This is a puzzling story. At Crenshaw High School in Los Angeles, teachers, administrators, students, and the community leaders worked together to improve te school. It seemed to be working. The school made enormous gains.
But then Superintendent John Deasey stepped in and pulled the plug. He will reconstitute the school, break it up into four small schools, fire the staff, and start over. The staff can reapply for heir old jobs, but half or more are not likely to be invited back.
The school seemed to be turning itself around. White harsh measures?
Can anyone explain?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
All you have to know is who Deasy really is and who he really works for. First, he is a world class liar. He still claims he has a PHD and his PHD is phony. He was superintendent of Prince Georges County when the story on his phony PHD surfaces. One week after they originally come out he quits his job as superintendent. No one quits a jog if they are innocent. One week after he quits his superintendents job he is hired by the Gates Foundation. One year after that he is at LAUSD. I called every LAUSD board member before the vote for Deasy to be superintendent and not one board member had even entered his name into Google to see who he is. After the phone calls they then knew and have no deniability. I spoke to the issue before the vote and they did not care. Deasy’s real bosses are not the citizens of LAUSD but Gates, Broad, Walton, HP and the other corporatizer privatizers for their benefit. Deasy is as phony an educator as there is. Of the about 348 charter schools in L.A. County LAUSD, according to the 2012 L.A. County Office of Education (LACOE) about 248 are in LAUSD, 8 suthorized by the State Board of Education and 10 authorized by LACOE. That leave about 60 for the other 87 school districts in L.A. County. Does this also seem strange to you? In LAUSD you have a large general fund budget, yet, the big banana is the $27 billion in school construction bonds in which LAUSD spends 2-3 times for construction the average for L.A. County according to the Jan. 2008 Office of Puvblic School Construction (OPSC) study on school construction costs. This is a lot of free money and you must have your people in place to properly, for your and their benefit, distribute that money to your friends. After all, this is all about profit for my friends, isn’t it?
Always, follow the money. Another for instance is Deasy and board president Garcia constantly state that LAUSD only has $4,800/student when the CDE website states that in 2010-11 it was $11,233/student. In the same year when you compare the ADA in the CDE website and in the superintendents budget how is it that the ADA is different by 72,000 and how can top level administrators balance a budget when they do not know the revenue? Fraud is the answer!
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What company did the district hire to place Deasy? I’m afraid it is the same company that is in charge seeking out my local superintednent search. If you know could you respond?
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I can explain. Fremont High was reconstituted at the height of its improvement with a strong core of veteran teachers and with buy in from the community. The district doesn’t want this- they want chaos they can control. They want “numbers” not real education. They want new teachers they can control. This also allows them to disempower good veteran teachers and mark them as “displaced.” I was offered quite a few jobs in other schools before the reconstitution but afterwards it was as if I was a leper. I was the same teacher. Who are these displaced teachers? . Often very highly educated with much life experience in other fields. At Fremont, we had a former editor for a major publishing house, a former TV actress and a former Boeing engineer just to name a very few. They were all excellent teachers- and veteran teachers who were career changers.
Because of the dynamics of new school years, after a few years, parents and students begin to forget- this is something the district can count on. Successful programs disappear and in the case of Fremont, an English class about novels is started where no novels are allowed to be read- only excerpts.
The last thing the district wants is an urban school that is brought to success by veteran teachers and parents together. This is why they are generally reconstituted as success is beginning to be demonstrated. For whatever reason, they only want to show “success” through their own corporate driven, test driven reforms. Thank god I did not receive this type of education in high school. But not everyone is fooled. At the first graduation after two years of reconstitution, there were several quotes in the LA Times article stating that the old staff was more professional and more interested in education. One graduating student lamented the “inexperienced teachers” that were hired. But two years down the line is a bit late.
With no institutional memory, the district, rather than the community maintains power.over a school. It’s not about education and that’s what I finally had to face. That’s why teaching is no longer the priority in my life that is once was.
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We have to elect Robert Skeels and other progressives to our Board and oust Deasy. This is criminal what he is doing. Sleazy Deasy wants to destroy the unions and eventually replace all teachers; temporarily replace with TFA recruits.
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Thank you Joan. I will immediately fight all the Superintendent’s racist “magnet” reconstitutions as soon as I am elected. In addition to Crenshaw HS, they’re doing the same thing to Dorsey HS, and King MS. King is in my neighborhood.
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Can you explain how you would do it, Mr. Skeels?Would you fire or at least try to get rid of Superintendent Deasy. We have been told a lot of things by others who ran for the school board..and at the end they have done nothing.
