Saturday, January 30, 2016

Gauchos; My favorite Girl Scout cookies



4LAKids: Sunday 31•Jan•2016
In This Issue:
 •  MAGNET SCHOOLS: No longer famous, but still intact
 •  FROM L.A. UNIFIED TEACHER TO SUPERINTENDENT: Who is the real Michelle King?
 •  CALIFORNIA LAWSUIT APPEAL PURSUES CLAIM OF INADEQUATE EDUCATION FUNDING
 •  LINCOLN HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT GETS PERFECT SCORE ON AP CALCULUS EXAM -- 1 OF 12 IN THE WORLD TO DO SO
 •  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:
 •  ► Friends4smf :: The GoFundMe campaign
 •  Follow 4 LAKids on Twitter - or get instant updates via text message by texting
 •  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.
When some loud braggart tries to put me down
And says his school is great
I tell him right away
"Now what's the matter buddy
Ain't you heard of my school?
…It's number one in the state!"


Congratulations to the student-athletes of Narbonne High School football team for winning the 2015 California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) Division 1-A State Football Championship.

Narbonne High Wins Historic CIF State Football Title | http://bit.ly/1m21RDd

This is the first time that a school from LAUSD has won the state title in the 99-year history of the CIF. Congratulations also go to head coach Manuel Douglas , his coaching staff, principal Gerald Kobata, and the outstanding seniors on the team who are – every-last-one-of-‘em – going on to community colleges or universities, many on full scholarships. Congratulations also to all the students and faculty and Narbonne alumni. You are champions all – and Gauchos forever!


And introducing a new subject without changing it: It is Girl Scout Cookie Season!

I was at the School Board’s Committee of the Whole meeting Tuesday, minding everybody else’s business, when the Narbonne football team was honored for their state championship and student athleticism.

There was a presentation on the Governor’s Proposed Budget+Legislative Agenda - http://bit.ly/1PZIEtZ - …and the usual Oliver Twistian “Please, sir, can LAUSD have some more?” commentary. LAUSD’s own Washington DC lobbyist gave a presentation on Federal Legislation+Budget - http://bit.ly/1Qy82JW - and here an interesting development developed.

It seems that the feds have allocated a sizeable ($80 million) budget increase to Charter Schools… and a not-so-sizeable one ($5 million) to Magnet Schools.

Why, pray tell, School Boardmember Schmerelson asked, did charters get a bunch and magnets only get a little?

Well, Joel Packer (the LAUSD lobbyist), said, The National Charter School Association has more and more-effective lobbyists in Washington than the Magnet School Association.

Here I looked up from answering emails and shopping for slippers at Zappos: A D.C. lobbyist was arguing that some D.C. lobbyists are more successful/better funded/better connected than others? The playing field in the lobbies of Congress and corridors of power is not level?

I Was Shocked! – believing as I do that democracy+fair play are as universally clung to as expense account lunches, Georgetown cocktail parties, tasseled loafers and Air Force One cufflinks among the K Street crowd.

But to my surprise, the astonishment among the board of education was not that charter school association lobbyists were more successful than magnet association lobbyists – their surprise was that there is a magnet school association – and that they and/or LAUSD is not represented on-or-by it.

“We love our magnet schools!” It was argued by the board and by Superintendent Michelle King that LAUSD Magnet schools/centers outperform their host counterparts, other LAUSD schools and charter schools.

• In the most recent English-Language Arts (ELA) Smarter Balance Assessment, 65 percent of Magnets scored higher than the state average.
• On the Math assessment, 56 percent of Magnets scored higher than the state average.
• Currently, over 67,000 students attend one of LAUSD’s 198 Magnet programs.
• If LAUSD’s Magnet program were its own district, it would rank as the 54th largest school district in the nation and 5th largest in the state …larger than the Detroit or Boston or San Francisco School Districts.

Gentle reader, the above data+results prove LAUSD’s Magnet Program’s popular acceptance+success …and we are data-driven+outcome-oriented, right?

Except all those data and results and facts and outcomes are meaningless against the claims trump(eted) by Charters. (And like The Donald, charter schools dominate the conversation even when they are not in the room!) They frame the discussion; they must be better! They have the brand: They are Charter Schools. To return to the musical wisdom of Brian Wilson and Mike Love: “Rah rah rah rah sis boom bah!” They have more+better+better-paid lobbyists. They are louder. Their volume knob goes to eleven.
When I'm drivin' in my car
And that man comes on the radio
He's tellin' me more and more
About some useless information
Supposed to fire my imagination…

When I'm watchin' my T.V.
And that man comes on to tell me
How white my shirts can be
But he can't be a man 'cause he doesn't smoke
The same cigarettes as me


LIBRARY AMNESTY: From February 1 – 14, 2016, the Los Angeles Public Library (LAPL) will welcome back its overdue books and the people who love them. During these two weeks only, you can return overdue materials to any of the 73 libraries and LAPL will forgive your past and present fines. Your record will be cleared and you can use your library card again. LAPL Misses You - FAQ | Los Angeles Public Library http://bit.ly/20zMGR9


The L.A. Times, in its newest profile of new superintendent Michelle King, (From L.A. Unified teacher to superintendent: Who is the real Michelle King? - follows) seems to imply in the lead paragraphs that King’s elevation is a victory for Beaudry insiders and District staff.

In other words: The Bureaucrats Won …and of course, bureaucrats in the Times and Eli Broad’s thinking, are champions of the status quo and enemies of disruptive ®eform.

I don’t agree – though I can understand how insiders and outsiders alike might see it that way. I certainly understand the bureaucrats feel relief that John Deasy – an attack dog who didn’t believe anything worth replicating happened before his arrival on the scene – and Ray Cortines, who in his first two iterations at LAUSD was occupied with budget-cutting and rightsizing – are behind us.

(Ray v.3.0 was about damage control; he excelled at that!)

Bureaucrats are essential in an organization – a bureaucracy – as large as LAUSD; they are both the glue and lubrication that keep the moving parts functioning together. The collective noun, or Term of Venery (think a Pride of Lions or a Murder of Crows) applicable here is a Necessity of Bureaucrats.

Michelle King has been a kindergartener and an elementary, middle and high schooler in the District. She was a cheerleader. She has been a teacher’s aide and a teacher and an administrator and a principal. She has been a bureaucrat and a functionary, a cog in the machine – and a thread in the tapestry. She has been an LAUSD parent.

It is too early to know for sure but the hope is that We All Won. She is one of us – We the District – and we have high expectations of her.

To which I add the advice to her and all of us that goes without saying but must be said: “Don’t screw up!”


¡Onward/Adelante! - smf


MAGNET SCHOOLS: No longer famous, but still intact
By CHRISTINE H. ROSSELL - from Education Next | Spring 2005 / Vol. 5, No. 2| http://bit.ly/23z24zT
●●smf: Sometimes the news isn't necessarily new ...this from ten years ago

The year was 1968. Martin Luther King had been assassinated, and American cities were erupting in flames because of King’s violent death and the decades-long smoldering resentments from racism. In a small city far away from the churning ghettos of Detroit and D.C., a small public school was about to enter the racial hubbub and become part of education history.

That fall, McCarver Elementary in Tacoma, Washington, hung out its shingle inviting students from anywhere in the city to enroll, breaking the link between school assignments and residential location and becoming the nation’s first “magnet” school. Thus began a nationwide experiment to integrate public schools using market-like incentives instead of court orders. (See sidebar, “In the Beginning.” http://bit.ly/23z24zT)

The following year, 1969, the country’s second magnet school opened–this one, more appropriately, in Boston, soon to be an epicenter of the race-based school wars. But, like its West Coast counterpart, the William Monroe Trotter School, in Beantown’s poor Roxbury section, was built as “a showcase for new methods of teaching”–enough of a showcase, it was hoped, to attract white children to a black neighborhood for their schooling. It was an odd idea, but one whose time seemed to have come. Within a decade there would be hundreds of such magnet schools all over the country.

