After a quarter-century of explosive increases in California, charter schools experienced all-time lows in growth the last two school years. And charters may also be facing an era of much harsher treatment from school boards allied with teachers unions who more than ever see charters as taking away resources that should go to conventional schools.

That was many education observers’ takeaway this week from the Los Angeles Unified School Board’s decision to approve a local moratorium on approvals of new charters until their impact on the state’s largest district is freshly assessed. District leaders had agreed to pass the resolution as part of their deal with United Teachers Los Angeles to end a strike that shut LAUSD schools for six days earlier last month.

Charters are privately operated public schools that hope to attract students from regular schools with their freedom to follow different teaching regimens. Some also offer specialized language or academic programs. Most are non-union.

From 1992 to 2016, charter schools went from zero students to more than 600,000 – about 10 percent of total K-12 students in California. The last two years, however, there was less than 2 percent growth in the number of total charters for the first time.

Charters initially faced brisk opposition from the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers, which had heavy influence in many districts thanks to the board members that union local chapters helped elect.

But in 2000, California voters approved Proposition 39 related to school financing. One provision requires that “school districts make available to all charter schools operating in their school district … facilities that will sufficiently accommodate all of the charter’s in-district students, and that facilities be ‘reasonably equivalent’ to other classrooms, buildings, or facilities in the district,” according to the state Department of Education page outlining how school districts should comply with the state law.

CalSTRS bailout spurs scrum for limited resources

Proposition 39 gave charters a potent tool to fight attempts to block them, leading to something of a cease-fire from unions. But the passage in 2014 of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System bailout not only isn’t having the effect of stabilizing school finances that some hoped, it’s created a more intense battle for district resources than ever.

Under the bailout, total contributions to CalSTRS will nearly double from 2013-14 to 2020-21 as hikes are phased in. But districts are required to contribute 70 percent of the new money – or close to $4 billion when the phase-in ends. Even with two more contribution hikes awaiting in 2019-20 and 2020-21, many districts across the state are already struggling to make their budgets balance.

That list starts with L.A. Unified, whose board was warned by the Los Angeles County Office of Education that the district couldn’t afford the two retroactive 3 percent raises it gave teachers to end the strike. The county office raised the possibility that the district’s finances could be so broken by 2020-21 that it could be subject to an outside takeover based on a state law requiring districts maintain minimum reserves.

L.A. Unified leaders hope to get the state Legislature to provide more funding for next school year. But the L.A. teachers union also wants the district to stop providing so much funding to the district’s 225 charters, which teach 112,000 of the district’s 486,000 students.

The wild card in a new cold war between teachers unions and charters is Gov. Gavin Newsom. While he has often praised charter schools as an important part of public education, he said while campaigning last year that he would sign legislation “requiring charter schools to be more transparent with their finances and operations and to adhere to stricter conflict of interest rules on their governing boards,” according to the EdSource website.

Charter school critics see this as an obvious response to the messy finances and scandals seen in some charters. Charter advocates see it as an ominous first step toward rolling back the charter movement. They backed former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa in the 2018 governor’s race.

Leaders of the Los Angeles Unified School District, by far California’s largest school district, are struggling to head off a teachers’ strike that a state judge ruled Thursday can begin Monday. United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), which represents 35,000 teachers, wants an immediate 6.5 percent pay hike and a two-year contract. L.A. Unified has offered a phased-in two-year raise of 6 percent as part of a three-year contract.

But while much of the focus has been on the chaos that’s likely if the district’s 640,000 students have nowhere to go Monday morning, the crisis is also drawing attention to the gigantic financial headaches facing the second-largest U.S. school district. Even if L.A. Unified sees its contract offer accepted, it’s on track for perpetual budget problems for as far as the eye can see because of its massive liabilities for retirement pensions and retiree health care.

Austin Beutner, the former executive and Los Angeles Times publisher who is the district’s superintendent, says UTLA refuses to acknowledge that the district faces a $2 billion shortfall over the next three years even if the district’s cheaper contract offer is accepted. That would wipe out LAUSD’s $1.8 billion reserve.

But union leaders, with 98 percent support among teachers for a strike, depict the $1.8 billion as money that can be tapped both for a bigger raise and for hiring more teachers and support personnel.

