt at suicide.

Polanco looked at the cuts and said they “were weak,” according to witness accounts in documents filed with the state. “Carve deeper next time,” he was said to have told the boy.

“Look,” Polanco allegedly said, “you can’t even kill yourself.”

The boy’s classmates joined in, with one advising how to cut a main artery, according to the witnesses.

“See,” Polanco was quoted as saying, “even he knows how to commit suicide better than you.”

The kicker: Polanco was a UTLA official, not just a member. And, after he got a vigorous defense from the UTLA, Polanco received only trivial punishment from LAUSD.

A teacher taunting a suicidal child is no big deal in a district run by a teachers union, you see.

The most obvious example is the fact that California has a 1971 state law — the Stull Act — that mandates student performance be included in teacher evaluations. This is just the sort of approach that President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan like as part of their push to eliminate the 10 percent or so of teachers they say are too incompetent to be allowed in the classroom.

But guess what: The law has been ignored for decades in California. Why? Because for at least 20 years, the most powerful special interest in the state has been the teacher unions — the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers. Keeping the CTA and CFT happy has been a higher priority in local school districts and in the Legislature than actually honoring a clearly written state law.

No job matches your specialty? So what? Here's your check

With monotonous regularity, stories come along to remind us of this dominance of the teacher unions. In the past two years, the main example has been the disgusting Mark Berndt scandal and fallout in California's largest school district. The veteran teacher couldn't be fired by Los Angeles Unified for feeding semen to students; he had to be paid $40,000 to quit. Since then, the Legislature has blocked measures to make it easier to fire classroom sexual predators such as Berndt. Instead, a fake reform passed this year actually would have made it tougher to fire pervert teachers. Thankfully, Brown vetoed it. He'll kowtow to teacher unions on a lot of fronts, but he draws the line at the Pervert Protection Act of 2013.

Now comes an example from the state's second largest school district. San Diego Unified has been pleading poverty for years. Now it turns out the allegedly fiscally bereft district is actually bereft of transparency and common sense. This is from the U-T San Diego:

“Teachers are [classified as] excessed when their positions are eliminated — usually due to an enrollment drop, increase in class size or — in the case of middle and high school — the discontinuation of a course or program. …

“San Diego Unified’s 2013-14 budget counts on some 300 teachers having retired or resigned last school year to save $27 million. …

“This week, excessed teachers will gather at a district forum to bid for vacant jobs, positions that will be awarded based on seniority and credentials.

“At the end of the forum, if there are more teachers than jobs, the district must create new positions since excess teachers are tenured employees who are guaranteed employment. …

“San Diego Unified employs more than 6,000 teachers. The number excessed each year varies — from 658 last year to 696 in 2011-12, 560 in 2010-11, and 347 in 2009-10, district records show.”

San Diego's version of “rubber rooms”

If anything confirms the fact that California's K-12 school system is more about providing union jobs than it is about providing students with an education, this is it. A school district that is allegedly so hard up for cash that it uses 30-year borrowing to pay for graffiti removal keeps hundreds of teachers on the payroll who don't teach.

This isn't as outrageous as the “rubber rooms” of New York City where hundreds of violent or deranged teachers sit around all day and collect pay to do crosswords and listen to their iPods. But it's just as revoltingly stupid.

By Chris Reed

The hegemony of Democrats in California is based to a striking degree on the ability of public employee unions — whose leaders and most affluent members are predominantly white — to keep minorities on board even though “social justice” means sharply different things to teachers union members and to most Latinos, African-Americans and Asian-Americans.

This task is made easier by many Republicans, whose views on immigration and English-only policies and whose nostalgia about the way California used to be can easily be depicted as nativist fear of the other. Even as Democratic stewardship of the state’s economy has created the longest sustained unemployment in 70 years, the GOP’s horrible image has insulated Democrats from losing minority votes.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that at least some minority politicians are beginning to figure out that a party primarily devoted to preserving the jobs, automatic pay hikes and generous pensions of public employees is a party that’s not necessarily interested in what’s best for minorities.

