In This Issue:
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EDUCATION ORGANIZATIONS MERGE TO EXPAND PROGRAMS IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY |
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FUND SET UP TO RAISE MONEY FOR L.A. UNIFIED MERGES WITH GROUP STARTING TWO CHARTER SCHOOLS |
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UNDER
PRESSURE TO PRODUCE BETTER NUMBERS, SCHOOL OFFICIALS IN CALIFORNIA AND
NATIONWIDE HAVE OFTEN DONE WHATEVER IT TAKES TO GET TO THOSE NUMBERS |
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HIGHLIGHTS, LOWLIGHTS & THE NEWS THAT DOESN'T FIT: The Rest (but
not necessarily the best) of the Stories from Other Sources |
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EVENTS: Coming up next week... |
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What can YOU do? |
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Featured Links:
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Sometimes it isn’t about what went wrong at LAUSD last week.
Sometimes [hopefully] it's about what went right/turned out well/shows promise.
And sometimes it's about what’s been going on, institutionally …or just
in the fringes – not below the radar -but certainly in the chaff.
This week it’s a homework assignment+research project about two entities:
THE L.A. FUND FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION. [lafund.org]
and
LA’s PROMISE [laspromise.org]
FIRST: Read that first two articles (following). Consider the sources.
.
Google the two funds. Wikipedia them. Look up their Form 990’s. Copy
your work to Julian Assange & Edward Snowden …though they
undoubtedly already know – a secrets go this one isn't very!
Add 4LAKids to the search string (…I'm one of my favorite authors on the
subject!) As you dig into the sordid tale you will discover this is
part of the SONY Pictures e-mail hack by North Korean cyber hackers!
LAUSD shenanigans; the international incident!
Please do the research. Please do the homework. Please tell me if you don't conclude that:
1. THE L.A. FUND FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION and L.A.’s PROMISE are and always
have been pretty much the same entity/cast o’ characters/unusual
suspects up to their usual mischief with as little of their own money
and as much as the public’s as possible.
2. and that this “merger” is:
A. a not-clever-enough-by-half way to “repurpose” tax-exempt donated funds intended to assist LAUSD schools+students TO
B. assist charter schools+students …and to perhaps enrich the principals
and further their goals, programs and business enterprises.
Just sayin’.
¡Onward/Adelante! - smf
EDUCATION ORGANIZATIONS MERGE TO EXPAND PROGRAMS IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY
By Michael Janofsky | EdSource | http://bit.ly/28VnDnQ
June 23, 2016 :: Two nonprofit educational organizations said Thursday
they are merging, with plans to expand their programs that largely
operate in the Los Angeles Unified school district to districts
countywide.
The two groups, LA’s Promise and the Los Angeles Fund for Public
Education, said the new organization, the LA Promise Fund for Public
Schools, will offer their current programs to the 80 other school
districts within Los Angeles County, the most populous in California.
The aim is to enhance academic and career prospects through enrichment
programs for a greater number of students.
“Today is day one,” said Veronica Melvin, the CEO of LA’s Promise, who
will lead the new organization. “Our approach will be to engage
one-on-one with superintendents or board members across the county to
let them know how we can help them grow.”
Thursday’s announcement is the second in recent months by private
organizations embarking on a fundraising drive to help students in and
around Los Angeles. It follows the creation of Great Public Schools Now,
whose goal is to identify successful programs within L.A. Unified, the
second-largest school district in the country, and replicate them
through financial grants in high-poverty neighborhoods within the
district.
The two efforts are unrelated, but taken together, they reflect a
willingness of outside organizations to aid public school districts at a
time when many of them are pressing to balance a high demand for
quality education with budgetary constraints. The L.A. Unified board
this week approved a $7.6 billion budget for the coming school year, but
district officials have warned of a possible deficit by 2018-2019.
