They make orange jumpsuits for stuff like this …don’t they?

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

Grieve. Mourn. Repeat.

4LAKids: Sunday 19•June•2016 In This Issue:  •  WHAT PAMELA ANDERSON’S NIGHT VISIT TO THE LA UNIFIED SCHOOL BOARD WAS ALL ABOUT  •  Editorial: WHAT’S REALLY IN LAUSD’S ONLINE CREDIT RECOVERY COURSES?  •  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. Orlando. San Bernardino. Charlotte. Sandy Hook. REMARKS OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA AS DELIVERED IN HIS WEEKLY RADIO ADDRESS The White House | June 18, 2016 :: It’s been less than a week since the deadliest mass shooting in American history. And foremost in all of our minds has been the loss and the grief felt by the people of Orlando, especially our friends who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. I visited with the families of many of the victims on Thursday. And one thing I told them is that they’re not alone. The American people, and people all over the world, are standing with them – and we always will. The investigation is ongoing, but we know that the killer was an angry and disturbed individual who took in extremist information and propaganda over the internet, and became radicalized. During his killing spree, he pledged allegiance to ISIL, a group that’s called on people around the world to attack innocent civilians. We are and we will keep doing everything in our power to stop these kinds of attacks, and to ultimately destroy ISIL. The extraordinary people in our intelligence, military, homeland security, and law enforcement communities have already prevented many attacks, saved many lives, and we won’t let up. Alongside the stories of bravery and healing and coming together over the past week, we’ve also seen a renewed focus on reducing gun violence. As I said a few days ago, being tough on terrorism requires more than talk. Being tough on terrorism, particularly the sorts of homegrown terrorism that we’ve seen now in Orlando and San Bernardino, means making it harder for people who want to kill Americans to get their hands on assault weapons that are capable of killing dozens of innocents as quickly as possible. That’s something I’ll continue to talk about in the weeks ahead. It’s also part of something that I’ve been thinking a lot about this week – and that’s the responsibilities we have to each other. That’s certainly true with Father’s Day upon us. I grew up without my father around. While I wonder what my life would have been like if he had been a greater presence, I’ve also tried extra hard to be a good dad for my own daughters. Like all dads, I worry about my girls’ safety all the time. Especially when we see preventable violence in places our sons and daughters go every day – their schools and houses of worship, movie theaters, nightclubs, as they get older. It’s unconscionable that we allow easy access to weapons of war in these places – and then, even after we see parents grieve for their children, the fact that we as a country do nothing to prevent the next heartbreak makes no sense. So this past week, I’ve also thought a lot about dads and moms around the country who’ve had to explain to their children what happened in Orlando. Time and again, we’ve observed moments of silence for victims of terror and gun violence. Too often, those moments have been followed by months of silence. By inaction that is simply inexcusable. If we’re going to raise our kids in a safer, more loving world, we need to speak up for it. We need our kids to hear us speak up about the risks guns pose to our communities, and against a status quo that doesn’t make sense. They need to hear us say these things even when those who disagree are loud and are powerful. We need our kids to hear from us why tolerance and equality matter – about the times their absence has scarred our history and how greater understanding will better the future they will inherit. We need our kids to hear our words – and also see us live our own lives with love. And we can’t forget our responsibility to remind our kids of the role models whose light shines through in times of darkness. The police and first responders, the lifesaving bystanders and blood donors. Those who comfort mourners and visit the wounded. The victims whose last acts on this earth helped others to safety. They’re not just role models for our kids – their actions are examples for all of us. To be a parent is to come to realize not everything is in our control. But as parents, we should remember there’s one responsibility that’s always in our power to fulfill: our obligation to give our children unconditional love and support; to show them the difference between right and wrong; to teach them to love, not to hate; and to appreciate our differences not as something to fear, but as a great gift to cherish. To me, fatherhood means being there. So in the days ahead, let’s be there for each other. Let’s be there for our families, and for those that are hurting. Let’s come together in our communities and as a country. And let’s never forget how much good we can achieve simply by loving one another. Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there, and have a great weekend. YOU MAY NOTE THAT THIS WEEK’S 4LAKIDS IS ABRIDGED. 1. I was writing of the pending District Budget/LCFF/LCAP – saved by a deus-ex-machina/last-minute-letter from the Superintendent of Public Instruction 2. …plus Eli Broad’s magical reanimation of his Great Schools Now Plan! 3. I had a well-researched-yet-dripping with-vitriol rant about how the Beaudry Building is the Most Visitor Unfriendly Building on the Planet! 4. But it is Sunday afternoon and I am feeling unwell …and nothing I write can compare to the tale of the wonderful+enchanted Tuesday night visit of Pamela Anderson to the LAUSD Board of Education! ¡Onward/Adelante! - smf WHAT PAMELA ANDERSON’S NIGHT VISIT TO THE LA UNIFIED SCHOOL BOARD WAS ALL ABOUT Posted on LA School Report Mike Szymanski | http://bit.ly/1UWgtBe June 17, 2016. 11:16 am. :: Sometimes staying late at the LA Unified school board meetings has its benefits. Particularly when quirky things happen in only-in-LA moments. About 8:45 p.m. Tuesday late into the meeting, most of the audience members had cleared out of the school board auditorium and the 200 or so protesters outside were gone. There were almost as many people up on the horseshoe dais as there were watching. Board President Steve Zimmer kidded about seeming a bit loopy because his cold medicine was kicking in. Then, the school police officers stirred, the board members stopped talking and a blur of diverse people marched down the aisle of the auditorium. Up front was blonde bombshell Pamela Anderson, looking as stunning as she did in her “Baywatch” days two decades ago. In a tight black top and flowered skirt, she brushed back her characteristic blonde locks and prepared herself to address the school board for the first time. In the pressroom watching on closed-circuit TV, reporters were surprised and snickering about why she was there. The LA Unified communications team didn’t have any idea. Along with the actress, there were TV journalist Jane Velez-Mitchell and 9-year-old actress Felix Hemstreet, as well as a triathlete, a cardiologist, a best-selling author, a dietician, a doctor of 40 years and Torre Washington, who bills himself as “a professional vegan bodybuilder.” The circus of presenters was inspired by 14-year-old Lila Copeland from Paul Revere Middle School who wants to have a regular vegan option on the menu in the nation’s second-largest school district. It appeared she had an impact on the board, and she had already met with Laura Benavidez, of the district’s Food Services division, who seemed open to the idea. “This school district is at the forefront of offering good nutritious food for the students, so we just want them to be aware of allowing vegan options for the students too and helping us have a healthy future for this planet,” Copeland said. “We want the district to provide a vegan option.” The experts spewed statistics and anecdotes. They brought up methane caused by cows, the drought, global warming, childhood obesity and ethical reasons for being vegan. They talked about how eating meat can cause heart disease and strokes, they detailed the outmoded federal nutritional standards and brought in packets of