The idea was simple enough: draw white students to predominantly black schools by offering a special education with a focus on a particular aspect of the curriculum, such as performing arts, or Montessori, or advanced math, science, and technology. Federal and state agencies, anxious to avoid the growing messiness of coercive integration measures like forced busing, directed new resources toward these magnets, encouraging their pioneering academic programs and giving grants for new facilities. Glossy brochures were mailed to parents and press releases to local media. The hope was that these well-funded, themed schools would ignite a passion for learning as well as spark a movement to voluntarily integrate schools.

The names alone give a sense of the new schools’ range and optimism–the Thomas Pullham Creative and Performing Arts magnet (in Prince George’s County, Maryland), the Copley Square International High magnet (in Boston), the School 59 Science magnet (also called the “Zoo School,” in Buffalo), the Greenfield Montessori magnet school (in Milwaukee), the Central High School Classical Greek/Computers Unlimited magnet high school (in Kansas City). Even older and well-established “examination schools,” such as Boston Latin and City Honors (in Buffalo), would soon claim magnet status to avail themselves of new students and additional funds.

AN EARLY EXPERIMENT IN “CHOICE”

The first magnets appeared as the school desegregation battles were heating up. In 1969, the year William Monroe Trotter opened in Boston, a federal court ordered the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district in North Carolina to use busing to desegregate its schools. The use of crosstown busing to accomplish desegregation was unprecedented–and the case went right to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the highly controversial forced integration program in 1971. A federal district court in Boston, paying insufficient attention to the ideals of the Trotter school, introduced a forced busing program in 1974 that set off demonstrations and riots. The court order also prompted the city’s educators to include magnets in their formal, citywide forced busing plan the following year. Thus was born the first “forced busing plan with magnet options.”

Coming as they did, in the midst of several different national desegregation crises, early magnet schools offered a relatively uncontroversial–and peaceful–means of integrating schools. And the magnet movement got an early boost from two federal district court decisions in 1976, in the aftermath of the discord in Charlotte and Boston. In approving magnet-driven, voluntary desegregation programs in Buffalo and Milwaukee, the courts seemed more than willing to accept reasonable alternatives to the forced dissolution of geography-based school assignments.

Though it was another decade before the first southern school district (in Savannah) was allowed to desegregate its school system with a voluntary magnet-school plan, the new schools were soon opening almost everywhere–or, at least, everywhere that public school systems needed to stem the white-flight resegregation that was overtaking many urban school districts, mostly in the North. By 1981, there were some 1,000 such magnet schools in the United States; by 1991, there were over 2,400. (See Figure 1/ http://bit.ly/23z24zT)

These new schools proved to be a remarkably robust and popular trend in school choice. In a study I undertook in 1989, I found that 12 percent of the elementary and middle school magnet programs in my sample specialized in basic skills and/or individualized teaching; 11 percent offered foreign language immersion; 11 percent were science-, math-, or computer-oriented; 10 percent catered to the gifted and talented and 10 percent to the creative and performing arts; 8 percent were traditional, back-to-basics programs (demanding, for instance, dress codes and contracts with parents for supervision of homework); 7 percent were college preparatory; 7 percent were early childhood and Montessori. (The remaining preferences, each under 7 percent, included multicultural/international, life skills/ careers, and ecology/environment.) At the high school level, the programs tended to be either career-oriented (medical careers, law and criminal justice, communications and mass media, hotel and restaurant) or schools with some sort of entrance criteria. The Magnet Schools Association of America, based in Washington, D.C., reports a similar distribution of program themes in today’s magnet schools.

My analyses of the success of these magnets in actually attracting whites indicate that school structure and racial composition was important. Predictably, the most popular magnet school structure was a dedicated magnet, where everyone in the school had chosen it and all were in the magnet program. These “perfect” magnets, however, were the least common, because creating them requires that an entire school be emptied out and children assigned elsewhere or a new school be built. The next most popular magnet structure, and the most common today, is a program-within-a-school. Only students who chose the magnet program are in it, but there is also a neighborhood population assigned to the school that is not in the magnet program. The racial composition of the magnet program is different from the school that houses it and is usually around 50 percent white.

The least-popular magnet structure in black neighborhoods is a “whole-school-attendance-zone” magnet: everyone in the school is in the program, but the school has a neighborhood population assigned to it. That these schools and their magnet programs tend to have a racial composition closer to that of the neighborhood–majority minority–only reduces their attractiveness to whites. However, according to most surveys, although whites prefer majority white schools, a sizable, albeit smaller, number will choose schools where whites make up somewhat less than half of the student body.

STAYING POWER AND AN EVOLVING MISSION

Even as courts across the country began releasing school districts such as Kansas City, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Savannah, Buffalo, and Boston from long-running desegregation orders during the 1990s, magnet schools continued to thrive. My 1991 randomized national sample of 600 school districts indicated that the 2,400 magnet schools in the United States were operating in 229 different school districts.

And it would appear that their ranks continue to swell despite the declining number of districts operating under court-ordered desegregation plans. The directory published by the Magnet Schools Association of America lists more than 3,000 magnet or theme-based schools as members.
With desegregation waning as a public goal, however, magnet schools have maintained support by attaching themselves to the school-choice movement. For instance, the Magnet Schools of America web site now makes a classic choice-based argument on behalf of magnet schools–that being allowed to choose a school will result in improved satisfaction that translates into better achievement. Thus, although proponents of magnet schools have not disavowed the desegregation goal that is the program’s roots, they currently place almost equal emphasis on magnets as instruments of school choice.

One of the reasons for the sustained growth of magnet schools is the federal government’s steady financial support for the idea. Magnet schools were originally funded as tools of desegregation under the Emergency School Assistance Act from 1972 to 1981. In 1981 they were folded into the Chapter 2 block-grant program, but explicit federal support for magnet schools as desegregation tools resumed in 1985 with the authorization of the Magnet Schools Assistance Program (MSAP), included in the Education for Economic Security Act. Under the new program, however, magnet schools not only had to aid desegregation, but also had to focus on improving the quality of education in order to qualify for funds. The Magnet Schools Assistance Program still exists, now run by the Office of Innovation and Improvement in the Department of Education, and with the same twin goals of fostering integration and choice.

Funding for magnet schools is also part of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, housed in the portion of the law bannered “Promoting Informed Parental Choice and Innovative Programs.” Funding has not kept pace with either inflation or the growth in magnet schools, but neither has it withered away. (See Figure 2/ http://bit.ly/23z24zT) The MSAP appropriation was $75 million in 1984, rose to $108 million in 1994, and remained at $108 million in 2004. Though the program falls under the law’s choice provisions, the federal government still considers magnets an important aspect of desegregation policy, defining a magnet school as one that “offers a special curriculum capable of attracting substantial numbers of students of different racial backgrounds.

THE MONEY BITE

Perhaps the greatest challenge to magnet schools now comes from fiscal constraints at the state level. Where desegregation has become a secondary goal, resource-rich magnet schools are often a target for cuts when money is tight. States such as Missouri, Ohio, and Michigan have challenged court-ordered desegregation plans in order to reduce their financial and legal liability. But even states such as Massachusetts, Maryland, and California that were never parties to a desegregation lawsuit have been cutting funds for magnet schools. The Prince George’s County, Maryland, school district, for example, eliminated magnet programs at 33 schools in the fall of 2004 because of state funding cutbacks. (smf notes: This was before Deasy’s tenure at Prince George’s County schools.) The only theme programs that will be kept are the Montessori, French immersion, and creative and performing arts, and they will no longer be called magnets.

