At a recent meeting of the Los Angeles school board, newly re-elected member Steve Zimmer spoke passionately about the reasons to reduce class size.
Watch here to see Zimmer’s address to the board. Zimmer was a TFA teacher who taught in the L.A. schools for 17 years before he ran for school board.
Los Angeles has some of the most crowded classrooms in the nation.
The board passed a resolution to spend new money to reduce class size. Superintendent Deasy decided to ignore the board’s wishes. He recently committed tens of millions of dollars to buy iPads for the children in the crowded classrooms.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Did the tens of millions of dollars come directly from the L.A. operational budget, i.e. to pay for teachers? Or was it from a different source? My school purchased tech due to a Microsoft monopoly settlement. These funds could not have been used toward staffing. I believe is small class sizes; I am just wondering about the source of these funds and the correlation between the two decisions that seems to be made in this post.
The funds were school bond funds which we, the taxpayers, passed to build and renovate our schools. The problem with this purchase is that it will continue to expand and the only people who wanted this was Deasy and the board. Educators felt this was not a good use of bond money. Who cares about what we think?
Sad to add, our Governor Brown said in his State of the State speech earlier this year, that the hard fought Prop. 30 tax money would be used to buy computers/Ipads to be used by students to prepare them for Common Core testing.
We were snookered by our Gov.
Those of us who worked so hard to help him get his initiative passed have lost faith in his perspective. When he argued that the lion’s share of this funding would go to inner city children, we cheered, but then he added his caveat to buy millions of dollars of Ipads for such a questionable use.
I was at the recent installation of the School Board members for LAUSD to cheer for my candidate, Monica Ratliff, and also saw Steve Zimmer give his touching heartfelt speech. When Zimmer recommended at the previous meeting to use this windfall tax money to hire back teachers, Deasy snidely said that Zimmer “wanted to hire everyone on the West Coast” or words to that effect. It was an awful moment for educators since we all understand the tremendous difference class size means in the education of students. The current 42 – 47 in a room makes it almost impossible to do quality teaching.
Everybody is missing the point. It is against the law to spend school construction bond money for any equipment that will not last 10 years. They are paying $1,000 each and it was approved without the details or contract. Apple just lost a major price fixing case. At $1,000 each, which is the real cost, and about 600,000 students that is $600,000,000. They will only last 3 years if that and that is what Apple told the district they were guaranteed for. That means a constant outflow of $200,000,000/year to just maintain without inflation or any other thing. LAUSD this year has about $11,600/student. This is $30,000 minimum for every classroom every three years or a minimum of $10,000/classroom/year. Deasy thinks he is going to get a tax for them to maintain and replace in time. Deasy did you not watch us kill Measure J for $90 billion with only $25,000? Deasy did you see what happened to every bill to reduce bonds to 55% from 2/3? So much heat came down because of what we did to Measure J that the legislature threw out every one of them this year? Are you awake yet Deasy?????? I have been to enough functions lately including for 6 hours today to know that people are fed up with you and all these kinds of actions in all sections of government. You once again are doing illegal acts like approving Parent Triggers with illegal signatures, falsely charging and terminating employees like teachers without due process. Deasy, this is over.
People, do your budget and legal research.
George, I was of the understanding that the Ipads were to paid from the Prop. 30 new tax funding. Please expand on this.
The ipads are going to be funded by bond money, which cannot be used for staffing.
George,
Who, exactly, is responsible for enforcing the law regarding LAUSD?
Re: the ipad plan, I’d just like to give a shout out to every idiotic article about the “digital divide” written over the last 20 years. I give up, you win.
Never give up…
FLERP!
I don’t know how none of us never learned nuthin without computers, ipads, etc. . . to teach us. I guess people like Descartes, Einstein, Socrates, Confucius, Sor Juana, Averroes, Maimonides, Buddha, etc. . . must not have been “edumacated”.
You made me smile…
De nada.
Might someone have made exactly the same statement (less a couple of your more recent historic figures) about printed books?
I have posted this before, but perhaps it is worth posting again:
No, don’t believe so. Printed books served to spread words to the common man from the cloistered world of the Catholic Church. Computer reading, ipads, etc. . . serve to reach only those who can afford and/or have access to the internet, so in a certain sense it is a limiting technology.. Quite a bit different.
Those who tout technological innovations as a panacea for the teaching and learning process the most usually have a monetary stake in said technology.
