Perdaily.com

It's Not What You Say, It's Where You Say It

2010-06-21T22:44:40Z

Last Thursday, June 17th, I went to the California Endowment to hear Professor Pedro Noguera speak on the topic The Trouble With Black Boy: Pedro Noguera on Race Equity and the Future of Public Education. While I do not consider myself to be in Professor Noguera's league intellectually, it became clear while he was presenting his ideas that we both saw eye to eye on what it would take to finally reform public education and the aspects of this failed system that he was focusing on in his talk as they related specifically to Black youth and their continued failure in public education. My epiphany came in the realization that if you talk about what Professors Noguera, Diane Ravitch, Charles Kerschner, Alan Singer, and other academics address in universities as respected academicians, you will be given a six-figure salary, book deals, and consulting jobs, while if you say the same things that these erudite teachers are saying at the K-12 level, you will be put on paid administrative leave at best, to make sure you do not infect others with you ideas, or more likely hounded out of public education altogether.

Today is the last day of school for the 2009-2010 school year and an end to my forced confinement in my home in lieu of being allowed to teach. I would like to use this last regular blog to suggest a working liaison to implement the well-thought out ideas of these professors and the practical day-to-day experience of public school teachers (who in the final analysis must be the vehicle of implementation of real reform). As smart as these professors are, their ivory tower isolation has kept them unaware of one painful reality that will subvert all their insights unless it changes: Entrenched corrupt, politically connected, and incompetent school districts will continue to do more damage than people of good will like Professor Noguera and the others can possibly undo unless he is willing to address his presently limitless energy toward these entrenched dysfunctional public school entities whose own success is clearly antithetical to any real chance.

It is gratifying when one realizes that the educational repository of knowledge represented by these professors, teachers, parents, and students must be rationally organized to confront the ignorance that presently controls public education in this country. These foolish people have substituted slogans for the substantive programs that must be put in place to deal with the reality we face in public education without flinching from the difficult task necessary for all of us to turn it around:

In lieu of wasting any further precious energy in a dialogue with and dictated by public education as presently constituted, we must promulgate an alternative clear and specific plan for public education reform that is well organized and capable of specifically answering all the difficult questions that present public education leadership does not feel it is incumbent upon for them to answer. We have spent a great deal of time on this site talking about difficult issues like social promotion and in order for us to offer a more realistic possibility of success in public education, we need to define a specific process by which we can not only address this and other problems, but which can also offer a real time two-way accountability organizational structure that is able to fine tune these reforms based on data and consequential modifications of what we propose that is independently verifiable.

Once we have developed this detailed plan of education reform through the liaison of academics, educators, students, and families, we must use it as a political organizing tool to coalesce nationwide support creating an awareness that is presently lacking: We are the majority with a better way of fixing public education based on our daily experiences which is better than presently being offered by those in power who clearly don't have a clue as to what needs to be done.

During the summer, I propose using www.perdaily.com as the virtual commons that I have talked about before. A place where we can build the reform program that we will move to institute in September. Of course, this process will require that whatever we develop and post must be defensible to all taking part in this process. While the very nature of this democratic process will not allow all ideas to be incorporated as presented, I do feel that if all who taking part in this process have the feeling that their ideas are being heard and honestly considered, they will be willing to give their active support when we put out the final platform at the end of summer based on a democratic deliberation and decision process .

While I will continue posting from time to time over the summer, my plans to spend the summer in the town of Boquete, Panama for 8 weeks in a total Spanish immersion program and the organizing and writing of the detailed organizational platform that I will share with you as it comes together for real public education reform will keep me pretty - and hopefully you - occupied during the summer. If I am able to convince you of nothing else, it is that when all is said and done, we have the power to bring about change, if we allow ourselves to do so. I hope that you will join me in creating the first-rate 21st century public education system that is the indispensable mechanism to keep our democracy viable.

Calling A Spade A Spade

2010-06-18T18:20:10Z

In the L.A. Beez -- Hive For Hyper Local Ethnic News -- article entitled Feds Eye African-American Performance Gape in L.A. Schools, the predominantly African Americans readership are feed the foolish arguments that the habitual failure of Black children in LAUSD has something to do with "the ongoing budget crunch," seniority of teachers, or the preference of good teachers to go to "affluent neighborhoods." Nothing could be further from the truth. The painful reality is that our society -- whether Black, White, and/or Brown -- we have allowed a coat of endemic ignorance, not stupidity, to be used in defining education without rigor for children of color in this system. While a patina of colored folks have been co-opted into this racist system to give it visual credibility, it is still the American beehive that continues to give children of color the royal shaft instead of the royal jelly.

Good teachers don't go to less affluent neighborhoods because poverty scares them, they don't go because no attempt is made to maintain enough discipline to create an environment where rigorous education can take place. While you wouldn't know it at inner city schools like Audubon Middle School from the burned out and cynical attitude of teachers and administrators, they did not get into teaching in the first place to teach the affluent, but rather as an expression of the idealism and social justice that brightened their own eyes while going to school.

There was little or no affluence in the Bronx when the Muslims created first-rate education for their children when they got tired of waiting and there doesn't need to be in the hood of today. There just needs to be consequences -- good and bad -- for all constituencies: teachers, students, parents, and administrators based on whether they follow or subvert a clear, pragmatic, and specifically defined high quality education program. What there needs to be is a confrontation of the deeply held belief by most African American children that being "school boy" is a negative. When I taught at Dorsey and tried to teach at the same level that I later taught at Palisades Charter High School, I had to suffer the ignorance of my principal who called me into her office to remind me, "This is a Black school." Dumbing down Black and Brown education while talking about how all of our kids are going to college is not just dishonest, it is criminal and should be prosecuted as such.

Whether or not Russlyn Ali remembers where she and her people came from remains to be seen, but there is one sure way to find out if the Civil Rights division of the Department of Education investigation is for real or just the same old same old- get in their faces with the facts. The following people in the Civil Rights Office in San Francisco are charged with the expanded investigation, but don't seem to be able to find out whether LAUSD is engaging in "intentional or unintentional discrimination."

United States Department of Education

Civil Rights Division

Michael Hing

415.486.5514

Michael.hing@ed.gov

Jim Wood Civil Rights

ocr.sanfrancisco@ed.gov

415.486.5555

These lawyers seem to have forgotten the fundamental idea that intentional is not just overt acts but also the failure to act when there is a clear duty to do so. In discussions with these folks they are constantly reminding me of the limited scope of their investigation, which seems limited to asking LAUSD whether or not they are intentionally discriminating. The guy I talked to reminded me of a male Butterfly McQueen from Gone With The Wind fame, who said, "I don't no much about birthin' [educated students of color]." While even that might be okay, the question remains is he open to learning from people who are having their children discounted on a daily basis by LAUSD.

If the scope of Ms. Ali's investigation is to be limited to English Language Learners, which clearly includes native born African American children - when it comes to standard English - who normally arrive at the school room door "having heard millions of less words than their affluent White counterparts," (Geoffrey Canada- Harlem Childrens Zone) she might consider contacting her colleagues in the Department of Justice and see if they might be willing to bring a Ricco organized crime investigation against LAUSD, since natively intelligent children of color could not continue to do so abysmally in school unless there was a well organized conspiracy to make sure they don't live up to their potential. Educate Latinos, lose your cheap labor source. Educate Blacks, and you destroy the tacit belief held by many Whites and Blacks that Black children cannot compete. Enough is enough already.

Flickr: Jim B L

Pali Charter... The Rich Getting Richer

2010-06-17T17:41:06Z

Here's a little something that we received from an ex-teacher of Palisades Charter High School describing their never ending quest to be financially irresponsible...

