Sunday, February 07, 2016

Good grief, Campbell Brown!



4LAKids: Sunday 7•Feb•2016 Super Bowl•101SlowJam
In This Issue:
 •  WHO'S REALLY BEHIND CAMPBELL BROWN'S SNEAKY EDUCATION OUTFIT?
 •  20th STREET ELEMENTARY PARENTS GATHER 'PARENT TRIGGER' SIGNATURES A SECOND TIME AFTER LAUSD DOESN’T MAKE CHANGES
 •  THE BIG (D)EASY: A GOOD REASON TO NOT GO TO NEW ORLEANS JUST IN TIME FOR MARDI GRAS!
 •  SUPER QUIZ A BATTLE ROYAL: Academic decathlon Super Quiz is a sport unto itself — with the fans to prove it
 •  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:
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 •  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.
The big LAUSD news this week is about a blog. Not this one. It’s about LA School Report.

LASR founder Jamie Alter Lynton claims LASR is NOT a blog, it’s an online news site. (4LAKids in not a blog either – it’s The New York Times. Only it’s just online. And it’s about public education in general and LAUSD in particular.) JAL also claims that LASR is nonpartisan and independent.

• First: Anything that advertises itself as non-partisan is in all probability: Partisan.
• Second: A “partisan” is a member of an irregular military force formed to oppose control of an area by a foreign power or by an army of occupation by some kind of insurgent activity. Therefore+consequently a “non-partisan” is: A foreign power or an army of occupation.
• And Third: LASR is dependent on Jamie Lynton writing the checks to the reporters and whatnot – much like the LA Times is dependent on various foundations funded by the Broad Foundation to fund their Education Matters Initiative. Or whoever’s initiative Education Matters is.

This week, Campbell Brown and her non-partisan+independent news site (The 76 Million) took over writing the checks at LASR. But I’ve gotten ahead of myself; let’s go back to the beginning!


JAMIE ALTER LYNTON
was (the past tense is from her LASR bio | http://bit.ly/1KxifXT) a journalist and television news producer and executive for 15 years in her early career, working at CNN, CBS and CNBC. She served as a VP and LA Bureau Chief of Court TV, and managed its educational division.

Her mother was the first woman elected official in Chicago history. Her brother Jonathan Alter is a cable news pundit/charter school proponent and was a featured talking head/public education disdainer in “Waiting for Superman.” Her husband Michael Lynton, former chairman of Pearson PLC’s Penguin Group, is the CEO of Sony Pictures. Other relatives are ambassadors and political appointees as becomes well-connected alumni of All the Right (private) Schools.

Lynton started+bankrolled LA School Report in 2012 to “help inform the public about the inner-workings of the Los Angeles Unified school district” as “a news site whose first goal would be to demystify the inner workings of public education”.

There were ethical missteps. Lynton supposedly came to the fray to expose school board campaign spending and abuses – and then contributed substantial campaign donations to the Community Coalition – the political action committee which supported pro-®eform agenda candidates. She hired a decidedly partisan editor, Alexander Russo …but then parted with him over internal (Lynton v. Russo) politics.

Lynton brought Michael Janofsky, a veteran of the New York Times, onboard at LASR as executive editor – and the bias+partisanship eased …though it never went away.

Lynton was close to then Superintendent Deasy – she served on the LA Fund Deasy’s “Robin Hood” fundraising board; LASR supported Deasy’s initiatives and tenure - and LASR benefited from insider information and access.

(Ironically, the North Korean hack of the Sony e-mails produced intriguing evidence of Lynton and LASR’s connections to Deasy+Co and $chool ®eform Inc.: Venture capitalist and Alliance Charter Schools board co-chair Antony Ressler, on the District 1 LAUSD School Board Election: “10000 votes for School board race... Crazy that we have a publicly elected school board... This is NOT what democracy is supposed to be. No one in LA cares TR” - e-mail to Jamie Alter Lynton on Jun 5, 2014, at 10:04 PM | WikiLeaks Sony Hack #126221 | http://bit.ly/1L6lxMM)

LA School Report capitalized on Lynton’s Court TV experience and covered the Vergara Trial wall-to-wall with decidedly pro-plaintiff/pro-Deasy reporting.