Books could only spread the word to those that could afford it (and those that were literate), a small group to begin with.
Last year, our state writing exam wanted the 8th graders to write about the pros and cons of “tablets” in the classroom. The word “tablet” was not defined, and a lot of my students didn’t know what they were. We have a high-poverty school. I had never really believed that the tests were skewed against the poor until that question. 1:1 technology is NOT the solution, but there really is something of a digital divide with these kids. That question was terribly written and unfair to kids who don’t have that kind of technology at their fingertips.
It was my understanding that the money was coming from bonds unless they changed it which would be worst since the money from the stata was supposed to be used for class size reduction.
Wherever it comes from, it’s a wasteful use of funds that will hurt us down the road. We really can’t afford this.
If Deasy’s privateer buddies are so good for education in L.A., why don’t they assume this debt? They’re not crazy but they know the district and Deasy are. Unfortunately, this
Will affect all of our bottom lines.
I’m moving over a great COMMENT from Leonie
Haimson’s blog / article on LAUSD being Ground
Zero in the battle against privatizaion, and
Haimson’s analysis of the battles in LAUSD to
lower class size:
http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2013/07/los-angeles-ground-zero-in-fight-over.html
Here’s the COMMENT… the third one down:
———————————————————————————
redqueeninla said…
Excellent, spot-on debriefing.
There is not a parent in the room or across
the district who could possibly be fooled by
the Bog Lie that ‘reducing class size is just
a personnel issue’. It is nothing short of
surreal that anyone entertains this notion
for an instant. Let alone votes in support of
it for years.
Children need to be taught, by human teachers,
who care about them so that the children can
form a connection with that teacher. This is an
impossibility in a classroom with too many
children. period.
Period!!!! No one thinks otherwise, as evidenced
by all the walking with their feet parents have
been doing for schools where their child has a
functional teacher “in front of them”.
The real question is:
Who could have the temerity to suggest some
special children don’t actually have the same
need as others to low class-size?
Who could possibly have the audacity to suggest
that what’s critical for their own kid — low class
size — is not important for another’s child???!
This notion of “special-ness” needs some long,
serious close looking at.
July 14, 2013 at 3:01 PM
lol Jack — I noticed the typo after that had posted and just figured, well — no one will ever read it anyway! Make that: ‘Big Lie’ please … not “bog lie”. 😉
Mr Mugivan (below): reducing class size will retain the *capacity* to teach well in theory at least; there will (I hope) always be some mavericks who work around the impositions of Panem. Else, with no human contact, there will be no capability left for subversive “work-arounds” (i.e., creative, effective teaching).
Given the choice between a constipated, top-down controlled curriculum administered by a real live teacher in a reasonably-sized classroom vs. a mechanical, electronic blue-screened media presentation bereft of human interaction sardined into a crowded room, I would throw in my towel with the first as having a slightly better likelihood, at least potentially, of retaining the ingredients for a good outcome.
Class size is no longer a serious issue with the dumbing down of the students with testing.
Students in large classes may not be dumbed down as effectively. The real issue is what is happening in pedagogy. Do we want optimum size for insidious instruction? This issue is is to save union jobs and these organizations are supported by the unions. Let’s pull wasteful Special Dd (“learning disabled”) and resource room teachers into the classrooms.
Let’s not label kids as “learning disabled” before 3rd grade, if at all. This will release the funds to reduce class size.
Special Education takes ove 1/2 of the budget at my school. My guess is that is the norm throughout the district. A “regular” classroom will have 35 – 45 students and 1 teacher. A Special Education classroom will have 2-12 students with a teacher and an average of 2 teacher’s aides, and sometimes more. Our budget for Special Education Aides, is over $1,000,000. We are spending 1/2 of the school’s money on 10% of the population. You can do the rest of the math. State mandates and keeping out of lawsuits is what drives the money decisions in LAUSD. Sad, but true .
If you impose the market-based system favored by corporate reformers, Special Ed students will not be serviced… because the market model views students not as human beings, but commodities.
As commodities, they will be valued on two criteria:
1) cost to educate… with those who cost least favored, and those who cost more—i.e. Special Ed. kids who require more expensive teachers with extra certfication and smaller class size to service them, which also drives up the cost their education;
2) the outputs… in this sense, the test scores—those who score highest, or have the greatest potential to score high will be sought out and services, while those with the lowest outputs—Special Ed. kids, through no fault of their own… will be shunned and avoided at all cost.