Ex-Teacher:

"At the meeting of the Board of Directors of Palisades Charter High School on June 5, 2010, the outgoing Executive Director Ms. Dresser-Held presented a new salary schedule for school administrators. Now their salaries will grow by $ 5,000 each year plus the same annual Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) raise that the faculty might subsequently receive. Thus, in five years, an administrative salary from a starting amount of $ 99,000 goes to an impressive $129,000, after which regular career increments and COLA will continue to apply. Isn't it a betrayal of the charter goals in the school that proclaimed that it would change the LAUSD paradigms, focus on the needs of classrooms and teachers, set new priorities, and generally do things differently? If you truly want to change the long failed paradigm of public education from the presently dysfunctional top/down model that has never worked in creating educational equity among our students, there must be a greater parity between what teachers are paid and what administrators are paid if we seek a two-way accountability that has a greater likelihood of assuring that all students get the best education possible.

When one of the board members, Mr. Schugalter called the proposal unreasonable - teachers have the same expenses in this city but start their career at a salary, which is 45% of the starting administrator's salary, another member of the board opened a personal attack on him. The board demonstrated its inability to address his well thought out arguments: if all administrators receive contracts for two years, then an administrator whose performance is deemed unsatisfactory will still get a salary increase in the second year even though he or she will have to leave the school at the end of the contract.

As an outside observer I can see no rationale for allowing the outgoing Executive Director to solely establish recklessly high salaries for the administrators without the input of a committee specifically constituted to dispassionately look at the market value of highly qualified educational administrators that could analyze salaries based on a clearly defined work expectation with which to ultimately assess their success in a matter ultimately submitted to the board for their decision. It looked and sounded as if the whole thing had been predestined to be rubber stamped by the inept board. To have the lame duck Executive Director Ms. Dresser-Held make decisions that she will in no way have to live with is an indefensible process the recognition of which should have got Mr. Schugalter praise instead of scorn- no wonder he has decided to leave the Pali Board which seems to feel unfettered by the necessity to be able to rationally defend its actions.

On June 8, 2010, there was another board meeting at Palisades Charter High School. This time, the board had to approve the new budget with a deficit of more than $360,000. Last year, the deficit was over $ 250,000. In this case, the majority of the Pali Board members seemed unconcerned with what is clearly the carrying of an unnecessary deficit that could easily have been balanced if they had not abdicated their responsibility to sound fiscal policy. Reserves that were the source of funding this deficit, should be used for exceptional expenses not to establish an unsustainable fixed cost of doing business in bad economic times.

Although concrete recommendations where those cuts could be done without affecting the classroom performance were put forward, they were ignored without offering any justification. This is not the deliberative process that the Pali Board in furtherance of it fiduciary duty to the school should have engaged in. This school budget took no cognizance of the fiscal health of California, poor prospects of getting more revenues next year, and a serious drop of revenues coming to the school in the last two years and most likely next year. The school expenses have grown dramatically this year due to the transportation cost. And yet the board blindly voted to approve the new budget with the new deficit of more than $ 360,000 despite Mr. Schugalter's motion to return the budget to the Budget Committee where it could have easily have been balanced at the expense of out of classroom positions of questionable value to the school. Next year, when the school budget is even deeper in the red and the state revenues drop even more, the board will have to reduce personnel salaries, cut school days back, and resort to other dramatic measures, while having radically depleted necessary financial reserves, but the board members who made these irresponsible decisions a week ago will never admit that they wasted school resources while they still had a chance to save money. It is reminiscent of Schwartzenegger cutting taxes for the rich and cutting state fees when he came into office without ever looking to the future budgetary problems that were just on the horizon and which we are all now painfully aware of.

The school administration prefers to hire younger teachers in order to pay them less, increases class size steadily every year, and takes loving care of their own salaries. When I left Pali several years ago, it was clear to me that no individual would be able to reverse the trend of self-aggrandizement of those on the in at Pali unless the majority of teachers, students, and parents finally say we have had enough. The story of Palisades Charter High is the story of fanfares, nepotism, inefficiency, and selfishness of those who grabbed the helm. The school API rating is better because the number of students from poor and uneducated families went down while the number of white kids from more educated families went up. This obviously has little to do with improving public education.

The more I learn about the board that runs the school, the more I understand that the school is another disappointing replica of LAUSD with the same typical malaise. The school board members' priorities are not in classrooms: they cut field trips for students and allowed more bureaucrats in the offices; they increase class size every year and pay sky-high salaries to numerous administrators but the faculty salaries are only a few per cent higher than those in the LAUSD system; they hire a UCLA team to formulate the school leadership vision that costs over $ 40,000 and closed the summer school program because there was no money; their cafeteria budget has been in the red for years, yet nothing has ever been done to make it efficient. There are four counselors in the College Center, whereas all other public schools in California have only one. Their Human Resources Department has two specialists without any justification. The board allowed massive mismanagement in personnel and fiscal issues one of which is the pool that never really needed to be built in the first place with another pool across the street that could have been brought up to snuff for a fraction of the cost.

I believe the local community needs to know what is happening at Pali and how taxpayers' money is being wasted in this public school in the same manner as when it was in LAUSD.

I hope you will find it possible to post my letter because lack of information only exacerbates the problem.

Thank you,

Former teacher

PS Could your site e-mail this letter to the school personnel also? I don't have access to their site.

Rhee(constitution) In D.C - Harbinger Of Things To Come In LAUSD

2010-06-16T19:00:46Z

The reconstitution of a school by making teachers reapply for their jobs or by replacing administrators is to education reform what blood letting is to good health. For the most part, it is not who is doing the teaching of administrating, but rather what they are administering. If I had a mechanically perfect car, but decided to put polluted old gasoline in it as its source of energy, I would have performance problems no matter how many parts on the car I decided to change.

One of the hallmarks of failed public education reform is that the majority of solutions that politicians and out-of-touch school district administrators continue to propose in no way deal with the polluted fuel system that has shown itself incapable of supplying the relevant energy that is so desperately needed to allow teachers and administrators to effectively do their job. While the first blush response is that the teacher is not doing their job and this is what is causing the failure, a more educated approach would clearly rule this out by showing that it is the mismatch between subjective student level and relevant teachers' skills that is causing the continuing failure of students to achieve reasonable annual academic success.

The Washington Post article states "150 teachers at those schools must reapply for their jobs if they want to remain." Nowhere in this plan is the gulf between these students subjective academic level in English and Math and the grade-level that they have been disingenuously put into for political correctness ever been addressed. That being the case, it doesn't matter if the teacher is the most capable and conscientious teacher there is, the foundational skills to benefit from the teacher are not present in the student and the relevant pedagogic approach is not in the training of teachers who might know their own subjects well, but lack the specialized skills to deal with these students deficits so they might understand enough of the standard English foreign language that their teacher is using to try and communicate with them.

Turning one of these schools -- Stanton -- over to a Philadelphia-based charter school organization called Scholar Academies will have no greater success unless they attempt to align these failed students academic abilities with a teacher having the relevant skill set to engage them. What Chancellor Rhee is doing in Washington, D.C. and Superintendent Cortines is starting to do in LAUSD and other big-city minority dominated school districts are doing throughout the country is a priori assign blame to teachers and then proceed with their reform of public education using the reconstitution of teachers and a few administrators as their sole program for fixing public education- this approach is doomed from the start.

