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4LAKids: Sunday 28•Dec•2014 In This Issue:  •  Whistleblower Case (cont.): EX-L.A. UNIFIED TEACHER WINS $3.35 MILLION AFTER FIRING FROM JROTC JOB  •  AN UPDATE ON LA'S IPAD PROGRAM  •  DATA DRIVES THE BUS (OVER A CLIFF) …and some parents say “enough” to a district’s assessment craze  •  JOHN GOODLAD DIES AT 94; LED RESEARCH ON HOW SCHOOLS FAIL TO EDUCATE  •  HIGHLIGHTS, LOWLIGHTS & THE NEWS THAT DOESN'T FIT: The Rest (but not necessarily the best) of the Stories from Other Sources  •  EVENTS: Coming up next week...  •  What can YOU do? Featured Links:  •  Give the gift of a 4LAKids Subscription to a friend or colleague!  •  Follow 4 LAKids on Twitter - or get instant updates via text message by texting "Follow 4LAKids" to 40404  •  4LAKids Anthology: All the Past Issues, solved, resolved and unsolved!  •  4LAKidsNews: a compendium of recent items of interest - news stories, scurrilous rumors, links, academic papers, rants and amusing anecdotes, etc. Charles Dickens pretty much invented the modern secular Christmas in a novella published in 1843. “Marley was dead” it begins. Thankfully 2014…far, far from the best+worst of times… is almost dead too. in her annual Christmas message, H.M. The Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland, and of Her other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, etc., singled out two (if you can ‘single out ‘two) items for specific mention: THE FIRST was the selfless heroism of those fighting the battle against Ebola. THE SECOND was the centennial of the Christmas Truce of 1914, when peace broke out spontaneously on the Western Front of World War I. The war would last four years, but four months into it the fighting stopped and No Man’s Land was occupied in Peace. For one brief instant in the bloodiest century in the history of mankind (no disrespect to our sisters, but we of the masculine gender own that title!) the promise of “Silent Night”/”Stille Nacht” was kept and the melody and verse sung in true harmony. Football games may have been played. The generals were horrified. The Powers That Be made sure that precedent was never repeated, – not in that war or in any since. One hundred years later it is a singular moment of unauthorized heroism. Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht, Hirten erst kundgemacht Durch der Engel Halleluja, Tönt es laut von fern und nah Silent night, holy night, Shepherds quake at the sight. Glories stream from heaven afar, Heav'nly hosts sing Alleluia; …with apologies to Leonard Cohen: It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah. May they all sleep in that heavenly peace. 2014: A year with little to recommend it. A year that celebrates the Triumph of Fracking and the Reemergence of Terrorism. Terrorism reestablished a caliphate, kidnapped and enslaved and married-off schoolgirls and slaughtered schoolboys. It annexed Crimea and shot down airliners while other planes from the same airline vanished into thin air and/or the deep blue sea. Fracking brought us the appearance of energy independence; $2.50-a-gallon gasoline, cheap natural gas, an 18,000 point Dow Jones Average and the collapse of the ruble. Capitalism so rocks! Of course fracking also uses and/or contaminates water during an historic draught, adds more CO² to the atmospheric soup (which warms the globe), possibly triggers seismic disturbance and depletes whatever oil reserves are left – creating an economic bubble in the energy business while doing nothing for sustainability or renewability. It’s a stay, not a reprieve. Fracking+Terrorism. “A plague o' both your houses!” A plague named Ebola. MORE LOCALLY we have issues with GOP Hacking Sony and North Korean Cinema Criticism, Police Use of Deadly Force against Black men, GOP Congressional Gridlock, Immigration Policy and iPads and MiSiS. (Rhymes with Isis!) The good news is that we have neither Donald Sterling nor John Deasy to kick around anymore – next Wednesday is officially Dr. DZ’s last day! The bad news is that that catchall excuse-for-everything (…and answer to the question: “What else could go wrong?”) won’t work for anything new in2015. Some LAUSD students are hoping they get a full class schedule when the next term starts; kids everywhere are wondering when they can have their chocolate milk back. Here I Will Wander Afield and Upset Everyone, One Way or Another: COMPARE+CONTRAST: BAD TEACHERS & BAD POLICEMEN. The pinhead conventional wisdom has it that If only we could eliminate The Bad Teachers and/or The Bad Policemen, everything would be better. The media seems to agree. Sure these are complicated problems … but surely there are simple solutions! • If only there was more accountability/more classroom observations/CCTV in every room/more dashboard and body cams. Video fixes everything – remember Rodney King? / Remember Eric Garner? • If only the Teacher’s Unions/Police Unions/and the rank+ file wouldn’t blindly rally around their own. Sure we’ve been attacking them …but what’s with them defending themselves? • Maybe the problem isn’t bad teachers/bad police officers. Maybe the problem is bad public sector unions. • Most teachers and most police do a fine job; we just need to root out the bad ones – whatever that percentage is. • Peer review doesn’t work; the conflict-of-self- interest is too great. • Prosecutors and principals and downtown brass and grand Juries and school boards are too close/too intertwined/too systemically embedded to be trusted to self police. There ought to be an algorithm. An independent third party. There ought to be The National Council on Teacher Quality or some other Bill Gates/Eli Broad off-the-shelf grassroots organization. Where is ALEC when we need them? In the words+music of Mr. Sondheim: Don't you love a farce; my fault I fear I thought that you'd want what I want - sorry my dear But where are the clowns? Send in the clowns …Don't bother they're here Some will say that my comparison doesn’t work; police make life or death decisions – teachers shape young lives, deciding over time. Generally cops are politically red; teachers're blue. Most cops would probably agree that teachers’ unions are the problem – buncha’ knee jerk liberals. Likewise teachers will blame police unions – paramilitary right-wingers. Both are control valves in the School-to-Prison Pipeline. And the truth is that both teachers and police can ruin lives in a single moment and/or over time - by mistake or by design or by pure unadulterated ignorance. “We have met the enemy,” the possum said,”… and he is us." And so it was and need not forever be. Next week: 2015. ¡Onward/Adelante! - smf Whistleblower Case (cont.): EX-L.A. UNIFIED TEACHER WINS $3.35 MILLION AFTER FIRING FROM JROTC JOB JURORS AWARD $3.35 MILLION TO AN EX-MILITARY MAN THEY FIND WAS FIRED FOR WHISTLE-BLOWING AT LAUSD SCHOOL • EARLIER STORY: WHISTLEBLOWER CASE COSTS LAUSD A $3.3 MILLION JURY AWARD + smf’s [less than] 2¢ | http://bit.ly/16Duak9 by Howard Blume, LA Times | http://lat.ms/1EvKra3 Dec.27, 2014 :: After Archie Roundtree and Gerardo Loera clashed at John H. Francis Polytechnic High School in Sun Valley, their careers quickly diverged. Roundtree lost his job and his teaching certification. Loera rose to become chief academic officer for the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation's second-largest school system. This month, however, Roundtree, 57, received a measure of vindication regarding the events that ended his career. After a three-week trial, a Superior Court jury found that Loera had targeted Roundtree for blowing the whistle on problems with the Air Force Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps program at Polytechnic. Loera was the school principal at the time. The verdict was $3.35 million in damages, including more than $1 million for Loera's conduct. L.A. Unified has denied that Loera or anyone else did anything improper and may appeal. The lawsuit arises from events that occurred three years ago, when Roundtree headed the JROTC at the San Fernando Valley campus. Loera had hired Roundtree in 2009, after the retired Air Force major left an Apple Valley school that had discontinued the program. Roundtree said he taught students about drill and military ceremonies, the history and structure of the Air Force as well as government systems and the Constitution and Bill of Rights. He also taught ethics, fitness, ways to deal with stress and good conduct. In the fall of 2011, Roundtree met with Loera to discuss the instructor's concern that the schedule allowed for only an introductory JROTC class, which he felt was not enough to build a program. He said he also believed Poly was not complying with two key rules. For one, Poly failed to enroll at least 100 students for two full quarters. And too few students chose to be in JROTC; rather, they had been assigned involuntarily to the class, according to testimony. Roundtree wrote a request to the Air Force that Loera signed, asking for Poly to offer the program temporarily with fewer than 100 voluntary cadets. And the letter talked of these students being enrolled for two quarters. The Air Force approved it, according to court documents. ______ “I respect the jury verdict, but that cannot replace what was taken from me. “- Archie Roundtree, former L.A. Unified teacher _____ "I thought he would shake my hand and be happy to stay in compliance with the law," Roundtree said. "I thought he would appreciate me bringing that to his attention." But Roundtree reported that Loera did not abide by the commitment. The teacher also later raised concerns about the school's other JROTC instructor teaching geometry. The Air Force paid half the cost of its instructors and expected them to teach only JROTC, he said. Scheduling more JROTC courses was challenging because they no longer counted toward a student's physical education requirement. The school system also was focusing more intensively on English and math. Loera complained to the Air Force about