Superintendent: Union hopes to create ‘state crisis’

Writing in the Times, Beutner sees the union’s refusal to ever make a counter-offer as a sign of a larger agenda. “UTLA leaders have said since early 2017 – before contract negotiations even began and more than a year before I became superintendent – that they wanted ‘a strike to create a state crisis,’” he asserted.

The hope is that such a crisis would lead the Legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom to push for increased education funding. But it’s not clear if there’s much public appetite for paying higher taxes or using “rainy day” reserves for this purpose at a time when school funding has gone up more than 60 percent over the least eight years. School funding is $78.4 billion this fiscal year, an increase of more than $30 billion from 2010-11. On Thursday, Newsom proposed spending $80.7 billion for 2019-20.

Yet the tactic makes more sense as a reflection of union leaders’ drawing the same conclusion as Beutner about LAUSD’s grim fiscal path. The total cost of pensions and retiree health care for more than 36,000 former teachers is projected to double from 8 percent to 16 percent of the annual budget as mandatory payments to the California State Teachers’ Retirement system soar under the terms of the 2014 bailout approved by the Legislature. The bailout phases in a 132 percent increase in per-teacher contributions, with the final increase in 2020-21.

And UTLA also may have confidence it will be heeded in the Capitol, based on what happened in 2013 with the Local Control Funding Formula, which gives more per-pupil funding to districts with high numbers of English language learners, foster students and students from poor families. While the law was touted by Gov. Jerry Brown as a way to help close the achievement gap by directing additional resources to individually help students, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson’s 2015 ruling that the additional funds could be used for teacher raises freed up school districts to ignore the original intent of the law.

L.A. Unified got huge boost from school funding change

About 510,000 of L.A. Unified’s students fit the criteria for additional state funding, vastly more than any other district in the state. But with few signs the extra money is reaching English language learners in LAUSD, one theory heard in education circles is that the Local Control Funding Formula was more about propping up the district’s shaky finances than a principled attempt to directly help struggling students. UTLA is by far the most active and powerful local teachers union in California.

L.A. Unified’s fiscal problems were laid out in 2015 by a panel of experts brought in to examine district finances. They concluded drastic steps needed to be taken to address the combined problems of declining enrollment and increasing pension and health care costs. But the district has not followed through with work force cuts or with attempts to collectively bargain for changes in employment contracts that give teachers lifetime health care benefits for themselves and their spouses – one of the most lucrative and costly benefits in California government. The panel said without huge changes, LAUSD was headed for bankruptcy.

The Los Angeles-based Parent Revolution group, which focuses on improving education and increasing educational opportunities for poor minority students, analyzed 44 LAUSD schools with weak test scores last school year. At these schools, only 20 percent of students met or did better than state math standards and only 28 percent in English.

Yet last school year, 68 percent of teachers in these schools were not subject to official evaluations – either through oversight or via exemptions ordered by their principals. Of teachers who were evaluated, 96 percent were found to meet or do better than district performance standards. Over the past three school years, the figure edged up to 97 percent getting positive evaluations – meaning only about one in every 30 evaluated teachers is found wanting.

“We do see this in other districts, where almost everyone has a satisfactory rating and it’s disconnected from student achievement,” Seth Litt, Parent Revolution’s executive director, told the Los Angeles Times. “It shouldn’t be disconnected.”

The findings parallel those that emerged from the landmark Vergara v. California lawsuit, in which nine students from state public schools represented by civil-rights attorneys hired by the Students Matter group alleged five state teacher job protection laws were so powerful that they had the unconstitutional effect of keeping incompetent teachers on the job and funneling them toward schools in poor communities.

Evidence presented by the plaintiffs in the case showed that only 2.2 teachers on average are fired each year for unsatisfactory performance in a state with 275,000 teachers at its public schools.

The case’s primary focus was on Los Angeles Unified. In a twist that few expected, some of the most powerful testimony against the teacher protection laws came from then-LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy. He testified in early 2014 that even if a teacher were “grossly ineffective,” it could cost the district millions in legal bills to fire the teacher.

Later that year, state Judge Rolf Treu agreed with the plaintiffs that the five teacher protection laws unconstitutionally deprived the students of their right to a good public education. Treu likened the laws’ effects to those of segregation before the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Treu’s decision was overturned on appeal on the grounds that the trial failed to clearly establish a factual nexus between student performance and the job protection laws.