While there's surely a significant number of incompetent teachers in public education that need to be removed from the classroom to stop them from doing more harm to their students, they in no way represent such a large percentage of the teaching population that reconstitution of a school is required. It is also worth noting that the majority of what we now identify as incompetent teachers did not start out that way, but developed their dysfunction in the present public school atmosphere where teachers get no support for discipline or good teaching practices. First create a pragmatic educational environment driven by student data and interdisciplinary working together of teachers and administrators and then see how many teachers we would have to reconstitute. If teachers' training and students ability were more closely aligned, even some of the teachers who have become "burnouts" might be salvaged if they were allowed to work in a classroom environment with reasonable discipline of students and where the curriculum of the class bore some relationship to what the students were actually capable of doing in clear recognition of their deficits in English and Math. Any restructuring of schools that does not have this as its first principle is mean spirited and designed to do anything but turn around the abysmal performance of big city minority dominated public schools.

Allegedly, "No Child Left Behind gives Rhee options to address problems at schools that have consistently failed to make what the law describes as 'adequate yearly progress' on standardized test scores. Overall, about 90 of DC.'s 123 schools are under some form of federal notice to improve." Nowhere in this language is a recognition of the present abilities of the D.C. students, which makes "adequate yearly progress" as realistic a goal as me becoming superintendent of LAUSD. "The six schools cited Monday, with a combined enrollment of about 2,200, have undergone multiple waves of federally mandated improvement and restructuring" without ever making a dent in endemic student underachievement, because they stubbornly refuse to address where their students are actually functioning. Add to this the fact that the more years allowed to pass without doing this, the less likely we are to succeed in ever turning it around and you get a clear picture of the formula for disaster that Chancellor Rhee and other superintendents are racing to implement. "Four of them[schools]--Ballou, Stanton, Hamilton and Garfield--have not met annual progress benchmarks for at least seven years," but nobody in power seems to really have the slightest interest in why this continues to be so. They would rather content themselves with blaming the evil and lazy teachers.

Reed vs. California

2010-06-15T20:15:45Z

Even in H.G. Wells classic science fiction story The Time Machine, the passive Eloi ultimately get the guts to fight back from being bred as the food supply for their more assertive underground dwelling Morlock masters. While LAUSD hasn't started eating teachers yet, I don't put anything past LAUSD's carnivorous leadership that like the Morlock will do anything to survive in a Los Angeles that is more devastated year after year by LAUSD continuing and unchecked malfeasance. But let's face it folks, the less than intellectual wizards that continue to run the District and public education into the ground in Los Angeles and elsewhere couldn't do so if they were not kept in power and supported by the puppet masters in Sacramento and Washington who take their marching orders from corporate interests that President-elect Karen Lewis of the Chicago Teachers' Union sees only concerned with the potential $380 billion privatization of public education.

Just take a look at the recent case of Reed vs. California which recently came down from the California Supreme Court and hopefully you will realize just how coordinated the attack is against professional teachers and the hard earned salaries and benefits that most of us are entitled to for doing one of the most important -- yet least valued jobs -- in our society.

What is scary about this case is that it purports to champion the rights of poor inner city students who have had a disproportionate number of their teachers fired because of the reduction in forces ("RIF") that came down unequally against them.

What it doesn't address is the reason why this happened. "The three middle schools at issue were struggling before the RIFs, as shown by the fact that all three were ranked in the bottom 10% of California schools in academic performance." The case exclusively focuses on the effect of this failure at the schools, but never asks what were the causes:

1. The schools in question find it impossible to attract experienced teachers with tenure and reasonable seniority, because any teacher who has been in these schools or the scores of other schools like them knows for a fact that LAUSD administration will give you no support for maintaining enough discipline to even have a chance to teach and not do daycare.

2. Middle and high school teachers are single-subject area teachers. The vast majority of students in these schools are without the foundational skills necessary to learn the more advanced subjects that are taught in middle and high school, so why would a teacher with a choice put themselves in a no-win situation where they don't have the skills necessary to teach these students.

3. In fairness to the administrators that have no tenure in their positions, they are just following LAUSD marching orders that we have said on this blog many times requires them maintaining attendance at any cost to keep the money coming in from the state.

4. Seasoned and highly seniority teachers chose not to teach at these schools, not because they are elitist and crypto-racist as was implicit in the lawsuit, but rather because the objective reality is that nobody can teach students without foundational prerequisite skills in a system that prefers to dump these students into the next grade year after year without ever trying to engage them where they are at with adequate resources that include teachers qualified to give them the remediation they need.

5. Maintaining the fantasy that these are real middle and high schools flies in the faces of all data on the majority of these students who are still functioning on an elementary school level while at the same time never having bought into the discipline that must exist if education is to take place at any grade level. In fact, although these middle and high schools function at a weak elementary school level, when you factor in behavior, you wind up with ignorance and misbehavior that make education or remediation objectively impossible.

So why is this case going on? Clearly for any teacher who is willing to take their head out of the sand and look at this case in conjunction with everything else that is coming down the pike at us, it is about destroying a professional well compensation teacher corp in favor of one that would not have the job security or strength to question the privatization of American public education for corporate profit.

Reed vs. California is just the latest attack on hard earned union rights like seniority, where the truth about the case as mentioned before is that it has less to do with seniority than it does with a failed school where those in LAUSD who made it fail and with the power to change the culture of the school to something that would be more attractive to experienced teachers refuse to do so. Even administrators don't want to be in these schools for anything more than the 2 or 3 years necessary to flesh out their resumes in their attempt to get a big job at the LAUSD Beaudry headquarters, where they can assure that the policies that keep these schools failing year after year will never change in a manner that might threaten their privileges.

Add the attack on seniority presented in Reed to the attacks on tenure, discipline, pay and benefits, and class size and you can see the Walmart approach to public education that will only be happy when they can figure out how to lessen costs in order to get as much money as they can from the state without having to deal with the problems that teachers, students, and education give them. The ceaseless assault on teachers that continues to cut funds and overfill classrooms while not addressing either the students or teachers needs will not stop unless educators, students and parents show a willingness to actively confront the corruption and incompetence.

Chicago Teachers' Union Victory Against Scapegoating Teachers

2010-06-14T18:22:07Z

Someone once said, "Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans." That is true to the nth degree for teachers who have one of the most stressful jobs there is, but also must deal with a constant assault from LAUSD to try -- as I have said many times on this blog to scapegoat them -- for a system they have no control over. Well, while it is too early to tell, there might have been the first step toward turning this regrettable circumstances around in Chicago Public Schools, where its 30,000 teacher have just elected Karen Lewis to end the 40 year reign of business and politics as usual at their teachers' union.

If you would like to hear her comments, you can listen here.

Let me take this opportunity to summarize some of the points she made in the speech so you can see that although we don't often have the time to appreciate it, the battles that we are fighting for real education reform are being waged in every major city throughout this country. From a husband who writes in about his wife's inability to teach in her D.C. school, because of a failure of administration to support her in maintaining minimal discipline, to a Chicago school system that newly elected Chicago Union President Karen Lewis describes in a manner that one would be hard pressed to distinguish from the LAUSD inspired nonsense we face here in Los Angeles.

Karen Lewis's 59% victory gives teachers the political power to advance one of her major campaign slogans, "Put business in its place out of our schools." She aims to accomplish this by defining a specific program for advancing student and teacher needs to fulfill these needs, while carefully "scrutinizing present practices" that are rampant with corruption in aid of corporate America tapping into the "$380 billion trust" that up until recently has been in the public sector for the exclusive benefit of public schools. Lewis talks about the corporate battle plan that began in Chicago 15 years ago to starve school budgets, increase class size, and close schools... sound familiar?