LASR often crossed the line into good and even excellent reporting; 4LAKids has often re-blogged LASR stories when they got it right, wrong …or occasionally preposterous. When the iPad and MiSiS crises unraveled and Deasy’s doomed superintendency inevitably imploded LASR was in there digging for the story – sometimes breaking news ahead of The Times and KPCC. By the time of the Jefferson High School/Cruz v. CA Fiasco (and the junket to Korea) LASR was asking for Deasy’s head.

Once Deasy was gone Jamie Lynton’s interest in LAUSD waned. The Hollywood Reporter reported last February that “Sony CEO Michael Lynton, 55, has decided to move to New York and expects to do so shortly. That's motivated partly by wife Jamie's desire to live there…” http://bit.ly/1Jny1m8.

InsidePhilantropy.com reports that “Michael Lynton and his wife Jamie move their philanthropy through the Lynton Foundation. The Lynton Foundation has primarily focused on New York City outfits recently. This is especially noteworthy, given Jamie's interest in LAUSD...” http://bit.ly/1Peeo0R


THEN, LATE LAST SUNDAY EVENING AT 11:01 PM THE FOLLOWING EMAIL CAME FROM LA SCHOOL REPORT EXECUTIVE EDITOR MICHAEL JANOFSKY:


Subject: A change at LA School Report

I apologize for the mass email, but it's the best way to inform all of you a bit of news.

After 2 1/2 years as managing editor, I am no longer working for LA School Report. Its founder has merged it with reform-minded Campbell Brown's The 74, a change that was related to me only a few days ago. As part of the new arrangement, I learned I was removed as editor, with LA School Report and The 74 installing a replacement.

In my time as editor, I've worked closely with many of you, and I want to say how much I've appreciated your professionalism, your collegiality and your willingness to help us understand contentious, controversial and complicated issues affecting LA Unified. As an editor and occasional writer who has worked only for news organizations that favor neither one side of an issue or the other, I always tried my best to steer LA School Report down the middle, keeping it as fair and neutral as possible. I know some of you might disagree, but I am proud of the work we did.

I'm especially indebted to those who were always eager to respond to our questions in a timely manner and to help us understand the issues more deeply. Thank you.

I've learned a great deal from all of you, and I thank you for that, as well.

I wish all of you the best.

Michael Janofsky



BY 9AM MONDAY MORNING FEB 1st THE LA SCHOOL REPORT GUSHED WITH THE BREATHTAKING NEWS:

LA SCHOOL REPORT ANNOUNCES PARTNERSHIP WITH ED NEWS SITE, THE 74

Posted on February 1, 2016 8:57 am by LA School Report

The 74 and LA School Report – two rapidly growing education news sites – will partner to expand coverage of education in Los Angeles and America’s second-largest school district, the founders of the sites announced today….

::

LA SCHOOL REPORT WELCOMES NEW EXECUTIVE EDITOR LAURA GREANIAS

Posted on February 1, 2016 8:58 am by Laura Greanias

LA School Report didn’t exist when I was an editor at the Los Angeles Times, but I wish it had…..

::

BIG NEWS: FROM LA SCHOOL REPORT FOUNDER JAMIE ALTER LYNTON

Posted on February 1, 2016 9:00 am by Jamie Alter Lynton

Dear Readers:

I am thrilled to announce today a partnership between LA School Report and the online education news site The 74…

::

Almost immediately the LAUSD media universe+blogosphere was overwhelmed with the news – and email boxes and text message folders overflowed with the effluvia of The End of (a small corner of) The World As We Know It.


But wait, you ask, who is THE 74 – when it’s at home…?

ANNOUNCING THE 74 BY CAMPBELL BROWN


June 23, 2015 :: I am excited to announce the launch of a project I’ve been working on for some time now. As profiled in The Wall Street Journal today (Campbell Brown to Launch Non-Profit Education News Site That Won’t Shy From Advocacy - http://on.wsj.com/1Rfzbni0), The Seventy Four, a non-profit, non-partisan news site about education, is now a reality.

