Superintendent John Deasy

Via Ed Source | By Charles Taylor Kerchner

The Los Angeles Unified School District board bought itself a little stability last week when it extended Superintendent John Deasy’s contract for a year by handing him a “satisfactory” rating in his annual evaluation.

Buying stability can be a good thing; it’s a key to educational success.

“Stability helps move toward continuous improvement,” said Marshall “Mike” Smith, a policy scholar for four decades and a top federal education official in several administrations, including U.S. under secretary for education in the Clinton administration and a former adviser to current education secretary Arne Duncan. Smith points toward the countries that have done well on international comparison tests, as well as U.S. cities and states.

Read the full story here.

Via the Los Angeles Times | Editorial

John Deasy, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, can be impatient and stubborn, qualities we often admire in him. It takes a sense of urgency to get things moving in L.A.’s schools, as well as a willingness to stand against the forces that resist change.

But it is important for the superintendent to pick his battles wisely, and he fell short on that score when he forged ahead on a $1-billion project to equip every student in L.A. Unified with an iPad. He expressed great confidence that the district had the answers to a number of important and easily foreseeable problems when, in fact, it didn’t.

Deasy wisely called last week for slowing down the planned iPad rollout. His is a difficult task, finding the balance that will allow him to get all the problems worked out while ensuring that all students have equal access to the latest equipment.

Any project so massive and entirely new is certain to involve some mistakes and, yes, even some waste. That said, it is more important for L.A. Unified to move carefully than to move quickly.

Read the full editorial here.

Via Los Angeles Times | Editorial Board

Last week, Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a bill to streamline the process for firing teachers, saying that he agreed with its goal but calling it an “imperfect solution.” Now he should follow up, taking the lead on this important but contentious issue much as he did when he revamped the way schools are funded.

Existing state law makes it enormously difficult, expensive and time-consuming for school districts to fire teachers who are doing a truly bad job. Previous attempts to reform the system have been immediately squashed under fierce lobbying by the California Teachers Assn. This year, AB 375, by Assemblywoman Joan Buchanan (D-Alamo), tinkered around the edges of the existing process, which involves creating a special appeals panel each time a district wants to fire a teacher. School administrators opposed the bill, objecting mostly to the shorter timeline for gathering evidence.

We believe the bill would have improved the process, though only modestly.

Read the full editorial here.

As reported yesterday in LA School Report, LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy and others are in Washington today, making a final push to persuade the Obama Education Department to approve its revised application for a waiver from No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the 2002 federal education law.

Superintendent Deasy has said that a NCLB waiver would free up as much as $80 million in federal funding for other purposes.  Thus far, at least, neither Board members nor the local teachers union has been critical of the district’s pursuit of the NCLB waiver.

Publicly, at least, Obama’s education team has been signaling its support for the application, and the California Department of education is nominally supportive of the effort, too.

But there’s an unusually high level of conflict on education issues right now between Sacramento and Washington.  Conflicts between Washington and Sacramento — combined with objections from state and local teachers unions to certain requirements for waivers, and practical concerns  – could have some effects, direct or indirect, on whether LAUSD and eight other districts win approval from Washington to change some of the current NCLB requirements – or the final form of the waiver that is approved.

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This is an oped describing how layoffs of teachers in recent years have created a paradoxical situation in which there will soon be teacher shortages, penned by UC Riverside interim Dean of Education Douglas E Mitchell in yesterday’s San Jose Mercury News:

“The looming shortage is the result of massive teacher layoffs resulting from California’s budget crises and the 2008 recession,” writes Mitchell. “College students, recognizing the loss of teaching jobs, dramatically reduced enrollment in California’s university-based teacher training programs. Enrollments at teacher credential programs in California colleges and universities dropped by more than 40 percent since 2007, and more than 50 percent since 2001.”

“An informal University of California-Riverside poll of personnel administrators in Southern California indicates that the reserve pool of laid-off teachers will be essentially exhausted by the beginning of the 2013-14 academic year. As a result, school districts are beginning to look again for newly credentialed teachers. Enrollment cuts by California schools of education means they will be hard to find.”

You can read the full text of the oped here: California facing a severe teacher shortage.

While high-profile School Board votes are often said to be “baked” ahead of time — negotiated and known by the key participants well before the public vote — it’s not at all clear that was the case yesterday at the LAUSD School Board meeting, where the result was a 5-2 vote for Richard Vladovic as the new President.