Indeed, there is probably no school district with an extensive system of magnet programs that has not closed at least one or two magnets because of a budget crunch. In fact, many magnets are the victims of their own success: by the 1990s most neighborhood schools had the science labs and computer technology that had once made magnets unique. Even McCarver in Tacoma removed “magnet” from its name in 1998 and, as a result of No Child Left Behind, became a School in Need of Improvement.

Connecticut is an important exception to this trend, but that is because since 1996, the entire state has been under a state supreme court order to desegregate. Using a complicated formula approved by the court, the state funds magnet schools that accept students from several different districts (at a minimum there must be two) at a per-pupil rate that increases as the number of districts sending students increases–an attempt to bring central-city minority students and white suburban students together in the same school. Thus the scheme eschews outright racial quotas, but achieves some of the diversity that quotas would create.

CHALLENGES FOR THE FUTURE

Though finances will always be a magnet school’s primary concern, the greatest threat to the magnet system going forward is the same as that which gave magnets their early jump-start: the courts. Even the No Child Left Behind Act’s requirement that school districts adopt a voluntary desegregation plan, for instance, may conflict with legal precedents set in most federal appeals courts. In 2001 only the federal appeals court covering the states of Connecticut, New York, and Vermont had upheld the use of race in student assignment or magnet school admissions in school districts not already under court order; it did so on the grounds that the state had a compelling interest in racial diversity. But even in that circuit, several school districts and one state (Connecticut) have continued to avoid the use of racial quotas in magnet admissions because they believe using them invites a legal challenge.

The 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing the use of racial quotas at the University of Michigan–but approving the use of race as one of many factors in admissions decisions–has had little impact on magnet schools, mainly because most had already abandoned the use of quotas. And most school districts now recognize that using explicit racial quotas in magnet admissions when desegregation orders have been lifted is risky. When the court-ordered desegregation plan in Prince George’s County was ended in 2002, the superintendent formed a panel of experts on magnet schools that was thought to be politically and ideologically diverse. Our task was to figure out what to do about magnet school admissions criteria.

All of us were in agreement that race could no longer be used in magnet admissions. We devised a plan in which the district was divided into three subdistricts of roughly similar racial and socioeconomic balance. Students, regardless of their race, could choose any magnet school in their subdistrict. We hoped that racially diverse student bodies would result from the individual choices of students, but there was no way to guarantee it. Since then, as noted above, state funding cuts have prompted the district’s administration to dramatically reduce the number of magnet schools, keeping only the most popular. Similar choices are being made in other districts, where some magnets survive while others are being closed.

Districts throughout the country are responding in one of two ways: either adopting a race-blind system of admissions, thus converting the magnet to a themed school of choice; or constructing a system whereby race is only one of several factors considered in admission. The former is more likely to happen in school districts that have very few whites left and in districts that have had strong appeals court opinions rejecting the use of race altogether. The latter is more likely to occur in school districts such as Fort Wayne, Indiana, that have enough whites left to actually integrate a number of magnet schools and where there has been no strong circuit court decision rejecting the use of race.

It is remarkable, perhaps, that despite the reduction in state funding and the elimination of explicit racial quotas, the total number of magnet schools has not declined. I would suggest three reasons for their resilience. First, the great triumph of the civil-rights movement was its success in getting whites to support the principle of racial diversity in the schools. In districts that still have enough whites to make integration feasible, magnet schools are viewed as an effective way to achieve that diversity, even in districts where court orders have been lifted or never existed. Second, magnet schools have been incorporated into the school choice movement as a means of improving achievement and into No Child Left Behind as a way of increasing the opportunities available to children in low-performing schools. Third, parents like school choice. Although undoubtedly there are some who enroll their children in a theme-based school in order to enable them to pursue a passion, most parents are probably interested in theme-based education as a means of igniting a passion. Magnets have thus developed strong constituencies locally and nationally and, for the foreseeable future, remain an important, if less often noticed, feature of the American education landscape.

• Christine Rossell is a professor of political science at Boston University.


●●smf’s 2¢: The LAUSD Magnet program is the legacy of Theodore T. "Ted" Alexander, Jr., for whom the Alexander Science and Math Magnet School in Exposition Park is named. Alexander was responsible for district integration after a 1977 court order required Los Angeles schools to desegregate, a ruling that prompted a citywide fight over mandatory busing.

To help defuse community opposition to busing, Alexander supervised the establishment of magnet schools. The magnet campuses achieved integration by attracting students of all races from across the city with specialized classes that included science, journalism and curricula for the academically gifted.
- from Alexander's LA Times obituary http://lat.ms/20yEXCR


FROM L.A. UNIFIED TEACHER TO SUPERINTENDENT: Who is the real Michelle King?
by Howard Blume | L.A. Times | http://lat.ms/1nUgPwB

Jan 28, 2016 :: At the announcement that Michelle King had been promoted from deputy superintendent to the top leadership position at the huge and troubled Los Angeles Unified School District, the small throng gathered at district headquarters rose to its feet in applause.

The ovation was a "Survivor"-like salute to a member of the tribe. Here was someone who had navigated a high-stakes, politically treacherous enterprise in which, this year alone, 60,000 employees will spend more than $7 billion in taxpayer-supplied money to give 650,000 students a better chance at succeeding in life.

This very district, after all, had educated King since kindergarten. It provided her first job, as a teacher's aide, while she was still at Palisades High School. And for almost 30 years it has provided her livelihood.

Applause, however, doesn't necessarily mean she's the best person for the job.
If there's not much recent public evidence by which to evaluate King's suitability for one of the most important positions in education, it's because 10 years ago the district swallowed King into the upper reaches of its labyrinthine bureaucracy.

In a home movie of her life, that would be the point at which we switch from vibrant color into grainy black and white.

"It is hard to tell who's the real Michelle because she is always so dutiful to her bosses," said one source who requested anonymity. "I can't remember a time when she said: 'This is what I think.' It was always the party line."

King's earlier career provides some insight.

Take, for example, another show of support that came in 2002, when King walked into her first faculty meeting after being promoted from vice principal to principal at Hamilton High in Los Angeles' Palms neighborhood.

"The entire faculty burst into a standing ovation," says retired teacher Shelley Rose. "I've never seen it before or since."

Hamilton, it seems, had been tearing itself apart. The district had set up two magnet schools on the home campus as part of a strategy to lure back white students who had fled public schools. Some staff complained that the combined campus favored the wealthier, whiter magnets.

The staff already had confidence in King. As an assistant principal, she had "bridged all of the factions," says Merle Price, a former deputy superintendent.

As principal, she reassured the magnets that they could remain independent, while also addressing grievances from the neighborhood school, Price says.


She also began to even out class sizes, so that the magnets no longer had far fewer students.

"Michelle united the faculty, boosted morale, and righted the ship almost immediately," says Barry Smolin, an English teacher. "A lot of it had to do with her calm demeanor, her willingness to hear all sides of an issue and make informed decisions based on sometimes conflicting perspectives — and her genuine concern for students and teachers."

One way she showed that concern, former colleagues say, was by letting teachers with nonconformist styles do things their way — an approach that has been notoriously foreign to some administrators.
English teacher Dan Victor, now retired, remembers telling King that a schoolwide assembly she'd called conflicted with his plan to prepare students for an Advanced Placement test the next day.

"Why don't you do what you think is best," she said.

He kept his students in class.

At least by some important measures her approach worked.

In each of the three years before King became principal, Hamilton's test scores had fallen short of the state's target for how much the school was supposed to improve.

After she took charge, the scores surged well past these annual goals.

Hamilton High performed better under Michelle King

She didn't solve all of Hamilton's problems, though.

The home school continued to perform below the state average and a large divide remained between the higher scores of whites and more prosperous students and those of low-income blacks and Latinos.