3 state justices wanted to hear teacher tenure case

But education reformers were somewhat heartened by what happened next. Three members of the California Supreme Court wanted to hear an appeal of the appellate ruling, suggesting at the least some interest in Treu’s reasoning, which was mocked as novel and weak by attorneys for teacher unions. While they were voted down by the state high court’s other four justices, they could be a factor in future litigation.

As for Los Angeles Unified, litigation over school practices affecting minorities and high-needs students has been common for decades. In September 2017, for a recent example, the district reached a $151 million settlement in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU over the improper diversion of Local Control Funding Formula dollars that were supposed to be used to help struggling students in poor communities, especially English-language learners.

LAUSD was also the target in 2010 of what a federal government statement called “the first proactive civil rights enforcement action taken by the Department of Education under the Obama administration” – prompted by what then-Education Secretary Arne Duncan called the district’s failure to adequately educate many Latino and African-American students. The case was settled in 2011 after the district agreed to make several substantial changes meant to improve these students’ performance.

But evidence presented in the Vergara case showed no subsequent gains by these student groups.

Los Angeles Unified has 640,000 students, making it by far the largest school district in California. Only the New York City school system, which has about 1 million students, is larger in the U.S.

The suit was filed by Public Counsel, a pro bono law firm, and Morrison & Foerster, against the State of California, the State Board of Education, the State Department of Education, and State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tom Torlakson.

“The state has long been aware of the urgency and the depth of the all-too-preventable literacy crisis, and yet it has not implemented a single targeted literacy program to remedy this crisis,” said Mark Rosenbaum, the lead attorney with Public Counsel, according to Education Week.

To support their case, the lawyers reportedly submitted results from a recent Stanford study examining the 26 lowest performing school districts in the U.S. based on literacy and basic education. Eleven of the 26 districts are in California.

Furthermore, data shows that less than 50 percent of students from third grade to fifth grade have met statewide reading standards since 2015. The plaintiffs, which include 10 public school students, want the state to create an accountability system to monitor literacy levels.

“Although denial of literacy is the great American tragedy, California is singlehandedly dragging down the nation despite the hard work and commitment of students, families and teachers,” Rosenbaum added.

Public Counsel has been pro-active in this capacity before as it’s also filed a similar suit against the state of Michigan.

The lawsuit seeks “proven literacy instruction, literacy assessments and interventions, support for teachers, and implementation of practices to promote parent involvement and learning readiness,” according to the press release.

Concerns about a lack of proficiency with basic reading skills has been a persistent concern in California.

For example, just 40 percent of LAUSD students met or exceeded English standards in 2016. That was actually an improvement from 2015 when only 33 percent of students met the benchmarks.

Statewide, around 48 percent of students met English standards on the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress during the same year.

Critics of current policy often cite tenure laws as a reason for the lack of improvement, arguing that the inability to fire poor instructors disadvantages poor and minority students.

But in a high-profile lawsuit in 2016 (Vergara v. California), a California appeal court upheld the teacher tenure framework, reversing a lower court ruling, in what was blow to school choice advocates but a win for teachers unions.

However, the newest challenge doesn’t take aim at tenure, but argues for improved teacher training and additional resources.

“We need citizens that can read. We need citizens that can vote,” David Moch, one of the plaintiffs and a retired teacher, reportedly said about the newest challenge. “Once you get behind, if there’s no intervention, there’s no catching up. The level of the work is getting more intense and multiplied at every level.”

California’s funding of education has gone from $50.4 billion in the fiscal year that ended in 2012 to $74.5 billion for the current fiscal year – a

Nevertheless, this summer has seen a steady stream of stories from school districts up and down the state warning of tight budgets, coming layoffs and worse. Ron Bennett, CEO of School Services of California, which advises more than 85 percent of the state’s nearly 1,000 districts, told the Bay Area News Group that one-third of districts face deficit spending in the 2018-19 school year and two-thirds do in 2019-20.