Both of these things have to with spending the least, so you’ll have a greater “surplus” or profit that will go back into the charter chains for more expansion and advertising.
Having to educate special ed kids is antithetical to a capitalist paradigm. the corporate reformers and privatizers wish to replace our public school system with.
Just like private schools the charters (essentially private schools with public money), by and large, refuse Special Ed kids entry, and if they manage to slip by their filtering system are soon kicked out… errrr, excuse me… “counseled out.”
This post does bring up the delicate but important question of how to allocate resources in education. Any school must answer this question of how to allocate resources. The post also asks us to question the idea that there is a better education for all. This poster claims that a better education for some results in a worse education for other because of reduced resources to the others. As an economist, this seems like a reasonable claim to me. Does it seem reasonable to anyone else?
Teachingeconomist: most absolutely. It’s rather like healthcare wherein there is really only one answer to the question: how to spread risk most equitably among all. You must pool all risk into one undivided bucket — that is a single-payer model of insurance. At its root it’s a simple maxima-minima problem. It’s not complicated and there are not multiple right answers.
Likewise, I’m slowly, belatedly permitting myself to consider the possibility that educational resources ought to be fixed too so as to permit maximum equitability for all. This, rather shockingly, disallows the existence of any private schools, or places where you could “unfix” the resource margin for you or yours. I must admit it doesn’t quite sit completely right to contemplate advocating a ban on any private schools at all. But when the system gets taken to its extreme, as we are actually seeing in reality today, with people routinely spending 50K annually on their singular child’s K-12 education while the public-school child is left with an order of magnitude less, this highlights the ‘taking from Peter to pay Paul’ principle quite acutely.
If all those private-school dollars could be put into a general fund for all, we would have the princeliest of educational systems anywhere and there would be ample to really address that achievement gap meaningfully. That’s my conviction at least. But allowing a society to build up where people will not pay for the general good, and will remove their own from the harm of this reality at the expense of the system, makes for a situation where it is hard to envision a fix short of locking the doors and *forcing* everyone to share.
Or how about this slightly gentler fix. What if rather than somehow ‘disallowing’ private schools (impossible, onerous, etc), we required every private school to contribute 50% of the tuition they request to the public educational coffer? Would that work?
Because in education, in our modern day and age, it is not clear the margin on resources really *is* fixed in this “winner-take-all” society of ever-escalating personal wealth. Most seem willing always to spend more on their own only, if they could. So that margin’s not fixed … so let’s just share it?
Which is all to say only that ‘Sophie’s Choice’ was imposed externally; change the rules of the game and there is no dilemma. Fund schools adequately, which we actually can afford to do and plenty have shown a taste for in principle, and that terrible task of allocating resources just melts away.
At every funding level we still have to decide how to allocate those funds and that will still be a choice to improve the education for some students at the (opportunity) cost to others, though the size of the differences created would decline with overall funding levels.
In any case it would take a very large increase in funding to give the students in the rural parts of my state the same opportunities as those in the urban sections, even more to give them the same opportunities available in the large cities on the coasts. Scale is very important in education. The LAUSD educates more students than are my state over a tiny fraction of the land of my state. Much more is possible there at a much lower cost.
I think your tax would work for some private schools like Dalton or Phillips Exeter.it would probably force private schools with less well off parents to close.
This is a terrible misunderstanding.
Your school budget is NOT taken over by your Special Ed costs. It is set independently from what is spent on them.
In fact, your school is funded in proportion to the number of students it has. This is all explained in the “Budgeting for Student Achievement” effort that Beaudry started to work on sometime during the 2009-10. There are several documents available at lausd.net you can take a look at that will explain the process (your principal was allegedly trained to lead the effort at your school) but the bottom line is that about $4k/student/year times your school ADA is the funding your school has to pay for all salaries + benefits plus instructional and janitorial supplies. It is your principal’s responsibility to decide what s/he will do with that money.
Special Ed costs come separately as do all “categorical” spending such as Title I and others.
To repeat: your base school budget is the same as everybody else. Special Ed is separate and the categorical program money is the school’s slush fund. That’s why certain schools badmouth Title I schools. But they have booster clubs so I don’t see what they are complaining about.
BTW, the whole budget “strategizing” is now done by Matt Hill. Look him and see why things are the way they are.