vegan meal samples for each of the seven school board members prepared by plant-based protein company Gardein’s chef Jason Stefanko. Anderson spoke for two minutes about milk and water and the United Nations. She said, “Kids today are appalled to learn that animals killed for cheeseburgers and chicken nuggets live in crowded dark filthy sheds by the thousands and are mutilated and slaughtered by having their throats slit while they’re still conscious.” Lila met this week with Zimmer and fellow school board member Ref Rodriguez as well as with the food services officials. The district already has a “Meatless Mondays” program and has taken the lead in requiring antibiotic and hormone-free chicken and turkey and is considering inexpensive low-fat options created by student chefs. On the other hand, the most animated part of a school board meeting two weeks ago centered on bringing back chocolate milk . “I’m impressed with what I’ve been told, but maybe I’m too old to change, maybe I’m not,” said 75-year-old board member George McKenna. “I’ve learned that everything I eat and love is not supposed to be healthy.” McKenna, who grew up in New Orleans, confessed his love for po’boys and beignets and said he just ate a ham sandwich. “I’m hooked on meat and ice cream.” But, he added, “I’m enlightened, and you make the case for healthy children. At least I’ll think about what I eat. Maybe you’ll change our behaviors, and maybe mine.” Zimmer quipped to his fellow board member, “We’ll go out for a veggie burger soon.” It didn’t go unnoticed to the school board that young Lila brought together a virtual Who’s Who of vegan experts, including vegan cardiologist Dr. Kim Williams, Dr. Michael Klaper, Kawani Brown, Dr. Heather Shenkman, Sharon Palmer and others. Of course, Anderson was a highlight, and although there wasn’t much of an audience, the school board meeting will be rebroadcast on Sunday morning at KLCS Television Channel 58 in between children’s shows such as “Dora the Explorer.” This time around, the show will feature an appearance by Pamela Anderson, and also a rant of a student earlier during Tuesday’s public comments that had a great deal of four-letter words while he described creating his own barber shop. Anderson’s talk is toward the end of the broadcast (at the 5:08:48 mark), which is now available on the LA Unified website. “I’ve learned so much from these people,” Anderson told LA School Report. “These are the experts. This is my first time to speak to the LA school board, and I think it’s so important to teach children to be vegan.” Anderson’s children went to schools in the Malibu school district, and she said she allowed her children to make their own choices. “As a mother, we are always trying to raise healthy kids, and this is one of the serious environmental problems. I’m here as a mom.” Velez-Mitchell said she came as a journalist but felt she had to speak out about some of the food served at the district. “The food that is served in this school district causes cancer. Give them an option to choose foods that will not cause them cancer.” Ultimately, the team offered to talk to any of the school board members. Zimmer quickly said, “I’m always happy to talk. And thank you for the samples, they were really good.” The next step is to get a resolution from the school board, and Lila thinks that will happen. Lila concluded: “No animal wants to die to become our food.” ●●smf: Not to argue Lila Copeland's point, but I refer us all to: Children's Book Review: ARLENE SARDINE Author+Illustrator Chris Raschka, Scholastic $15.95 (40p) ISBN 978-0-531-30111-1 http://bit.ly/1PBaFc2 Editorial: WHAT’S REALLY IN LAUSD’S ONLINE CREDIT RECOVERY COURSES? By The LA Times Editorial Board | http://lat.ms/1PBaflZ 19 June 2016 :: Because of new rules designed to raise graduation standards, officials of the Los Angeles Unified School District woke up in December to the grim news that only half of its students were on track to graduate, down from 74% the year before. The problem was that this was the first year all students had to pass the full range of college-prep courses — known as the A through G sequence – required by the University of California and California State University for admission. But just a couple of months later, the situation suddenly, startlingly improved, with 63% on track to graduate. By the end of March, 68% had completed their A-G courses, and an additional 15% were close enough that they might be able to make it. The actual graduation rate will not be known for several months. How did this remarkable turnaround happen, and what does it mean? Partly, it was that Michelle King, LA Unified’s new superintendent, moved swiftly and decisively, plunging the district’s high schools into a full-bore effort to bring students up to snuff, with extra counseling, Saturday classes and after-school classes. But also, the district relied heavily on what are known as online credit-recovery classes. These courses, which have helped boost graduation rates locally and across the country, have grown quickly from a barely known concept a decade ago to one of the biggest and most controversial new trends in education. This is how they work: Students who flunk a course can make up the credit by taking classes either in computer-equipped rooms at school, or at home if they have the equipment and Internet access. Teachers lecture on videos, the computer displays the readings or practice problems, and students take tests that are automatically graded. Written work is supposed to be reviewed by a district teacher. The courses have certain benefits: Students can replay a lecture for missed material, something that can’t happen in a regular classroom. When they can’t concentrate any longer, they can put the course on hold and take a break. But professors and other education experts are concerned that there is too little quality control to ensure that students have completed the equivalent of a regular classroom experience. Considering all the credit-recovery courses provided by educational publishers, it’s impossible to say as a rule whether these courses are sufficiently rigorous. Only one large-scale study has been published: Researchers reported in April that Chicago students who were randomly assigned to take an online Algebra I makeup course fared somewhat worse than those who were assigned to classroom makeup courses, with lower pass rates and lower scores on an end-of-course assessment. And an online credit-recovery course observed by Russell Rumberger, director of the California Dropout Research Project at UC Santa Barbara, required only 12 hours of computer time and the reading of one book. LAUSD maintains that’s not the case with its programs, which it says are rigorous and effective and take about 60 hours of work. A Los Angeles Times editorial writer arranged to take one of the courses... The results were at the same time reassuring and potentially disturbing. In order to get a closer look, a Los Angeles Times editorial writer arranged to take one of the courses offered to students at LAUSD: English Language Arts 11A, commonly known as the first semester of junior-year English. The results were at the same time reassuring and potentially disturbing. Any student who actually takes the full course — sits through each lesson, answers the questions and completes the assignments — gets a meaningful education. That’s why UC accepts the course, produced by Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Edgenuity, as a college-prep class. The reading excerpts come from fine and often challenging literature — “Moby-Dick,” “The Scarlet Letter,” great poetry and the like. Video lectures give the background of the works and teach lessons about tone, setting, vocabulary choice and so forth. There are four writing assignments during each semester. All in all, it would easily take 50 or 60 hours or more. The catch is that taking the full course isn’t always necessary. Some students are able to pre-test out of much of the course, including the writing. A 10-question multiple-choice quiz is given at the beginning of each of the three-dozen units. With a score of 60% or better — six of the questions — a student passes the unit, without having to go through the lectures, read the full materials or write the essays. Opening up other tabs on the computer to search for answers on the