The common problem facing all districts is the phased-in cost of the 2014 bailout of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System. Gov. Jerry Brown and state lawmakers agreed to a plan in which school districts would increase their contributions by 132 percent from 2014-15 to 2020-21 – picking up 70 percent of the cost of the bailout, with the state general fund and teachers covering the rest. This is accomplished by gradually raising district’s pension contributions from 8.25 percent of teacher pay to 19.1 percent of pay, which sharply increases compensation costs that already go up annually no matter what because California teachers typically get “step” raises of 3.5 percent to 4 percent in 15 of their first 20 years in the classroom.

The next most common problem is declining enrollment. ADA – average daily attendance – is the fundamental formula determining how much money the state gives each school district. While California’s population continues to inch up, in December, its birth rate fell to a historic low. Urban, suburban and rural districts have all been buffeted as a result.

Teacher pay raises add to fiscal stress

Exacerbating these two structural problems is the fact that after the state’s 2008-2012 revenue recession ended, politically powerful local teachers unions won substantial pay raises in many districts.

The most telling example: In the state’s largest district, Los Angeles Unified, United Teachers Los Angeles was given a 10 percent pay raise in 2015.

This has added to budget and management problems that have led one prominent educator, former Long Beach Unified and San Diego Unified Superintendent Carl Cohn, to call for LAUSD to be broken up.

District officials tried to put up a happy front after its 2017-18 budget was adopted last month. But a Los Angeles Times review of long-term spending plans suggested district officials were not taking serious steps to deal with a 2019-20 deficit expected to be more than $400 million. It noted that while L.A. Unified’s enrollment, now 514,000, continues to drop, the district has more administrators than ever.

Similar problems are seen throughout the Golden State.

Once adjusted for district size, Rim of the World Unified in the Lake Arrowhead area of San Bernardino County is in among the worst binds of any district in the medium term. The 2017-18 budget is not expected to run a deficit, but huge cuts are certain in 2018-19, when the six-school district has to deal with a projected $2.1 million deficit, and schools may have to close or consolidate in 2019-20, when a $4.5 million shortfall has been forecast.

In the affluent Silicon Valley, districts are also being pinched. The San Jose Unified School District needs to cut 150 jobs before its 41 schools reopen next month. Cupertino Union School District and its 25 schools, which made $2.6 million in cuts this spring, are sure to need another round of layoffs by next spring, when a $5.6 million deficit is expected.

The Napa Valley Unified School District, facing a $12.4 million shortfall in a $167 million 2017-18 budget, laid off 50 teachers who hadn’t gained tenure yet and eliminated 60 classified positions. Trustees are already warning of even worse cuts in coming years.

Such budget bloodbaths are the norm across California.

One of the relatively few bits of good news on the school finance front comes – unexpectedly – from Washington. After Donald Trump won the White House, some Democrats expected Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress to seek huge cuts in federal education aid to states – especially liberal ones like California.

But EdSource reported in May that the Trump administration’s budget plan would reduce annual federal education funding for the state from about $4 billion to $3.64 billion – a cut of less than 10 percent. The proposed cuts would be proportional – meaning Trump didn’t single out states he lost for less generous treatment.

Last week, a three-judge panel of the fourth state appellate court district unanimously rejected a 2015 PERB ruling that if upheld would have invalidated a successful 2012 San Diego ballot measure that gave newly hired city employees – except for police officers – 401(k)-style retirement benefits instead of defined-benefit pensions. The measure was meant to dig California’s second-biggest city out of a hole created by two City Council decisions to intentionally underfund the San Diego pension system, leading to a city fiscal crisis so severe that San Diego was dubbed “Enron-by-the-Sea” in 2004 by the New York Times.

PERB’s ruling was based on the view that any pension ballot measure that was promoted by elected city officials – in San Diego’s case, by then-Mayor Jerry Sanders and several City Council members – ran afoul of state requirements that local governments had to negotiate in the standard collective bargaining “meet and confer” process before they could change terms of employment.

This legal argument was tough to square with California’s history. Elected officials frequently have taken the lead in employing direct democracy to adopt new laws or modify existing ones – including those that affect terms of employment for public employees. In 2005, for example, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger sought to change teacher tenure rules in a special election. Schwarzenegger couldn’t sell the change to voters, but his attempt to do so was not seen as unlawful or unusual.

The appellate panel agreed with the city of San Diego’s argument that while elected officials helped lobby for the 2012 pension reform measure, it was crafted and placed on the ballot in keeping with standard practices for citizens’ initiatives, with petition committees, signature-gathering campaigns and other normal trappings of direct democracy. The ruling also noted that PERB had tried to use its official powers to block the ballot measure in early 2012 even before it reached the ballot, with the hint that appellate judges saw this decision as a sign of PERB abusing its authority.

