The Los Angeles Times has a strange editorial today, first excoriating the new board majority for pushing Superintendent Deasy too hard and acting as though they were in charge, not he. This is weird, because the board is elected and Deasy is their employee, not their boss.
Then they blamed the board (the “reform” board that they admired, which was aligned with Deasy’s agenda) for not vetting the troubled iPad rollout:
“It helped, in ways, that the meeting was devoted to the troubled plan to provide every student in the district with aniPad. This is one area in which the previous board majority, which was more aligned with Deasy’s agenda, failed to ask certain basic questions before approving the billion-dollar project.”
Now, given that the L.A. Times strongly supported the ousted majority, it is passing strange to blame the board for the lack of planning, the “failure to ask certain basic questions” about Deasy’s billion-dollar iPad project. Wasn’t it Deasy’s responsibility to plan ahead before asking the board to approve this very troubled project? On one hand, the editorial excoriates the current majoritiy (not aligned with Deasy’s agenda) for micromanaging, then turns about and criticizes the board (aligned with Deasy’s agenda) for not doing the necessary and basic planning in the iPad rollout.
Which is it, editorialist? Is Superintendent Deasy accountable for planning and implementing the iPad mess? Or was that the board’s responsibility? Is the board wrong when it asks questions and also wrong when it fails to ask questions?
Or should we just assume that Deasy is always right and his every decision is also right even when it is a billion-dollar fiasco? And if things don’t turn out right, blame the board, not the ones who are paid to implement the board’s decisions.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
With all the hoop-de-doo about ipads and ipods and computers in the classroom, I am reminded of the time when I read about a student who said, “I have a paper and pen and a teacher. What more do I need?” I don’t think Plato or Aristotle needed even the paper and pen.
Although nobody but me is keeping count, I think we have a tie for the top spot in a new awards category: Rheephormista Obvious Incoherency 2013 [ROI, aka Return On Investment].
This year’s formerly unchallenged #1 was Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s speech to the 2013 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.
Link: http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/choosing-right-battles-remarks-and-conversation
The LATimes editorial board piece gives frightening new meaning to the phrase “nothing else could ever be this bad.”
Link: the first given above in Diane’s posting.
Perhaps someone else will top[?] this before the year is out in the ever challenging EduInanities Sweepstakes.
I shudder to think…
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The LA Times editorial board should win!
Diane’s reaction is exactly what mine has been reading the editorials about lausd these past few months. The first I noticed was when the LA Times published an endorsement of Steve Zimmer’s opponent. Then, after Zimmer beat their candidate, they published an editorial stating that he was the best person to bring the board together. There have been plenty more between that and today’s. I can’t imagine a process that puts out such conflicting editorials. Makes me think of big, boisterous family dinners where group decisions are made willy-nilly. Somebody gets up to use the bathroom and wham! Pa’s sellin’ the farm!
Just wrote this for a blog site…but thought all of you would be interested. TA…we have long been allied but under my real name which no longer works here…
Just the Facts, please…
by Public Policy Educator, Ellen Lubic, Director, Joining Forces for Education
Today, Diane Ravitch posted on her blogsite an article on the LA Times editorial which once again lambasted the Board of Education for micro managing the ‘poor beleaguered’ Superintendent of LAUSD, John Deasy. The title of Diane’s writing is Putting Bureaucrats First. Evidently the LA Times does not understand the representative form of government in which we live, whereby We, the People, elect a School Board to represent us, to work in our behalf, in governing our school district by hiring and overseeing the senior administrator, the Superintendent of Schools, in this case the highly charged and highly paid John Deasy, maker of terrible business decisions which may well bankrupt our school system. It is Deasy who reports back to our School Board for they are his bosses, as we, the voting public of taxpayers, are theirs.