African-American Councilwoman warns about union power

The latest is Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jan Perry, an African-American progressive who pushes for green regulations and nanny-state causes but is also a budget hawk.

Perry lost last week’s mayoral primary after a campaign in which  she criticized the other two Democratic candidates — L.A. Councilman Eric Garcetti and L.A. Controller Wendy Greuel, who are both white — for their subservience to labor. Garcetti has tight ties with the SEIU; Greuel works closely with the police and fire unions.  In a weekend interview with the Los Angeles Times, Perry offered a distinctly Republican-sounding critique of the effects that raw union power and union-bankrolled candidates have on local government:

“Voters ‘need to examine what that will mean to them,’ Perry said. ‘They should look at where the money in this campaign comes from and think about if they want to have greater control of their public utility, for instance. Otherwise, if they don’t pay attention, they will be completely rolled over.

“‘Because that is what is at risk here, at great risk,’ she continued. Having someone too closely allied with employee unions in the mayor’s office could mean ‘the death of independent politics altogether. It could mean the only way you get elected in this town is if you get money from unions.'”

Poor schools for Latinos defined as civil-rights issue

Preceding Perry in realizing that union interests are often inimical to minorities’ interests was another Los Angeles Democrat, Gloria Romero, herself a former union member when she worked as a college professor.

As state senator, Romero  saw teachers unions sabotage reforms over and over again and fight relentlessly for policies that put veteran teachers at the safest, whitest schools and put the least experienced teachers at the poorest schools — often teachers who taught classes for which they didn’t even have the proper credentials. Romero lost so many battles — and saw so many Latino kids failed by L.A. Unified — that she ended up dropping a bomb, likening the fight to improve poor schools to a battle over civil rights.

For her candor, Romero was rewarded with a vicious California Teachers Association attack campaign that depicted her as “dangerous” and killed her 2010 bid to be superintendent of public instruction. The CTA’s choice, Tom Torlakson, has been just what the CTA wanted and just what reformers feared: a guardian of the status quo, right down to sticking up for school districts using 30-year borrowing on basic supplies and equipment so as to free up operating budget funds for teacher compensation.

Now Gov. Jerry Brown has essentially put all Latino elected officials in the Legislature and on local school boards on the spot by proposing a dramatic change in school funding policies to give more money to schools with most students with lagging language skills.

Brown says it is crucial to the future of California that these students, often Latinos, graduate high school with solid job skills.

Gov. Brown to Latino lawmakers: Whose side are you on?

This is not going to be an issue that Assembly Speaker John Perez — heretofore a CTA and CFT bosom buddy — necessarily can finesse. If the teacher unions try to kill Brown’s plan so as to maintain a funding status quo designed to create the most comfort for veteran teachers, Perez will have to take a stand.

Does he care most about keeping the teacher unions happy? Or about the hundreds of thousands of Latino schoolkids whom Brown hopes to help?

We shall see. But here’s hoping that not just Romero, but the state media in general, frames this issue as it should be framed: Just what do elected California Democrats define as “social justice”?

Helping teacher unions?

Or helping disadvantaged Latino students?

This could be the defining moment that California politics has badly needed since public employee union power metastasized after Gov. Pete Wilson left office in 1999.

By Chris Reed

My five-month-old crusade to get the California mainstream media to acknowledge the insanity of “construction bonds” which take 30 years to pay off being used routinely by school districts for short-lived electronics and basic maintenance hasn’t gotten far yet. The most significant article from a respected mainstream education reporter about this outrage came in December from John Fensterwald in EdSource. State newspapers’ education reporters? They can’t be bothered.

Yes, the California media do care about nutty capital appreciation bonds, which can’t be prepaid and delay initial repayments for 20 years out, leading to such ridiculousness as the Poway Unified school district borrowing $105 million that will take $981 million to repay — beginning two decades from now. But the problem of using 30-year borrowing for short-term needs is much worse than CABs. It’s far more common; it’s everywhere.