There are 74 million children under the age of 18 in the United States. And the unfortunate reality is that for many of these children, the public education system is broken.

Our mission at The Seventy Four is to lead an honest, fact-based conversation about how to give America’s 74 million children the education they deserve.


●●smf: Note the celebrity Cult-of-Personality first person singular pronoun “I”, gone plural/royal: “Our mission…”


…Wait: didn’t Campbell Brown used to be a CNN anchorperson?


Alma Dale Campbell Brown (born June 14, 1968) is an American television news reporter and anchorwoman. She served as co-anchor of the NBC news program Weekend Today from 2003 to 2007, then hosted the series Campbell Brown on CNN from 2008 to 2010. Brown won an Emmy Award as part of the NBC team reporting on Hurricane Katrina. Since 2013 she has served as an education reform and school choice activist. Wikipedia http://bit.ly/1Q2uXjX

Campbell Brown, like Jamie Lynton, went to The Right Schools. She was expelled from the Madeira School, a private, non-denominational college-preparatory boarding school for girls located in McLean, Virginia, for sneaking off campus to go to a party. Her tenure at NBC and CNN was not without controversy; she left under a cloud.

Brown has become an outspoken advocate for school choice and education reform. In June 2013, Brown founded the Parents Transparency Project, a nonprofit watchdog group on behalf of parents seeking information and accountability from the teachers’ unions and New York Department of Education on actions impacting children in school. Brown has also focused on reforming teacher tenure policies through the judicial system. She wrote a number of op-eds voicing her support for the successful Vergara v. California case in 2014, which overturned California’s teacher tenure, dismissal, and seniority policies. She celebrated Vergara as “A historic victory for America’s kids” and previewed the national ramifications of the ruling, saying, “It would be no surprise to see parents in New York and elsewhere take the cue of the Vergara plaintiffs and take matters into their own hands.”

Brown also serves on the board of Success Academy Charter Schools, a New York City charter school network – enmeshed in its own flavor of Charter-Schools-forcing-out-Special-Education-Students controversy. http://nyti.ms/20gVPw4 | Source: Wikipedia /The74million.org/CampbellBrown.com

MOTHER JONES WROTE: “Before Brown left CNN three years ago, her evening news show carried a memorable tagline: ‘No bias. No bull.’ She can't say the same for her foray into the education wars.” | http://bit.ly/1T5Hcwq


DIANE RAVITCH wrote in her blog: “The LA School Report has long been a partisan supporter of charters, Deasy, Broad, and all other parts of the privatization agenda. Under a new editor, the LA School Report became a neutral source. Now that editor has announced he is leaving because the LA School Report has merged with Campbell Brown’s “The 74.” http://bit.ly/1PHpEo1 And elsewhere: “If people like Campbell Brown really cared about poor kids, they would fight for small class sizes, arts teachers, school nurses, libraries, and improved conditions for teaching and learning. They don’t.” | http://bit.ly/1K5xI1o


LAUSD SCHOOLBOARD PRESIDENT STEVE ZIMMER WROTE, in a self-admittedly inflammatory response to Michael Janofsky’s email:
“It is no accident that Campbell Brown is coming to join Eli Broad in the effort to dismantle LAUSD and eviscerate democratically elected school boards and public sector unions across the nation. Now that the Los Angeles Times education coverage is funded by Broad, Wasserman, and Baxter and that the School Report will now be controlled by Brown and her funders, truth itself as it relates to public education in Los Angeles will be filtered through an orthodox reform lens at every turn. After the Times editorial leadership essentially told me that agenda was as important as accuracy in their coverage of the Board and of the district, I knew we were in a different place. Tonight, I understand that even more.”

In case you missed it, Zimmer wrote: “…the Times editorial leadership essentially told me that (®eform) agenda was as important as accuracy in their coverage of the Board and of the district".