That "achievement gap" remains one of the most significant challenges in the district she now runs.

::

In thinking of the forces that shaped her, King recalls the riots of 1992 when, as a young teacher, she stood in her hillside home in South Los Angeles' largely African American, largely upscale View Park neighborhood, watching large swaths of Los Angeles burn.

Her father had become a lawyer while she was still a child. Her mother worked for the county. Together they provided their daughter with a sheltered life.

"It was assumed and expected you would go to college," King says. "My father looked at my report cards. We were taught to respect our teachers and that we would get good grades."

She attended L.A. Unified schools, including Palisades High, where she was a top student and a cheerleader and one of the few blacks at a school whose student body was mainly wealthy and white.
After attending UCLA, her first teaching assignment was in the San Fernando Valley, a world apart from the worst poverty of the L.A. basin.

King was not oblivious to social ills, but her understanding deepened, she said, as she watched the video of police officers beating Rodney King, followed by the trial that acquitted them.

The community rage that followed made an impression, firing up a long-standing instinct to help foundering students push ahead.

In high school she'd become a student aide because she liked helping students who were struggling. She also tutored at UCLA.

Later, she moved through teaching jobs at Porter Junior High and Wright Middle School while shepherding her own three daughters through school.

Sometimes that meant making choices. The first time King was offered the principal's job at Hamilton she turned it down. Her marriage by then was in trouble, and, even after the divorce, King was determined not to miss back-to-school nights or lose the family's tradition of long Sunday dinners, at which the girls could talk out the issues of their lives, she says.

When one of her daughters wanted to attend a girls school, King enrolled her in the private Archer School in Brentwood.

King says that watching how the all-girl school empowered her daughter made her believe in the value of single-gender schools — an option she has said she wants to expand in L.A. Unified.

Beyond that, King hasn't detailed specific new initiatives she'll suggest for the district, nor has the school board articulated how it plans to measure her success.

In recent years, success has meant remaining in the background and carrying out orders.

"Michelle never really had a chance or opportunity to stand out or share her thoughts," says longtime PTA leader Scott Folsom. "She is always quiet in meetings. I have never heard her disagree with or question the company line."

King acknowledges this trait.

"I've always followed the direction of my superintendent," she says. "I might not agree with him, but ultimately I'm a soldier and it's their ship. It's their vision and I'm going to follow it."

And, she says, she's learned from each superintendent she's served.

As Supt. Ramon C. Cortines' chief of staff, and later as chief deputy superintendent, she learned to "communicate and communicate and overly communicate, particularly with the Board of Education."
As head of operations for Supt. John Deasy, who replaced Cortines, and then was replaced by him after resigning under pressure in October 2014, King learned from "his unrelenting focus on youth and poverty," she says.

King also cites two readings that have influenced her approach to management.

The first befits a former science teacher: "Turning Research Into Results" by Richard Edward Clark and Fred Estes.

"I believe you gather data before you strike out," King says.

The other is "Leadership from the Middle: A System Strategy" by Michael Fullan.

Even now that she's at the top, being in the middle is where she seems most comfortable.

Those who know her best describe a regular-gal charm, a "margarita buddy" who got visibly embarrassed at the raunchier parts of the Spike Lee-produced movie "The Best Man," a person who likes to bowl and is pretty good at it.

Colleagues say she's easy to be with, a team player.

King says her devotion to collaboration was instilled early, as a new UCLA graduate in an intern program that shoved an unproven teacher in front of a room of seventh-graders ready to test her.
That trial by fire seared something into her mind. If her colleagues hadn't rallied to support her, she could have failed, King says. It taught her that educators need to rely on each other.

She wants to apply that same lesson to a fractured school system with a team that now includes parents and district critics. That, she says, is why the board hired her.

"They have charged me with bringing the district together," she said.

- Times staff writers Zahira Torres and Sonali Kohli contributed to this report


CALIFORNIA LAWSUIT APPEAL PURSUES CLAIM OF INADEQUATE EDUCATION FUNDING
By Michael Collier | EdSource Today | http://bit.ly/1KhRGWF

January 27, 2016 | As they presented oral arguments before an appellate court Wednesday, attorneys in a high-profile lawsuit hoped that justices will allow them to go to trial to prove that by inadequately funding public schools the state is violating California students’ constitutional right to a quality education.

The three justices on the 1st District Court of Appeal in San Francisco must rule within the next 90 days on whether to overturn a ruling by an Alameda County Superior Court judge who dismissed the case, Robles-Wong v. California, on grounds that there’s no constitutional right to an adequately funded education. In that ruling, Judge Steven Brick said the Legislature has the right to set funding levels as it chooses.

The case consolidates two lawsuits filed in 2010 — Campaign for Quality Education v. California and the Robles-Wong case.

In a session lasting more than an hour, justices on the court focused on the issue in the lawsuits’ core claim, that insufficient funding levels are denying children their constitutional right to an education that prepares them to participate fully in economic and civil life.

The justices focused on the key idea of the concept of quality, while the attorney for the state, Joshua Sondheimer, said the state does not oversee quality.

Steven Mayer, an attorney for the plaintiffs in Robles-Wong, told the justices that the state Supreme Court has held that education is a constitutional right in the state, “and a violation of that right has occurred.”

The Legislature defines quality education in establishing high academic standards but it hasn’t provided enough funding so that all students can meet those standards, Mayer said.

While a ruling by the three justices won’t be issued for several weeks, it could be groundbreaking if the justices decide that a quality education is constitutionally guaranteed.

Justice Peter Siggins acknowledged that under the state’s current system there is “a disparity of opportunity” for students.

Mayer said that a minimal level of state funding, which Proposition 98 guarantees, doesn’t ensure quality education.

“We can’t have a system where half the students are not proficient,” Mayer argued, and pointed out that California students consistently rank near the bottom of the nation in academic performance. Furthermore, more funding, not simply redistributing funding, is needed, he added.

Sondheimer argued that there is “no qualitative level for education in the state Constitution.”

That prompted Justice Martin Jenkins to assert that “there must be a qualitative element in every classroom.”

Plaintiffs in the Robles case are the California School Boards Association, the California State PTA, the association of California School Administrators, the California Teachers Association, the Youth & Education Law Project at Stanford Law School and 60 individuals, including the lead plaintiff, Maya Robles-Wong, who was a junior at Alameda High School when the suits were filed. The Campaign for Quality Education suit was filed by Public Advocates Inc., which represented five nonprofits serving low-income, minority families.

Alameda County Superior Court Judge Steven Brick dismissed both lawsuits in December 2011. In his rulings, Brick acknowledged students’ fundamental right to an education, but he said the state Constitution does not require the Legislature to fund public education at a specific level. The plaintiffs appealed the decision to the state appeals court in San Francisco, and the court combined the two lawsuits into one.

Last week, the California School Boards Association released a report on public school spending levels: California’s Challenge: Adequately Funding Education in the 21st Century | bit.ly/1KNFyrl

The new figures updated the ones based on decade-old published studies, which the association submitted as evidence in the Robles case.

The new report asserts that the $64 billion that Gov. Jerry Brown proposes to spend on K-12 schools in the 2016-2017 school year to implement the Common Core, other state standards and to fulfill the eight priorities of the Local Control Funding Formula, would fall tens of billions of dollars short of what is needed for the state to ensure that every child has access to quality learning.

John Fensterwald contributed to this report.


LINCOLN HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT GETS PERFECT SCORE ON AP CALCULUS EXAM -- 1 OF 12 IN THE WORLD TO DO SO
By Hailey Branson-Potts – L.A. Times | http://lat.ms/1NHRzOU

Jan 28, 2016 :: The call from Lincoln High School’s principal’s office came unexpectedly, as they often do.

Cedrick Argueta’s friends joked that he might be in trouble. Cedrick didn’t think so.