In L.A. many of the same devices were used, but here we added billions of dollars in bond issues to build new schools of questionable necessity, while further putting the state into debt for these corporate construction company make-work projects that were put into place while giving these same corporate entities sweet tax breaks, while making it harder to get tax money for more mundane public education expenses that have been allowed to go wanting.

In Chicago, they spent $60 million on standardized tests to show student failure that really had more to do with "zip code" to create a "perceived failure" that could be used to scapegoat the teahers. The less than diligent teacher leadership that Lewis has replaced "didn't bother to point it out," that the Chicago School District was actually orchestrating the failure of public education to justify the "reform" that would allow the lucrative charters to come in -- charters that have never opened their books to show their finances and charters that have had no greater success in raising the academic performance of traditionally low achieving students buried in poverty. Chicago School administration only exacerbated the situation by closing 70 schools while pushing charters that did no better.

One suggestion that teachers' union president-elect Lewis suggests that might also help here in Los Angeles is changing how we finance public schools. In Chicago, school funding comes 60% from porperty taxes and 30% from the state. Lewis suggests that this be reversed so that poor neighborhoods can get the funds that they desperately need to fix their schools. In California, with the earlier Jarvis-Gann initiative that limited all property taxes, the requirement of a 2/3rds majority to pass new taxes, and the significant tax cuts Governor Schwartzenegger gave to corporations and the rich, we suffer from the same disparity of treatment of our students depending on whether or not they come from a poor neighborhood or not. Add to this the fact that Whites have basically abandoned public education and don't want to pay for a system that they no longer use and the similarities become more striking with those faced in Chicage, NYC, Baltimore, and most major urban school districts throughout this country. Chicago is slightly smaller than Los Angeles in terms of size and so is the massive debt of $600 million that is also crippling it.

Lewis ends by saying that "Great schools with great teachers is the most important civil right of out generation." While we at perdaily couldn't agree with her more, I will temper my cautious optimisim with healthy skepticism derived from having heard many people say the right thing only to pale in the execution when faced with the entrenched and legendarily corrupt Chicago government of Mayor Daly, that Mayor Villaraigosa seems so intent on emulating.

How Should LAUSD Be Structured?

2010-06-11T20:13:56Z

While there is no shortage of discussions dealing with fixing public education in the United States and more specifically LAUSD here in Los Angeles, it seems that a certain fundamental question remains aloof from this conversation:

It is the purported purpose and uncontradicted position among all parties in the debate on fixing the long-failed public education system that education is more than ever necessary. The foundational purpose of public education is to teach at the very least a sufficient amount of basic language, math, social studies, and science skills so that students can ultimately assume their future role as responsible adults and productive members of society. As productive working members of society with the necessary knowledge acquired from education they must also serve as arbiters of power as anticipated by our constitution. What seems a gross disconnect from these goals is the very structure of public education in its present form as a top/down oligarchy (dictatorship of the few) that doesn't seem to believe enough in the democratic principles that it defines as educational goals to employ them in the formation of our youth.

The mandate given to anyone having political power in a democracy is that this mandate is normally contingent on some degree of successful performance and does not allow the passing on of hereditary dictatorial powers. Even in some dictatorial governmental structures like those employed by some native American tribal cultures, these dictatorial powers given to a chief could be withdrawn at any time by a council of elders if they felt that the chief's performance left something to be desired. For some unexplained reason, at LAUSD the oligarchy stays in power no matter what. What is called leadership is really a titular superintendent who is effectively isolated and limited in his function by what the entrenched bureaucracy allows him to propose or do by controlling what the superintendent is made privy to. Ironically, there is no singular sinister malafacteur at work here. Rather, LAUSD's "intelligence" functions like a communal beehive, the brain-pod of a bird, or the Borg for all you Star Trek science fiction afficionados- a series of hardwired responses to perceived danger that have no intellectual component other than immediate self-defense.

The things that we give the highest reward for in our society outside of this cloistered LAUSD totalitarian reality will only get you in big trouble if you dare to express them in LAUSD as presently constituted. There is a certain irony to the fact that an institution with the lofty rhetorical goals it continues to espouse of education at the highest level has been allowed to degrade into the most anti-intellectual environment that I have ever experienced Several years ago, my wife and I were having dinner with a couple who were both professors in the history department at UCLA, when it occurred to me that these highly intelligent and insightful people spoke no language that was comprehensible to the mediocre oligarchs that have now intellectually run LAUSD into the ground for generations. If these professors or anybody else with a modicum of intellect dared to enter LAUSD, they would be drummed out within 5 years as are 50% of the teaching staff.

If leadership reflects rank-and-file, why are these failed leaders with no vision allowed to continue decimating the majority of our youth instead of fulfilling a more reasonable mandate of giving them the best public education possible? The answer is in the still vibrant Social Darwinism ideas with roots of the 19th century public education system that we still have in force, which uses the superficial and disingenuous rhetoric of excellence while all the time maintaining a throwback system whose real mandate is to replicate the status quo and those who have always had the power. What is lost on the architects of this failed system is the reason that we espoused a democratic system of government and education in the first place. It was not for some lofty ideal, but rather for the clearly rational conclusion that any system that draws on the strengthens of a greater pool of intelligence has a better chance of remaining a viable culture in the face of societal decline that has brought down all previous societies.

I don't know if I have the possibility of another stint at the university in me, but if I did, I would like to write a doctoral thesis on the idea that has been going through my mind over the last couple of years that all societies plant the seeds of their own demise when they fail to recognize that the well-being of the haves in any society is contingent on the well-being of those with less. When the disparity of wealth in terms of possessions and knowledge become too great, the citizens clearly have lost the historical awareness that should have been transmitted through education as to what the costs to both the haves and the have nots will be. Unlike Karl Marx, I look to the haves in Los Angeles and elsewhere to redress dysfunctional education that they have misguidedly abandon, because its continued failure will take them down as much as those who remain the direct victims of this system.

Last night I attended the annual awards ceremony at the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies (LACES), one of the few shining lights of what remains possible in terms of academic excellence in LAUSD. It is an island of culture that over the years has attracted concerned parents of all ethnicities who seek an alternative. While nothing is perfect, LACES showed a vision of what is possible for all LAUSD schools if the haves with the power to bring about the change necessary finally wake up. The Patrick Moten Memorial Music Scholarship was awarded in the memory of this accomplished deceased Black musician to a White student. Other students without concern for their own ethnicity were honored on an equal plane for academic excellence that saw a multi-ethnic recognition of the living spirit of the samurai for excellence in Japanese studies. Whenever I lose heart and wonder if we will ever turn around LAUSD, I am strengthened by experiences that show at least some young people in 2010 not carrying the unnecessary racial baggage that I was raised with or the debilitating notion that many of my educator colleagues continue to believe that we will never change it.

UTLA - Adaptation To LAUSD Failure Is Not A Viable Policy

2010-06-10T18:49:58Z

UTLA finally needs to have a discussion as to what is the mandate of the union. It is either an entity that spends its limited resources on playing a game defined by LAUSD in which it clearly cannot win or it needs to finally define and spend its limited resources toward expressing a clear platform with which they can galvanize support among its rank-and-file and the community -- it cannot do both. Not only does UTLA's present course change nothing, worse yet, it gives credibility to LAUSD's misguided and self-serving programs and policies that are antithetical to everything that must exist in order for excellent public education to exist in Los Angeles.

Like LAUSD, UTLA is presently not fighting for better education, it is fighting for jobs and while there is a clear correlation with having an adequate well-trained staff of educators, the waste that continues to be endemic to LAUSD doesn't mean that not losing teachers and having adequate staff is equal to an accountable education system that truly educates ALL students to their potential.