Roundtree, accusing him of undermining the program to force a transfer to another school. He also directed an assistant principal to compile student complaints, which, Loera testified, first surfaced without his prompting. Within L.A. Unified, Loera was regarded as a JROTC supporter, sometimes serving as the district's designated expert on the subject. Loera, 41, did not respond to requests for an interview. In a statement, L.A. Unified said that "each of the administrators' actions were taken with the students' interests at heart and were not done in retaliation against Major Roundtree." In court documents and at trial, Roundtree's attorney, Renuka V. Jain, raised several issues with Loera's conduct. She offered evidence that Roundtree learned that a case was being made against him only after the military had already taken steps that led to his "decertification" as a JROTC instructor. That action can't be appealed. Moreover, under the teachers contract, Jain said, Roundtree should have had a chance to address all of the accusations against him. At trial, witnesses from the Air Force, relying on information from L.A. Unified, sided with the school district. The Air Force has declined to comment. The jury, on Dec. 16, found that Roundtree proved that district employees retaliated for his report of a violation of a federal law or regulation. It also found that Loera and two other administrators made "one or more defamatory and untrue statements" with the intent to harm Roundtree. Loera had never been under an obligation to keep Roundtree at Poly, but his actions against him ultimately prevented the instructor from teaching ROTC at any campus after he finished the school year at Poly, Jain said. Loera left Poly for a senior management position later that same year. The district's share of damages owed was more than $1.8 million. Loera was assessed $1 million, and assistant principal Adriana Maldonado-Gomez, $500,000. The district said it will pay these costs because the administrators acted within the scope of their duties. "I respect the jury verdict, but that cannot replace what was taken from me," said Roundtree, who returned to Apple Valley and works as a part-time driving instructor and substitute teacher. The Air Force closed its program at Poly last June. It hadn't attracted enough students. AN UPDATE ON LA'S IPAD PROGRAM • National Public Radio is updating some of the top stories we've been following in 2014. By Annie Gilbertson | NPR Ed | http://n.pr/1COLTlX December 22, 2014 7:23 AM ET :: The 650,000 students in the Los Angeles Unified School District expected to be tapping and scrolling on their very own iPads by now, halfway through the school year. Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent John Deasy, seen in a photo taken last year, says his resignation was "by mutual agreement. i But the largest school technology expansion in the country became a magnet for controversy and was a factor in the resignation of Superintendent John Deasy in October. He had made technology a centerpiece of his efforts to close the persistent academic achievement gap between disadvantaged students and their more privileged peers. Eighty percent of LA Unified's student body is low-income and only about half read at grade level. "So the pace needs to be quick, and we make no apologies for that," Deasy told KPCC in 2012. But in the last year, the largest school technology expansion in the country stalled. The iPads arrived in schools before WiFi, officials didn't include keyboards with the tablets and students found ways to bypass online protection software and access Facebook and Twitter. Then this month, in a surprising move, the FBI seized 20 boxes of documents related to a $500 million iPad contract with Apple and Pearson, the company that provided the software loaded on many of the iPads. The investigation is housed in the agency's office of public corruption. In August, KPCC published emails between Deasy and executives at Apple and Pearson. The early email discussions resembled LA Unified's later bidding requirements, which included such details as a 9.7-inch screen — the size of the original iPad. "I believe we would have to make sure that your bid is the lowest one," Jaime Aquino, a former top district staffer, wrote to executives at Pearson in one of the email exchanges. Both Aquino and Deasy have said the selection process was fair. Three days after KPCC's report, Deasy canceled the contract with Apple. In October, less than two months later, he announced his resignation. A federal grand jury has convened, but prosecutors haven't revealed the individuals targeted or possible charges in their investigation. The school board has purchased 112,500 iPads so far. After a board member fought for a laptop option, they also bought 8,394 Google Chromebooks. A survey released in September found most students skipped over Pearson's software in favor of playing games and watching videos in class. Student reviews of the iPad have been mixed. Aiden Lafreniere, a junior at Valley Academy of Arts and Sciences in Granada Hills, said having a tablet makes it easier for her to stay in touch with her teachers. "We have a place we can constantly go and check our instructions," she said. "There isn't that factor of losing work when you turn it in because of massive amounts of paperwork." Jesus Vargas was less enthusiastic when he test-drove a district iPad in October 2013. Then a senior at USC Math, Science and Technology High School, Vargas coded his own apps. He complained Pearson's learning software wasn't challenging, and the iPad wasn't adequately versatile. "It's very similar to the interface of an iPod, which I have not used in a long time," Vargas said. It's not clear when the rest of the district's students will receive their own tablets or laptops. Ramon Cortines, LA Unified's new superintendent, plans to put out a call for new bids in 2015. When that happens, Marc Zev, an parent in the district and a software developer, hopes the district will base the new purchase requirements on what works best for students and teachers. So far, most of the devices were purchased without input from those who will be using them. "I think the board really blew it," Zev said. "They just didn't think it through." • Annie Gilbertson covers education for KPCC. DATA DRIVES THE BUS (OVER A CLIFF) …and some parents say “enough” to a district’s assessment craze by edushyster2012 | http://bit.ly/1xqwYKp December 17, 2014 :: It’s field trip time and today we’re headed to the scenic seaside community of Salem, Massachusetts. When last we stopped by to “discover the magic of Salem,” we also discovered a school system gone wild for “bigger rigor,” especially for young Salem-ites who hail from the city’s less, well, luxurious lanes. But one child’s opportunity gap is an opportunity for a savvy eduprenueur, and edupreneurial opportunities abound here these days. Buckle up reader, because it’s time to board the data bus. THE JARGON GAP As you’ll recall from our last visit here, the schools in Witch City face a bewitching problem. A spell had fallen upon the city’s school choosers, so that affluent residents all chose certain schools, like the Saltonstall, whose privately-funded science lab overlooks the harbor, while poor students, many of whom were still learning English, chose other schools at which science is now an enrichment. But then a unique opportunity arrived to close this opportunity gap by way of a system called the Open System. You can read about the wonders of this approach here [http://bit.ly/1xqxKXN], here [http://bit.ly/1xqxVCt], here [http://bit.ly/1xqxYy7] or here [http://bit.ly/1xqxYOB] — but suffice it to say that the approach seems to entail filling Salem’s gaps with jargon. Give “leaders and teachers real control over the time, people, data and culture within a system to best meet their students’ needs”? Check. Learn from “high-flying outliers”? Check. “Empower best leaders and teachers across the city and support them in delivering results for our students?” Check. EMPOWER EMPOWER The Open Systems solution comes to Salem via Lawrence, whose state-run school system is now a net exporter of, if not excellence per se, edupreneurial ideas. At the center of the Open System beats an edupreneurial heart, one belonging to Empower Schools, founded by edupreneur Chris Gabrieli, whose list of political connections is as long as an extended school day, and Bret Alessi, former Education Pioneer and current Mass 2020 visionary. What precisely Empower Schools does, other than BELIEVE IN OPEN SYSTEMS…and produce case studies like this one [http://bit.ly/1AXmC6U], remains a bit vague-ish. What I can tell you is that Empower has quickly won over powerful friends aka “aligned leaders,” like Massachusetts Commissioner of College and Career Readiness, Mitchell D. Chester, who recently sang Empower’s praises to the Boston Globe in a story on how school partnerships with edupreneurial groups like Empower are failing to produce results. EVERYBODY WHO IS ANYBODY But I digress. The important thing is that the Salem schools bus is hurtling towards a new system, an Open System, and that everyone who is anyone appears to be on board, from the city’s politically ambitious mayor, to the members of the Salem Partnership, to the members of the Community Advisory Board of the Salem Partnership, to the members of the Salem Education Foundation. In other words, everybody who is anybody in the city is “highly aligned,” jargonically speaking, behind a vision of what the city’s students need to succeed: a “laser-like focus on instruction” and “frequent assessments.” The Open System also comes with transportation — and to quote district leaders, “data drives the bus.” And teachers don’t just want to teach, they want to Teach Plus co-captain the data bus. IN WHICH SOME PARENTS ASK TO GET OFF OF THE BUS The problem with a community in which everyone who is anyone is “highly aligned,” is that it’s very difficult to find