PERB wanted collective bargaining to apply retroactively to older laws

PERB’s previous setback in asserting the sweeping powers of collective bargaining laws came in its response to a lawsuit filed in 2011. Parent activists sued the Los Angeles Unified School District for not considering student performance when formally evaluating teachers, as is required by the Stull Act, a far-reaching state education blueprint enacted in 1971.

PERB contended that before teachers were subject to such evaluations, the matter should be collectively bargained – even though the primary law establishing collective bargaining for teachers was approved in 1975, four years after the Stull Act took effect. The agency also held that it should have initial jurisdiction over the case – not state courts.

But Los Angeles Superior Court Judge James C. Chalfant’s 2012 decision categorically rejected PERB’s arguments, saying that LAUSD could not ignore the Stull Act’s requirements, that collective bargaining did not apply retroactively to older state laws and that parent activists were free to use the courts to challenge whether public schools were complying with state laws.

The Stull Act remains an area of contention for California public schools despite Chalfant’s ruling. In September, Contra County Superior Court Judge Barry P. Good rejected a lawsuit that said 13 Northern California school districts were breaking state law by refusing to consider student performance in evaluating teachers.

Good’s 40-page ruling held that the Stull Act’s requirements were not as “clear and unambiguous” as those who filed the lawsuit contended.

The California Court of Appeal, Second District, will take up the closely followed appeal in its Los Angeles courtroom.

The 2014 decision by Los Angeles Superior Court Rolf Treu made headlines across the nation. After the judge cited evidence showing the near-impossibility of firing incompetent teachers in California, he wrote, “All sides to this litigation agree that competent teachers are a critical, if not the most important, component of success of a child’s in-school educational experience. There is also no dispute that there are a significant number of grossly ineffective teachers currently active in California classrooms” — with most working in largely minority schools.

The result, said Treu, was a de facto segregated system that reminded him of the circumstances in Kansas that led to the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that led to the end of segregated schools. He wrote that evidence presented by the Vergara plaintiffs — nine students in predominantly minority schools in Los Angeles Unified — showed California had failed to provide “a student’s fundamental right to equality of the educational experience.”

Poor teaching a ‘deep-rooted inequity’

The ruling was depicted by the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers as an outrageous exaggeration of problems in state public schools and a de facto attack on teachers and unions. Nevertheless, the ruling prompted the New York Times to run an editorial lambasting California’s schools for neglecting Latino and African American students:

When states are sued for providing inferior education to poor and minority children, the issue is usually money — disproportionately more money for white students, less for others. A California judge has now brought another deep-rooted inequity to light: poor teaching.

In an important decision issued on Tuesday, Judge Rolf M. Treu of the Los Angeles Superior Court ruled that state laws governing the hiring, firing and job security of teachers violate the California Constitution and disproportionately saddle poor and minority children with ineffective teachers.

The ruling opens a new chapter in the equal education struggle. It also underscores a shameful problem that has cast a long shadow over the lives of children, not just in California but in the rest of the country as well.

Treu stayed his invalidation of the teacher-protection laws pending appeal.

The state government’s appeal of the ruling, filed by Attorney General Kamala Harris, questioned Treu’s assumptions about the effects of state law:

The notice of appeal cited several issues, including that “changes of this magnitude, as a matter of law and policy, require appellate review.”

 

The notice also faulted the trial judge, saying that he had “declined to provide a detailed statement of the factual and legal bases for [his] ruling.”

That’s from the Los Angeles Times.

High-profile law professors split on ruling

A powerhouse group of law professors, led by Harvard’s Lawrence Tribe, supported Treu’s decision in a friend of the court brief:

The California Constitution establishes public schools for the benefit of children, not teachers, and the State Education Clause talks about the right to public education as “essential to the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people,” not as a right essential to the economic security of the teachers selected by the state to make that right a reality. Public schools exist to educate students, not to provide jobs, and job security, to teachers.