Many of us have watched, and even been in the midst of, this dance of death that is public education leadership in Los Angeles, with all the many power players such as the major privatizers-for-profit like Eli Broad, Rupert Murdoch, the Waltons, Bloomberg, Gates, and those other billionaires who interfere with the democratic election process by pouring millions of their dollars into out-of-state school board elections in order to get their selected toadies elected. These are the same intruders who create ‘media spins’ that bypass whirling dervishes in their dizzying absurdities, as witness the Oct. 29 photo-op concocted ‘phony public’ collected by their PR and law firm reps, their highly paid organizers and ubiquitous ‘suits’ Ryan and Rose mentioned below.
So the stage is set for the months of angst regarding the potentially sweetheart deals for iPads contracted for above-retail price, without keyboards nor WiFi, nor plans for loss or damage, for 650,000 LAUSD students, and the elaborate rationales from a “civil rights issue” by Deasy, to “they are not that expensive and did not go over budget” as claimed last week by the scapegoated Jaime Aquino.
It was clear from the ‘surprise’ Aquino resignation some months ago that Jaime would be the sacrificial goat, not lamb, in this scenario. He was assigned to fall on his own petard for the farce that is LAUSD’s, Deasy and company, so poorly conceived decision to spend a huge amount of taxpayer money to give iPads to every student in this vast district.
At this point, only Board member Monica Ratliff has the good judgment and guts to stand up for what is correct and say, ‘hold it, and let’s wait and see how things go’ before throwing more taxpayer money at this over-priced tech event.
Every taxpayer in our State should be emailing the Board to follow Ratliff and not throw good money after bad. Let’s have some time to let this fiasco shake down.
Yet today Sacramento announced that it has sent us, and other districts, all the rest of the windfall taxpayer funding to all be used to implement the very questionable, not longitudinally tested, Obama/Duncan mandated, Common Core system which educators all over the U.S. are lambasting for the many errors in the material, for the pressure of extensive testing from kindergarten though high school. Trained therapists are horrified at the children who are falling apart from the pressures of all this testing, children who experts say will never love learning for its own sake due to this stress, but will learn mainly to hate school.
And of course, there is the constant trumpeting from the The LA Times which always reacts the same way, first with some few articles that may, or may not, show the problem, but repeatedly with the unidentified editorial writer blaming the Board for the mistakes of the administrators. They conveniently forget that the Board that supported Deasy in this fiasco is now a different makeup after the last election. But still many of the Teacher 5 members are not being rational in their support of Deasy and Eli Broad, the mastermind behind most of the actions at LAUSD.
Back to Aquino, who when testifying in front of the Board last week on the costs of the iPads and the faulty planning, consistently called the uproar from the community who pays all these bills, “NOISE.” That is the Deasy/Aquino/lawyered up ‘spin’…we who pay the bills should not be heard for all we are doing is generating NOISE. This disrespect for the ‘real public’ is outrageous.
The ‘scam public’ bussed in for the Oct. 29 Board meeting, which was carefully choreographed by Ryan and Rose of United Way and Parent Revolution, was such an obvious set up which I witnessed personally from spending the day in their midst, and observing them. And yesterday, Ben Austin, who is their highly paid PRev leader, (financed by the Walton Family Foundation and Eli Broad and other billionaires), wrote his spin on HuffPost. His story diverges 180 degrees from those of us who were there and witnessed the undemocratic outcome of too much power in the hands of these self-entitled oligarchs (and their top law firms too) who paid everyone of the participants to show up and do their phony dance to the tune of money, money, money. And the Board let it all happen…even seemed to condone and endorse it.
This is how facism grows when too few have all the money and it buys all the power.
You’re seeing the corporate governance mindset take over our public institutions. Corporate boards as also elected (by the share holders) and, formally anyway, the CEO reports to the board. And yet, in reality the CEO is largely unaccountable and acts at his or her whim. Boards rarely act to limit CEO actions or even hold them accountable, absent some disaster in which the CEO gets a golden parachute.
In other words, corporate governance is really tyranny.
Why then have so many of our so-called experts in political science, government, economics, and business, insist that government be run “like a business”? Why do editorial boards, like the LAT’s, not see they are only making government more incompetent and corrupt by supporting public officials who want to act like CEOs?