anyone who is willing to yell “stop,” even as the data bus careens towards Salem Harbor. Well there is somebody… Earlier this year, Stephen and Sherry Croft alerted Salem Public School officials that they refused to let their sons take ANet tests, the diagnostic assessments that eat up an increasing amount of instructional time in the schools, which paid $337,000 last year for the Achievement Network’s services. To which they were told “too bad, you can’t” because, as the superintendent explains in this letter denying the Croft’s request, assessment is now so “highly aligned” with instruction that the two can’t be separated. “In addition to the fundamental purpose assessment serves as part of the instructional cycle, it is our goal to provide all of our students with a comprehensive program of studies. Subsequently, parents are not allowed (with the exception of sex education) to “pick and choose” which aspects of the school program their/child/children will or not participate in. This responsibility rests with those of us directly involved in your children’s education here in the Salem Public Schools.” In his testimony to the Salem School Committee, Stephen Croft pointed out that with its obsessive focus on assessments, Salem isn’t actually providing students with a comprehensive program of study. And that it is parents who are the most directly involved in their children’s education and “they need to know that they have the right to refuse these tests.” The Crofts prevailed, by the way, and their sons won’t be taking any more ANet tests. What’s more they’re not alone. A total of five families—so far—are refusing to let their kids take ANet tests, a number that will only grow as more parents learn that the choice is theirs to choose. HIP, HIP HOORAY—IT’S TEST-TAKING DAY! Meanwhile, it’s a day of the week that ends with “day,” which means it’s already time for another round of ANet assessments in Salem. Which means that at the Collins Middle School, where the Salem School Committee holds its regular meetings, it’s time for an ANet pep rally. Students, teachers, teacher leaders and data bus drivers are all on hand to boost spirits in hopes of boosting scores so that the scores on the test that actually counts will be boosted as well. Students wear blue and white, the Collins colors, and once pencils are down, volunteers scour student test sheets, awarding prizes to testees whose tests display the most “annotation.” There’s even a special cheer. “There is nothing we can’t do, when we’re dressed in white and blue.” Except, apparently, get off the bus. ____ • EduShyster is the blog of freelance journalist and public education advocate Jennifer Berkshire. JOHN GOODLAD DIES AT 94; LED RESEARCH ON HOW SCHOOLS FAIL TO EDUCATE GOODLAD, FORMER UCLA DEAN, WROTE THE 1984 BOOK "A PLACE CALLED SCHOOL". HE ARGUED STRENUOUSLY AGAINST USING TEST SCORES AS A SERIOUS MEASURE OF SUCCESS. By Elaine Woo | LA Times | http://lat.ms/1Be8TqJ Sunday. Oct. 28 2014 :: John I. Goodlad, whose exhaustive analysis of the culture of schools and the reasons for their failures made him one of the intellectual leaders of the education reform movement that took off in the early 1980s, (smf: Not to be confused with the ®eform movement, which has financial leaders!) died Nov. 29 in Seattle. He was 94. The former dean of UCLA's Graduate School of Education, who later taught at the University of Washington, had cancer, said his son, Stephen. Goodlad was the author of "A Place Called School" (1984), a classic eight-year study of 38 schools in 13 communities in which he described chronic problems that were pushing the nation's schools "near collapse." Published shortly after "A Nation at Risk," the 1983 report by a presidential commission that found American education beset by "a rising tide of mediocrity," Goodlad's book sounded many of the same alarms while also laying out an alternative vision of what schooling should be. A progressive in the tradition of philosopher John Dewey, Goodlad described schools where accomplished teachers could lead their peers, where students are not grouped by age, and where the ability to discuss and assess ideas matter more than test scores. "John always argued strenuously against test scores as a serious measure of whether we had good schooling," said Roger Soder, an emeritus professor of education at the University of Washington and president of the Institute for Educational Inquiry, a nonprofit group Goodlad founded in1992 after retiring. "He said what we really needed to talk about was the relationship between schooling and what it takes to maintain a free society." One of the most comprehensive studies of its kind, "A Place Called School" drew its conclusions from the detailed observations of a team of researchers and more than 20,000 interviews with students, teachers, principals, parents and others. It offered evidence of the adverse effects of common practices such as the "tracking" of students into high- and low-performance groups and grade divisions that ignore differences in students' readiness to learn. "John was always saying, 'What is sixth grade anyway, and who made it up?'" recalled Jeannie Oakes, a nationally recognized expert on tracking and other inequities who was one of Goodlad's researchers as a UCLA graduate student. "He invented the idea of the non-graded elementary school. He studied reading failure and what happens when kids don't get promoted. He came up with the idea that kids ought to be given the opportunity to learn to read when they are developmentally ready." The book also closely examined the education of teachers and lamented the practice of rewarding the most capable teachers by taking them out of the classroom and putting them into administration. • “FOR THE MOST PART, REWARDS FOR FACULTY MEMBERS INTERESTED IN TEACHER EDUCATION ARE FOR STUDYING TEACHERS, NOT FOR PREPARING THEM. “- John Goodlad "Teaching is perhaps the only 'profession' where the preparation recognized as most advanced [the doctorate] almost invariably removes the individual from the central role of teaching," Goodlad wrote. He recommended instead a system in which teachers progress from teaching aide to doctorate-holding head teacher, with commensurate increases in pay. In "Teachers for Our Nation's Schools," his 1990 report based on 1,600 hours of interviews at 29 colleges of education, he criticized education schools' weak faculties and misplaced priorities. "For the most part," Goodlad wrote, "rewards for faculty members interested in teacher education are for studying teachers, not for preparing them." Many of Goodlad's ideas were grounded in personal experience. Born on Aug. 19, 1920, he had a bucolic childhood in an isolated mountainside community near North Vancouver, Canada. Growing up during the Depression, he found teaching one of the few occupations available to him. In 1938, after one year of normal school, he obtained an elementary school teaching certificate. His first job was in a one-room schoolhouse with 34 children spanning eight grades. An unhappy student named Ernie, who had been held back several times, made a deep impression on him, spurring his thinking about how grade levels based on age were, as he wrote later in "A Place Called School," little more than "an adult convenience for classifying, tracking, assessing, advancing, and retarding the millions of students who move through it." He had more time to grapple with those issues in his next school, which was so crowded that he and the overflow of students from several grades were sent to a makeshift classroom in a church. The less-than-ideal conditions forced the young teacher to find ways to reach all the students without watering down instruction. Recalling that he asked a custodian to build a sand table for his classroom, "I created a very progressive environment," Goodlad said in Educational Leadership magazine in 1995. "With a great big sand table … I integrated history, geography, art, reading and other subjects as well as broke down all of the grade lines." By 1946 he had earned both bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of British Columbia. After receiving a doctorate in education from the University of Chicago in 1949, he began training teachers in the Atlanta Teacher Education Service and at Emory University and the University of Chicago. In 1960 he moved to UCLA, where as director of the university's lab school he blended students of different ages in the same classroom. He later served as dean of the education school for 16 years, molding it into one of the top teacher training schools in the country. In 1985, he joined the faculty at the University of Washington, where he founded the Center for Educational Renewal to promote collaborations between schools and the universities where teachers are trained. He retired in 1991. In the foreword for a 20th anniversary edition of "A Place Called School," prominent education theorist Ted Sizer noted that Goodlad's findings were "still sweepingly familiar. The breathtaking waste of time and treasure tolerated in many schools is no less with us today than when today's middle schoolers' mothers were 12th graders. There is a sad, almost eerie relevance to the detailed specifics of Goodlad's critique." Goodlad acknowledged that not enough had changed in the nation's schools. But he never lost his optimism that real reform—or renewal, as he preferred to call it--was possible. "He absolutely loved schools," Oakes said of the scholar, who titled his 2005 memoir "Romances with Schools: A Life of Education." Besides his son, Goodlad is survived by a daughter, Paula, and five grandchildren. HIGHLIGHTS, LOWLIGHTS & THE NEWS THAT DOESN'T FIT: The Rest (but not necessarily the best) of the Stories from Other Sources ENGLISH-LEARNING STUDENTS IN CALIFORNIA STILL BEHIND “These kids need to be visible,” said Shelly Spiegel-Coleman of Californians Together, a Long Beach-based nonprofit that promoted the legislation and released the state data. “In