Internet is allowed. That’s not really cheating: The questions aren’t about straightforward facts. Students must interpret passages, for instance. But there’s plenty of help online via Sparks notes and other resources, and a full hour is given to answer the 10 questions. A second problem with the course is that no full books are assigned in the first semester; the second semester requires just one book. That’s the minimum required by UC, but significantly fewer than most junior-year classroom-based courses. Carol Alexander, director of college-prep requirements at LAUSD, said there’s only one book required because the students have already taken the course in class and read books there. But if they flunked the course in class, what reason is there to believe that they did the reading or understood it? Frances Gipson, the district’s chief academic officer, said that not all students get the opportunity to pre-test out of all the units in the course. Students are not supposed to be allowed to skip sections that they did poorly on the first time, she said. That might be true. But two students at Fremont High School who took the same junior English course described nearly identical experiences. Both said they had pre-tested out of most of the units. One said he had been given only one writing assignment, and the other said he had been given one or two over both semesters — only a fraction of those the course supposedly requires. L.A. Unified appears to be setting the bar lower than most districts across the nation. Edgenuity says that of the 1,900 districts using the company’s credit-recovery courses, most will not allow students in English classes to pre-test out of units. Districts that do allow skipping of units through pre-testing often require the students at least to do the writing assignments, and they monitor the tests so students can’t search the Internet for clues. And most districts set the passing grade for the pre-test at 70% or higher in contrast to L.A. Unified’s 60%. The big issue is the lack of accountability... Who checks that students are getting enough online coursework to receive a meaningful education? The big issue is the lack of accountability. The district has a vested interest in raising graduation rates and making the A-G policy look good. But who checks that students are getting enough online coursework to receive a meaningful education? Who sets the standard, if there is any standard, for the minimum amount of work that must be put into an online course to receive credit? A UC official also was surprised to learn that students might be pre-testing out of most of the units in any course. Monica Lin, associate director for undergraduate admissions, said UC doesn’t supervise how local school districts use their courses and doesn’t have the time and resources to conduct regular audits even if it wanted to. She added that the university would reconsider approval if it knew that large numbers of students were pre-testing their way through most of the course. Her instincts are right. If large numbers of students are indeed testing out of significant portions of these courses — which is difficult to ascertain — and if they’re skipping writing assignments on a regular basis, then those students are being done a serious disservice. If they’re just reading one book in a year in what’s supposed to be the equivalent of a junior-year English course, that’s unacceptable too — and raises worrisome questions about the rest of the credit-recovery courses being offered as well. L.A. Unified deserves credit for its intensive attempt to raise its graduation rates. Online credit recovery can and should be a helpful tool, giving students independence, flexibility and a chance to make up for past mistakes. But the district needs to get a handle on these courses. It — along with UC and the State Board of Education — needs to set minimum standards, including how much of a course must be completed without pre-testing in order to earn credit. The new federal school-accountability law that replaced the No Child Left Behind Act places considerable pressure on low-performing high schools and their districts to raise graduation rates. But that’s a worthy goal only if students are better educated than they were as dropouts. No one is doing teenagers a favor by sending them to college or into the work world thinking they have skills that are still lacking. COST OF SUSPENSIONS IS HIGH FOR STUDENTS WHO DROP OUT AFTER DISCIPLINE, REPORT FINDS | EdSource http://bit.ly/200VtLf STATE GIVES LA UNIFIED AN EXTRA YEAR TO ACCOUNT FOR SPENDING ON NEEDY KIDS | 89.3 KPCC http://bit.ly/1UIOHFG JUST IN: GREAT PUBLIC SCHOOLS NOW UNVEILS PLAN TO FUND EXPANSION OF SUCCESSFUL SCHOOLS TO SERVE 160,000 LOW-INCOME LA STUDENTS - LA School Report http://bit.ly/24ZBrll PHILLY’S SODA TAX MAY BE TURNING POINT http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/soda-tax-philadelphia-224442 EVENTS: Coming up next week... *Dates and times subject to change. ________________________________________ • SCHOOL CONSTRUCTION BOND OVERSIGHT COMMITTEE: http://www.laschools.org/bond/ Phone: 213-241-5183 ____________________________________________________ • LAUSD FACILITIES COMMUNITY OUTREACH CALENDAR: http://www.laschools.org/happenings/ Phone: 213-241.8700 • LAUSD BOARD OF EDUCATION & COMMITTEES MEETING CALENDAR What can YOU do? • E-mail, call or write your school board member: 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. • 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.

I've been to the mountaintop

4LAKids: Sunday 1•May•2016 In This Issue:  •  EITHER 16,000 OR 6,000 SENIORS ARE IN DANGER OF NOT GRADUATING +smf’s 2¢ +a real meaningful opinion about A-thru-G  •  CHARTER SCHOOLS SHARING LAUSD CAMPUSES: NOBODY LOVES IT, EVERYONE HAS TO LIVE WITH IT  •  ITI TASK FORCE PREPARING RECOMMENDATIONS FOR EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY PLAN  •  GRANADA HILLS CHARTER HIGH SCHOOL WINS NATIONAL ACADEMIC DECATHLON  •  RENOWNED EDUCATOR WARNS THAT LA UNIFIED’S FUTURE IS ‘DIRE’  •  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. There is an uncertain mythology about the community in Northeast Los Angeles that claims to be Mt Washington. Let’s just say that MW is not a mountain, but a 940 foot anthill. It is Mt Washingtonians who make a mountain of it, perched above Highland Park and Cypress Park and Glassell Park and Eagle Rock, overlooking the railyards and Dodger Stadium with a distant visage of Downtown LA. From other sides of the hill one can see Glendale …or look down the San Gabriel Valley. The mountain itself forms the aquafer that feeds the spring that is Sparkletts. The late great LA Times columnist Jack Smith created Mt Washington in his mind and on the pages of The Times – a place not unlike Lake Wobegon: Our women are strong, our men are good looking and our children are above average …with test scores to prove it. Smith populated his MW with characters larger-and-more colorful than life. If Jack Smith hadn’t come along someone else surely would’ve have noticed the quirky hillside community with marginal economic advantage and undue political influence: Half-a-bubble-off-level. We have lost a favorite daughter, a strong Mt Washingtonian of the first rate. PAT GRIFFITH was not a rabble-rouser or a troublemaker; she was leader-from-the-center who quietly looked at the situation, figured out what needed to be done – and saw that it was done. Pat was a founding member of the Mt Washington Babysitting Co-op – and kept that organization running – and the mission of Parent+Child Networking going. She was instrumental and getting a second Babysit Co-op started when younger kids and new parents came on the scene. And she pushed the edge of the envelope and was instrumental in forming the Mt Washington Preschool – first in a church basement and later in a number of venues until it found a home at La Casita Verde. Mt Washington Preschool delivered a low-cost/educationally effective/economically sustainable/ culturally sensitive early childhood education program – a national model – for infants-to-pre-K to the community and surrounding communities. The preschool eventually expanded to three sites as Mount Washington Preschool and Child Care Center, Inc. – with onsite preschool programs in LA City Hall and the downtown Federal Building as well as La Casita Verde. As