He was right.

It turned out that Cedrick, the son of a Salvadoran maintenance worker and a Filipina nurse, had scored perfectly on his Advanced Placement Calculus exam. Of the 302,531 students to take the notoriously mind-crushing test, he was one of only 12 to earn every single point.

“It’s crazy,” Cedrick said. “Twelve people in the whole world to do this and I was one of them? It’s amazing.”

Since word of his feat has spread, the lanky 17-year-old senior – who described himself as a quiet, humble guy – has become something of a celebrity at Lincoln High, a school of about 1,200 students in the heavily Latino Lincoln Heights neighborhood.

At a school assembly, students shouted, “Ced-rick! Ced-rick!” when Principal Jose Torres announced his score. Friends started calling him “One of Twelve.”

And Torres said this week that he might as well become the teen’s booking agent, laughing as he held up a typed schedule of Cedrick’s media interviews.

“It’s mind-blowing,” said Torres, who has worked within LAUSD for 31 years. “It’s the first time I’ve had something of this magnitude. A lot of kids expected him to be the one.”

VIDEO: Meet The Kid Who Got A Perfect Score On The AP Calculus Exam http://lat.ms/1nuQGUy

Cedrick and his classmates took the AP Calculus AB exam, a 3-hour and 15-minute test administered by the nonprofit College Board for possible college credit, in May.

Cedrick learned over the summer that he had scored a 5 – the top score – on the exam but had no idea he’d gotten every single question right until last week.

In a letter to Torres last week, the College Board called it a “remarkable achievement.”

As far as math whizzes go, Cedrick is unassuming. He likes to play basketball with his buddies, and his favorite reading of late was the Harry Potter series. Knowing he was going to do television interviews this week, he donned a blue LHS hoodie and sneakers.

Math has always just made sense to him, he said. He appreciates the creativity of it, the different methods you can take to solve a problem.

“There’s also some beauty in it being absolute,” Cedrick said. “There’s always a right answer.”

When asked about his perfect exam score, Cedrick just thanked everybody else in his life.

“It just sort of blew up,” he said. “It feels kind of good to be in the spotlight for a little bit, but I want to give credit to everybody else that helped me along the way.”
The Times' new initiative to inform parents, educators and students across California >>

Cedrick is the son of Lilian and Marcos Argueta, both of whom came to the United States as young adults – she from the Philippines, he from El Salvador. Lilian, a licensed vocational nurse, works two jobs at nursing homes. Marcos is a maintenance worker at one of those nursing homes. He never went to high school.

Lilian Argueta, pausing during one of her shifts this week, said her son’s accomplishment is still sinking in. He texted her when he found out, and she told him it was great but, she said, she didn’t understand the magnitude until reporters started calling.

Argueta said that she always told Cedrick and his younger sister to finish their homework and to “read, read, read,” but that they knew she’d be proud of them whether or not they got straight A’s.

“I’m just thankful,” she said. “God gave me two perfect kids.”

To celebrate, the Arguetas took Cedrick to Roy’s, his favorite restaurant in Pasadena, where he ordered a big pork shank. He was still excited about the free souffle the waiters brought him after learning his score.

On Wednesday, Cedrick hung out in the classroom of his calculus teacher, Anthony Yom, which is decked out with signs that say “Mathlife” and a picture of Homer Simpson.

All 21 of Yom’s AP Calculus students who took the exam last year passed; 17 got the highest score of 5. It was the third year in a row that all of Yom’s kids passed the test.

Yom, 35, said he treats his students like a sports team. They’d stay after school, practicing problem solving for three or four extra hours, and they’d come on weekends. On test day, they wore matching blue T-shirts sporting their names, “like they’re wearing jerseys to the game,” Yom said.

“I think they don’t want to disappoint each other,” Yom said. “Talent can only take you so far. These kids put in so many hours.”

Yom said he knew most of his kids would score 5s, but even he was blown away by Cedrick’s perfect exam. The odds of such a thing, he said, are like winning the lottery.

As if that weren’t enough, Cedrick also earned perfect scores on the science and math sections of the ACT exam last year, he said. This year, he’s taking four more AP exams, including the Calculus BC segment. Friends are pushing him for a repeat perfect performance.

“There’s a lot of pressure,” he said, laughing.

Cedrick graduates in June and hopes to attend Caltech and become an engineer. For his family, a scholarship would be a godsend.

Cedrick’s got big plans. He wants to maybe “design something really cool.” He wants to have his name on something that’s known around the world.

But this summer, he just wants to hang out with his friends.


HIGHLIGHTS, LOWLIGHTS & THE NEWS THAT DOESN'T FIT: The Rest (but not necessarily the best) of the Stories from Other Sources
PARENTS GETTING ONBOARD WITH IMMUNIZATION MANDATE :: SI&A Cabinet Report
http://bit.ly/1SiYTZw

LAUSD BOARD TOLD CHARTERS ATTRACTING MORE FEDERAL DOLLARS THAN MAGNETS
http://bit.ly/1OXMyWv

OBAMA OUTLINES $4 BILLION ‘COMPUTER SCIENCE FOR ALL’ EDUCATION PLAN http://wapo.st/1m4bdOK

CSBA Report: CALIFORNIA'S CHALLENGE: Adequately Funding Education in the 21st Century
http://bit.ly/1KNFyrl

CALIFORNIA LAWSUIT APPEAL PURSUES CLAIM OF INADEQUATE EDUCATION FUNDING
http://bit.ly/1PM2Llf

OLD NEWS IN A NEW BLOG: Former Houghton Mifflin Exec Reveals How Pearson Unfairly Won the LAUSD iPad Deal
http://bit.ly/1P3UjIe

??? Rumor Seeking Confirmation/Denial: Paul Pastorek - in charge of Education Initiatives at the Broad Foundation - is outta there.


EVENTS: Coming up next week...
Tues. February 2, 2016 - 10:00 a.m.- CURRICULUM, INSTRUCTION AND EDUCATIONAL EQUITY COMMITTEE

Tues. February 2, 2016 - 2:00 p.m. - EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION AND PARENT ENGAGEMENT COMMITTEE

*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.


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 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.
• 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. 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.


Saturday, January 23, 2016

Squirmishes



4LAKids: Sunday 24•Jan•2016
In This Issue:
 •  LAUSD’s New Supe: WHY DON’T ANGELENOS TRUST HOMEGROWN TALENT? Unfortunately, To Make It Big In L.A., You Often Have To Go Make Your Mark Elsewhere
 •  TIME TO BREAK UP GIANT SCHOOL DISTRICTS + smf’s 2¢
 •  NOTED JOURNALISM ETHICIST - WHO WROTE THE BOOK ON THE SUBJECT - SAYS L.A. TIMES IS "TRAPPED IN A MASSIVE CONFLICT OF INTEREST"
 •  CALIFORNIA THREATENS TO TAKE MONEY FROM SCHOOLS WITH UNDER-VACCINATED KIDS
 •  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:
 •  ► Friends4smf :: The GoFundMe campaign
 •  Follow 4 LAKids on Twitter - or get instant updates via text message by texting
 •  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 moon is full. The surf is up. The tides are king. The weather on the right coast is frightful – triggered in part by our own Pacific Ocean El Niño – which is thankfully delivering snowpack to the left coast Sierra along with chaos to the Atlantic Seaboard.

…and what is a seaboard anyway?