many instances, these students are sitting in mainstream classes and are not getting any specialized help.” | http://bit.ly/1CON5pB LAUSD BOARD MEMBERS LOOK TO SLOW CHARTER SCHOOL EXPANSION http://bit.ly/1COMGmZ LAUSD MONITOR REPORTS PROGRESS IN MISIS CLASS SCHEDULING FOR SPRING http://bit.ly/1COMRyN MOST SCHOOLS SOLVE WEB ISSUES FOR COMPUTER TESTING (Calif.) Of the state’s more than 11,000 public school sites, students at fewer than 21 of them will be taking the Common Core assessments this spring the old fashioned way – on pencil and paper. | http://bit.ly/1Bed9q4 TEACHER TENURE, TAXES ON UNION EXECUTIVE’S 2015 AGENDA The walls of Joe Nuñez’s second-floor office, a stone’s throw from the state Capitol, bear reprints of fruit- and vegetable-crate labels from California farms, colorful reminders of his humble roots as the son of south-state farmworkers. Now, as the first Latino executive director of the powerful California Teachers Association, the 61-year-old product of public education and long-time teacher-activist confronts a new year brimming with tensions born of politics and plenty. | http://bit.ly/1Bednxx LAUSD STUDENT ORGANIZED PROTEST THAT HELPED REFORM SCHOOL POLICING Understanding the power of carrying signs, singing chants and “not changing the world but improving our day-to-day lives” is what drove one South Los Angeles student to organize protests that helped bring about sweeping reforms in the policing of Los Angeles Unified schools. | http://bit.ly/1Bedqtm LACER AFTERSCHOOL PROGRAMS GIVE STUDENTS A REASON TO GO TO CLASS http://lat.ms/1COMx31 SKIPPING KINDERGARTEN DAYS CAN HAVE CONSEQUENCES FOR YOUNG LEARNERS December is a rough month for attendance among kindergarteners at Los Angeles schools where winter sick days and extended family vacations take their toll on learning, perhaps more than parents of the young students realize. | http://bit.ly/1BeduJu WHY CAFETERIA FOOD IS THE BEST Many parents undoubtedly think they are doing the best for their children by having them bring lunch from home instead of eating the lunches served in school. But recent studies clearly prove them wrong. | http://nyti.ms/1BedGsb THE CONTRACT, THE SCHOOLS, AND THE WORLD WE WANT TO SEE by Alex Caputo-Pearl, UTLA President | http://bit.ly/1BedNnH DUNCAN'S EDU-PREDICTIONS FOR 2015 U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is predicting big things for college access, preschool, and ed-tech. But he doesn't mention NCLB reauthorization. | http://bit.ly/1BeeddI A 2014 RECAP, AND COMMON-CORE HEADLINES YOU PROBABLY WON'T SEE IN 2015 http://bit.ly/1Beeeyr COUNSELING COMES UP SHORT Many state ambitions to increase college readiness and completion are being undercut by policies that perpetuate the status quo in high school counseling, according to a report by the Education Commission of the States. It’s not too late to get on track — but states and high school counselors need to abandon their current “students will ‘figure it out’” approach, ECS says. That means investing in strategies — not all of them pricey — that research shows correlate with increased odds of college-going: low student/counselor ratios and better support for counselors; three-minute videos on college costs, financial aid and the benefits of attending college; and asking parents to sign off on their child’s college/career plan, to name a few. More on promising state efforts: http://bit.ly/1CrE9q6 CELEBRATING TEN YEARS OF POST-KATRINA, NEW ORLEANS CHARTERS– AND YOU ARE NOT INVITED By deutsch29 - Mercedes Schneider's Blog In modern America, when it comes to selling a product, the question of whether the product actually works as promised becomes irrelevant. The narrow concern for the profit-driven ends with effectively marketing the product. < Sales result from effective marketing– not the least of which is repeatedly telling the consumer that the product works. Tell consumers that the product works. Tell them repeatedly. They then mistake repetition for truth, and voila! the product moves off of the retailer’s shelf. This is the story of the now-all-charter Recovery School District (RSD) in New Orleans: It is an inferior product that continues to be pushed as a nationwide model of charter school success, yet it is a failure. A flop. Nothing more than marketing hype. And certainly no miracle. In June 2015, a questionably-funded group will be hosting a ten-year celebration of all-charter RSD. The event– focused on school “choice”– will be closed to the public. Makes one wonder what story will be told at this exclusive conference in order to package and nationally promote the RSD product . You won’t get to hear it firsthand. You are not invited. Fortunately, I have a story for you here, a documented story, and it is available to any who would read it. No RSVP required, even. I must note, though, it is a long story– more like a book chapter than a blog post–and it ends with a challenge for our 2015 invitation-only conference host– so make yourself comfortable. | http://bit.ly/1COEW4n A YEAR IN REVIEW Feeling nostalgic for all the negotiated rulemaking and regulatory proposals issued by the feds in 2014? Never fear. The Education Department is out with a year-end recitation of accomplishments, published in the Federal Register. Peruse at your leisure: http://1.usa.gov/1Hr0C4B WANT TO TEACH KIDS ENGLISH? THEN TEACH THEIR PARENTS. Letter to the Editor of the LA Times The Los Angeles Unified School District is trying to fix something it broke. ("California schools step up efforts to help 'long-term English learners,'" http://lat.ms/1CONngi) Amid the Apple iPad fiasco, sex abuse scandal and new computerized student attendance problems, few have decried the cruel destruction of the district's nationally acclaimed adult education program, which could help the parents of LAUSD students learn English. Of the 300,000 students in the program before 2012, there are now 97,000 (plus a long waiting list); of the 3,200 teachers, there are now 850. If the parents of non-English speaking children cannot learn English, how can their children? Children need help with their homework and their self-esteem. Seeing their parents going to school and learning English creates wonderful, lifelong role-models. Prior to 2012, the LAUSD graduated adults fluent in English and American culture, holding high school diplomas as well as credentials from the excellent vocational programs. As a retired longtime adult education teacher of English as a second language, I have yet to receive a good answer as to why these cuts were made. Planaria Price, Los Angeles | http://lat.ms/1CONsk1 EVENTS: Coming up next week... *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 • LAUSD BOARD OF EDUCATION & COMMITTEES MEETING CALENDAR What can YOU do? • E-mail, call or write your school board member: Tamar.Galatzan@lausd.net • 213-241-6386 Monica.Garcia@lausd.net • 213-241-6180 Bennett.Kayser@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 your city councilperson, mayor, 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. Join your PTA. Serve on a School Site Council. Be there for a child. • If you are eligible to become a citizen, BECOME ONE. • If you a a citizen, REGISTER TO VOTE. • If you are registered, VOTE LIKE THE FUTURE DEPENDS ON IT. THEY DO!. Who are your elected federal & state representatives? How do you contact them? Scott Folsom is a parent leader in LAUSD and is Parent/Volunteer of the Year for 2010-11 for Los Angeles County. • He is Past President of Los Angeles Tenth District PTSA and represented PTA on the LAUSD Construction Bond Citizen's Oversight Committee for ten years. He is a Health Commissioner, Legislation Team member and a member of the Board of Managers of the California State PTA. He serves on numerous school district advisory and policy committees and has served as a PTA officer and governance council member at three LAUSD schools. He is the recipient of the UTLA/AFT 2009 "WHO" Gold Award for his support of education and public schools - an honor he hopes to someday deserve. • In this forum his opinions are his own and your opinions and feedback are invited. Quoted and/or cited content copyright © the original author and/or publisher. All other material copyright © 4LAKids. • FAIR USE NOTICE: This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. 4LAKids makes such material available in an effort to advance understanding of education issues vital to parents, teachers, students and community members in a democracy. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. • To SUBSCRIBE e-mail: 4LAKids-subscribe@topica.email-publisher.com - or -TO ADD YOUR OR ANOTHER'S NAME TO THE 4LAKids SUBSCRIPTION LIST E-MAIL smfolsom@aol.com with "SUBSCRIBE" AS THE SUBJECT. Thank you.

Foreign policy