The new entity will continue to run three schools in south Los Angeles
that have been managed by LA’s Promise since 2006. Those schools are the
result of a negotiated arrangement with the district that
differentiates them from traditional L.A.Unified schools in how they’re
run in an effort to improve academic performance. The schools – two
large South L.A. high schools (Manual Arts and West Adams Prep) and one
middle school (John Muir) – have greater autonomy over budget,
curriculum, instruction, schedule and staffing, but all employees are
members of unions. The L.A. Unified board recently denied the group’s
application to open two charter schools, a middle school for the coming
school year and a high school for the 2017-18 school year, but that
decision was overturned on appeal by the Los Angeles County Board of
Education.
The LA Fund managed a range of in-school programs throughout Los Angeles
County, including Girls Build LA, an empowerment program that has
reached more than 7,000 girls; The Intern Project, a paid internship
program for high school students at companies like SpaceX and
Participant Media; #ArtsMatter, an advocacy program that integrates arts
and creativity into core curriculum; andGrants HQ, which offers
personalized training and support to thousands of educators seeking
additional classroom resources.
Melvin said the new LA Promise Fund intends to spend the next three
months identifying specific goals, strategies for implementing them and
fundraising. Each of the merging organizations has an annual budget of
$3 million.
“Over the past several years, LA’s Promise and the LA Fund have both
compiled impressive track records with programs that empower students
both inside and outside the classroom,” Megan Chernin, who serves on the
boards of both merging organizations, said in a statement. “The new
enterprise formed by the combination of these two extraordinary
organizations will be in a unique position to seed great programs that
can then be developed and rolled out across the county.”
Without specifically citing the new organization, L.A. unified
Superintendent Michelle King said in a statement, “The District is
always open to new strategies for improving our schools, and we look
forward to discussions that will help us better serve our students.”
FUND SET UP TO RAISE MONEY FOR L.A. UNIFIED MERGES WITH GROUP STARTING TWO CHARTER SCHOOLS
by Howard Blume and Zahira Torres | LA Times | http://lat.ms/28WNuLr
June 23, 2016 :: Former L.A. Unified Supt. John Deasy and Hollywood
philanthropist Megan Chernin had ambitious goals in 2011 when they
announced the creation of a nonprofit that in five years would raise
$200 million for district students.
see: EFFORT LAUNCHED TO RAISE $200 MILLION FOR L.A. PUBLIC SCHOOLS - latimes - http://lat.ms/28XEN8u
They said the Los Angeles Fund for Education, with fundraising prowess
and freedom from bureaucratic constraints, would help revolutionize a
district that had long struggled to educate its children.
The nonprofit fell far short of that fundraising goal, drawing about $7
million in donations from its inception to 2014, according to the most
recent tax documents available. Now, the LA Fund has announced a merger
that shifts its mission away from an exclusive focus on the district.
The LA Fund has joined forces with LA’s Promise, a nonprofit that
manages three district schools, to create LA Promise Fund, a new
organization whose goals will include forming charter schools.
“We were left no other option” but to open charter schools, said
Chernin, who serves on the boards of both groups. “We just want to have a
larger impact and we want to be more efficient about our impact.”
Chernin said the merger is, in part, a reflection of the groups’ limited
ability to work successfully with L.A. Unified, for which she faults
the school district.
The new nonprofit’s leaders say the decision also will reduce operating
costs, allowing it to serve more students across the county who live in
poverty.
But the new direction offers another sign that philanthropists who were
attempting to overhaul the nation’s second-largest school district from
within now are looking for other avenues.
“We want to create the maximum opportunities for the most
disenfranchised youth of Los Angeles and we realized that together we
could have a great impact,” said Veronica Melvin, the chief executive of
LA’s Promise, who will head the new group.
The decision comes as Los Angeles Unified contends with another reform
effort, originally spearheaded by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation,
that sought to more than double the number of charter schools in the
city over eight years, a move that would slash the district’s enrollment
and state funding.
That proposal evolved into a plan put forward last week by the nonprofit
Great Public Schools Now, which says it wants to hand out grant money
to expand not just charters but any effective schools in L.A.’s
low-income neighborhoods – even potentially expanding good traditional
public schools.
The LA Promise Fund could be among the organizations that benefit.