Just look at where UTLA presently spends it money:

1. It supports supplemental property assessment Measure E, which is not only necessitate by California' budget deficit, but also by the vast sums of money that continue to be wasted at LAUSD in the maintenance of 8 superfluous mini-districts, a television station, unjustified out-of-classrooms positions, and a whole host of expenditures that should have gone on the chopping block long before asking taxpayers to foot yet another bill for an education system that has never vindicated the investment. While we can argue about the necessitate for charter schools, one cannot argue with the huge windfall in finances that charters get by eliminating this bloated LAUSD bureaucracy. The fact that many of these charters then create their own LAUSDesque dysfunctional top heavy bureaucracies does not negate that the money is there if reasonable oversight is part of the governance process.

2. UTLA owns its building at Berendo and Wilshire and collects close to $60 a month from over 38,000 members and service receivers, but always pleads poverty, because it is constantly fighting the same grievances over and over again against LAUSD for actions that clearly show a pattern on the part of the District that does not respect the Collective Bargaining Agreement, the California State Education Code, or even LAUSD's own internal policies. Rather than definitively litigate to establish a more balanced and ultimately less expensive process in resolving disputes with LAUSD, UTLA continues these repetitious processes with LAUSD that only serve to justify the jobs of highly compensated bureaucrats at LAUSD and UTLA who are never going back to the classroom and whose work up until now has not changed the failed academic culture of LAUSD nor is it likely to.

3. UTLA spends huge sums of money to influence LAUSD Board elections and other political campaigns at the state and national level, but has little to show for it because UTLA self-interests are not equatable with what's good for public education, unless there existed a clearly teacher defined platform of where we wanted to take public education and what teachers stand for independent of LAUSD's ideas. UTLA union policy at present has no more of a clue as to what needs to be done than LAUSD.

4. UTLA's support of LAUSD Board candidates that supposedly support teachers is not the same as supporting candidates that will confront the entrenched and self-serving leadership of both LAUSD and UTLA, rather than become a part of it. Public education reform is not possible as long as LAUSD and UTLA run under a top/down model whether there is no democratic process that allows rank-and-file input into what policies and programs should run the District. Failure to do this has created the fertile ground where the present orchestrated media attack against teachers seeking to blame us for the failure of education has found a responsive ear in the public that is sick of obscene amounts of money being spent with nothing to show for it.

There is not a nickel's worth of difference between the vacuous edspeak rhetoric of LAUSD or UTLA which talks about "social justice, crisis, actions, fighting back, and organizing" without ever saying how this is going to take place. Given the feudal nature of how both LAUSD and UTLA are run, I might suggest an approach that the Russian people choose when they brought about their revolution in 1917. While I do not agree with the politics of that revolution I do agree with the limited and specific ideas that were used to bring it about: Peace, Land, and Bread.

So what ideas express real education reform? While a slogan by definition is not specific, it can be overlain on any specific education policy consideration in asking whether what is being done now stands a chance of fulfilling the slogan. So, as a first suggestion for some bedrock principles of public education designed to finally bring about measurable change how's about:

1. Clearly defined consequences for all education stakeholders -- whether you're a student, teacher, administrator, or parents you have both rights and obligations. The failure for any of these constituencies to live up to clearly defined obligations needs to be addressed by a summary process designed to end non-compliance in a timely manner, which is what is presently sabotaging LAUSD.;

2. Ending social promotion -- By putting programs in place that address the subjective needs of our students and not some fantasy that continues to be promulgated by LAUSD and by hiring the expertise necessary to implement such pragmatic education, we will no longer have to choose between social promotion and grade retention, neither of which deal with the underlying deficits are students continue to be unnecessarily afflicted with. This will require the renegotiation of how seniority is used and how compensation dealt with.

3. Education must be driven by data with a clear willingness to change policy when there is little or no evidence to show that a program is working or has any chance of working.

While these first principles do not specifically address things as diverse as the proposed cutting down of shade trees by a co-sited charter school or the epidemic levels of diabetes in Latino children that approaches twice the state average, such issues and others will be resolved if the above 3 policies are implemented as part of a reform process that sees such things as only symptoms of the underlying disease which is the failure to educate.

LAUSD Still Wishing We Would Go Away...

2010-06-09T21:36:39Z

In plumbing the depths of ignorance at LAUSD, I am always surprised when I realize that I have come no where near the bottom of their self-inflicted stupidity. In the never ending soap opera that is my daily interaction with LAUSD's staff as much as I should have learned by now that they have no shame and will say anything, I still have a difficult time having such a low expectation of people who should be my colleagues in furthering the excellence of public education, rather than the premeditated sabotage that is their daily work.

When I bumped into LAUSD Office of the Inspector General investigator John Metcalf, I was initially gratified when he told me that my harvesting of fellow employees email addresses and sending them a flyer about education reform and www.perdaily.com did not violate the District's Acceptable Use Policy. However, my joy was short lived because he cited the following Employee Code of Ethics policy that he was assured by LAUSD's attorneys I had violated:

"Good Morning Mr. Isenberg,

Under Employee Code of Ethics you will find the following information.

RESPONSIBILITY

17. Proper use of public resources. Except for occasional and limited personal use that does not interfere with performance of duties or create an appearance of impropriety, we are committed to ensuring that District facilities, equipment, supplies, mailing lists, or; other District resources are used for District purposes.

John Metcalf

Office of the Inspector General,

Investigations"

I don't know how more "occasional" one can be in their use of a system than one time. After all, it's not like I continued to spam fellow LAUSD employees. As for "limited personal use that doesn't interfere with performance of duties or create an appearance of impropriety," what is it about a teacher seeking an active dialog about addressing LAUSD's longstanding failure that is unacceptable. First of all, it is not "personal use," but rather clearly within the scope of my employment as a profession educator in furtherance of what LAUSD administration and every staff development I have ever attended has encouraged me to do- make the system better. Here the problem seems to be that I actually conquered the endemic cynicism that is at epidemic proportions in my profession as an educator and actually sought a democratic dialog on how to fix it. So, ah, what is wrong with that.

I did not state any specific reforms, but rather sought to define a new process. It occurs to me that if Superintendent Ramon Cortines had proposed what I was proposing, he would have been lauded as an avante-garde educational innovator trying to define a new method of fixing public education. How does such a process "interfere" with anybody's "performance of duties?" Where is the "impropriety?" Is confronting and seeking change of the privileged position LAUSD leadership the impropriety?

By being an employee of LAUSD, I do not give up my civil rights as guaranteed by the United States Constitution and selectively incorporated and made applicable to the State of California and entities like LAUSD. While LAUSD continues to delude itself that it has sovereignty, as of this writing they do not have F 16 fighter jets and even if they did, they would have to respect my right to freedom of speech under the 1st Amendment unless they could show a "clear and present danger" in my exercise of protected speech or a threat to national security. Arguable, fixing public education will actually make us let threatened.

Furthermore, it is not my burden of proof to show that what I am saying is acceptable, rather, it is for the government or government entity like LAUSD to show that there is a "compelling governmental interest in limiting my right to speak and that limitation goes no further than is absolutely necessary. LAUSD and its attorneys who seem to have slept through their Constitution law class don't seem to understand this principle or meet this burden of proof in their attempt to chill my 1st Amendment rights.

And finally, the United States Supreme Court strictly scrutinizes any limitation on freedom of speech where the restrictions are vague and overly broad. In reading the aforementioned cite to the Employee Code of Ethics, I would defy anybody to tell me what kind of speech is acceptable under this LAUSD policy.

Here was our original email:

Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser.

Teachers. Administrators. Staff.