I think the sort answer is that by creating a “do your own thing”, consumer society, we’ve lost all touch with the meaning of governance and the need for building and keeping trust in political institutions. The élites who own the LAT and control its editorials want things this way, since under these conditions the power of wealth has few limits.
Thanks for the explanation, moosesnsquirrels. You made sense out of nonsense. 🙂
Really interesting thoughts/explanation, MoosenSquirrels — thank you! A lot there to think about … and it sounds pretty darned sound.
moosesnsquirrels: I echo 2old2tch and redqueeninla.
Comments like yours are part of the reason I keep viewing “Diane Ravitch’s Blog A site to discussion better education for all.”
Thank you.
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I find the absence of any name on these editorials conspicuous. As a grad student, Ii learned to read closely, and when I deconstruct this text, I am struck by the fact that no one wants to own this opinion, which is not an opinion at all but a ploy designed to subvert our understanding of what is going on. Frankly,, I do not think its going to work, and they know that too because tsomebody hired a PR firm and bussed in Deasy “supporters” who were paid to be these and give talking points as they lined up to sing his praises.
I noted two things.
Ms. Ratliff was indeed the demonized dissenter on the board who dared to point out the problems this program is riddled by. Though there was tremendous effort made to silence and subordinate her, Ratliff stood her ground, proving Democracy may be limping but it is not down for the count yet.
Zimmer gently reminded Mr.Aquino that what he was calling “noise” has some validity, which it most certainly does, but one wonders where Aquino gets off denying the board or Ratliff her right to question everything. Clearly, Aquino see Deasy and his entitled arrogance as his role model rather than Socrates. The irony is that this editorial foreshadows Aquino’s role as Deasy’s fall guy when some more of the truth is exposed.
Generally large city newspapers run unsigned editorials. They also often have, somewhere on their website, the names of editorial board members.
Fascinating how people read this editorial. I see it as praising a board member who asked important questions and at the same time commending the board for not micro-managing (which can be a tough line to draw, because clearly the roll-out of these i-pads has not gone well).
We have yet another divide forming as a result of ed reform in Ohio:
“Roman Catholic pastors are understandably eager to lease now-closed school buildings to charter schools.
That runs counter to the priorities of Greater Cleveland Congregations, a group of religious congregations that has taken a hard line against East Preparatory Academy. East Prep is a new charter school that is leasing space from a former Catholic school near Case Elementary School, a Cleveland public school.
GCC accuses the school of aggressively recruiting students from Case.
Bob Tayek, a diocese spokesman, defended East Prep’s lease, explaining that priests may lease to any school with a charter from the state.
Unfortunately, here in Ohio that’s a pretty low bar.”
The diocese is now leasing former Catholic school buildings to Ohio’s completely unregulated charter industry, which angers the OTHER local religious denominations which are trying to protect the local public schools from the predatory recruiting tactics of Ohio charter chains.
Ain’t free markets grand? The various religious denominations have been either cooperating or co-existing peacefully for 150 years in Ohio, until ed reformers arrived and turned public education into a cash cow.
Just more unintended consequences, I guess. Where are the Fordham Institute experts that I always see quoted in media? They are IN Ohio, are they not?
http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2013/11/the_cleveland_roman_catholic_d.html
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2013/10/charter_school_recruiting_gimm.html
“A new charter school that parked an ice cream truck behind a Cleveland school district school this summer to attract students has angered neighborhood parents and a regional coalition of churches.
Officials of the Greater Cleveland Congregations and parents of students at Case Elementary School on the near East Side gathered Monday to call that recruiting effort unacceptable and to seek assurances from the new East Preparatory Academy charter school that it aims to provide quality education and not just make profits off students.
Jawanza Colvin, pastor of Olivet Institutional Baptist Church, said the group does not want charter schools – schools that are publicly-funded but privately-run – to be able to attract students with gimmicks like ice cream or electronic giveaways without providing a quality education.
“The message that we’re sending to all the poor-performing charter schools in the city of Cleveland is that our kids are not for sale,” Colvin said, before leading the crowd in chants of “Our children are not for sale.”