Maybe what the Los Angeles Unified school board did Wednesday finally will give this issue the attention it deserves:

“During the … meeting, the board also approved {Superintendent John] Deasy’s proposal to spend millions to supply every student and teacher with a tablet computer by 2014. …

“Deasy’s plan to supply all 650,000 students in the district with a tablet computer by 2014 will ultimately cost $500 million. The tablets are supposed to support the transition to Common Core Standards. They are being paid for by revenues raised for school construction bonds R, Y, and Q, which voters approved to address ‘unmet facilities needs.’

“Several school principals spoke during the meeting about a spike in math and English test scores after incorporating tablet apps into their lesson plans.

“Gina Russell-Williams, principal at Curtiss Middle School, said the tablets would help her teachers provide additional intervention and tutorial services to students. Other teachers said teaching students on tablets would allow them to compete with wealthier, smaller, private schools.

“Board member Bennett Kayser abstained from the vote, saying in a statement after the meeting that the process should be slowed down and studied further. No one voted against the measure.”

Is giving kids quality high-tech devices to assist in their education a good idea? Of course.

Is giving kids quality high-tech devices to assist in their education a good idea if bonds to pay for the devices are still being paid off in 2043 — decades after the devices stopped being usable? Of course not. That’s grotesquely irresponsible.

If CEOs did what superintendents did, they’d be in jail

But what would be criminal or subject to shareholder lawsuits in the private sector is just fine in the corrupt world of public education.

The L.A. school board’s actions confirm what I heretofore will refer to as Reed’s Law: Whether in the Legislature or in local school districts, the top priority is always freeing up or increasing revenue to allow tenured teachers to receive the automatic “step” raises that typically are provided for 15 of their first 20 years on the job — just for showing up.

That’s why we see lies about attendance and property tax receipts. That’s why we see grotesque bond abuses. It’s all about preserving the pay status quo for veteran teachers. Understand this, and California politics becomes demystified and uncomplicated.

It’s not “all about the kids.” It’s all about the veteran teachers.

Maybe L.A. Unified spending a half-billion dollars over the next 30 years on iPads that will be broken or stolen by 2016 will finally hammer this home.

By Chris Reed

The Los Angeles Times is the biggest newspaper in the state by far, presumably staffed with veteran reporters with a BS detector. As it turns out, the reporter on one of their most important beats — the Los Angeles Unified School District — is either thick as a brick or a union stenographer.

The story is about how school district boss John Deasy is struggling to get United Teachers Los Angeles to go along with an application for $40 million in Race to the Top funds from the Obama administration.

Reporter Teresa Watanabe actually buys the UTLA’s lame lie that it opposes the application because it might cost millions to administer!!!!!

 Faced with a looming deadline, Los Angeles schools chief John Deasy on Wednesday urged the teachers union to lay aside its concerns and back a federal grant application that could bring $40 million to the cash-strapped district.

If the Los Angeles Unified School District wins a federal Race to the Top grant, Deasy said, it could restore hundreds of jobs for teachers, counselors and others to help middle and high school students stay on track for graduation.

‘It’s a critical opportunity in these painful fiscal times,’ he said.

But so far United Teachers Los Angeles has not endorsed the application, leaving the district short of meeting the required support from the superintendent, school board president and teachers union. Deasy said all parties must sign off on the application by Friday to make the Oct. 30 deadline.

UTLA President Warren Fletcher said the union was concerned that the grant would not cover all the costs of implementing the district’s proposal. The district’s draft application proposes a $43.3-million budget, potentially requiring $3.3 million from general coffers that is equivalent to the cost of 39 teachers, he said.

‘We need to make sure it’s budgetarily sustainable,’ Fletcher said. ‘We don’t want to mortgage our future.'”

Incredibly enough, it’s not until the ninth paragraph that Watanabe even mentions that “another sticking point” was that the Obama administration would only give the grant to districts that had meaningful teacher evaluations based partly on their students’ performances.

Yo, Teresa!!! Where have you been for three years? Race to the Top grants being killed by teachers fighting for the status quo have been in the news the whole time!

Watanabe is either the most naive person in American journalism or the most in the union tank.

Dumb de dumb dumb.