In the days leading up to the vote, insiders generally thought that the vote would be between Vladovic and Steve Zimmer.  Just before the Board convened, rumors spread that Ratliff was the swing vote between the two.

However, during the meeting (see video below), Board member Marguerite LaMotte nominated Vladovic for the position, and Board member Monica Garcia nominated Tamar Galatzan. There were no additional nominations proposed.  The two nominated candidates were asked to describe why they should be President and who they would select as a Vice-President.  Then the Board voted.

Ratliff, who’d been thought to be the deciding vote between Vladovic and Zimmer, effectively blocked Zimmer from being considered, according to the LA Times. However, Garcia and Galatzan made a bad bet in pursuing the Presidency for Galatzan rather than making Ratliff choose between Vladovic and Zimmer, according to others.

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While laid-off teachers and ardent school reform critics may be all aglow over LAUSD School Board member Steve Zimmer’s “Pacino-esque” speech on behalf of the proposed teacher hiring/ class size reduction resolution last week, perhaps it’s not quite yet time for anyone to declare victory.

Last Tuesday, the LAUSD Board debated and ultimately passed a resolution calling for a return to 2007 staffing levels — despite the fact that LAUSD has a budget deficit and has lost enrollment in the years since then.

According to folks like NYU school reform critic Diane Ravitch, the proposal is brilliant and its most impassioned defender — Zimmer — is to be greatly admired for his lengthy remarks on its behalf.

According to one observer, Zimmer’s performance was Pacino-esque.

Alas, not everyone would agree with such a kind view of the proposal, including the LA Times editorial page, which noted that the proposal Zimmer was advocating “made no sense” and LA Superintendent John Deasy, who mocked the teacher rehiring proposal as a “directive to hire every human being on the West Coast” (and in so doing committed an over-reach of his own).

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This is a guest commentary written by LAUSD teachers Jeff Austin and Edward Kusell-Zigelman to Mayor-elect Garcetti about what he can do to be a leader on education issues in City Hall:  

Dear Mayor-Elect Garcetti,

A few weeks ago, residents of Los Angeles made their voices heard by voting you into office. We’d like to congratulate you on your victory, thank you for your past leadership in the education space, and praise you for your willingness to take on the enormous responsibility of running the City of Los Angeles.

As you well know our city faces a number of challenges, none more important than how we improve the quality of education we offer our city’s children. As teachers in Los Angeles public schools, we know first-hand that this city has reached a crucial moment in public education; relations between the union and district have dipped to new lows, and thousands of teachers throughout the city are counting on your leadership to help us push through this impasse and refocus on our students.

For years now, Los Angeles has been trying – but largely failing—to attract more great teachers to our hardest to staff schools. At the same time, we’ve struggled to keep more families in our district schools. By working together—union and district— we can turn this around by putting professionalism back into the profession. Teachers need accountability as well as autonomy and control over their classrooms and the support to innovate for the betterment of our students.

We must work together and build more support and opportunity into a teacher’s classroom and career. If we do, great talent and eager families will flock to our public schools.

If we are unable to attract great teachers and thereby give students the world-class education they deserve, we will fail our students and fail to reach the promise of a more prosperous Los Angeles.

To that end, we’ve come up with a few ideas about how we can refocus the conversation about public education on progress and innovation for our classrooms and careers.

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Parent trigger options (via StudentsFirst)

The latest LA Times piece on the parent trigger process at Weigand Elementary focuses its attention on the principal being pushed out (and the teachers who may go with her) rather than on the dismal results under her leadership and the frustrated low-income parents who petitioned for her removal.

The debate over the merits of the Weigand petition have gone national, in the form of dueling blog posts between two education pundits, Brooklyn-based NYU historian Diane Ravitch and Washington, DC-based Rick Hess.

This is a guest commentary from Ama Nyamekye,  Executive Director, Educators for Excellence (E4E) Los Angeles:

School Board races can sometimes seem like inside-baseball, but they actually define the leadership and agenda of Los Angeles Unified School District, which serves over 660,000 children.

With that in mind, Educators 4 Excellence and EdVoice recently interviewed both candidates to better understand the different beliefs and objectives they might bring to the School Board. Now that we have heard from both candidates, the voters must decide which leader and approach would best represent the East Valley and all students in Los Angeles.

But, the first challenge is showing up. Without question, the most important people in this election are you, the voters. Here are three reasons Angelenos in the valley need to show up to vote in this year’s school board election:

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