Politics is a spectrum disorder. Its professional practitioners and the pundits thereof (...with the extra-added-detraction of the former governor of Alaska) are in Iowa, New Hampshire and on cable news – in utter lunar/lunatic synchrony. Because one New York City billionaire espousing “New York values” is never enough, Michael Bloomberg is considering a ‘what-the-hey’, billion dollar run. The pro football playoffs are into their penultimacy. Pearson LLC – the largest education company and the largest book publisher in the world – failing because of errors in management, ethics and software design – is laying off employees and its CEO. (Needless to say, its stock is on the rise.) The Newport-Mesa School District is paying its assistant superintendent extra retirement benefits to not retire. Glendale Unified has discovered that poetry encourages English language learners. Governor Brown gave his State-of-the-State address and for once educators and budget nerds did not hang on his every word, hoping for a scrap. (Never mind that financial markets from Beijing to Wall Street are tanking!) Bankruptcy and municipal/school district ‘emergency control’ have turned out as toxic as a cup of green tea at the Pine Bar of London’s Millennium Hotel for kids in Michigan. The State of Illinois is contemplating ‘emergency control’ for Chicago City Schools – the birthplace of big-city mayoral control.

Refugees are drowning on the beaches and straining the borders in Europe and detention centers here; Cubans are marooned in Costa Rica and Pink Floyds’ Wall may be the musical answer to the karaoke question: “What’s next?” And something is amiss with the LAUSD audit …or is it?

And the same folks at Caltech who took away Pluto are giving us a new Planet Nine. Somewhere. Out there.

And Glenn Frey is gone. My favorite Eagles song is Ol’ 55 – which is really a Tom Waits song.
“Well, my time went too quickly…”


¿Well, what can a poor boy do…?
Except to sing for a rock 'n' roll band
'Cause in sleepy London town
There's just no place for a street fighting man
No

…or you can volunteer to help out in LAUSD’s Academic Decathlon. They need help next Saturday on January 30th and beyond as judges, proctors, assistants, readers and general volunteers. See: http://bit.ly/1QlfU1k
Or contact Cliff Ker
LAUSD – Academic Decathlon
c/o Beyond the Bell
333 S. Beaudry Ave, 29th Floor
Los Angeles, CA 90017
Voice (213) 241-3503
Fax (213) 241-7562
Email: cliff.ker@lausd.net


And then just keep on keepin’ on.

¡Onward/Adelante! - smf


LAUSD’s New Supe: WHY DON’T ANGELENOS TRUST HOMEGROWN TALENT? Unfortunately, To Make It Big In L.A., You Often Have To Go Make Your Mark Elsewhere
By Joe Mathews | Connecting California Columnist in Zócalo Public Square | http://bit.ly/1ZHuUJv
Republished as: Why Can’t Los Angeles Trust Its Own? in the Jan 22 L.A. Daily News

January 21, 2016 :: Last week, Michelle King was appointed superintendent of L.A. Unified, California’s largest school district. But can we really trust her to lead the Los Angeles schools? After all, she’s from Los Angeles.

Actually, that understates how suspiciously local King is. As a child, she attended L.A. Unified schools. Then she got degrees from UCLA and Pepperdine (and is even now working on a doctorate at USC). She has spent her 30-year career in the L.A. school system, as a science teacher, principal, and top deputy to the last two superintendents. Heck, she even sent three children to L.A. schools.

If she were any good, wouldn’t she have lived or worked someplace else?

Is that a ridiculous question? Yes, but it mirrors much of the reaction in Los Angeles to her appointment. While politicians and interest groups released official statements full of praise, everyone from education professors to newspaper editorialists whispered their disappointment that L.A. Unified had hired someone so achingly local and low profile. One mover-and-shaker lamented to me that while there is a Michelle King on Wikipedia, it’s the co-creator of the TV drama The Good Wife.

This is supposed to be the era when we celebrate the local—local produce, local bookstores, local governance. But in Southern California, we’re not so excited about locally grown leaders. It’s the dark side of being a globally connected and welcoming place. We have for so long been a city of stars from someplace else that we have little faith in those boring grinds who are actually from here, painstakingly pay their dues and then have the temerity to think they might run things.

And so King, who probably knows L.A. Unified better than any living being, was labeled a disappointing fallback choice. Los Angeles elites had been hoping for a star from the outside—a political figure like the Obama cabinet member Julian Castro or a member of Congress who could transition into schools; or some gilded creature from the billionaire-backed reform movement; or a high-profile superintendent from a city like Miami or St. Louis—both of which, it should be noted, have far fewer residents than L.A. Unified has students.

Of course, Los Angeles’ contempt for its own is not new. Los Angeles’ locally grown police chief Charlie Beck, for all his progress in crime-fighting and diversifying his force, labors under the sense that he’s not in the same class of out-of-town predecessors. Once an internal candidate, always an internal candidate.

And no matter who you are, making the New York Times has always been a far bigger deal than getting written up in the Los Angeles Times—even before our local paper was downsized by out-of-town owners. And Hollywood has organized itself as an exclusive club that keeps regular Angelenos at a remove; even in 2016, the entertainment industry remains so distant from the diversity around it that it has turned the Academy Awards, with another slate of all-white acting nominees, into a national joke. When our movie stars do philanthropy, it’s more likely to be directed to South Sudan than South L.A.

Los Angeles also has a nasty habit of outsourcing thorny problems: When our big institutions get into trouble, we don’t knuckle down and fix them ourselves. We bring in outsiders to fix them. Over the past generation, our sheriff’s department, police department, the Dodgers, and elements of our transportation and school district have had to be taken over, or put under trustees. “Too much of the city has been taken into receivership,” the author D.J. Waldie has written of L.A.

I’ve experienced L.A. self-contempt personally. When a source or friend is introducing me to some powerful L.A. figure, I’m struck at how little access my years of journalistic work in Southern California buy—and at how many doors suddenly swing open when it’s mentioned that I went to college at Harvard.
This is supposed to be the era when we celebrate the local—local produce, local bookstores, local governance. But in Southern California, we’re not so excited about locally grown leaders.

In this context, the reaction to King’s appointment, while frustrating, is hardly surprising. You could argue that she’s the best prepared L.A. Unified leader in a long time—having been a success as teacher, principal, and administrator, most recently as a top aide to the past two superintendents. Her expertise ranges from science education, to instructional reform, to student discipline. And she’s hardly following giants; the district has had eight superintendents in 20 years, many of them outsiders, including a Navy admiral who had little idea what he was doing.

And while elites don’t know her well—she was presumably too busy working to write lots of op-eds and give speeches—regular people in L.A. schools do. As the L.A. School Report site pointed out, King was far and away the most frequently mentioned person in the district’s online survey of what kind of new superintendent parents, staff, and teachers would want.

This community support, however, counted as a strike against her in editorials by the Los Angeles Times and L.A. Daily News after her appointment. Both papers damned her credentials with faint praise (the Times editorial called her “obviously capable” twice) and advised her to pick fights and make enemies—the kind of tactics that backfired on her predecessor and former boss, John Deasy. The only thing more condescending than the editorials was a column in which the Times’ Steve Lopez said the school board “decided on someone who has been a good, low-profile soldier rather than a strong, independent voice, and for now at least, I find that disappointing.”

And I find Lopez’s notion that a good local can’t be strong and independent to be maddening. And out of touch.

The reality is that, with all our diversity and strange ways of governance (from ballot initiatives to our hundreds of regulatory commissions), California’s institutions are getting more complicated—making it harder for outsiders to step in. And with all of L.A. Unified’s challenges, from its hundreds of thousands of poor students to its big projected deficits, there may be no California government more complicated and important.

In other school districts, local leaders or those elevated from the ranks have succeeded. There may be no better big-city school district in the state than Long Beach, run for the last 14 years by Chris Steinhauser, who was both student and teacher in the schools he leads. In San Francisco, Richard Carranza, who was the top deputy of his predecessor, has done so well that L.A. Unified sought to recruit him before choosing King. At San Diego Unified, Cindy Marten, a local elementary school principal elevated to superintendent three years ago, has made some political mistakes but also has pleasantly surprised many with dramatic changes to culture, training, and personnel, including the replacement of more than 70 principals and vice principals.