[Zimmer’s email is available+recommended in its entirety here: http://bit.ly/1PHpEo1 ]


The vaunted business-model applied to public-education paradigm has reached a new phase. First there were mom+pop/parent+educator charter school entrepreneurial start-ups. Then there was the franchising and growth-model mass marketing driven by venture capital – leading to corporate model charter management organizations as the MBAdults and hedge funders and KIPP and Green Dot and the Alliance contested market share+return-on-investment. The war for hearts+minds is not being won in the ballot box, let’s head for the courts while we subvert+compromise+buy+pay-for the independent media; whatever that was. The next step is Mergers+Acquisitions and Leveraged Buy Outs, packaging+bundling the privatized +deregulated assets as investment securities. Credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations, anyone? Rupert Murdoch says that public education is a $50 billion a year money-making-opportunity.

LA School Report slipping deeper into the quicksand of $chool ®eform Inc. is really not earth shaking; though 4LAKids must note that one of the first stories in the New+Improved LASR was an interview with (former) Mayor Tony. And seeing that Mayor Tony is on my mind, his attraction to television news personalities and the carnal temptation of Ms. Lynton and Ms. Brown cannot go unremarked upon.

Almost immediately after the merger+acquisition of LA School Report by The 74, the new+improved LASR and the LA Times got into a Twitter fight over which one broke the Parent-Trigger-at-20th-Street-Elementary-School story first …because who broke the charter school-news story first IS apparently truly earth shaking in the nonpartisan+independent education media.

The 74 million US schoolchildren, the 9 million California school age kids and the 643,493 LAUSD students are who really matter.

“And if people like Campbell Brown really cared about poor kids, they would fight for small class sizes, arts teachers, school nurses, libraries, and improved conditions for teaching and learning.”

That’s what matters.

¡Onward/Adelante! - smf



WHO'S REALLY BEHIND CAMPBELL BROWN'S SNEAKY EDUCATION OUTFIT?
THE FORMER CNN ANCHOR SAYS HER NONPROFIT SEEKS TO PROTECT KIDS FROM PREDATORS IN THE CLASSROOM. ITS REAL AGENDA MAY BE UNION-BUSTING.

By Andy Kroll, Mother Jones | http://bit.ly/1T5Hcwq

Tue Oct. 29, 2013 5:00 AM EDT :: Early one morning in July, former CNN anchor Campbell Brown appeared on MSNBC's Morning Joe, pen in hand, notes fanned out in front of her. Viewers might have mistaken her as a fill-in host, but Brown had swung by 30 Rock in her new role as a self-styled education reformer, a crusader against sexual deviants in New York City public schools and the backward unions and bureaucrats getting in the way of firing them. "In many cases, we have teachers who were found guilty of inappropriate touching, sexual banter with kids, who weren't fired from their jobs, who were given very light sentences and sent back to the classroom," Brown, the mother of two young sons, explained.

Brown was there to plug her new venture, the Parents' Transparency Project, a nonprofit "watchdog group" that "favors no party, candidate, or incumbent." Though its larger aim is to "bring transparency" to how contracts are negotiated with teachers' unions, PTP's most prominent campaign is to fix how New York City handles cases of sexual misconduct involving teachers and school employees—namely by giving the city's schools chancellor, a political appointee, ultimate authority in the process.

Shortly after it was launched in June, PTP trained its sights on the New York mayoral race, asking the candidates to pledge to change the firing process for school employees accused of sexual misconduct. When several Democratic candidates declined, perhaps fearing they'd upset organized labor, PTP spent $100,000 on a television attack ad questioning whether six candidates, including Republican Joe Lhota and Democrats Bill de Blasio and Anthony Weiner, had "the guts to stand up to the teachers' unions." The spot stated that there had been 128 cases of sexual misconduct by school employees in the past five years, suggesting that nothing had been done in response. "It's a scandal," the ad's narrator intoned. "And the candidates are silent."

Before founding PTP, Brown raised this issue in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in July 2012. But what she failed to disclose was that her husband, Dan Senor, sits on the board of the New York affiliate of StudentsFirst, an education lobbying group founded by Michelle Rhee, the controversial former Washington, DC, chancellor. Rhee made a name for herself as public enemy No. 1 of the teachers' unions and has become the torchbearer of the charter school movement. In 2012, her "bipartisan grassroots organization" backed 105 candidates in state races, 88 percent of them Republicans. (Senor was also the spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority following the invasion of Iraq and served as a foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney in 2012.)