Junk food, junk education.
It was clear from the surprise Aquino resignation some months ago that Jaime would be the sacrifical goat, not lamb, in this scenario. He was assigned to fall on his own petard for the farce that is LAUSD’s, Deasy and company, so poorly conceived decision to spend a huge amount of taxpayer money to give iPads to every student in this vast district.
At this point, only Monica Ratliff has the good judgment and guts to stand up for what is correct and say, hold it, and let’s wait and see how things go before throwing more taxpayer money at this over-priced tech event.
The LA Times always reacts the same way, first some few articles that may, or may not, show the problem, but repeatedly with the unidentified editorial writer blaming the Board for the mistakes of the administrators. And the Board that supported Deasy in this fiasco is now a different makeup. But still many of the Teacher 5 members are not being rational in their support of Deasy and Eli Broad, the mastermind behind most of the actions at LAUSD.
Aquino, when testifying in front of the Board last week on the costs of the iPads and the faulty planning, consistently called the uproar from the community who pays all these bills, NOISE. That it the spin…we who pay the bills should not be heard for all we are doing is generating NOISE. This disrespect for the ‘real’ public is outrageous.
The ‘scam public’ bussed in for the Oct. 29 Board meeting, which was carefully choreographed by Ryan and Rose of United Way and Parent Revolution was such an obvious set up. And yesterday, Ben Austin, who is their highly paid PRev leader, (financed by the Walton Family Foundation and Eli Broad and other billionaires), wrote his spin on HuffPost. His story diverges 180 degrees from those of us who were there and witnessed the undemocratic outcome of too much power in the hands of the oligarchs (top law firms too) who paid everyone of the particpants to show up and do their phony dance. And the Board let it all happen…even seemed to condone and endorse it.
This is how facism grows when too few have all the money and all the power.
As the writer of the editorial in question, my concern is the simply inaccurate representation of the editorial board’s position on L.A. Unified. The board was not a “supporter” of the ousted majority. It endorsed a pro-reform candidate over Steve Zimmer, while noting that Zimmer had some very likable qualities. It did not endorse the reform candidate in another race, instead choosing Monica Ratliff, a teacher seen as the underdog, to replace a reliable reform member of the board. At the same time, the board reluctantly endorsed reform candidate Moinca Garcia, saying that she was a poor candidate but that the only stronger candidate had vowed to try to get John Deasy fired. The board does not believe in rubber-stamping Deasy’s initiatives, but it also strongly opposes removing him from the post, especially when the candidate shows no willingness to try to work with him.
The editorial board’s position has been that it prefers a school board with independent thinkers representing a balance of opinions, who ask well-researched questions, avoid speechifying for the sake of speechifying and put student interests first. There are times for asking plenty of tough questions. A billion-dollar expenditure for an untested program in which district leadership lacks answers to even the most basic issues is obviously one of those times. But hours and hours of haranguing about exactly how the district will pick and train the coaches to teach teachers about Common Core curriculum isn’t the board’s job.
The Times editorialized twice in the fall of 2012 about the tablet project. (The district had not yet chosen iPads and the estimated cost of the project was unknown.) In both editorials, the Times said the district should hold off because there were many important concerns and unanswered questions. Obviously, the editorials were signaling to the school board that it was a time to ask questions.
Thanks for your thoughtful answer, Karin. You may have noticed that I don’t think of people who prefer charters over public schools to be “reformers.”
This iPad deal has national implications for Common Core, and I hope the editorial board will continue to ask tough questions. L.A. is pending (or may spend) $1 billion for iPads, which are loaded with Pearson content. Both the iPads and the lease on the content will be obsolete in three years. Will LAUSD pay another $1 billion then?
This is a great deal for Pearson and Apple, but is it a good deal for the kids?
This money was taken from 25-year construction bonds. How will LAUSD pay to fix its buildings?
What about class size and the arts? Can L.A. Afford to reduce the first and restore the second?
Most important, if the technology for Common Core costs $1 billion for L.A. Alone, what will it cost the nation?