president+ board chair of MWP&CCC Pat led the non-profit through hard financial times and difficult transitions in school staffing, consistently delivering a high-quality program and running an effective and tight ship. Getting little kids stared on their educations on the right foot. Pat did this as a “part-time” volunteer, taking time from her family and daughter and job and life, giving-back and modelling the village it takes to raise our children. Pat passed away on April 18th quite unexpectedly, leaving her husband, Scott Burleigh, and adult daughter Geneva – and an entire community – devastated. Thank you Pat and Godspeed. Your example will lead us. There will be a memorial service for Patricia Eileen Griffith for family+friends this Sunday afternoon (today) at the Denny & Jack Smith Community Center at Mt Washington School. Pat had lots o’ friends, if you suspect you are one of them – there is no past tense – you are! MEMORIAL FOR PAT GRIFFITH, SUNDAY, MAY 1 Date: Sunday, May 1, 2016 Time: 5:30 p.m. – Potluck 6:30 p.m. – Remembering Pat Location: Mt. Washington Elementary School Multipurpose Room 3981 San Rafael Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90065 Potluck suggestions – please bring 8-12 servings of something you love, ideally according to these last-name categories (if the thing you love doesn’t fit the category, bring it anyway): A-F: salads G-L: side dishes M-R: main dishes S-Z: fruit and desserts (smf - this is exactly how we did it for Babysit Co-op meetings!) Beyond this, donations in any amount to the Mount Washington Preschool and Child Care Center, Inc. [http://bit.ly/1YYAs2W] that Pat loved so deeply would be a wonderful way to remember her: 4601 N. Figueroa Street, Los Angeles, CA 90065. Bike self-parking will be available courtesy of the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition. (Please bring your own lock). _____________ CONGRATULATIONS TO THE DECATHLETES+COACHES at Granada Hills Charter High School for winning the 2016 National Academic Decathlon! _____________ IN THE SUBBASEMENT of a building at Kaiser Sunset – on a floor called – in an architectural anomaly – ‘The Atrium” – is the Radiation Oncology Lab. The waiting room is the atrium, the ceiling four or five floors above, all skylit+airy, ranks of seats facing large screens that summon the next patient into Radiation Therapy – into Rooms 1A, 1B, 1C and 1D, plus 2A, 2B, 2C and 2D. You meet good people in the waiting room – waiting for their names to go up on the screen. We are going to be treated. We are going to get better. This is not the dismal institutional waiting room from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward. Also in the seats are those waiting for patients to be treated: spouses and family members, friends and caregivers. Next of kin. They are worried. They have seen the actuarial tables. My name comes up and I head down the hallway to your room, 2B. or not 2B. Past the lead lined doors and the shielded+reinforced concrete partitions. The path is a maze of turns; radiation travels in straight lines. That stuff I learned in Physics comes in handy. I would imagine that the entry to the Pentagon Situation Room is like this, but with more flags. 2B: The Machine waits, all apple green and huge. A proton beam linear accelerator, to be specific a Varian TrueBeam™ Radiotherapy System. The internet says these puppies cost upwards of $3 million each. Helpful young technicians are eager to help – after asking a few trick questions to make sure I am who I am say I am. (The danger of someone else getting my radiation therapy must be huge!) I am laid on a table and aligned with lasers to discrete tattoos on my body: Aim radiation here! I am a specimen on the stage of a microscope – like the old Monsanto Ride at Disneyland. The table rises and pushes in, into the center of the Varian TrueBeam™ Radiotherapy System as the helpful technicians all leave the room and the door closes with a click; they will be watching the rest on computer screens – remotely targeting invasive malignancies like drone pilots in the Nevada desert. (Needless to say your cell phone stopped working the second you left the waiting room; the wi-fi here is for different purposes!) You are left alone with Your Machine, which whirrs and clicks and buzzes, rotating about you on its multiple axes, delivering death to your enemy – which is ironically you, gone ironically wrong. Alone with your machine your mind wanders to the poem by Richard Brautigan: I like to think (and the sooner the better!) of a cybernetic meadow where mammals and computers live together in mutually programming harmony like pure water touching clear sky. I like to think (right now, please!) of a cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics where deer stroll peacefully past computers as if they were flowers with spinning blossoms. I like to think (it has to be!) of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace. And as this seems to make cosmic sense the background music, which has been piped in from the eighties for this particular moment, segues to a new tune: Well now, I get low and I get high, And if I can't get either, I really try. Got the wings of heaven on my shoes. I'm a dancin' man and I just can't lose. You know it's all right. It's OK. I'll live to see another day. We can try to understand The New York Times' effect on man. Whether you're a brother or whether you're a mother, You're stayin' alive, stayin' alive. Feel the city breakin' and everybody shakin', And we're stayin' alive, stayin' alive. Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive, stayin' alive. Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive. And ironically, with a smf hat-tip to the Brothers Gibb, that’s why we’re all here …wherever here is. ¡Onward/Adelante! - smf EITHER 16,000 OR 6,000 SENIORS ARE IN DANGER OF NOT GRADUATING +smf’s 2¢ +a real meaningful opinion about A-thru-G ●●smf’s 2¢: according to the two articles below, by the same author on the same day but in two different (but not much) online publications, either 16,000 or 6,000 LAUSD seniors are in danger of not graduating. OMG! But what’s 10,000 twelfth graders among anti-public school provocateurs? ►16,000 SENIORS FAILING WITH 6 WEEKS TO GO: THE DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD OF LAUSD’S RAISED BAR FOR GRADUATION Posted on LA School Report by Craig Clough | http://bit.ly/1NKudiF April 28, 2016 6:30 pm :: The LA Unified school board faced a difficult decision in June. It had previously voted to raise the bar on its graduation requirements starting in 2016 in an effort to get more students into college, but it was clear not enough students were ready for the challenge and graduation rates would plummet if aggressive action was not taken. The board ultimately chose to stick with the raised bar, and the district is now entering the final stages of that difficult decision. More than 6,000 seniors are currently failing at least one of their required “A though G” courses, meaning if they can’t raise their grade to a D by the end of the semester in six weeks, they will not graduate on time. Yet these students are considered “on track” by the district because to be labeled on track, a student need only be enrolled in the required A-G courses. And 10,000 more are considered “off track,” meaning they are missing one or more A-G class. “While I am encouraged by the recent efforts and commitment (to A-G), it also shows us the gap of the work that we have today,” board member Monica Garcia told LA School Report. Garcia has been one of the board’s strongest supporters of the A-G standards, and at the June board debate said, “This has been a hard road. Not because we are not committed to a hundred percent for everyone,” but because the district struggles to “improve practice that meets the needs of all kids.” A recent district report showed that 68 percent of seniors are currently “on track” to meet their A-G course requirements — a number that has been predicted to significantly rise before the semester is over — but 30 percent, or 6,400, of those on-track students were failing a course at the 10-week mark. While district leaders have expressed optimism that many students are getting the help they need, it is clear that a significant number of students who last year would have otherwise graduated with the same final transcript will not do so this year. Thousands of other students will also graduate having earned D’s in the A-G courses, which means they will not be eligible for California’s public universities because C’s are required. And still thousands more will graduate only due to a massive $15 million credit recovery program that allows them to earn a C if they can demonstrate proficiency in an online course, a practice that has been called into question by some education experts who characterize it as an essentially cheap and faulty way of getting a student to graduate. A report this month from the Public Policy Institute of California studied the impact the raised A-G standards are having on a number of districts that have taken them on. San Diego Unified, which like LA Unified is also implementing A-G standards for the first time this year, is facing a huge drop-off in graduation rates.