 

Another group of high-profile law professors, including Harvard’s Charles Ogletree and UC Irvine’s Erwin Chemerinsky, criticized Treu’s reasoning in their brief opposing the ruling:

Even if the record supported and the trial court found that the statutes caused the harms to the education of poor and minority students, that would not be sufficient to find the statutes invalid on their face and enjoin their enforcement. There also would need to be proof that striking down these statutes would remedy the harms and improve the education for these students. … There is no basis in the trial court’s decision, or in the voluminous record of an eight-week trial, for concluding that education of any identifiable group of students would be improved by the elimination of tenure, the prohibition on considering seniority in layoffs, or the injunction against enforcement of the procedural requirements for performance-based dismissal.

 

For more on the various friend of the court briefs — including one filed by former GOP Govs. Pete Wilson and Arnold Schwarzenegger — go here for an EdSource overview.

But a big topic has never seemed to come up: the fact that LAUSD’s finances are in such grim shape the district could be headed for bankruptcy. That was the conclusion of a panel of experts asked by district leaders to do a de facto audit in response to criticism that the school board and then-superintendent Ramon Cortines weren’t being realistic about medium- and long-term costs of LAUSD’s operations. In November, the Los Angeles Times obtained a copy of the panel’s report and printed key details:

The group, which met in private over the last several months, concluded that L.A. Unified will face a budget deficit of $333 million in the 2017-18 school year, an additional $450 million the following year and $600 million more the year after that.

 

This year’s general fund totals about $7.1 billion. …

 

If declining enrollment “cannot be reversed, the district’s future planning will be characterized by constant down-sizing and loss of revenue until the district reaches a new equilibrium at a lower, but sustainable, level,” the report said. If the district can’t adapt, it can’t remain viable, according to the report. …

 

L.A. Unified also spends more than it should on cafeteria operations and compensation for injured workers, the report said.

 

The panel made numerous recommendations, including: improving student and teacher attendance, offering an early retirement program, advocating for increased funding and reducing the total staffing in line with declining enrollment.

District must pay $493 million in 2020 for pensions

The experts’ report focused on costs that Los Angeles Unified officials could in theory contain or reduce. But it didn’t focus on a key reason that the district’s finances are about to get much worse because it is dictated by state law: the 2014 bailout of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System approved by the Legislature and signed by Gov. Jerry Brown.

While Brown in 2011 had released a pension reform blueprint that called for government agencies and their employees to roughly share the costs of pensions going forward, the CalSTRS bailout had far different terms. It requires total annual contributions to CalSTRS to go from $5.9 billion in 2014 to at least $10.9 billion in fiscal 2020-21. Of that additional $5 billion a year, 70 percent is to be provided by school districts, 20 percent is taken from the state general fund and 10 percent from teachers’ paychecks.

In Los Angeles Unified, the financial burden this adds to the district budget is immense, as LA School Report noted in 2014 after the bailout was enacted:

While teachers and school districts across the state will see their contribution rates increase, LAUSD, the largest school district in the state, will pay the lions-share.

 

The rescue, which will help address a $74 billion shortfall in the teachers pension fund, requires school districts to radically raise their contributions to the fund from the current rate of 8.25 percent, to a rate of 19.1 percent by 2020. Teachers will see a more modest step up, from 8.15 percent to an eventual 10.25 percent of their salary, over the same seven year period. The state’s contribution will rise from 3 percent to 6.3 percent.

 

But in real dollar terms, the pension contribution price tag for LAUSD is steep: it will eventually more than double by the end of the phase-in period, from its current payment of $213 million per year, to $493 million per year by 2020.

 

“It is a daunting thought,” Dennis Meyers, executive director for governmental relations at the California School Board Association, told LA School Report.

Mayor Ed Lee and the San Francisco Unified School District announced Wednesday they plan to build a 100-unit housing complex solely for public school teachers and paraprofessionals, and invest up to $44 million over the next five years to help them purchase homes.

 

The proposals seek to help the many teachers and teaching assistants in San Francisco who say untenable housing prices have made it impossible for them to live in the city.

 

“Providing this housing opportunity for our teachers is one of the most important things we can do as a city,” Board of Supervisors President London Breed said in the mayor’s office Wednesday. She added that she was “really a bad kid in school” and the teachers who helped children like her “deserve an opportunity to live in this great city.”