Writing in Slate, Brown, a veteran journalist, confessed to being naive about the standards for revealing a potential conflict of interest: "If you live in the overlapping world of politics and media, as I am learning, anything less than full transparency can potentially do you in." She still managed to get in a few digs at the unions. "I failed to disclose," she wrote, "because I stupidly did not connect the teachers' unions' opposition to charter schools to their support for a system that protects teachers who engage in sexual misconduct."

But there is much more about PTP that is less than transparent, including its sources of funding and its overall agenda. As a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, PTP may keep its donors' identities secret and spend money in electoral campaigns, so long as political activity doesn't consume the majority of its time and money.

Despite its nonpartisan billing, Brown's nonprofit used Revolution Agency, a Republican consulting firm, to produce the mayoral attack ad. Its partners include Mike Murphy, a well-known pundit and former Romney strategist; Mark Dion, former chief of staff to Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.); and Evan Kozlow, former deputy director of the National Republican Congressional Committee. The domain name for PTP's website was registered by two Revolution employees: Jeff Bechdel, Mitt Romney's former Florida spokesman, and Matt Leonardo, who describes himself as "happily in self-imposed exile from advising Republican candidates."

Brown failed to disclose that her husband sits on the board of the New York affiliate of Michelle Rhee's education lobbying group.

Another consulting firm working with Brown's group is Tusk Strategies, which helped launch Rhee's StudentsFirst. Advertising disclosure forms filed by PTP list Tusk's phone number, and a copy of PTP's sexual-misconduct pledge—since scrubbed from its website—identified its author as a Tusk employee. (Tusk and Revolution declined to comment. Brown referred all questions to her PR firm—the same one used by StudentsFirst.)

What about Brown's allegation that the New York schools did nothing about 128 cases of sexual misconduct? It turns out that in 33 of those cases, the employee in question had been fired, the New York Times reported. Many of the others were disciplined.

Brown's group paints the unions as the main obstacles to a crackdown on predators. Yet Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, says that the union's New York City chapter already has a zero-tolerance policy in its contract, and that AFT only protects its members against "false allegations." New York state law also mandates that any teacher convicted of a sex crime be automatically fired. It is the law, not union contracts, that requires that an independent arbitrator hear and mete out punishment in cases of sexual misconduct that fall outside criminal law. The quickest route to changing that policy may be lobbying lawmakers in Albany, not hammering teachers and their unions.

Before Brown left CNN three years ago, her evening news show carried a memorable tagline: "No bias. No bull." She can't say the same for her foray into the education wars.


The Seventy Four, founded by controversial advocate, takes over LA School Report - LA Times



20th STREET ELEMENTARY PARENTS GATHER 'PARENT TRIGGER' SIGNATURES A SECOND TIME AFTER LAUSD DOESN’T MAKE CHANGES
By Adolfo Guzman-Lopez | KPCC 89.3 | http://bit.ly/20CrVYJ

February 3, 2016 :: Saying they're fed up by the slow pace of change, parents at a southeast Los Angeles elementary school have gathered signatures for "parent trigger" petitions for the second time to force the Los Angeles Unified School District to turn the campus over to a charter school operator.

It's the first time that California's parent trigger law has been used as a tool to force change twice at the same school. The law, which was passed in 2010, compels school districts to carry out a major overhaul of a campus – including turning over to an outside operator – if a majority of parents seek the change.

Parents at 20th St. Elementary School first organized in 2014, but decided not to formally submit their petition when LAUSD administrators proposed an improvement plan that included promises to improve the administration of the school, provide teachers with professional development, and use data to measure teaching and learning.

“They said, ‘don’t turn them in; let’s drop the plan. Let’s see how we can all work together and make changes,'” said Lupe Aragon, whose daughter attends fourth grade at 20th St. Elementary.

During the last round of state testing*, just 19 percent of the school's students met standards in English and 20 percent met standards in math. Aragon said she and other parents had been frustrated by the school's continued low-performance and lack of rigor displayed in her daughter's and other student's course work.