L.A. Unified officials recently rejected a bid by LA’s Promise to start
two charter schools, saying the organization needed to concentrate
instead on improving achievement at the schools it already manages for
the district. The charters later were approved by the county.
“I hope this new effort is about collaboration and not competition,”
Board President Steve Zimmer said about the merger. “My door, our door,
is always open to collaboration. What we’ve learned is that conflict
and competition does not help kids.”
Deasy came up with the LA Fund and pursued donors interested in seeing a specific set of reforms at the district.
But after he resigned under pressure in October 2014, a political shift
in the school board left donors who supported his goals without a
powerful ally to pursue their favored reforms, which included making
test scores a key factor in teacher evaluations and opening more charter
schools.
Some blamed Deasy’s departure for the LA Fund’s anemic fundraising. But
even while he was in office, the donations didn’t pour in.
To raise an amount like $200 million, “you have to be responsive, you
have to work very carefully with your donors, you have to listen to your
donors,” said Antonia Hernandez, president and CEO of the California
Community Foundation, who said she applauds Chernin’s efforts and
supports the merger. She added that previously “the conditions were not
ideal for conveying a sense of confidence to the people giving money
that it would be well spent.”
The LA Fund helped launch Breakfast in the Classroom, a program to
provide food to all students at the start of the school day, which
brought in additional federal funding. Previously students had the
option of arriving before school to receive a free breakfast.
The fund also paid for an advertising campaign that stressed the
importance of arts education and sponsored teams of girls at 44 schools
that competed to develop solutions to community problems. Another of the
nonprofit’s initiatives linked teachers to classroom grant
opportunities and students to internships.
Leaders of the newly merged organization say the projects will continue and will be open to schools throughout L.A. County.
While L.A. Unified students are expected to derive some benefit, the
mega-district now is left without an outside foundation devoted to
supporting the 550,000 students in district-operated schools. By
contrast, the target of the Beverly Hills Education Foundation is to
raise an average of $1,000 per student, or about $4 million annually for
its more than 4,000 students.
The LA Promise Fund, which will have a budget of about $6 million, hopes
to create a pipeline of schools, extending from kindergarten through
12th grade.
“We wanted and would still love to do that with LAUSD, but it wasn’t on
the table for us,” Chernin said. “So we figured we could create
charters.”
Times staff writer Joy Resmovits contributed to this report.
►LA TIMES EDITOR'S NOTE: The Times’ Education Matters initiative
receives funding from a number of foundations, including one or more
mentioned in this article. The California Community Foundation and
United Way of Greater Los Angeles administer grants from the Baxter
Family Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the California Endowment and
the Wasserman Foundation. Under terms of the grants, The Times retains
complete control over editorial content.
UNDER PRESSURE TO PRODUCE BETTER NUMBERS, SCHOOL
OFFICIALS IN CALIFORNIA AND NATIONWIDE HAVE OFTEN DONE WHATEVER IT TAKES
TO GET TO THOSE NUMBERS
Editorial by The LA Times Editorial Board | http://lat.ms/28WRk7n
26 June 2016 :: In 2014, the Los Angeles Unified School District
announced a spectacular improvement in its graduation rate: Fully 77% of
students who had come in as 9th graders four years earlier were now
going to graduate as seniors. But there was a bit of a trick behind the
number: It included only students who attended what are called
“comprehensive” high schools. Those who had been transferred to
alternative programs — the students most at risk of dropping out —
weren’t counted. If they had been factored in, the rate would have been
67% — still good, but not nearly as flashy a number.
Here’s another example of a misleading number: In May of this year, the
California Department of Education reported a rise in the statewide
graduation rate, to 82%. But one reason for that was the cancellation of
the high school exit exam, which used to be required for graduation and
which students could pass only if they had attained a modicum of
understanding of algebra and English skills.
In a time when most middle-class jobs require at least some training
beyond 12th grade, raising the number of high school graduates is
considered essential. Dropouts are not only more likely to be
unemployed, but more likely to be imprisoned. That’s why the newly
passed federal education law, optimistically titled the Every Student
Succeeds Act, requires states to hold high schools accountable for
improving graduation rates.