Of course, L.A. Unified presents a bigger challenge. Which is precisely why a woman tough enough to negotiate the L.A. district as parent, teacher, and administrator for 30 years stands a better chance of succeeding than just about anyone else.


TIME TO BREAK UP GIANT SCHOOL DISTRICTS + smf’s 2¢
By Walt Gardner in EdWeek | http://bit.ly/1PoDFlU

January 18, 2016 7:35 AM :: The beginning of the new calendar year is a propitious time to question whether the nation's largest school districts can ever deliver a quality education ("Principals' Union Says Mayor de Blasio Has Lost Focus on Students," The New York Times, Jan. 11, and "What new L.A. schools chief Michelle King needs to do now," Los Angeles Times, Jan. 15).

The New York City and Los Angeles school systems, the largest and second largest, respectively, are cases in point. Both have consistently shortchanged students they are supposed to educate. I maintain that they are ungovernable and will remain ungovernable because of their size. I'll take each district separately.

The union representing the 6,000 members of the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators has gone on record that it has lost confidence in the Bill de Blasio administration. (In New York City, the mayor is the head of public schools.) Principals in 94 of the district's lowest-performing schools complain that they are swamped with paperwork, meetings and micromanagement, to the point that they cannot do what they believe is best for their students.

The district's chancellor, Carmen Farina, counters that autonomy has to be earned. When it isn't, principals are replaced. To date, roughly one third of principals in these underperforming schools have fallen into that category. Adding to the problem is that the number of complaints received by the special commissioner of investigation has reached an all-time high of 5,566. Although graduation rates are at record levels at 70 percent, taxpayers have not forgotten the New York Post's articles titled the "EZ-Pass" scandal that documented grade tampering and questionable summer-school programs ("The phoniest statistic in education," Thomas Fordham Institute, Jan. 13).

The situation in Los Angeles is not much better. When Superintendent John Deasy resigned in Oct. 2014, he was replaced by Ramon Cortines as interim superintendent. Deasy's tumultuous three-and-a-half-year tenure was characterized by a botched $1.3 billion plan to give iPads to 640,000 students in 900 schools and by his testimony in the controversial Vergara v. State of California case. Although test scores and graduation rates improved slightly, the LAUSD is reeling from declining enrollment and a precarious financial status. On Jan. 11, Michelle King was named the new superintendent after a five-month nationwide search.

The district has long been known for heated politics and an assertive teachers' union. The school board's members have only exacerbated matters by failing to understand their job as elected overseers, which is why there have been eight superintendents over the last 20 years. Some have been outsiders and some insiders. But neither has mattered. This time the board selected King, the consummate insider, because of her experience as a student, teacher, high-school principal, and senior administrator in the district.

I don't think anything significant will ever change in New York or Los Angeles unless both school systems are broken up into smaller, more manageable districts. Behemoths cannot fulfill their obligations to all stakeholders, no matter who is at the helm. I'm not saying that dismantlement will result in miracles. But I believe that smaller school districts will be in a far better position to serve students and parents because they are more nimble and more attuned to their constituents.

My proposal is not original. Over the years, there have been several such proposals, but to no avail. For example, on Oct. 7, 2014, a petition was circulated by the California Trust for Public Schools to break up the LAUSD, but it met with fierce resistance from vested interests ("Break up the Los Angeles Unified School District," GoPetition). On Mar. 30, 2015, Education Next called for an overhaul of the New York City school district ("New York City's Small-Schools Revolution"). If the goal is to create a governing structure that works for students, shuffling leaders will not do the job. Something more fundamental needs to be done. If not now, when?

●Walt Gardner taught for 28 years in the Los Angeles Unified School District and was a lecturer in the UCLA Graduate School of Education. Follow Walt Gardner on Twitter.



●●smf’s 2¢: Quoting: “My proposal is not original. Over the years, there have been several such proposals, but to no avail.”

Really??

1. Drawing on a comment from an EdWeek reader “Been There, done that!” In 1969, New York State devolved the New York City school system into 32 self-governing school districts, each with their own community school board - for over thirty years the decentralized system staggered, the lowest performing districts became patronage pools for the local electeds, scandal after scandal, the middle class districts thrived, the "haves" prospered and the "have-nots" were ignored.

Prior to 2002, the NYC Board of Education ran the schools, supervised the 32 sub-districts and appointed the Chancellor (Superintendent). On June 30, 2002, Mayor Bloomberg secured authority over the schools from the New York State legislature, which began the era of "mayoral control" over the city schools. The mayor then changed the name of the schools agency from the Board of Education to the Department of Education, a mayoral agency. http://bit.ly/1UgSoDS

Mayor Bloomberg began reorganization and reform efforts. The community school boards were abolished and the Board of Education was renamed the Panel for Educational Policy, a twelve-member body of which seven members are appointed by the mayor and five by Borough Presidents. [http://bit.ly/1Pt2sW2] When asked what recourse parents had if they didn’t like the way he was running the schools, Mayor Bloomberg infamously said: “They can ‘boo’ me at parades!”

2. The NYC Principal’s Union isn’t asking for the District to be broken up, they are asking for an end to mayoral control. It’s not the same difference!

3. If LAUSD were to be broken up, how do were guarantee that the results of the 1969 NYC Schools break-up aren’t replicated on the Left Coast?

4. And how will we equitably assign the $20.6 billionin bonded indebtedness held by LAUSD to multiple school districts?


NOTED JOURNALISM ETHICIST - WHO WROTE THE BOOK ON THE SUBJECT - SAYS L.A. TIMES IS "TRAPPED IN A MASSIVE CONFLICT OF INTEREST"
by Karen Wolfe from PSConnectNow.org |http://bit.ly/1QahtPQ

January 18, 2016 :: A member of a Facebook group that discusses education asked journalism ethics expert Peter Sussman about the LA Times coverage and posted this. Shared with their permission:

I asked a journalist friend about the ethics of the L.A. Times taking money from Eli Broad while editorializing in favor of his project.

His response:

PETER SUSSMAN: "Was I tagged because this is such a tough ethical issue to parse?

"It is not.

"With this kind of entanglement with the subject of its news stories, the Times has given up the right to expect any trust or credibility for its journalism on education. They are trapped in a massive conflict of interest, and no amount of pro forma disclosure will fix that. It's so sad to see what has happened to that once-great publication.

"You can add to the comment that trust and credibility are the life's blood of journalism, and without it, a "news" organization is no different than any other partisan in public disputes, with the added problem that there is no major paper to hold it accountable, although in this case a blogger has apparently stepped into the breach. People have jeopardized and lost their jobs for defending their editorial independence and standing up to such conflicts of interest.

"I haven't read the background on the issue you've highlighted, but if all your information is accurate, the Times' problem extends beyond opinions to reporting, however well-intentioned their education reporters are."


--Peter Sussman, retired longtime San Francisco Chronicle editor. Sussman has held a number of positions in the Society of Professional Journalists, the nation’s oldest, largest and most broadly based association of journalists. He was a 15-year member of the Society’s national Ethics Committee and was a co-author of the organization’s 1996 Code of Ethics, which had generally been considered the primary ethics code for the profession for almost two decades.


●●smf’s 2¢:
Sussman’s comments have gone slightly viral in the anti-®eform blogosphere, picked up and commented upon by Diane Ravitch in her blog:
“This is not a small question. How can we have freedom of the press if billionaires buy the media and/or subsidize the coverage that directly affects their interests? | http://bit.ly/23kl9We.
A commenter opines: “This oligarchic virus has infected the entire LA Times and is not confined to just Education news. This is no longer journalism, but rather it is an advertisement for charter schools run by the privatizers…”
– and excoriated by ®eformista cheerleaders including Alexander Russo who was briefly the editor of L.A.School Report. [http://bit.ly/1UhvNHa - or is that an ‘everybody-does-it’ apologia?]