“She was taking home math problems that were basically for first and second graders, additions that were only one digit,” Aragon said.

Now, 20th St. Elementary parents – along with the activist group that helped craft the law and has worked to organize parents at schools around the state – argue that the district has failed to fulfill any of the improvement plan's commitments.

“Parents basically felt like once they took the pressure off the system that the petitions represented, the system went right back to ignoring them,” said Seth Litt, executive director of the activist group, Parent Revolution.

In particular, the parents submitting the petition allege that LAUSD has failed to appoint a new principal with a strong track record on school improvement and to provide the training to school staff that it had promised.

LAUSD officials would not comment on the petition other than to say school district administrators are reviewing the documents.

The petition, which was submitted to LAUSD Superintendent Michelle King earlier this week, contains signatures from families of 58 percent of the students in the school.

Now it’s up to L.A. Unified to verify the signatures. Once that’s done it’ll be up to the board to approve a charter school operator.

Since the parent trigger law went into effect in 2010, Parent Revolution says that petitions have been submitted to force change in schools in six California schools, including three in Los Angeles. Threat of parent trigger petitions have also been used as a bargaining tool to promote changes in an additional five schools, including the first attempt at 20th St. Elementary.


* smf: There has been no state testing with scores that count for over two years; the Parent Trigger Law requires timely state testing to identify candidate schools.


THE BIG (D)EASY: A GOOD REASON TO NOT GO TO NEW ORLEANS JUST IN TIME FOR MARDI GRAS!
The 2016 NCCEP (National Council for Community and Education Partnerships)/GEAR UP Capacity-Building Workshop (CBW) took place January 31-February 3, 2016 at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The CBW is a distinctly different learning opportunity from the NCCEP/GEAR UP Annual Conference. The CBW is where grantees roll up their sleeves and have extended conversations with experts in the field and their peers about how to advance the cause of college access and success.

From the CBW program:

▲EXCEL Workshop E5: PRINCIPALS OF CHANGE MANAGEMENT
Gain the Knowledge and Skills to Guide Effective Change Management Strategies That Will Improve Outcomes for Your Organization
• Speakers: John Deasy, Superintendent-in-Residence, The Broad Academy
• Christina Heitz, Managing Director, The Broad Academy
Overview: Managing change is one of the most complex tasks of a leader. GEAR UP practitioners who seek to drive improvements in their programs often face resistance to change. This resistance is an entirely normal reaction. People value their current reality and the habits that reinforce it for many good reasons. Because change implies loss, discomfort, and distress,

GEAR UP practitioners must effectively manage others’ desire to hold on to the familiar and to be exempt from change. In this interactive skills session, participants will explore means of establishing credibility as a change leader, investing others in the purpose of a change, and building a clear vision of the unfamiliar destination that we are leading others towards.

Objectives: In this workshop you will:
• Gain an understanding of the success factors of change management.
• Learn how to make a persuasive case for change and engage key stakeholders.
• Engage in best practices in leading change.

●● A 4LAKids correspondent emailed these two cents worth from the conference:
Fri, Feb 5, 2016 2:48 pm :: REPORT FROM THE US DOE GEAR UP CONFERENCE FOR SUPERINTENDENTS IN NEW ORLEANS THIS WEEK:

College Board, Obama, branding social justice with Common Core, testing, etc. …and Deasy was the leader and the "expert". Broad people introducing Deasy to Supes.

• All of the "great American schools" are charter
• LAUSD is the leader in social justice
• Yesterday Deasy led supes in professional development on the nine steps of educational reform
• data data data Deasy was analyzing poetry by numbers.


SUPER QUIZ A BATTLE ROYAL: Academic decathlon Super Quiz is a sport unto itself — with the fans to prove it
by Sonali Kohli | LA Times |http://lat.ms/1K6AUdp

Feb 7, 2016 :: The fans from Van Nuys High School craned their necks, team members' names scrawled across their faces, looking for their fellow students.

As the team started filing in, the two rows of students in the bleachers waved signs and chanted the coach's name: "Abreu! Abreu! Abreu!"

They were cheering for their school's academic decathlon team.