4LAKids: Sunday 21•Dec•2014 The Winter Solstice In This Issue:  •  TURKEY ISSUES ARREST WARRANT FOR U.S. BASED ISLAMIC CLERIC …WHO JUST HAPPENS TO BE THE LARGEST CHARTER SCHOOL PROMOTER IN THE U.S.  •  WHISTLEBLOWER CASE COSTS LAUSD A $3.3 MILLION JURY AWARD + smf’s [less than] 2¢  •  PUNISHED TEACHER IN CLASS AGAIN: Eight-month exile over fundraising spotlights union and district differences on the issue of discipline  •  From the wonderful folks who drew the FBI to LAUSD: PREPARING FOR A RENAISSANCE IN ASSESSMENT  •  HIGHLIGHTS, LOWLIGHTS & THE NEWS THAT DOESN'T FIT: The Rest (but not necessarily the best) of the Stories from Other Sources  •  EVENTS: Coming up next week...  •  What can YOU do? Featured Links:  •  Give the gift of a 4LAKids Subscription to a friend or colleague!  •  Follow 4 LAKids on Twitter - or get instant updates via text message by texting "Follow 4LAKids" to 40404  •  4LAKids Anthology: All the Past Issues, solved, resolved and unsolved!  •  4LAKidsNews: a compendium of recent items of interest - news stories, scurrilous rumors, links, academic papers, rants and amusing anecdotes, etc. Tip O’Neill said that all politics is local – and I believe that the most powerful+local political dynamic is that at the school site. The teachers and the parents and the students and the administrators; the credentialed and the certificated and the neighbors and the community and real estate agents. The agendas and the policies and the politics and the pedagogy and the curriculum and the PTA. ¡C’mon down! Of course, we occasionally wander off campus and the school board gets involved in the minimum wage of hotel workers. The puzzle pieces involve immigration policy and international publishing cartels and billionaires with too many billions and too much time on their hands …surely everything that’s wrong with education can be fixed with a better algorithm. Or another model from business school. LAST WEEK’S NEWS was all about foreign policy. Cuba. Russia. Pakistan. North Korean cinema criticism. (I grew up in Hollywood and worked in The Biz; no one ever anticipated that a squabble between a Japanese Keiretsu and the [nuclear armed] Hermit Kingdom would be fought in cyberspace and the Hollywood Trades with the White House questioning the film distribution strategies of studio executives? I recommend: “This -- THIS? -- is what led to an international incident?”| http://lat.ms/1Ar2OZr to put it all in perspective.) LOCAL POLITICS GOES GLOBAL: Quietly fulminating on the local and foreign policy scene, tangled up in the geopolitics of the Middle East and the School ®eform Movement – with a foray into immigration policy – is the story of Fethullah Gülen, the government of Turkey and the operation of the largest chain of charter schools in the United States. As Seth Rogan – or is it James Franco? - would say: “Whatttt????” SIMPLY: Fethullah Gülen is an Islamic Cleric who lives in Pennsylvania and is the promoter and/or founder of 130 Charter Schools in the United States, which makes him the biggest charter school entrepreneur in the country. Bigger than Green Dot or KIPP. Magnolia Charters in Los Angeles? That’s him! • There are some that say that he teaches religion in his schools; he denies it. • There are some that contend he illegally imports teachers from Turkey to teach in his schools; he denies it. • LAUSD recently pulled the plug on a couple of his schools for fiscal impropriety. http://bit.ly/1ClbL6a • Oh, and Tayyip Erdogan, the President of Turkey, says that Gülen is secretly plotting to overthrow the Turkish Government in a coup– and has sworn out an arrest warrant against him. Today the AYP, Tomorrow the World! Now President Erdogan isn’t necessarily a nice man … FDR’s Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, once said "[Nicaraguan dictator] Somoza's a bastard!" And Roosevelt replied, "Yes, but he's our bastard." ….and Fethullah Gülen doesn’t look like a Central Casting wild-eyed+bearded radical Muslim cleric – (he quotes Gandhi and MLK …but so did Dr. Deasy) …but let me just say that this is all very curious. And it gets curiouser and curiouser with every passing day. YOU MAY HAVE READ in these pages- or elsewhere - about the former LAUSD risk management consultant who is suing the District for firing him when he blew the whistle on alleged improprieties in the Miramonte settlement. That case drags on, all suit and countersuit; but last week the District lost a $3.3 million whistleblower and defamation-of-character lawsuit over improprieties at Poly High – a case that features some familiar figures – and more loose ends than a grass skirt. Happy Holidays Everyone - and Happy New Year. If you believe in such things, please say a prayer for Peace. With apologies to John+Paul: It's getting better all the time. I used to get mad at my school (No I can't complain) The teachers who taught me weren't cool (No I can't complain) You're holding me down (Oh), turning me round (Oh) Filling me up with your rules (Foolish rules) I've got to admit it's getting better (Better) A little better all the time (It can't get more worse) ¡Onward/Adelante! - smf TURKEY ISSUES ARREST WARRANT FOR U.S. BASED ISLAMIC CLERIC …WHO JUST HAPPENS TO BE THE LARGEST CHARTER SCHOOL PROMOTER IN THE U.S. ●●smf: This is a great story, filled with lovely complications and international intrigue. The regime in Turkey is no more a wellspring of western secular democracy than Fethullah Gülen is a wild eyed bearded mullah. Instead we have nuance and politics and power and money: This is the New Byzantium. P.S.: The Magnolia Charter Schools in LAUSD are affiliated with Gülen. ►TURKEY ISSUES ARREST WARRANT FOR U.S. BASED ISLAMIC CLERIC By Ece Toksabay, Reuters | from WorldPost: a partnership of The Huffington Post & Berggruen Institute on Governance | http://huff.to/1ABl3K0 12/19/2014 8:34 am EST Updated: 10:30 AM | ISTANBUL, (Reuters) :: Turkish authorities are seeking an arrest warrant for U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen whom President Tayyip Erdogan accuses of trying to undermine Turkey and overthrow him, a government official said on Friday. The issue of a warrant would take Erdogan's campaign to root out Gulen supporters, including purges of the judiciary and police, to the international arena potentially testing already strained relations with Washington. Gulen has lived in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania since 1999. He was a close ally of Erdogan in the early years after his ruling AK Party took power in 2002 but has been in open conflict with him since a graft investigation emerged a year ago targeting the then-prime minister's inner circle. Erdogan portrays the investigation as part of a coup attempt and describes Gulen's followers as traitors and terrorists - all charges that Gulen, who runs a vast network of schools and business enterprises in Turkey and abroad, denies. Turkish courts have dropped the corruption cases, critics at home and in the West citing that as evidence Erdogan is stripping the judiciary of its independence. Asked about a report that a warrant had been issued, a government official, requesting anonymity, told Reuters: "There is no decision yet. The prosecutor has made a request and the judge is evaluating it." It was not immediately clear on what specific grounds the warrant was being requested. If it is forthcoming, Turkish authorities would be free to apply to the United States for extradition, with no guarantee of success. Erdogan's image in the West, once that of a moderate reformer, has been eroded as his open intolerance of opposition and of criticism has grown. A Turkish court on Friday kept a media executive close to Gulen and three other people in custody pending trial on accusations of belonging to a terrorist group, in a case which Erdogan has defended as a response to "dirty operations" by his enemies. Hidayet Karaca heads Samanyolu Television which is close to Gulen. The European Union, which Turkey is seeking to join, has said last weekend's police raids to detain Karaca and other media workers was contrary to European values. Erdogan told the bloc to mind its own business. Ekrem Dumanli, editor-in-chief of the Gulen-linked Zaman newspaper, was released but forbidden from traveling abroad before trial. Seven more people whom prosecutors sought remanded in custody in the case were also released pending trial. ●(Additional reporting by Gulsen Solaker in Ankara and Ayla Jean Yackley in Istanbul; Writing by Daren Butler; Editing by Nick Tattersall, Ralph Boulton) _____________ ►120 AMERICAN CHARTER SCHOOLS AND ONE SECRETIVE TURKISH CLERIC: The FBI is investigating a group of educators who are followers of a mysterious Islamic movement. But the problems seem less related to faith than to the oversight of charter schools. By Scott Beauchamp | The Atlantic | http://theatln.tc/1DSGA6s Aug 12 2014, 11:25 AM ET :: It reads like something out of a John Le Carre novel: The charismatic Sunni imam Fethullah Gülen, leader of a politically powerful Turkish religious movement likened by The Guardian to an “Islamic Opus Dei,” occasionally webcasts sermons from self-imposed exile in the Poconos while his organization quickly grows to head the largest chain of charter schools in America. It might sound quite foreboding—and it should, but not for the reasons you might think. < You can be excused if you’ve never heard of Fethullah Gülen or his eponymous movement. He isn’t known for his openness, despite the size of his organization, which is rumored to have between 1 and 8 million adherents. It’s difficult to estimate the depth of its bench, however, without an official roster of membership. Known informally in Turkey as Hizmet, or “the service”, the Gülen movement prides itself on being a pacifist, internationalist, modern, and moderate alternative to more extreme derivations of Sunni Islam. The group does emphasize the importance of interfaith dialogue, education, and a kind of cosmopolitanism. One prominent sociologist described it as “the world’s most global movement.” Singling out the Gülen schools as particularly nefarious, simply for being run by Muslims, smacks of xenophobia. Much of the praise for the Gülen movement comes from its emphasis on providing education to children worldwide. In countries like Pakistan, its schools often serve as an alternative to more fundamentalist madrassas. Gülen schools enroll an estimated two million students around the globe, usually with English as the language of instruction, and the tuition is often paid in full by the institution. In Islamic countries, where the Gülen schools aren’t entirely secular: The New York Times reported that in many of the Pakistani schools, “…teachers encourage Islam in their dormitories, where teachers set the example in lifestyle and prayers.” But the focus is still largely on academics. Fethullah Gülen put it in one of his sermons, “Studying physics, mathematics, and chemistry is worshipping Allah.” In Western countries such as the United States, Germany, and France, there isn’t any evidence whatsoever that the nearly 120 Gülen charter schools in America include Islamic indoctrination in their curriculum. The schools are so secular that singling out the Gülen schools as