* ( The district is undertaking a wide-scale credit recovery program for the first time this year similar to LA Unified’s and it is unclear to what level this could boost the graduation rate.) The results at San Diego Unified are bittersweet, with more students than ever meeting the A-G requirements, while at the same time graduation rates are set to drop from 87.5 percent in 2014 to 72 percent this year. Ten percent more San Diego students may become eligible to apply to the California public university systems, but 16 percent more may fail to graduate. “In sum, by increasing graduation requirements, San Diego and other districts have opened more doors to success. Ironically, they have also opened more doors to failure, in the sense that a greater number of students are now at risk of not graduating,” the report stated. While district leaders are predicting that LA Unified will avoid any graduation crisis due to the credit recovery program, and that graduation rates may even rise to new highs, the district still grapples with the same issues San Diego is facing from choosing to raise the graduation bar. Like San Diego, LA Unified lowered the planned requirement for C’s to be earned in A-G classes for graduation to D’s, even though it meant the ultimate purpose of getting kids into college would not be met. According to a district memo, as of March, 48 percent of LA Unified seniors were on-track to graduate with C’s or better in all A-G courses, meaning if the district actually meets the predicted rate of 80 percent graduation this year, some 11,000-plus students will be graduating without qualifying for admittance to California’s public universities, which is the entire intent and purpose of the A-G graduation standards. “You talk about the right to a diploma and this is a debate that we have, and I don’t think there is really one right answer that could apply to all students,” said Sara Mooney, an education program associate at United Way of Greater Los Angeles, which has advocated for the district to keep the A-G standards. “For students, the purpose of the courses are not just to make you eligible for college but this is also a conversation about the quality of a child’s education, and that means the quality of their diploma and the weight that their diploma carries after they graduate. We really have to be responsible for this in offering them the resources to be successful in their school and subsequently in life.” When asked how she weighs the balance between the higher standards and the needs of the students who will not make it to graduation as a result, Garcia said, “For the last 10 years I have represented the kids who don’t get a diploma and who do get a diploma. And every year there have been more young people getting a diploma. So we are not new to dealing with the absence of success for our system to get to everybody. That is not the new piece. The new piece is that we do have a challenge to the system in how do we manage what is a California requirement, and what is an LAUSD requirement. And we have more students completing the courses required for college, which is a very good thing.” One promising statistic for A-G supporters is that overall the district’s A-G completion rate has gone from 18 percent in 2005 to the projected-and-rising 68 percent of today. “I am encouraged by what I see for us moving toward higher standards and higher levels of personalization,” Garcia said. “I think it’s very exciting that, yes, we have increased the challenge, and repeatedly our young people have said I need high expectations like that.” * A previous version of this story said San Diego Unified was not undertaking a large credit recovery program. The report citied includes only data through August before the credit recovery program began. __________ ►L.A. SCHOOLS INSIST 6,000 HIGH SCHOOL SENIORS WITH FAILING GRADES ARE ‘ON TRACK’ TO GRADUATE IN 6 WEEKS By Craig Clough in The 74 - This article was produced in partnership with LA School Report | http://bit.ly/1Y09FmJ April 28, 2016 :: While the Los Angeles Unified School District’s projected 2016 graduation rate continues to tick up as seniors complete extra credit recovery courses to make up those they previously failed, 30 percent of those now considered “on track” for graduation currently aren’t because they are failing at least one of the district’s A through G classes. To be labeled “on track” a student need only be enrolled in the A-G courses, which are required for admittance to California’s public universities, and if these failing grades do not improve to at least a D by the end of the semester, six weeks away, roughly 6,400 seniors would not be eligible to graduate on time — which would drop the city’s current projected graduation rate from 68 percent to 48 percent. Frances Gipson, LA Unified’s chief academic officer, said a number of actions have been taken to get extra help and resources to the students who are failing a course, and the district is still hopeful that last year’s record graduation rate of 77 percent will be surpassed. “We are seeking to exceed last year’s expectations, that is our goal,” Gipson told LA School Report. Due in part to a $15 million credit recovery program that has been aggressively implemented this school year, the projected A-G completion rate has risen steadily, up from 54 percent in January and 63 percent in February to now stand at 68 percent. (District officials in February predicted LA Unified may graduate 80 percent of its seniors, which would be an all-time record.) The credit recovery program was enacted by the school board this fiscal year to help offset a potential graduation crisis, as this year is the first time the A-G courses are required for graduation. The courses, if all are passed with a C or better, would make students eligible for acceptance in California’s public universities, although seniors only need to get a D in order to graduate. Gipson said the extra help being given to seniors failing an A-G course include having counselors meet with the students and letters sent to the student’s parent or guardian. School counselors “have met with all students in the class of 2016 that are currently on-track but received a fail at the 10-week mark to discuss intervention and supports needed to pass and stay on track,” said an April 18 memo to Superintendent Michelle King from Gipson and Carol Alexander, director of A-G Intervention and Support. Asked if the number of students currently failing an A-G course was a cause for concern, Cynthia Lim, executive director of LA Unified’s Office of Data and Accountability, said that it was hard to determine what the number meant because “this is new. We’ve never had A-G as a graduation requirement before, so this is all new.” Gipson added that the current 20 percent number “is relatively consistent with past patterns we have seen with students in terms of, as you think about your own child or your friend’s children, there are always those who may be getting a D or an F and we need find out why they may be getting a D or an F. Is it because of attendance? Is it because they need extra tutorial support? Are they not turning in assignments? Do they need extra assignments? I think there are multiple pathways we can explore.” Before the credit recovery program began across the district in the fall, the projected graduation rate was only 54 percent, a steep decline from last year’s all-time high of 77 percent. The credit recovery