Los Angeles Unified School District schools completed the annual decathlon Saturday with the game show-style Super Quiz event at the Roybal Learning Center downtown. It's the only event that allowed an audience. And they came out in full force, with hundreds of parents, students and school officials filling the gymnasium's bleachers.

Angel Abreu, a Van Nuys High history teacher and the school's decathlon coach since 1989, offered his students extra credit to attend the competition's grand finale, the Super Quiz. They were surrounded by teachers, principals and teachers from 58 participating schools.

The Super Quiz consists of three rounds of 12 questions — during each round, three students from each team sat huddled in folding chairs on the gym floor, knees touching, Scantron test forms balanced on their laps. The students had 10 seconds after the announcer read a question to talk to one other and mark an answer. Up to two right answers could be counted for each team.

As announcer and former KTLA news anchor Emmett Miller read the answers after each question, the proctors sitting with each team raised signs to show how many of the students had correct answers, and the crowd erupted in cheers and whoops.

"May I beseech you, please, to keep your voices down," Miller said at one point.

Sometimes it was so loud even during the questions that students from Cleveland Charter High School used sign language to tell each other which answer letter to choose, team captain Mariana Castellanos said.

A number of competitors were also athletes, but some students and parents said Saturday's crowd outdid the fans at their games.

"It was very exciting, yeah, it's kind of like a sport," said Melania Gomez, whose son Jorge competed for Bell High School.

Granada Hills Charter High School, the defending national decathlon champions, unofficially won the L.A. Unified Super Quiz with a perfect score of 72. Some say Saturday's quiz is a good indication of who will place in the overall competition, even though it's a relatively small portion of the entire score.

The winners of the competition will be announced officially Friday, and teams with the highest overall scores will advance to the statewide competition.

The decathlon consists of seven multiple-choice tests plus three "subjective" tests — a speech, interview and essay — and finally the Super Quiz.

Every year the decathlon has a theme running through the subjects — art, economics, literature, math, music, science and social science. Super Quiz asks questions in all those areas except math.

Last year's theme was energy; this year's is India.

Joshua Silva and Jordan Silva (no relation), both seniors at West Adams Preparatory High School, said they didn't know much about India before they started studying over the summer. Joshua knows the colonial history of the country, but became more familiar with spicy foods at the decathlon lunch practices, which happened often, he said.

Students at other schools said they learned the music — not just the Bollywood songs known to some Americans, but classical music whose patterns they had to learn for the tests.


HIGHLIGHTS, LOWLIGHTS & THE NEWS THAT DOESN'T FIT: The Rest (but not necessarily the best) of the Stories from Other Sources
JAN. 2015 REVENUES: INCOME TAXES MODESTLY UNDER PROJECTIONS http://lao.ca.gov/LAOEconTax/Article/Detail/168

SCHOOL BUDGET HEADS UP! LAO: California revenue dips, possible sign of ‘revenue deterioration’ to come http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article58276623.html

AT LONG LAST, PUBLIC EDUCATION ENTERS THE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATES! - TED CRUZ: "When Heidi's first lady, the French fries are coming back to the cafeteria!" http://bzfd.it/1Prq55I .

Subject: A CHANGE AT LA SCHOOL REPORT http://bit.ly/2038lza


EVENTS: Coming up next week...
Tuesday morning, February 9, 2016 - 10:00 a.m. - REGULAR BOARD MEETING - INCLUDING CLOSED SESSION Items

Tuesday morning, February 9, 2016 - 1:00 p.m. - REGULAR BOARD MEETING

*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:
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!


Who are your elected federal & state representatives? How do you contact them?




Scott Folsom is a parent leader in LAUSD and was Parent/Volunteer of the Year for 2010-11 for Los Angeles County. • He is Past President of Los Angeles Tenth District PTSA and has represented PTA on the LAUSD Construction Bond Citizen's Oversight Committee for over 13 years. He currently serves as Vice President for Health, is a Legislation Action Committee member and a member of the Board of Directors 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 "WHO" Gold Award and the ACSA Regional Ferd Kiesel Memorial Distinguished Service Award - honors 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.
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