particularly nefarious, simply for being run predominantly by Muslims, smacks of xenophobia. However, these schools might be suspect for reasons that are completely unrelated to Islamic doctrine. One of their most troubling characteristics is that they don’t have a great track record when it comes to financial and legal transparency. In Utah, a financial probe launched by the Utah Schools Charter Board found the Beehive Science and Technology Academy, a Gülen-run charter school, to be nearly $350,000 in debt. Furthermore, as the Deseret News reported, the school’s administrators seemed to be reserving coveted jobs for their own countrymen and women: “In a time of teacher layoffs, Beehive has recruited a high percentage of teachers from overseas, mainly Turkey.” Even more unnervingly, the school’s money—public funds from the local community—was being donated to Gülen-affiliated organizations and used to pay the cost of bringing teachers to Utah from Turkey. To illustrate the level of fiscal mismanagement, the school spent about 50 cents to pay the immigration costs of foreign teachers for every dollar that it spent on textbooks. In 2010, after being the first charter school in Utah history to be shuttered, Beehive appealed the decision and was reopened the same year. There are similar stories from other states. In Texas, where 33 Gülen charter schools receive close to $100 million a year in taxpayer funds, the New York Times reported in 2011 that two schools had given $50 million to Gülen-connected contractors, including the month-old Atlas Texas Construction and Training, even though other contractors had offered lower bids. It was the same thing in Georgia, where Fulton County audited three Gülen schools after allegations that they’d skipped the bidding process altogether and paid nearly half a million dollars to organizations associated with the Gülen movement. The Gülen movement is known for its secrecy. But when it comes to the Gülen charter schools, the lack of transparency is part of a larger problem that has nothing to do with the Turkish-based organization. Diane Ravitch, education professor at New York University and Assistant Secretary of Education under George H.W. Bush, writes about this larger transparency issue in her latest book, Reign of Error, explaining, “In 2009, New York Charter School Association successfully sued to prevent the state comptroller from auditing the finances of charter schools, even though they receive public funding. The association contended that charter school’s are not government agencies but ‘non-profit educational corporations carrying out a public purpose.’” The New York State Court of Appeals agreed with the organization in a 7 to 0 vote. It took an act of legislation from the state—specifically designed to allow the comptroller to audit charter schools—for this to change. Ravitch also writes of a similar instance in North Carolina in which the state, urged on by lobbying giant ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), proposed the creation of a special commission, composed entirely of charter school advocates, as a way for charter schools to bypass the oversight of the State Board of Education or the local school boards. Ravitch writes, “The charters would not be required to hire certified teachers. Charter school staff would not be required to pass criminal background checks. The proposed law would not require any checks for conflicts of interest—not for commission members or for the charter schools.” In other words, it isn’t the Gülen movement that makes Gülen charter schools so secretive. It’s the charter school movement itself. This comes across in the latest news story related to the Gülen schools: an FBI raid last month on the headquarters of over 19 Gülen-operated Horizon Science Academies in Midwest. According to search warrants obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times, federal authorities were interested in gathering general financial documents and records of communication. The warrant specifically mentions something called the E-rate program—a federal program that, according to the Sun-Times, “pays for schools to expand telecommunications and Internet access.” A handful of the Gülen-affiliated contractors assisting the schools were receiving money from this federal fund. It’s difficult speculate what this could all mean, as all documents pertaining to the investigation, save the warrants themselves, have been sealed from the public. It isn’t the Gülen movement that makes Gülen charter schools so secretive. It’s the charter school movement itself. Meanwhile, the Ohio State Board of Education has launched its own probe of the nearly 20 Gülen-associated charter schools in its state. As part of the investigation, four former teachers from Horizon Academy (the particular name of the Gülen charter school chain in Ohio) gave testimony. The teachers mentioned issues as disturbing as cheating on state tests, unsafe building conditions, overcrowding, and even sexual misconduct. One of the teachers, Matthew Blair, had previously tried to contact the state’s Department of Education in order to file complaints, but hadn’t heard back from officials. Board president Debe Terhar assured the teachers, “Your concerns have not fallen on deaf ears. We hear you, and we will move forward with making sure this thing is investigated.” I contacted Matthew Blair, and he told me that the problems with the Gülen schools were merely symptomatic of a larger problem within the state’s education system. “The charter school system in Ohio is broken beyond repair,” he wrote in an email. “As it is, charter schools operate in a lawless frontier. Regulations are few and far between. Those that exist are consistently and consciously overlooked.” The Gülen schools, he wrote, “are an excellent example” of this problem: “A Gülen organization controls the real estate companies that own their schools. They charge rent to their own schools and tax-payers foot the bill. They refuse to answer public records requests, falsify attendance records, and cheat on standardized tests. Yet, Ohio continues to grant them charters to operate.” He added, “It doesn't hurt that the Gülen organization is politically active and treats state politicians to lavish trips abroad.” But overall, he said, “this Wild West atmosphere of few regulations creates incestuous relationships among politicians, vendors, and schools. Charter schools like Gülen's give generously. In return, they are allowed to keep their saloons open and serve whatever they want. The only way to save the charter school system is to start over again by using the model of effective public schools.” They participate in a system that gives every incentive to keep their financial dealings under wraps. The Gülen movement insists that the accusations against are the result of gross exaggeration or outright falsehood. Websites like Gulenschools.org and hizmetchronicle.com defend Gülen charter schools from accusations of impropriety: aggregating positive news about the schools, restating their mission in magnanimous language, and distancing Fethullah Gülen himself from any of the legal proceedings or investigations. One particular article quotes Gülen’s attorney, who responds to (more) FBI raids on Gülen schools in Louisiana by reminding readers that Gülen himself “is not the founder, shareholder, or administrator of any school.” But the problem with Gülen schools isn’t that they’re connected to a particular religious movement (although some might object to public funds making their way to any religious institution). The problem is that they participate in a system that gives every incentive to keep their financial dealings under wraps. Charter schools were designed to provide a certain amount of autonomy, and many schools have successfully walked the line between public responsibility and private innovation. But there are vulnerabilities built into the system, and one is a reduced oversight that enables schools to move vast amounts of public funds into private hands. The Gülen movement, with its foreign origins and mysterious leader, may make for a particular intriguing story. But as the saying goes, “Don’t hate the player; hate the game.” WHISTLEBLOWER CASE COSTS LAUSD A $3.3 MILLION JURY AWARD + smf’s [less than] 2¢ by Vanessa Romo, LA School Report | http://bit.ly/1wOSJo7 December 19, 2014 12:39 pm :: LA Unified sustained another legal blow this week in a “whistleblower” case that’ll cost the district millions. After nearly a month-long trial, a Los Angeles jury awarded retired Air Force Officer and Junior ROTC instructor, Archie Roundtree, $3.3 million, finding that the district had revoked his teaching certification in an act of retaliation. This latest setback comes a month after the district announced a $139 million settlement in civil cases stemming from the actions of a former teacher at Miramonte Elementary School. Shortly after reporting a series of violations in the operation of the JROTC program at John H. Francis Polytechnic High School in Sun Valley, Chief Academic Officer Gerardo Loera began complaining to the Air Force about the veteran instructor. The Air Force subsequently revoked Roundtree’s 15-year certification to teach JROTC cadets. According Renuka V. Jain, a lawyer who represented Roundtree, “The jury awarded Roundtree $1,810,840 on the whistleblower claim, $1 million in defamation damages against Loera, and $500,000 against Assistant Vice-Principal Adriana Maldonado-Gomez. The jury also concluded that Loera had acted with malice, oppression or fraud.” “The settlement is good but he will never be able to get his certification back,” Jain told LA School Report. “There is no appeal, there is no review. The only people who can get it back is Air Force and they’re not going to do that,” she said. The district said in an email response it is “very disheartened” by the verdict. “It is never the intention of the District or its administrators to engage in defamation or