program involves getting seniors currently not on track to take extra coursework on weekends, after school as well as during holiday breaks. Many of the courses are online and only require students to demonstrate basic proficiency in the subject, which has caused some to question the academic rigor of the online courses. The district and Gipson have previously defended the academic value of the courses. Over spring break in late March, the district enacted the “Spring Plus” program at 15 high schools that provided resources and dedicated staff to get students back on track, according to Gipson and Alexander’s memo. The program has continued on Saturdays since spring break and is scheduled to be completed May 28. Attendance has varied depending on the day, but 313 seniors showed up at the 15 high schools on the first Monday of spring break. According to an April 4 memo, 21,729 seniors are currently on-track to complete their A-G requirements, but 6,428 — or 30 percent — received an F at the 10-week mark. There are 4,746 seniors off-track by one or two courses, 1,455 off-track by three or four courses and 3,878 off-track by five or more courses. In June, when facing the stark graduation projections due to the coming A-G requirements, the school board lowered the required grades in A-G courses from a C to a D for the class of 2017. (The class of 2016 could always receive D’s for graduation.) The A-G course requirements, which were first conceived and passed by the board in 2005, are aimed at getting more LA Unified students into California’s public universities. Despite the lowering of the bar, the district has made significant progress since 2005, according to a March 7 memo by Gipson and Alexander that showed 48 percent of all LA Unified high school students are passing their A-G courses with C’s or better. “This shows tremendous growth since the class of 2005, when only 18 percent graduated meeting the A-G course requirements with a C or better,” the memo stated. _____________ ●●●ANOTHER …AND FAR WISER OPINION: Alan Warhaftig [http://bit.ly/1QIs4yz], The English coordinator/counselor at Fairfax High School, writes 4LAKids: Subject: Re: 16,000 seniors failing with 6 weeks to go: The double-edged sword of LAUSD's raised bar for graduation - LA School Report MISIS aside, it was obvious from the outset that the A-G graduation requirement would cause problems. I once told Marguerite LaMotte how much I admired her for voting against A-G, and she responded that she’d paid a stiff political price for that vote. I don’t doubt that there have been examples of low expectations by counselors based on the race of a student, and I’m all for raising standards and making the high school diploma more meaningful, but having worked with teenagers for 25 years, I can tell you that, in general, they could not care less about a School Board mandate for higher achievement. The edicts of elected officials don't outweigh what’s going on in some of their lives.In the past two months, I’ve had three students in my classes unexpectedly lose a parent.   School is a struggle for them at the moment, but it’s not the most important struggle in their lives. Declaring that LAUSD would henceforth attempt to emulate Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, where "all the children are above average," was the height of impracticality. A-G is a set of requirements for eligibility for admission to the state’s four-year universities, and the California Master Plan for Higher Education says that the UCs are for the top eighth of high school graduates and the Cal States are for the top third. Why should all high school students be required to meet the academic requirements of the top third in order to receive a high school diploma? Merely meeting the A-G requirements doesn’t gain a student admission to Cal States or UCs. There aren’t enough places for everyone, so admission requires a competitive GPA and SAT score. Practically speaking, the A-G graduation requirement means that, in addition to previous graduation requirements, students need to pass Algebra 2, Chemistry and two years of a foreign language. Algebra 2 is the problem. With the fail rate for Algebra 1 above 50%, Algebra 2 is a huge hurdle for many students. With the adoption of the Common Core curriculum, math has become substantially more difficult - requiring more problem solving than procedure. It would be interesting to know how many students aren’t reflected in the charts, having dropped out of school after failing Algebra 1 two or even three times, and seeing no path to graduation. What is the four-year cohort graduation rate? CHARTER SCHOOLS SHARING LAUSD CAMPUSES: NOBODY LOVES IT, EVERYONE HAS TO LIVE WITH IT by Kyle Stokes | KPCC 89.3 | http://bit.ly/1VZLnvJ Audio from this story: 4:23 | Listen: http://bit.ly/26FI6oC (strongly advised) April 28 2016 :: Martin Wong and Wendy Lau were frustrated. They'd gotten a letter from the Los Angeles Unified School District saying their daughter's school, Castelar Street Elementary in Chinatown, might have to turn over several classrooms to a charter school. Most frustrating about the letter, dated February 27, was that Wong and Lau could do little to stop Metro Charter School from "co-locating" on the district's property — a California law known as Prop 39 says school districts must open up their campuses to charter schools searching for a building. "We're thinking, 'What?'" Wong said. "'How can all this happen without involving parents?'" But unbeknownst to Wong, Lau and many parents at Castelar, leaders of Metro Charter School had their own frustration's with the district's proposed arrangement. The district said Metro Charter School's request was essentially for 12 classrooms. But L.A. Unified assigned only five classrooms at Castelar to the co-location. The rest of the rooms the district offered were at two other district schools. "The proposal was for us to split ourselves into three campuses," said Apurva Pande, a member of Metro Charter School's board. Accepting the offer, board members decided, would be neither logistically nor financially viable. So Metro turned down the district's co-location offer, despite a desperate need for more space. The political friction between L.A. Unified and charter schools makes it easy to forget the two sides are often so much more than neighbors — they're practically roommates. More than 19,000 students attend a charter school that operates on a school district site. One out of every three independent charter schools in Los Angeles is co-located, many under Prop 39 — and some of the arrangements are peaceful and mutually beneficial. But the frustrations that ended the Metro-Castelar co-location before it could begin are also common. Some charter school advocates suspect the district is mismanaging the process of assigning co-locations — and have argued as much in court. But district sympathizers say parents at Castelar, or at any school selected for co-location, had a right to be worried. "There are co-location sites that work better than others when there really is an effort to share space," said L.A. School Board president Steve Zimmer. "But make no mistake: this is a broken system, a broken law, it needs to be changed. "This is a zero-sum game," he added, "that is set up to create winners and losers. And most often — not always, but most often — it’s the host district school that loses. They lose space. They lose students." With their passage of Prop 39 in 2000, California voters expanded charter schools rights to district space. No longer would state law only require districts to share unused, surplus space with charter schools; district would have to ensure its facilities could be "fairly shared" by all public school students, including charter students. Under Prop 39, districts must offer charter schools "reasonably equivalent … facilities that will sufficiently accommodate all of the charter’s in-district students." School districts can't charge rent, but can collect fees from co-located charter schools for expenses like maintenance and security services. The schools' principals negotiate plans to share spaces like libraries, cafeterias, gymnasiums and playgrounds. Since Los Angeles real estate is expensive, finding suitable space to lease is difficult, city permitting can be a hassle and charters' access to bond money to build their