A silver lining
Tuesday’s school board meeting was a stark reminder of the lesson we have all learned many times before – parents can’t rely on politicians to advocate for their own children.
In a remarkable show of political cowardice, several LAUSD school board members overrode Superintendent Cortines’ thoughtful recommendations and removed three of the highest quality charter schools in Los Angeles from having the opportunity to serve children and run any of the schools they had been recommended for. In an even more stunning display of the backroom deal making, the school board voted to remove high-quality charter operator ICEF from the new Barack Obama Middle School after exactly 0.0 seconds of discussion.
What started six months ago today as an historic break with the past, and a promise to finally put kids first -- was exposed Tuesday as the same old business-as-usual politics played by grown-ups, for grown-ups, about grown-ups.
While there was deep disappointment amongst the hundreds of parents who showed up to demand change -- including the dozens who literally camped out outside Beaudry the night before -- we believe there is a huge silver lining in Tuesday’s outcome: For the first time in the history of Los Angeles Unified, groups of teachers and the District are actually going to be accountable for student performance. While UTLA has traditionally opposed performance-based contracts, they just signed the biggest performance-based contract in the history of LAUSD, if not the nation. Groups of teachers and LAUSD administrators spent the past six months promising parents that they could produce better student achievement than high quality charter operators. And now, they will have to prove it.
While we are clearly skeptical of many of these plans, and cynical about the processes that gave them control, we truly wish them the best of luck. While we are encouraged by increased local control, we think that a system that still sucks 40% of dollars out of the classroom to a centralized bureaucracy and that contains little to no adult accountability is unlikely to succeed. We deeply hope, however, that our skepticism is proven wrong. It is critical that we all find ways to work together to develop in-district reform models that can out-perform high quality charter schools. The children and parents of Los Angeles desperately need more options that work, and if UTLA-run pilot schools or other in-district models prove to be successful, we will gladly embrace them and work for their expansion. but if they don’t, we hope that those who embraced these models will join us in the historic struggle for transformative change that serves every single child in Los Angeles.