Sussman himself is probably a little cranky; he questions recent changes to the SPJ Code of Ethics – but
recent events at ABC and CBS and NBC News (…and everything at Fox News) opens the journalism biz to scrutiny.
The New York Times is being questioned by journalists over “ethically dubious” Iran tour packages the paper is offering with the apparent approval of the Iranian government. http://bit.ly/1Qk4JpL.
Pearson Publishing used to own the Financial Times and the Economist.
And then there’s Rupert Murdoch.

Just because you’re cranky doesn’t mean you’re a crank. And when the ®eformistas and the ©harter $chool Crowd Howl….
“I saw the best minds of future generations destroyed by blandness, neglected unheeded unheard unseen, tested by testers and subjected and examined, write not who you are but who you think I think you should be, credit derivative swapped into the supply side, toasted and sent naked into the world, college unready and career unprepared, stoned immaculate with an order of fries and a medium drink.”

…methinks we’ve touched a nerve!


CALIFORNIA THREATENS TO TAKE MONEY FROM SCHOOLS WITH UNDER-VACCINATED KIDS
166 SCHOOLS IN CALIFORNIA HAVE MORE THAN 25 PERCENT OF THEIR KINDERGARTNERS ENROLLED AS CONDITIONAL ENTRANTS; 107 ARE IN THE LOS ANGELES UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT.

Rebecca Plevin | KPCC 89.3 | http://bit.ly/1SbrFt5

January 21, 2016 :: In an effort to get more kids vaccinated on time, the state of California says that it will financially penalize schools that wrongly admitted a high percentage of kindergartners who were overdue for their second dose of the measles vaccine.

The state acted because its data analysis indicates that many schools are erroneously enrolling kindergartners who are overdue for one or more vaccinations and by law should be excluded from class until they're up to date with their shots.

Incoming kindergartners can be admitted as "conditional entrants" if they are not fully immunized but not overdue for any shots, or if they have a temporary medical exemption. Last fall, more than 24,000 kindergartners were conditional enrollees statewide, according to data released by the California Department of Public Health. Nearly half of them were in Los Angeles County schools.

Public Health says it analyzed a sampling of conditional entrants from the 2014-15 school year last spring, and found that nearly 94 percent had not received the minimum number of vaccine doses required for the "conditional" classification.

Under a new policy published in July, state auditors will now review schools with 2015-16 conditional kindergarten admission rates above 25 percent. The auditors will check whether these schools received state payment for attendance of students who should have been excluded from class for not meeting the conditional admission criteria.

If children entered school with only one of two required measles shots and had not received their second shot within three months, as required by state law, the guidelines require auditors to verify the students were excluded from class. If they were not excluded, the policy says the auditors should "disallow the [average daily attendance payment] for any days after three calendar months and ten days from the first dose until the date of the second dose."

The California Department of Education says it will audit 166 schools statewide for having more than 25 percent of their kindergartners enrolled as conditional entrants; 107 are in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Public Health is also helping local health departments educate school staff on the proper use of conditional entrance criteria for measles.

Officials say the new rules are partly a response to the measles outbreak that began at Disneyland in Dec. 2014. It sickened 131 Californians and shined a light on the low vaccination rates in some communities.

The number of conditional entrants statewide and in L.A. County were down by about one-third this fall from the 2014-15 school year. Public Health partly credits the threat of the financial penalties, first communicated to schools last summer, for the reduction.

Ellen Morgan, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Unified School District, denies that the new rules spurred the district to track conditional enrollments more carefully. Rather, "we have always strived to utilize all our resources to comply with immunization policies," she says, noting that district officials review vaccination records and "run bi-monthly immunization reports to keep track of when the next doses of immunization are due," among other tactics.

Morgan says the district is not concerned that the state's crackdown could reduce its attendance reimbursements.

"We are confident that we will be able to review student records and assist parents and guardians obtain the resources needed," she says.

While the overall number of conditional entrants is down, numerous L.A. Unified schools still enrolled a high percentage of conditionals for the 2015-16 academic year. At Union Avenue Elementary, 57 percent of the school's 236 kindergartens were classified as conditional. At Virginia Road Elementary, 55 percent of the school's 81 kindergartners were conditional. At Stanford Primary Center, which only has pre-kindergarten and kindergarten classes, 75 percent of the 170 kindergartners were conditional entrants.

KPCC and the Center for Health Reporting last year reported that while state law compels schools to track conditional entrants and exclude those who don’t get fully vaccinated, L.A. Unified was failing to track all of them. In the wake of KPCC's story, the school district said it was hiring more permanent and temporary nurses to bolster its tracking efforts.


INTERACTIVE: Look up the latest data for kindergartens across SoCal



HIGHLIGHTS, LOWLIGHTS & THE NEWS THAT DOESN'T FIT: The Rest (but not necessarily the best) of the Stories from Other Sources
WI-FI ENABLED BUSES LEAVE NO CHILD OFFLINE: Coachella Unified Superintendent, a Former LAUSD Music Teacher, Strives to Close the Digital Divide

2016 LAUSD Academic Decathlon Volunteer Application + Job Description
http://bit.ly/1QlfU1k

INCENTIVE PAY TO KEEP NEWPORT-MESA UNIFIED OFFICIAL FROM RETIRING HAS TOPPED $273,000
http://bit.ly/1PdZM2P

KIDS FROM AROUND THE WORLD FIND COMMUNITY, LEARN ENGLISH THROUGH POETRY
http://bit.ly/1QrAoHL

LAUSD AUDIT SHOWS DISTRICT DEBT OUTSTRIPS ASSETS BY $4.2 BILLION +smf's 2¢
http://bit.ly/1PdZvwM

ILLINOIS REPUBLICANS PROPOSE TAKEOVER OF CHICAGO SCHOOLS FROM MAYOR ...AND EVENTUAL RETURN TO ELECTED SCHOOL BOARD
http://bit.ly/1NsjIJE

FOUR KILLED IN SASKATCHEWAN SCHOOL SHOOTING
http://nyti.ms/1NrT184

CALIFORNIA THREATENS TO TAKE MONEY FROM SCHOOLS WITH UNDER-VACCINATED KIDS
http://bit.ly/1SbrFt5

TIME TO BREAK UP GIANT SCHOOL DISTRICTS + smf’s 2¢
http://bit.ly/1ZL4WtO

NOTED JOURNALISM ETHICIST WHO WROTE THE BOOK ON THE SUBJECT SAYS L.A. TIMES IS TRAPPED IN A MASSIVE CONFLICT OF INTEREST
"@LATeducation receives funding from a number of foundations...Under terms of the grants, the Times retains complete editorial control"
http://bit.ly/1V3pR4F

COURT OF APPEAL TO HEAR ARGUMENTS IN VERGARA LAWSUIT NEXT MONTH
http://bit.ly/1ZEROq7


EVENTS: Coming up next week...
►Tuesday, January 26, 2016 - 2:00 P.M.
BOARD OF EDUCATION/COMMITTEE OF THE WHOLE
1. Welcome and Opening Remarks: Dr. George McKenna, Chairperson
• Special Recognition: Narbonne High School Football Team
2. State Legislative Budget Update: Ms. Leilani Yee, Director of Government Relations
• Federal Legislative Update: Mr. Joel Packer, The Raben Group
3. Discussion: Public Records Act Requests: Ms. Christine Wood, Office of General Counsel
4. Public Comment
5. Adjournment


►Thursday, Jan 28, 2016 – 10 A.M.
REGULAR MTG OF THE SCHOOL CONSTRUCTION BOND CITIZENS’ OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE

*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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