It is clear to almost everyone working for LAUSD that something has to change. It's imperative we do something different to finally succeed in accomplishing the lofty goals for our students. The real first step in this process is to finally acknowledge that this goal has eluded us up until now. If all of us are going to be held responsible for what is happening now and in the not too distant future of public education, then everyone must assume a more active role in determining LAUSD's direction.

Rather than let this present insecurity divide us, we should create an open and neutral forum where we can share our concerns as LAUSD employees on an equal footing. Hopefully, www.perdaily.com can become that space.

We can fight back.

It is no longer acceptable for us to sit back and take potshots at LAUSD, unless we are willing to talk about what we know and see on a daily basis. Issues like corruption, waste, mismanagement, teacher harassment and coerced grade inflation continually plague LAUSD year after year, with no end in sight. And as usual, teachers are the first to be blamed (or laid off). Here's our chance to shed some much needed light on what's really wrong with our schools, while proposing positive alternatives for discussion by all constituencies at LAUSD. If all of us work together, we can be the watchdog this district so desperately needs.
If you know something, email us at: tips@perdaily.com -- You can remain 100% Anonymous.

Public Education's Forgotten Excellence

2010-06-08T20:12:04Z

As I get older, often I find myself mentioning a great movie or actor, a book, or an important event from the past, while getting a quizzical look on the young face that I am trying to share my passionate memories with. While I am old enough to realize that nothing lasts, I also realize that in the relay race that is life, education must function as the bridge between the past and the future where what one generation has valued can be presented to the next generation for their scrutiny, possible approval, and as a point of reference in determining where they want to go.

In the Professor Stanley Fish's New York Times blog today entitled A Classic Education: Back to the Future, Professor Fish reminisces about Classical High School in Providence, Rhode Island where he went over 55 years ago. The academic rigor he describes from that time seems much further removed than its actual 55 years, when juxtaposed with an LAUSD of today which doesn't see this level of academic excellence as even a possible goal in anything but rhetoric. Much like LAUSD of today, Classical High was "A student body made up of the children of immigrants or first generation Americans; many, like [Professor Fish], the first in their families to finish high school with nearly a 100 percent college attendance rate." While it was a different time and the children of those immigrants came to America with different values, at the base of there success seemed to be a rigor of endeavor and intellectual curiosity and idealism that we have regrettably allowed to disappear at LAUSD where slogans have so long ago replaced substance that most are no longer aware that it is missing.

In listening to the 3 different perspectives Professor Fish talks about of Leigh A. Bortins' "The Core: Teaching Your Child the Foundations of Classical Education," Martha C. Nussbaum's "Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities"Diane Ravitch's "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education," I realized just how much as a society we miss what Bortins describes "as a continuing conversation that humankind has been engaged in for centuries." How much of the trouble that we presently find ourselves in from Afghanistan to the Gulf of Mexico comes from our public schools no longer functioning as a clearinghouse for the "collective wisdom of the ages" used to prepare the next generation for the problems of the present and the future.

The rich curriculum of math, science, language, history, economics and literature that Bortins describes as "the ideas that make us human" cannot presently exist in LAUSD because the rigor necessary to achieve their mastery is no longer a stated goal that offers real consequences for their non-attempt or achievement. When Bortins describes "grammar as the study of the formal structure of anything," what she hints at is an inquisitive mind that no longer has a place in an LAUSD where no good act good act goes unpunished and not making waves gets you a 6 figure salary with perks. My wife went to German school in Rome where she was raised. Students in her school only attended class 4 hours a day, but when they were in school, they worked and achieved much better academic results than their fellow students in regular Italian schools. The annual assessments that a school like Classical High in Rhode Island or the Deutsche Schule in Rome took were not the goal of education as they have become at LAUSD, but rather a foregone conclusion of success based on the rigor required from students, teachers, and administrators throughout the year who were too busy working to attend the endless meetings discussing ethereal goals that at LAUSD never seem to be achieved.

While LAUSD's failure as an educational entity can be witnessed by the much touted API scores, Martha Nussbaum suggests a much better test as to whether a culture of education has taken root: Do students "see themselves as members of a heterogeneous nation...and a still more heterogeneous world," which view comes from a rigorous and in depth education which has become sorely lacking in our schools. When Nussbaum "talks about a narrower and narrower view of education," one almost hears the vacuous edspeak platitudes that have come to replace substance so thoroughly in LAUSD that the actual mechanisms of how we educate- or more specifically- how we educate students from whom rigor has never been required are not even part of the conversation. In this stunted view of public education, nothing is "flexible, open and creative."

And finally there is Professor Diane Ravitch whose critique of what we are doing is the most damning because she is no longer an apologist for the failed choice in lieu of substance public education system that still is allowed to stifle real public education reform. One can only hope that if Ravitch who was such an ardent support of presently failed public education can turn around than maybe others will be moved from long failed public education policies that are insuring the decline of American society.

Send LAUSD A Message By Voting NO On Measure E

2010-06-07T18:26:29Z

It is very difficult for us to recommend a NO vote on Measure E because we are aware of the teachers jobs and programs from the arts to maintaining librarians that hang in the balance. However, giving LAUSD more money under the circumstances smacks of extortion, while the well being of students and teachers are the human shield to try and make just one more withdrawal from the taxpayers by the money junkies at the District. If their was any credibility in LAUSD one might offer even a more expensive tax measure, but without the ability to first restructure LAUSD's corrupt and self-serving bureaucratic leadership, it is unacceptable to give them more money to waste without LAUSD first showing that they would do something different with it than they already have done. Does anybody give YOU more money for failure?

Those in favor argue that the terms of Measure E specifically make it unacceptable to spent the funds from Measure E on more administrative salaries, but that as usual begs the question. If teachers don't show up to work, there is no school. It seems to me that there are still a significant number of administrators that should lose their jobs or be sent back to the classroom for a significantly diminished salary before teachers who perform the primary function in education are offered as the only cuts possible. Because LAUSD is unwilling to make the painful cuts in administration and other areas of questionable value doesn't mean that we should give them more money to make up the shortfall that is not only due to the California State budget crisis, but also the spendthrift mismanagement that has been endemic in LAUSD for far too long.

There are alot of pigs still feeding at the LAUSD sty. Nobody seems willing to ask why the economics of scale which are supposed to get LAUSD a better price on what it needs has degraded in a procurement system where LAUSD pays more for virtually everything from computers to books to telephones to handrails, while only using technology to increase expenses rather than bring them down.

It is a false and shortsighted construct of the facts to say that the billions of dollars that we voters already gave to LAUSD with the proviso that they could only be used for 150 new schools of questionable necessity cannot be used to make up the $640 million LAUSD budget shortfall this year. There is nothing that says LAUSD has to spend all this money and if they finally get honest and pull the plug on some of these Taj Mahal new school projects of questionable need, they might turn the money back to the state which would have to lessen the indebtedness that these bonds have already created for the taxpayers. If the bond debt was lessened because of the honest reassessment of the necessity of these schools, maybe taxpayers like me would be more inclined to trust LAUSD with more money, when they are willing to pragmatically stagger the start times of their existing schools in deference to students who work nights and teachers who would be willing to teach during nontraditional hours. Obviously, this maximization of existing schools would obviate the necessity of at least some the the new schools.

On June 8, 2010 LAUSD will still pay for 8 mostly empty mini-district offices that could easily be accommodated at the already half-empty Beaudry headquarters building. While everyone would like to have their own television station, in tough budgetary times the consideration might be given to mothball LAUSD's expensive station or sell it outright. Even the $3700 a month that LAUSD is still willing to spend for my old standalone classroom in a private office building at Hauser and Wilshire could pay the salary of a teacher for a year, but even with the lease on this property coming to an end this month, LAUSD refuses to let this rental property go. Why? One would think that if they were truly in such dire need of cash, an unnecessary expense like this would be first on the chopping block. What does Ray and Co. know that we don't?