retaliation against any employee for any reason,” the district said. “While the jury found in favor of Major Roundtree, the District believes and maintains that each of the administrators’ actions were taken with the students’ interests at heart and were not done in retaliation against Major Roundtree.” The district is currently reviewing the record and considering its options with respect to any challenges to the verdict. ●●smf’s 2¢: I have some real problems with the reporting of this story – or perhaps the editing thereof. ● “Shortly after reporting a series of violations in the operation of the JROTC program at John H. Francis Polytechnic High School in Sun Valley….”: Because this is a whistle blower suit I presume that Major Roundtree made the allegations - though to whom and what the allegations were are totally unclear. Did he complain to LAUSD? To the Dept of the Air Force? …and what exactly were the allegations? …and even more critically: What is the timeline? ● “….Chief Academic Officer Gerardo Loera began complaining to the Air Force about the veteran instructor”. Again, the timeline. Loera was named Chief Academic Officer on December 1, less than a month ago. The trial was “nearly a month long” so one must suppose that Loera’s action took place previous to him holding that job. • Loera’s previous job was Executive Director, Office of Curriculum, Instruction and School Support - where he was often called upon to be the administration’s thankless+unthanked mouthpiece re: the CCTP (iPads) and MiSiS. • Before that he was Jaime Aquino’s deputy when Aquino was Deputy Supe for Curriculum and Instruction. • And before that Leora was Principal of John H. Frances Polytechnic High School – a/k/a Poly High. (I had a girlfriend who went to Poly – that’s a very complicated story!) • And as for “Assistant Vice-Principal Adriana Maldonado-Gomez” …that is a new job title to me. We now have Assistant Principals – and back in my misspent youth there were Vice Principals …but….. Ms Maldonado-Gomez is currently on the faculty of Grant High School as an Assistant Principal PUNISHED TEACHER IN CLASS AGAIN: Eight-month exile over fundraising spotlights union and district differences on the issue of discipline By Howard Blume | LA Times | http://lat.ms/1wbn8bf Published online Dec 17, 2014/In print Dec 21, 2014 :: A popular South Gate Middle School teacher returned to the classroom Wednesday, eight months after he was pulled from campus for alleged financial improprieties. The case of Stuart Lutz, 60, became one more touchstone in the debate in the Los Angeles Unified School District over "teacher jail," the informal term for the administrative offices where instructors report after they've been removed from their classrooms over allegations of wrongdoing. The teachers union, United Teachers Los Angeles, has insisted that teachers have been needlessly removed from classes, kept out of work for unreasonable periods, overly punished for minor mistakes and wrongly dismissed. Lutz's experience underscores the question of whether administrators unfairly took advantage of district policy to remove teachers who were troublesome, but not necessarily guilty of substantial misconduct. Lutz was the union representative for his school and had some disagreements with the principal. Lutz acknowledged Wednesday that he failed to follow proper procedures for organizing and paying for field trips, but added that he and other teachers had been operating this way for years without knowing any better. At the request of the union, L.A. schools Supt. Ramon Cortines agreed to authorize a fresh and expedited look at the allegations and evidence against Lutz, an art teacher who was involved in student activities. "Under the new leadership of the district, intelligent minds have prevailed," said union Vice President Colleen Schwab. Union President Alex Caputo-Pearl called the return of Lutz a "huge breakthrough," but added that major differences remained in contract negotiations that still could result in a strike. The union and the district have agreed to fast-track negotiations, with meetings every week, he said. Lutz said his discipline ultimately consisted of a "conference memo," in which an administrator explained what Lutz did incorrectly and how to avoid such problems in the future. Such memos can lead to more serious consequences if a mistake or misconduct is repeated. The teacher praised "this wonderful outcome." "It’s so great to know that so many people were working so hard on my behalf for this homecoming," Lutz said. "I’m so happy to be back.” Students also would be pleased, said Armando Chavez, 14, who was in Lutz's class last year. "It was a lot of mayhem after they took him out, and a lot of things were very different," said Armando, who is now in ninth grade at South Gate High School. "We had about six substitutes for the rest of the year." The number of teachers and other employees who were removed from schools ballooned to about 300 after the January 2012 arrest of former third-grade teacher Mark Berndt for sexual misconduct at Miramonte Elementary. Berndt eventually was sentenced to 25 years in prison. His alleged victims received settlements totaling nearly $170 million. That case and others prompted district officials, particularly then-Supt. John Deasy, to take what they considered a safety-first approach, both to limit potential harm to students and to limit liability for the nation's second-largest school system. Other measures included reviewing records going back decades to weed out possible past or future offenders. District officials have insisted that they want to treat teachers fairly. They note that most teachers continue to be paid after they are pulled from their classrooms. L.A. Unified also recently set up a special unit of investigators to resolve sexual misconduct cases more quickly. And teachers who have been removed from the classroom, who formerly had to report to a district office during work hours, where they did nothing, now can remain at home. Union activists complained that such measures were insufficient because, they said, allegations still resulted in a teacher being considered guilty until proven innocent. From the wonderful folks who drew the FBI to LAUSD: PREPARING FOR A RENAISSANCE IN ASSESSMENT By smf for 4LAKids Sunday, 21 December, 2014 :: You have to give it to Pearson. No, really…you have to! It’s in the contract. It’s embedded in the standards and the NCLB waivers. .It’s in the stars. They are the world’s largest publishing company. They are the world’s largest textbook publishing company – which has the best highest-on-investment of any kind of publishing save for printing money itself. They apparently own the market in digital content publishing for the Common Core State Standards with their Common Core System of Courses – which may or may not actually exist – developed with start-up money from the Los Angeles Unified School District, thank you very much. Now they have a vision for the future, and in it they are the world’s largest testing company. They have seen the future and it’s Pearson. Last week Pearson’s Chief Education Advisor, Sir Michael Barber and assessment expert, Dr Peter Hill, generated a report about this bright new wonderful tomorrow. Their “essay” PREPARING FOR A RENAISSANCE IN ASSESSMENT says that new technologies will transform assessment and testing in education. According to the authors: • Adaptive testing (for example, tests that evolve in real time on screen) will help generate more accurate tests and reduce the amount of time schools spend on testing • Smarter, automated marking of exams will help improve accuracy and reduce the time teachers spend marking “rote” answers • Technology will help combine student performance across multiple papers and subjects. • Assessment will provide on-going feedback, which, will help personalise teaching and improve learning. • New digital technologies will minimise opportunities for cheating in exams or “gaming the system”. • The essay argues that current assessment methods are no longer working, so that even the top performing education systems in the world have hit a performance ceiling. The authors set out a ‘Framework for Action’ that details the steps that should be taken for “policymakers, schools, school-system leaders and other key players to prepare for the assessment renaissance” The report is 88 pages under the Pearson imprint. 88 pages of research an inch deep and a mile wide, reminiscent of every slick new modern educational text you’ve ever seen – with pictures and graphs and text boxes, all Helvetica and white space and more designed than written. It is salesmanship pretending to be scholarship. Data masquerading as knowledge. Advertising making believe it is research. In print I’m sure you can smell the shiny acid-free paper and soy based ink – with a press run of varnish to make the pictures pop and blacks truly black. You probably can’t smell the barnyard fecal matter at all. You can read it here: http://bit.ly/1sVee79 And you should, because as an early reviewer writes: “… these are the people that the reformsters listen to. “ That reviewer, Peter Greene, who blogs a at http:// curmuducation.blogspot.com continues: “…Let me just try to distill some of the big takeaways from Peter Hill and Michael Barber's essay. Here are some important things to know about what Pearson's brave new future education world would look like. Welcome to the matrix: students will be plugged in Pearson does not aspire to simply administer a high stakes test or two a couple of times a year. Think of every sort of assessment you do, from unit tests to small check quizzes to daily exercises for understanding. Pearson wants all of that. All. Of. That. Every single bit of assessment will generate data which will go straight into the Big Data Bank so that a complete picture of the individual student can be created and stored. I once noted that the Common Core standards make more sense if viewed as data