The question, though, is whether schools will bring those numbers up the
hard way, by improving the quality of education – or by falling back on
shortcuts and gimmicks. Early indications suggest that they’ll do a
combination of both. States and school districts, not just locally but
across the nation, have already come up with a wide array of ways to
make graduation rates look good on paper:
-- When large numbers of students across the country failed high school
exit exams over the past decade, states made it easier for them to pass.
California devised a simpler test; in New Jersey, students who failed
were permitted to take a far easier exam that asked them only one
question for each subject area. And if they still failed, they could
appeal by doing an essay or another project. Last year in Camden, N.J.,
after nearly half the students flunked the initial exam, almost all of
them were able to get their diplomas through one of the other routes.
-- Several states, including California, have eliminated their high
school exit exams altogether. And California was among at least six
states — including Texas and Georgia — to award retroactive diplomas to
students who had failed their exit exams in previous years.
-- In Chicago, low-performing public school students were counseled to
leave school for job-training or graduate-equivalency programs, and then
counted as transfers rather than dropouts. When an outcry ensued, the
school district lowered its previously inflated graduation rates in
2015.
--Texas allows schools to count students as “leavers” rather than
dropouts if they say they’re moving elsewhere or doing home-schooling,
without checking into whether those assertions are true.
-- Perhaps the newest and most widespread method that schools are using
to boost graduation rates are online credit-recovery courses such as the
ones that L.A. Unified offered this academic year when only about 54%
of seniors were on track to graduate. After a hefty dose of online
credit-recovery courses and other efforts, the latest but still
preliminary figure is now reported to be 74%. These courses can be
rigorous and valuable educational tools – but they also sometimes allow
students to too quickly and too easily make up the courses they have
failed.
Russell Rumberger, director of the California Dropout Research Project
at UC Santa Barbara, is not a fan of measuring a school’s success by its
graduation rate for precisely that reason: Doing so encourages schools
to lower their standards or to use misleading numbers or to find ways to
get failing students out of their schools without having to count them
as dropouts. In any case, he says, “a diploma is a blunt instrument” for
measuring learning; one study found that low-income students need to
show better mastery of the material than merely a pass in order to have a
real shot at reaching the middle class.
Under pressure to produce better numbers, school officials in California
and nationwide have often done whatever it takes to get to those
numbers.
Like it or not, Rumberger says, higher standards — such as those in the
Common Core curriculum standards recently adopted in California and most
other states — tend to mean lower graduation rates, and it’s
disingenuous for states to say they can raise both at once, and quickly.
It’s not that schools, including those at L.A. Unified, haven’t made
some authentic progress in graduating more students. The district
deserves credit for taking steps to follow up on absent students before
they become chronically truant. It has eliminated out-of-school
suspensions for relatively minor misbehavior. (Rumberger was involved in
a recent study showing that suspension increases a student’s risk of
dropping out.) These days, high school staff at many schools seem to be
more personally familiar with students than they used to be, and the
students in turn seem more comfortable interacting with the adults.
Counselors more often take the initiative, sitting students down to talk
about how they will make up missing credits. And the district has been
offering after-school and Saturday makeup classes as well as the online
credit-recovery courses.
But under pressure to produce better numbers, school officials in
California and nationwide have often done whatever it takes to get to
those numbers, including lowering standards while pretending to raise
them, and reclassifying students instead of educating them. These
students then go on to college or the workplace, mistakenly thinking
they have the skills they’ll need.
The irony is that the school-reform movement that has been leading the
push for higher graduation rates got its start years ago in a struggle
to raise academic standards. It arose in response to complaints from
employers that a high school diploma hardly meant anything anymore.
School reformers and Chamber of Commerce representatives complained that
high school graduates couldn’t pass the written test to become delivery
drivers or construction apprentices. Standardized tests, including high
school exit exams, were supposed to ensure that students reached at
least a minimal level of proficiency.
But schools in some areas — Texas and New York City were infamous
examples — started pushing out low-performing students. That led to
greater recognition that schools nationwide were, if not going as far as
Texas by actively discouraging the students who most needed their help,
also not doing much to get them to stay and raise their academic
ambitions.