Voting for Measure E on June 8th requires you to suffer from early Alzheimer's and forget all the times in the recent past that LAUSD has cried wolf only for the voter to realize after the fact that they just got scammed again. In November 2008 they put a $7 billion bond issue on the ballot that everybody from Attorney Connie Rice, who sits on the bond oversight committee, to charter operators, to the unions, all said that it was a bloated measure that asked for far more than was required simply because LAUSD thought that they could get away with the money grab by batting their institutional eyelashes and giving us the tired old Ray Cortines saw, "It's so the students can get a great education." Ex-City Controller Laura Chick tried for years to get LAUSD to open up their books for her to audit -- they refused and got away with it.

Once, shame on you Ray, twice shame on us if we go along with Measure E.

LAUSD Robots Only Follow Orders...

2010-06-04T16:22:52Z

Just when I thought it couldn't get more bizarre... I met with my Principal Janet Seary and Ignacio Garcia of LAUSD Staff Relations today, because it was Seary's intention to issue me another Notice of Unsatisfactory Acts and another 15-day Suspension for alleged acts on my parts that go back as much as 8 months to September 29, 2009. Surprise, this wasn't one Notice of Unsat and one 15-day Suspension, but rather two.

When I asked Ignacio Garcia if he had read the answers to these new charges, he said he had, but that "these were only preliminary finds and not as yet conclusions." So my next question to him was, "Since you've already waited 8 months, why not wait a little longer to see if there is any validity to the charges?" He responded, "The charges and penalties are not being imposed at this time." But this is only true, because I have a right to appeal the charges which tolls their implementation- something I should not have to do if there was not a preponderance of the evidence showing that I had done something wrong, which Garcia admitted there wasn't at this time.

I queried him on whether it wouldn't have been more reasonable to complete the investigation to ascertain whether I was in fact guilt of anything charged, since to hit me with charges with admittedly no reasonable belief on the part of LAUSD at this time that they were in fact valid was abuse of process, harassment, and a violation of my civil rights. Garcia responded, "I don't make the decision, we are not management, and my opinion in these matters is merely advisory. We leave this up to the principal."

My take away from this is that Principal Seary can do whatever she damn well pleases and LAUSD Staff Relations will back her no matter what. Being the social studies teacher that I was, my mind related this to the Russian mobilization plan at the beginning of the First World War. Once they started to mobilize against the Germans (you know Isenberg is a German name), they could not stop without leaving themselves vulnerable to invasion, because the railroad tracks, once occupied with trains pointed in one direction could not easily be backed up. With all the trains carrying troops and supplies the tracks were blocked. To stop the mobilization would have left them open to invasion.

At some point in this mobilization, the German Kaiser Wilhelm II called his cousin the Russian Czar Nicolas II (related through Queen Victoria of England) to apprise him of the fact that he didn't want war. Czar Nicolas II immediately got on the phone and called his chief general at the front to tell him to stop the mobilization. The general pulled the phone from the wall and later swore that he never received the phone call.

LAUSD's top/down model functions in the same unidirectional siege mode that L.A. Times Reporter Michell Landsberg analogized to a MASH triage unit during the Korean War. They don't know how to think or negotiate, only blindly defend the miscreants within LAUSD no matter what they do. Independent of my own personal problems with LAUSD, this is not a model for successfully running a school district or instituting desperately needed reform and after generations of this failed process, it should be clear that someone needs to intercede to change this clearly way of doing business.

The entropy that leads to totalitarianism and the blind obedience it requires only comes after a long time of allowing the toxicity of ignorance to remain unchallenged. Failed public education has now lasted so long in Los Angeles and elsewhere throughout the United States that it is clear to me that the people like Ignacio Garcia, Janet Seary, Janice Davis, David Vidaurrazaga, Jim Morris, and Ramon Cortines are products themselves of this failed public education system and as such do not have the rational thought processes necessary to understand something as straight forward as what it really takes to educate students or what it means to respect my constitutional rights under law. They must content themselves like Superintendent Ramon Cortines with statements like, "My main concern is that the students of LAUSD get educated," when rational, honest, and dispassionate examination of what LAUSD does would tell him that what he and his acolytes are doing actually precludes this goal.

It is up to teachers, students, and parents to get the cajones to finally make these fools pay for their crimes by making them an offer that they cannot refuse or continue to ignore. This does not require sending Luca Brazi to visit them, but rather for teachers, students, and parents to come to the realization that Cortines and Co. function because the majority that wants better is too cowed to stand up. When all is said and done, I'm still standing and will remain so until these people are gone. Whether I am right or wrong, I have felt a whole lot cleaner in the last year and have recaptured the idealism of my youth, which is a better way to live than the way most of you are living under the continuing reign of terror at LAUSD. If we only get one chance to go around, can you honestly say that this is the way you want to live your lives?

Online "Learning" Revisited

2010-06-03T17:07:02Z

Several days ago we did a post about the absurdity of LAUSD's latest proposal to do online learning as a way for students to make up credits in courses they have failed. While such an online program might have had possibilities, if it was fairly and honestly implemented, it did not take a genius or any precognitive abilities to know how LAUSD would implement such a program.

More important than continuing to point out the criminal manner in which LAUSD is run is to finally get teachers, students, and parents to understand that this incompetence will not be changed by continuing to talk about how LAUSD leadership cannot do anything right. Rather, the next step for us here at perdaily is to posit an alternative of good educational practices in dealing with our population of intentionally damaged students.

How many more of you out there can give a specific example about what we write about at perdaily like the following teacher? Or, how many of you can talk about how you have been treated and how you think you should have been treated. If the only voice heard is that of LAUSD, nothing will change.

"Leonard,

Anonymity, please. I don't know if you roamed Monroe, but it's not difficult to find the Apex online classes at most LAUSD high schools. It is the dysfunctional attempt at getting students to pass courses through the online environment. All your assumptions about the virtual academy are correct, its is malfeasance at its finest.

The unaddressed lax security allows for students to cheat at any time. Some students have friends complete the assessment portion. Some students even have their parents complete that portion, several admit to it. Students with decent computer skills keep the lessons open and search for answers. While a majority of the students use trial and error, knowing that a majority of the questions will be repeated.

The online courses require a teacher/coach to give remedial teaching, but this doesn't happen. Some might argue that the teacher support is there, but at no point in time is there more than the one teacher holding the "lab" environment static.

Not only is the virtual academy a waste, it is another sign of complicit nepotism in LAUSD. The course teacher is there as a full time teacher during school hours, after school hours, and during summer school; THE WHOLE WHILE, THERE ARE ONLY A HAND FULL OF STUDENTS IN THE CLASSROOM, not the full 30 or so students enrolled. So who gets to teach such an easy course and collect all the overtime? follow the smell.

I'm a believer that the virtual academy can work, but not as presented. Some high paid administrator lacking the business qualifications, who would be jobless in the private sector, probably put the plan together.

I should add that I (Lenny) graduated from Monroe High, back when it was an exceptional school in 1964.

tips@perdaily.com

flickr: Steve Rhodes

Bilingualism, The American Advantage

2010-06-02T17:55:31Z

In ancient Egypt there were many mutually exclusive myths of creation, because from each of these very different explanations of the beginning of life a unique and valuable lesson could be learned that would enrich life in the present. Within every human culture a battle rages between the conflicting notions that knowledge and truth are static concepts to be achieved and protected against the threat posed by change and the notion that knowledge and truth by their very nature are ideas that one never achieves but rather an endless process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis as a necessity of maintaining human viability in adaptation to an ever changing reality.