tags. I wrote that last March, but it still looks correct to me. The point of having everything done via internet-linked device is not just to deliver instruction and assessment to the student-- it's to be able to collect every bit of data that the student generates. Through the use of rubrics, which will define performance in terms of a hierarchically ordered set of levels representing increasing quality of responses to specific tasks, and a common set of curriculum identifiers, it will be possible to not only provide immediate feedback to guide learning and teaching but also to build a digital record of achievement that can be interrogated for patterns and used to generate individualised and pictorial achievement maps or profiles And Pearson is completely comfortable with assessment and instruction centered on character traits, developing grit and tenacity and prudence and the ability to work well with others. So their system will hoover all that info up as well. By the time your child is eighteen, there will be a complete profile, covering every aspect of her intellectual and personal development. I wonder if Pearson would be able to make any money selling that database to potential employers or to government agencies. Hmmm... Teachers will not be teachers Pearson doesn't much like the teaching profession as it currently stands. They believe that teaching must be transformed from a "largely under-qualified and trained, heavily unionized, bureaucratically controlled semi-profession into a true profession with a distinctive knowledge base, framework for teaching, well-defined common terms for describing and analyzing teaching at a level of specificity and strict control." "Learning systems of the future will free up teacher time currently spent on preparation, marking and record-keeping and allow a greater focus on the professional roles of diagnosis, personalized instruction, scaffolding deep learning, motivation, guidance and care." The system will do all the planning and implementing, and the system will put all the necessary technology at hand. "But without such a systematic, data-driven approach to instruction, teaching remains an imprecise and somewhat idiosyncratic process that is too dependent on the personal intuition and competence of individual teachers." All educational decisions will be made by the software and the system. Teachers will just be needed as a sort of stewardess. We will teacher-proof the classroom, so that any nasty individuality cannot mess up the system. Personalized learning won't be Pearson's concept of personalized learning is really about personalized pacing. The framework for learning starts with "validated maps of the sequence in which students typically learn a given curriculum outcome." So-- like railroad tracks. Personalized does not mean wandering all over a variety of possible learning paths. It means adjusting to move slower or faster while pausing for review when there's a need to fill in holes. Pearson does not offer an answer to the age-old question, "How do all students move at their own paces but still cross the finish line in time?" They do suggest that we give up the old age-grade progression, and they believe that high expectations fix everything, but they do not directly explain if that's enough to keep some students from being stuck in school until they're twenty-nine years old. Character may be important, but humanity, not so much One of the odd disconnects in Pearson's vision is that they value (enough to plan measuring) social skills and character, but they do not pause to consider how their system might affect or be affected by the development of these qualities. What does it do to the development of a child to be in groups that change regularly because of differing educational pace. What will happen when an eight year old must leave her best friend behind because she is being moved up? What will happen to the very bright twelve-year-old grouped with a bunch of fairly slow seventeen-year-olds? Pearson lists a wide variety of possible obstacles to this system's emergence, but they assume that students will simply fall in line and take the system seriously, feeling some sort of accountability to the device screen that delivers their instruction and assessment. Teachers no longer automatically receive the trust and respect of our students--we have to earn it. Pearson assumes that because they think they're important, students will, too. That's a bad assumption. Software will be magical Pearson knows that trying to test any higher levels of cognition with bubble test questions is doomed to failure. Their solution is magical software. Software can ask questions that will delve deep, and software can read and assess the answers to open-ended essay questions. Software can suss out a student's intelligence so well that it can then create more test items that will be perfect for that student. Software can unerringly crunch all the data to create a perfect profile of the student. Software can do all of these things better than live human beings (even though software is written by live human beings). And if you believe all that, I would like to sell you some software that controls the Brooklyn Bridge. Important people are listening to these guys You cannot read a page of this essay without encountering familiar references. New tests that move beyond the old bubble tests. High expectations can bring all students up to excellence. Enhanced data collection will lead to better learning. The job of teaching needs to be changed. We've heard it all from various bureaucrats, reformster leaders, and US Secretaries of Education. Important people pay attention to Pearson, even though most of their ideas are rather dumb and self-serving. We all need to be paying attention to Pearson as well, because back behind the Gatesian money and the policies of Arne Duncan we find these guys, generating and articulating the ideas that become foundational to the reformsters. It would be easy to dismiss Pearson as simple money-grubbing corporatists, to lump them together with the goofy amateurism of a Duncan or a Coleman. But they are rich, they are polished, they are powerful, and they are, I believe, driven. I have never read work by Michael Barber in which he does not note that changing the global face of education is a moral imperative, a job that he must do because he knows what must be done to improve mankind. For me, that takes this all to a new level of scary. | http://bit.ly/1AIIAJ8 Mr. Greene is quite verbose, if you really want to get into the weeds in deciphering Pearson’s Renaissance, continue on HERE HIGHLIGHTS, LOWLIGHTS & THE NEWS THAT DOESN'T FIT: The Rest (but not necessarily the best) of the Stories from Other Sources PUNISHED TEACHER IN CLASS AGAIN: 8-month exile over fundraising spotlights union/district differences re: discipline | http://bit.ly/1DYsoZO From the wonderful folks who drew the FBI to LAUSD: PREPARING FOR A RENAISSANCE IN ASSESSMENT | http://bit.ly/1GHOfma WHISTLEBLOWER CASE COSTS LAUSD A $3.3 MILLION JURY AWARD + smf’s [less than] 2¢ | http://bit.ly/16Duak9 ANOTHER LAUSD MiSiS COMPUTER GLITCH DELAYS TEACHERS FROM ENTERING GRADES + Weekly MiSiS third-party update | http://bit.ly/1AqRz3e TEACHING ENGLISH LEARNERS THE LANGUAGE OF MATH + smf’s 2¢ | http://bit.ly/13O6ZCO TO GIVE THEIR CHILDREN A BETTER EDUCATION, PARENTS LAUNCH A NEW SCHOOL | http://bit.ly/1GFre3o CORTINES DOUBLES NUMBER OF DIRECT REPORTS IN LAUSD OVERHAUL | http://bit.ly/1DSJPee COSTS FOR SPECIAL ED SERVICES CLIMB AS PARENTS FEEL THE PINCH | http://bit.ly/1JwsdVV 2 STORIES: UTLA LOWERS SALARY DEMAND, says pay proposal lowered in hopes of reaching a deal in the next few months | http://bit.ly/1wvqjj1 TURKEY ISSUES ARREST WARRANT FOR U.S. BASED ISLAMIC CLERIC ...WHO HAPPENS TO BE U.S. LARGEST CHARTER SCHOOL PROMOTER http://bit.ly/13KP7bV WASHINGTON STATE’S FIRST CHARTER SCHOOL PLACED ON PROBATION …for failing to live up to its charter | http://bit.ly/1z3CAYN NO RELIEF FOR LAUSD?: "'There must be some way out of here' said the joker to the thief” | http://bit.ly/1v3LWCJ CORTINES SEEKS AN ADDITIONAL YEARS’ RELIEF FROM SMARTER BALANCED/COMMON CORE TESTING. 2 Stories + smf’s 2¢ | http://bit.ly/1BUtn8C Lawbreaker? …or Whistleblower?: EX-LAUSD CHIEF RISK OFFICER’S MIRAMONTE LAWSUIT LACKS DETAIL, SAYS JUDGE | http://bit.ly/1A7zcjD EVENTS: Coming up next week... *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 • LAUSD BOARD OF EDUCATION & COMMITTEES MEETING CALENDAR What can YOU do? • E-mail, call or write your school board member: Tamar.Galatzan@lausd.net • 213-241-6386 Monica.Garcia@lausd.net • 213-241-6180 Bennett.Kayser@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 your city councilperson, mayor, 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. Join your PTA. Serve on a School Site Council. Be there for a child. • If you are eligible to become a citizen, BECOME ONE. • If you a a citizen, REGISTER TO VOTE. • If you are registered, VOTE LIKE THE FUTURE DEPENDS ON IT. THEY DO!. Who are your elected federal & state representatives? How do you contact them? Scott Folsom is a parent leader in LAUSD and is Parent/Volunteer of the Year for 2010-11 for Los Angeles County. • He is Past President of Los Angeles Tenth District PTSA and represented PTA on the LAUSD Construction Bond Citizen's Oversight Committee for ten years. He is a Health Commissioner, Legislation Team member and a member of the Board of Managers of the California State PTA. He serves on numerous school district advisory and policy committees and has served as a PTA officer and governance council member at three LAUSD schools. He is the recipient of the UTLA/AFT 2009 "WHO" Gold Award for his support of education and public schools - an honor he hopes to someday deserve. • In this forum his opinions are his own and your opinions and feedback are invited. Quoted and/or cited content copyright © the original author and/or publisher. 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