The federal No Child Left Behind Act, which never did much to encourage
higher graduation rates, might be dead, but its successor will have
little chance of succeeding if policymakers aren’t realistic about the
work and patience required to raise standards, test scores and
graduation rates. It’s slow, hard, incremental work without magic
solutions, and improved numbers aren’t always evidence of
better-educated students.
HIGHLIGHTS, LOWLIGHTS & THE NEWS THAT DOESN'T
FIT: The Rest (but not necessarily the best) of the Stories from Other
Sources
NEW STATE AGENCY GETS INFUSION OF $24 MILLION TO
PROMOTE SCHOOL SUCCESS + LCFF ACCOUNTABILITY | EdSource |
https://t.co/PGjYqhI17f
PARENTS+PRINCIPALS WILL WEIGH IN ON PROP 39 CHARTER CO-LOCATIONS AT L.A. SCHOOL CAMPUSES | LA Times | https://t.co/jfEsKCIOZx
Were they ever really two groups?: FUND SET UP TO RAISE $200 MILLION FOR
LAUSD MERGES WITH CHARTER GROUP | LA Times | https://t.co/RcLL7TR2wX
JUST IN: Teacher jail numbers rise to 181, costing LA Unified $15 million - LA School Report | https://t.co/ewJzuliadE
FIVE SIGNS OF A PRIVATIZED CHARTER SCHOOL | @TPM | http://talkingpointsmemo.com/fivepoints/five-signs-of-privatized-charter-school | https://t.co/jJCnTYWpgV…
ROY COHN: WHAT DONALD TRUMP LEARNED FROM JOE McCARTHY'S RIGHT HAND MAN | NY Times | https://t.co/x6giA07F60
BILL GATES HINTS AT SUPPORT FOR CLINTON | https://t.co/LDV8DV1jMs
EVENTS: Coming up next week...
• Tues. June 28, 2016 - 11:00 a.m. SPECIAL BOARD MEETING - - Including Closed Session Items
• Tues. June 28, 2016 - 1:00 P.M. - COMMITTEE OF THE WHOLE -
*Dates and times subject to change. ________________________________________
• SCHOOL CONSTRUCTION BOND OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE:
http://www.laschools.org/bond/
Phone: 213-241-5183
____________________________________________________
• LAUSD FACILITIES COMMUNITY OUTREACH CALENDAR:
http://www.laschools.org/happenings/
Phone: 213-241.8700
What can YOU do?
• E-mail, call or write your school board member:
Scott.Schmerelson@lausd.net • 213-241-8333
Monica.Garcia@lausd.net • 213-241-6180
Ref.Rodriguez@lausd.net • 213-241-5555
George.McKenna@lausd.net • 213-241-6382
Monica.Ratliff@lausd.net • 213-241-6388
Richard.Vladovic@lausd.net • 213-241-6385
Steve.Zimmer@lausd.net • 213-241-6387
...or the Superintendent:
superintendent@lausd.net • 213-241-7000
...or your city councilperson, mayor, county supervisor, state
legislator, the governor, member of congress, senator - or the
president. Tell them what you really think! • Find your state
legislator based on your home address. Just go to: http://bit.ly/dqFdq2 • There are 26 mayors and five county supervisors representing jurisdictions within LAUSD, the mayor of LA can be reached at mayor@lacity.org • 213.978.0600
• Call or e-mail Governor Brown: 213-897-0322 e-mail: http://www.govmail.ca.gov/
• Open the dialogue. Write a letter to the editor. Circulate these
thoughts. Talk to the principal and teachers at your local school.
• Speak with your friends, neighbors and coworkers. Stay on top of education issues. Don't take my word for it!
• Get involved at your neighborhood school. Volunteer in the classroom.
Join your PTA. Serve on a School Site Council. Be there for a child -
and ultimately: For all children.
• If you are eligible to become a citizen, BECOME ONE.
• If you a a citizen, REGISTER TO VOTE at http://registertovote.ca.gov/
• If you are registered, VOTE LIKE THE FUTURE DEPENDS ON IT. THEY DO!
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