 

The plan for a teachers-only housing complex is in its nascent stages. City and school officials said it will be constructed on property already owned by the school district, although they wouldn’t identify what sites are under consideration. They also haven’t determined who would qualify for the housing.

In May, Los Angeles Unified announced similar plans. This is from the LA Weekly:

The Los Angeles Unified School District [has a] 66-unit, four-story Selma Community Workforce Housing Project under construction at North Cherokee and Selma avenues in Hollywood and is scheduled to open in fall of 2016, the district says. It’s “intended for L.A. Unified employees who fall into a designated economic category. The complex is part of the District’s ambitious effort to attract and retain staff who want to live near work but can’t afford to pay for housing costs.”

Gov. Davis won tax break for teachers

This isn’t the first time that teachers in California have been singled out for special treatment. In 200o, Gov. Gray Davis sought to exempt teachers from the state income tax, a proposal that quickly faced strong opposition. He ended up signing a far more modest measure that gave teachers a tax credit of up to $1,500 for out-of-pocket classroom expenses.

Given that the average teacher pay in California is nearly $70,000, it seems possible that opposition could build to singling out a group with middle-class pay for special treatment in a state in which 23 percent of residents are in poverty. But San Francisco officials sought to blunt such concerns by framing the policy as being crucial to attract and retain teachers.

Cohn’s reasoning builds off the premise that the nation’s second-largest school district is so sluggish and unresponsive that it is beyond repair:

LAUSD’s governance structure is fundamentally broken and needs to be replaced by smaller units of school governance that are much more capable of delivering educational change that better serves students and their parents. In addition to being nimble and flexible, smaller school districts are physically closer to the parents they serve, and can initiate change strategies in a much more timely fashion.

Breakup would be good for struggling kids

And he also notes the timing is right because of the new education spending rules kicking in. The rules are billed as shifting resources to the neediest students:

The argument for breakup becomes even stronger today when you consider the important equity promise of Gov. Jerry Brown’s remarkable LCFF/LCAP school funding reform initiative, which places even greater authority at the local level to get things right for kids. When Los Angeles Unified screws up, more than half a million California youngsters are denied a critical opportunity to get a decent education during their one shot at using education to alter their life chances.

Cohn, who is the director of the Urban Leadership Program at Claremont Graduate University, made those observations in an essay for EdSource. The piece is unsparing:

Last October, you had students at Jefferson High School still walking the halls and in auditoriums without scheduled classes even though school had started back on Aug. 12. Even worse, you had a superintendent giving a deposition in court (Cruz v. California) that he was powerless to get these students scheduled in the right classes, and that he needed assistance from the State of California to get this basic responsibility done. …

The missteps of the district are legion – everything from expensive attorneys arguing for the district that a middle school student was mature enough to consent to have sex with a teacher to the billion-dollar iPad and MiSiS technology debacles and school board elections where records have been broken for adult special-interest-group spending.

No single event better captures the failure of this system than the recent revelation that 75 percent of the current class of 2017 is not on target to meet the school board’s 2005 adopted policy requirement that all students must meet UC/CSU A-G college entrance requirements in order to receive a high school diploma …

District shows callousness to disabled students

Cohn also offers an anecdote that implies the district is not just poorly run but cruel. He wrote that it resisted providing minimum legally mandated help to disabled students even after a federal decree. This “intransigence” speaks to larger problems of lack of accountability and slowness in implementing change, Cohn suggests.

Cohn’s tenure in San Diego was marked by school board battles, and he faced criticism for the district’s perceived hostility to charter schools. But his run in Long Beach was remarkable, as these details from his bio point out:

During his tenure as Superintendent, the LBUSD achieved record attendance, the lowest rate of suspension in a decade, decreases in student failure and dropout rates, and an increase in the number of students taking college preparatory classes. Through exemplifying this commitment to leadership and improved student achievement, he won the McGraw Prize in 2002, and the district won the Broad Prize in 2003.

Having a distinguished educator from next door knock the Los Angeles Unified is unusual and has caused buzz in education circles — not the general media. Still, Cohn’s criticism is so harsh that he may face a counterattack from the CTA and its largest local branch, United Teachers Los Angeles. They branded former state Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, as “dangerous” when she began criticizing the union and LAUSD in 2007. When Romero ran for state superintendent of public instruction in 2010, she finished third in the primary after facing a brutal series of CTA-funded attacks.