own buildings limited, co-location is often an "expedient" option for many new charter schools, said Myrna Castrejon, executive director of the pro-charter school group Great Public Schools Now. Castrejon said on some of the most harmonious co-location sites, charter and district-run schools are sharing extracurricular programs and professional development for teachers. Eloise Wong, a second grader in Castelar Street Elementary's Mandarin dual language program, shows off her classwork during an open house. Eloise Wong, a second grader in Castelar Street Elementary's Mandarin dual language program, shows off her classwork during an open house. Kyle Stokes/KPCC But discord from troubled co-location sites can drown out the harmony. At Castelar Street Elementary, for instance, parents protested that the rooms they stood to lose were actually in use. Two house a music program. The principal planned to turn another, currently a science room, into another computer lab for state testing. Wong and Lau pointed out the loss of six rooms — five for classrooms, one for an office — would make it more difficult for Castelar to grow its Mandarin dual language program, which had become a selling point for the school. But charter school advocates — while acknowledging the difficulty of L.A. Unified officials' task to find space to offer to all 95 charters that applied for Prop 39 space — aren't convinced their schools receive all of the space to which they're entitled. Last year, the state Supreme Court ruled L.A. Unified officials were "undercounting" the number of classrooms available to share with charters. In addition, the type of "split-site" co-location offer that Metro Charter found to be logistically and financially unworkable has become more common. Two years ago, L.A. Unified's made eight co-location offers that involved multiple sites; last year, the district made split-site offers to seven charters, according to a count from the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA). This year, the district offered 19 split-site co-locations. They've made 24 such offers for next year, according to the association. Metro Charter School's 200 students cram into a former daycare space on a hospital campus in downtown Los Angeles. Principal Kim Clerx says quarters are tight during lunch, which the school serves in this room. Metro Charter School's 200 students cram into a former daycare space on a hospital campus in downtown Los Angeles. Principal Kim Clerx says quarters are tight during lunch, which the school serves in this room. José Cole-Gutiérrez, who heads L.A. Unified's Charter Schools Division and oversees the Prop 39 application process, said it's not fair to read into the higher numbers of split-site offers without considering the locations of these offers. He said in certain areas of Los Angeles, district officials are simply unable to find space where charters can co-locate on a single site. "L.A. Unified understands and respects its obligation and takes it very seriously that we provide the space under Prop 39," said Cole-Gutiérrez. "Especially in those impacted areas [where available co-location space is already scarce], it will continue to be a challenge where we have to balance the needs of all the students in those areas." His office's task may be even more difficult if an expansion of charter schools moves forward. A leaked draft of a plan from Great Public Schools Now, which counts the Broad Foundation among its funders, calls for adding more than 130,000 new charter school seats in L.A. The plan's calculations count on Prop 39 space to account for some of those new seats. "Prop 39 is the epitome of everything that has changed in the charter movement from its inception — to be an incubator for change, and transformation, and innovation — to now being simply an instrument for competition," said board president Zimmer. But he also added the district's past implementation of Prop 39 has contributed to some of the discord. "In the previous administration, co-location was viewed as a punishment" for underwhelming enrollment figures, he said. The district could correct for that, Zimmer suggested, by offering host schools in co-locations financial bonuses or priority in maintenance requests. But he also called on state-level officials to correct co-location policies by offering clearer ground rules and a more level playing field. Castrejon, of Great Public Schools Now, also suggested the state could alleviate some of the pressure on Prop 39 by making it easier for charter schools to access public funds for construction. Others have suggested, in general, school districts could do more to include charter schools on their facilities bonds. There are co-location success stories, Castrejon said: "I don't think that it's necessarily by default an option that doesn't work." But do the troublesome co-locations outnumber the success stories? "There’s a lot of work left to do," Castrejon replied. "No question." ITI TASK FORCE PREPARING RECOMMENDATIONS FOR EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY PLAN from LAUSD Daily by LAUSD Office of Communications | http://bit.ly/1YYVdeJ Apr 29, 2016 | As it wrapped up its last official meeting of the school year, the Instructional Technology Initiative Task Force prepared to finalize its recommendations for a plan to integrate technology into the classroom. The group of educators and civic leaders was assembled last year by then-Superintendent Ramon Cortines and tasked with creating a District-wide vision and strategy for how to provide students and teachers with the technology they need to succeed. In the coming weeks, officials will be finalizing a report using the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) standards as a framework. Developed by the educators representing a wide range of content areas, grade levels, and geographic regions, the ITSE standards guide schools in transforming blended learning environments. Using this framework, the task force is developing recommendations to guide modernization of teaching and learning along with the necessary supporting infrastructure. The group will share its work with Superintendent King in the coming weeks and aims to present it to the Board of Education in June. Task force members frequently broke into small groups to engage in intense conversations about the future of technology in education. “I have a lot of confidence in the work we’ve done so far,” said Task Force member Michael Anderson, who is a National Board Certified science teacher at Los Angeles Academy Middle School in South L.A. “There is a lot of wisdom in this room, and the group is very functional. However, the major work will be in creating culture change. In order to do that we will need to continue listening carefully to what our students, our teachers, our parents and others are trying to tell us.” Dr. Sharon Sutton, a representative from the Cotsen Foundation for the Art of Teaching, expressed similar sentiments. “From an outside perspective, it’s just astounding how rapidly and thoughtfully this group has brought this together,” she said. “As we think about communicating recommendations, it’s important to define clearly what we mean by ‘learner.’ It’s not just the students we are talking about. It’s teachers, administrators and parents. We are all learners through this process.” The district's chief academic officer, Dr. Francis Gipson, was appointed by former superintendent Cortines to chair the ITI task force. The task force has met semimonthly since its inception. Dr. Frances Gipson, the District’s chief academic officer and the task force chair, hopes to convene group on a quarterly basis in the next school year. “I am so excited to have been on this journey with you all,” she said. “Thanks to your dedication, we are in the final stages of delivering a list of recommendations that are concise and elegant. Our work is by no means done, but we are in a place where we can have a new beginning. GRANADA HILLS CHARTER HIGH SCHOOL WINS NATIONAL ACADEMIC DECATHLON FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: received by email Press are invited to the Welcome Rally on Monday, May 2, 2016 at 8:00 a.m. School flagpole at 10535 Zelzah Ave., Granada Hills 91344 Contact: Marilyn Koziatek, Community Outreach, (323) 309-4241 mkoziatek@ghchs.com April 30, 2016– Granada Hills Charter High School garnered its fifth United States Academic Decathlon (USAD) title - in six years – earlier today in Anchorage, Alaska. Granada Hills Charter scored 54,195.1 out of a possible 60,000. This award marks the end of the 2015-16 academic decathlon season in which Granada Hills Charter won all levels of competition including the city, state and national titles. “It’s exciting to win at this level,” said Mathew Arnold, GHCHS English teacher and Academic Decathlon coach, “This win isn’t just for us. It’s a way to for the whole school to show our strength. I’m proud of our kids and feel fortunate to be a part of this team!” The Academic Decathlon is a 10-event scholastic competition for high school students that consists of seven multiple choice tests plus a speech, interview, and essay. Granada Hills Charter captured the trophy in the fast-paced super quiz round, signaling the end of the competition on Friday afternoon. The Awards Banquet was held at the Civic Center in Anchorage and the team’s championship was announced to cheers in the packed auditorium, including all the parents of the GHCHS team. “We are so proud of our son and his teammates for their dedication,” said Sundio Lin, father of Joshua Lin, a member of the team since 2015. “They work so hard. Seven days a week. The coaches and staff, they love our children and sacrifice so much, every year. We are grateful to see Joshua succeed like this.” The Academic Decathlon divides the competition into three categories based on GPA: Honor (3.75-4.00), Scholastic (3.00-3.74), and Varsity (2.99 or below). Granada Hills Charter won the top individual scores in all three categories. GHCHS also earned national USAD titles in 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2015. This year’s winning team of students are Mark Aguila, Julian Duran, Isha Gupta, Joshua Lin, Christopher Lo, Aishah Mahmud, Melissa Santos, Mayeena Ulkarim and Jorge Zepeda. The coaches are Mathew Arnold, Jon Sturtevant, and Rachael Phipps. # # # RENOWNED EDUCATOR WARNS THAT LA UNIFIED’S FUTURE IS ‘DIRE’ Posted on LA School Report by Mike Szymanski | http://bit.ly/1SVRqRg April 28, 2016 4:28 pm :: Internationally renowned education expert Pedro Noguera warned members of the LA Unified school board and superintendent that unless more serious measures are taken, the nation’s second-largest school district is destined to lose more students. “The future is dire,” Noguera told the Committee of the Whole on Tuesday afternoon. He pointed to entire neighborhoods in Philadelphia with abandoned schools. “It’s not there aren’t enough kids, they lost the commitment to education. I hope that doesn’t happen in this city.” The challenges LA Unified is facing, he said, include declining enrollment because of the growth of charters and demographic shifts, chronically under-performing schools, structural budget deficits and the need to increase public support for schools. Noguera has written 11 books and more than 200 articles about education and focuses his research on how economic conditions impact schools. He served as a school board member at Berkeley Unified and is now a Distinguished Professor of Education in the Graduate School of Education and Information Sciences at UCLA. Committee chairman George McKenna invited the professor to make a presentation to offer advice and give examples of what other schools do. “I appreciate you coming to tell us the truth, even though we may not want to hear it,” McKenna said. “We have to take this situation seriously, really seriously.” School board president Steve Zimmer attended the committee meeting although he was on his way to Washington, D.C., for the rest of the week to help lobby for the district. He told Noguera, “There is no more important city in this world for you to be in, and I’m glad that you’re here and work with us.” Zimmer noted that Noguera discussed the district’s concerns about competition for students between traditional and charter schools. “As you spoke,” Zimmer said, “it was actually quite emotional because I think we have been through a time where we have misunderstood the role of competition and in that misunderstanding have caused some injury and caused it to be potentially more difficult to build the foundation of trust.” Nearly 16 percent of LA Unified’s students are enrolled in 211 charter schools, and that number would grow significantly under a plan to increase charter enrollment in the district, which the school board unanimously opposed in January. Noguera said, “Like it or not, schools are competing for kids, and public schools don’t even realize it. Like it or not, that’s the set-up.” He pointed out his granddaughter goes to a traditional LA Unified school where the parents are only allowed to drop children off between 7:45 and 8:15 a.m., while the charter school around the corner allows drop-offs as early as 7 a.m. “For a busy working parent, like her mom is, and in a city like this where transportation is a big issue, that is not a small factor,” Noguera said. That alone could be a reason for a family to choose a charter school over a traditional school. “Public and charter schools are collaborating, but that is not happening enough,” Noguera said. “It has to be OK for principals to say, ‘I need help,’ and not have that being used against them. Otherwise, they will just hope that no one knows what the situation is.” He called for “collaborative problem solving,” which must come from the central office. “They must let everyone know they are not here to scrutinize, but want to help you and show you how to figure it out and solve the problem.” That includes the charter school and traditional school situation, he said. “Trust comes from collaboration,” he said. Superintendent Michelle King asked how to replicate what is successful at schools, and he described a program in San Diego where leaders visit schools once a quarter and offer support to principals and teachers about best practices. Noguera cited a 90-minute math class he had visited at Hollenbeck Middle School whose teacher had complete control of her class and allowed students to help each other. Meanwhile, a class across the hallway had students who were unable to focus and were being disruptive. “It took a while for that teacher to establish the class,” he said, pointing out that many of the students were English-language learners living in East Los Angeles. “She had to determine which kids could work together and which ones can’t work together.” He recommended that the district structure time so teachers can learn from other good teachers. McKenna brought up celebrated teacher Jaime Escalante whose rough approach with students was highly criticized. His story was told in the 1988 film “Stand and Deliver.” “Why is it so difficult to replicate good work?” asked McKenna, who like Escalante taught math in LA Unified. “Jaime Escalante’s work was frowned upon. What makes it difficult to go across the hall and learn from each other?” Noguera answered, “That is a common problem, because of the isolation of teachers.” Among Noguera’s suggestions for the school board were: • Support and recognize high-quality teaching. • Focus on morale. • Provide incentives for teachers and administrators with a track record of effectiveness to work in “high need” schools and communities. • Publicize your success. • Prevent educational issues from becoming overly publicized. Monica Ratliff asked about the bonuses and incentives given some teachers to work in more challenging schools. Noguera said the incentives don’t even have to be monetary but could include more planning periods or other bonuses. “We should look into this,” Ratliff said. Noguera pointed out that some answers are within the district already but aren’t being shared. He said some schools might be very good at converting English-language students into the general school population, but the district doesn’t have a way of tracking which schools are better at it. He and other university education experts are visiting schools throughout the LA Unified district. “I hope this will be an ongoing collaboration with the district,” Noguera said. EVENTS: Coming up next week... Curriculum, Instruction and Educational Equity Committee Meeting - May 3, 2016 - 9:30 a.m. *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. 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