For me, one of the most interesting expressions of the conflicting approach to maintaining American viability as a society, with the knowledge that every other previous society has declined, is what I think of as the inherently American process of cultural co-optation, while at the same time allowing our identify as American to be changed by the different human combinations and permutations that are forever changing the face of this country.

In the language wars, there are those that see America as English speaking and can even support this view by pointing to the rest of the world buying into the notion of American exceptionalism -- by rewarding our failure to learn other peoples languages and cultures by learning ours. And then, of course, there is the reality of what has in fact created American exceptionalism, which is the willingness to freely incorporate into our definition of what it is to be an American the often different and rich perceptions and historic experiences of the never ending waves of immigrants that are America.

It is a difficult balance to strike between a monolingual English language based American culture and a willingness to acknowledge that our edge in the world comes from a willingness to constantly allow this linguistic tradition to morph into something new and more adapted to the changes that are a fact of human life, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not. There was a time when French was the lingua franca of the world, but in observing French society we realize that its decline as a world culture had a great deal to do with the fact that they defined their language as immutable to the changes that American English has been willing to accept.

It is my belief that we have arrived at a crossroads in this country and more specifically in California where we must take the next step in cultural literacy, which means the acknowledgment of the fact that we as American stand to gain much more from speaking Spanish or other languages as opposed to insisting on the enshrinement of English as the only language with which the pragmatic American approach to life can be expressed. While in the past the cost of becoming an American has been for the immigrant to this country to give up their native language, using a risk vs. utility argument, I would now assert that we stand to gain much more by becoming a multilingual society than we do by remain English only.

However, let me be perfectly clear about the fact that I in no way seek to challenge the hegemony of proper English nor do I think that the acquisition of other languages would in any way do this. In fact, the recognition of Spanish as the cultural and linguistic source for the majority of the people in this state would strengthen both the mastery of English and Spanish as bilingualism has done in virtually every culture where it is allowed to flourish, because it builds into our educational process the nuances of creative difference that are expressed in different languages that are the prerequisite for creating a new way of looking at things that tends to elude an insular monolingual culture.

In light of the continuing problems that we experience in educating English Language Learners, it is important to note that a country like Sweden has 100% literacy in both Swedish and exceptionally high levels of literacy in English and other languages. This has not compromised the culture or national character of Sweden. In Holland and Denmark, the BBC has been part of their public media since WWII and yet these people do not see the acquisition of English as a threat to the hegemony of their own national linguistic tradition. Probably the best example of American inspired bilingualism is the Philippines where American missionaries and educators after the Spanish-American War adapted a tradition American system of public education so that educated Filipinos are equally fluent in Tagalog or their other native tongue and English, since they have taken courses throughout their schooling in both languages.

How much of the English only mentality in this country has to do with the human tendency toward laziness, where we enshrine what we know as a desperate defense against having to continue thinking and mustering the energy to learn something new. Can any of us honestly say that the addition of a second language to their knowledge would be a negative?

At 63, it is my greatest task, like it is the task of this country, in remaining viable for as long as we can in the ultimately futile fight against entropy to continue expanding my knowledge of what I don't know and those who are different than myself. To that end, I plan on spending 2 months this summer at the Habla Ya Spanish Language School in Boquete, Chiriqui, Panama.

My expression of American exceptionalism is in defying the entropy that has consumed previous cultures for as long as we can. At the very least, I should be able to find some new sources for public education reform topics from Central America to share with you during the summer.

Nothing Is Certain But Death And Taxes... And More Charges From LAUSD

2010-06-01T18:31:49Z

For those of you who have followed my odyssey over the last year, you probably thought that I could not receive anymore Notices of Unsatisfactory Acts or Suspensions from my Principal Janet Seary, because I have been under paid administrative leave at my house during the last 4 months and out of harm's way. Well, as I found out on last Thursday, May 27th you and I were wrong. To add to my previous two Notices of Unsatisfactory Acts and two prior pending Suspensions of 8 and 11 days respectively, I have been summoned to a meeting at LAUSD Staff Relations on Thursday, June 3, 2010 at 1 pm where I am to be hit with another Notice of Unsatisfactory Acts and yet another 15 day Suspension.

The fact that I have had no dealings with Principal Seary or anyone else at LAUSD has not dissuaded her from this latest set of bogus charges, because she has a clear understanding that absolutely nobody at LAUSD or anywhere else in California government will review or take exception to her charges against me no matter how ridiculous and unfounded they are. While she mentions no specific charges as to what I am supposed to have done, she does mention the dates: September 29, 2009, January 11 and 28, and February 2, 3, and 4 of 2010 and says, "At the meeting you will be provided the opportunity to present any new information, statements and/or documents in (sic) your own behalf that may effect my final decision." Frankly, although I have kept a detailed timeline of events over the last several years, I frankly have no notion of what took place on September 29, 2009 other than a faculty meeting where she tried to stop me from asking for a UTLA meeting of teachers without administrators present as is our right under the LAUSD/UTLA Collective Bargaining Agreement. If the purported purpose of this meeting is to give me a chance to respond to charges, shouldn't notice of the meeting include those charges?

Now is there even one of you out there in the blogosphere that thinks there is any "information, statement and/or documents" that I could present that would stop Principal Seary from issuing the Notice of Unsatisfactory Acts and 15 day Suspension, remembering of course that David Viadaurrazaga Head of LAUSD Staff Relations and Janice Davis, Principal Seary's immediate superior had no trouble admitting at my May 3, 2010 appeal of the earlier 8 and 11 day suspensions that neither one of them had ever read my responses to the initial charges or looked at the clear and uncontradicted evidence I had offered 4 months before that there was no basis to the charges. At the same meeting, when queried about what standard there was for determining the number of days a teacher was suspended, Vidaurrazaga initially lied and said there was a standard until Davis contradicted him by saying, "We leave it up to the discretion of the principal." Is there any wonder why Principal Seary and other administrators like her do what they do when they are told in the clearest of possible terms that they will be backed and supported no matter how outrageous or illegal their actions are.

To be charged in June 2010 with allegations that relate to events as far back as September 29, 2009 over 8 months ago is patently absurd and yet nobody questions this. Ironically, in examining Education Code Section 44032, which describes the grounds for a permanent employee being dismissed, it occurs to me that Principal Seary and all of her superiors who knowingly allow her to carry on these unfounded attacks on me, are actually the ones who should be dismissed:

(1) "Immoral and unprofessional conduct"
(3) "Dishonesty"
(4) "Unsatisfactory performance"
(5) "Evident unfitness for service"
(6) "Physical or mental condition unfitting him or her to instruct or associate with children"
(7) Persistent violation of or refusal to obey the school laws of the state or reasonable regulations prescribed for the government of the public schools by the State Board of Education or by the governing board of the school district employing him or her"

Now it's bad enough that I am being treated this way for telling the truth about rampant fraud at my school as I am under an affirmative duty to report under the LAUSD Whistle Blower policy, but more and more I am finding out that there are approximately 200 other teachers who are going through these Star Chamber proceedings throughout the District. One of these fellow teacher Mike Bujko was harassed out of teaching because he dared to report that a female assistant principal at his school had gone into the boys' locker room.

In following the discussion about education reform, one thing that people of good faith need to clearly understand is that there will be no reform as long as the banal cabal of evil continues to go unchallenged at LAUSD and UTLA, because their very existence as constituted is antithetical to any reform.