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Yes Mr. Dixon, my first agenda item is to begin the search for a new Superintendent who has no affiliation with The Broad Superintendents Academy or The Broad Residency in Urban Education. I think my decades of education activism and my numerous articles make my positions and my intentions clear. I have no aspirations at LAUSD except to preserve public education and return agency to our communities.
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What answer can there be other than squelching any school reform that happens without the outside interference of LAUSD or other non-profit or corporate reformers? Diane has blogged about other schools across this country that are accomplishing similar results as Crenshaw, but these schools often run into brick walls when the school district starts to interfere.
Deasy most likely had no choice but to put the skids on Crenshaw, first to prevent the public from finding out that a school can reform itself given the right circumstances and support, and to also discourage other schools from copying Crenshaw. With this action, Deasy is sending a message that, regardless of positive changes, he will find some bogus reason to wrench control out of the hands of this school’s community.
Isn’t it strange that a superintendent of the second largest school district in the U.S. is so quick to ignore the students, teachers and parents while at the same time begging them to be more involved? We now understand that actions speak louder than words.
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OK, this is the second article in as many days that mentions a superintendent who is closing an improving school to make room for several charter like programs. And both supers are graduates of the Broad Academy for Superintendents. Basic message is, nothing you were doing is worth consideration; only that which we do matters. Boiled down just a bit more — “Screw You”.
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Sorry….forgot an important point. Deasy tried to use school bond construction funds to purchase iPads for every, yes every student in LAUSD. He got turned down, so he made the same proposal at a school board meeting. One board member objected on the basis that there was no plan as to how LAUSD would pay for this. Then there are liability issues and insurance for loss and damage. And, let’s not forget what the cost would be for supplying software. One thing for sure, Deasy would make a lot of friends at the companies that would make a nice tidy sum from all these purchases.
So, could it be that Deasy sees the reconstitution of the large high schools as a way to cut the costs of personnel by getting rid of veteran teachers and bringing in TFAs?
Looking at the CA Dept. of Ed website, Crenshaw’s teaching staff(2010-11) has an average number of 13.1 years teaching experience. If you replaced them all with new teachers or TFAs, Deasy could save enough money to purchase thousands of iPads!!!!!!
As usual, follow the money as suggested above.
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It is now virtually impossible to discuss the scope of the hypocrisy at work in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Several writers here have touched on major issues such as the District’s construction expenditures, the disturbing nature of its school “reconstitution” policy, and its indifference toward veteran teachers, parents and students. To go into depth about these subjects alone would take more space than this blog would allow.
That being said, the Deasy Era at LAUSD is important not because it’s a unique display of the arrogant forces of privatization undercutting a large city’s public education system. On the contrary, it’s important because it’s not unique. Public school districts around the country are using their financial difficulties to justify the substitution of veteran teachers for younger, inexperienced teachers; the gradual dismantling of teachers unions; the standardization of curricula and tests designed to measure student memorization of data rather than students’ ability to think creatively and innovatively; and the systematic transfer of public institutions into private hands with the cumulative effect of morphing learning centers into training facilities.
Deasy’s recent take over of Crenshaw High is emblematic of the gibberish that passes for his pronouncements that his foremost concern is the welfare of his students and their parents. By positioning the education of Los Angeles’ children as a civil rights issue, he has cynically tried to buttress himself from criticism for his actions. The real civil rights issue now is how the people of Los Angeles will be able to get their schools back and see that their children become real learners, not robotic test takers destined to serve the interests of the ruling class.
It is absolutely stultifying that so much public discourse has ostracized teachers and their unions. They are to blame for most, if not everything, that’s wrong with our schools. They’re overpaid, no one holds them accountable, they’re impossible to fire, and they don’t care about their students. That these lies are now so widely accepted proves that privatization is working. And it will continue to work unless the public does something to stop it.
A good place to begin is Crenshaw. Return the school to its community.
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Yup, schools are the new cash cow.
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At the risk of “piling on” Deasy (which doesn’t bother me in the least), I would like to relate a story here that I feel encapsulates his credibility and purpose…Before I came out to LAUSD to teach from New Jersey, I was out here visiting and exploring employment opportunities with my son. I had an interview/meeting with the then Superintendent of Santa Monica/Malibu Schools. In that meeting, I was politely told that, although I had the qualifications to teach in Santa Monica, there just weren’t any openings that suited my credentials (secondary English). I might add here that at the time the District was advertising for two English positions. Anyway, it was also suggested to me that I try LAUSD since they were hiring and would take any “warm body” (that is my paraphrase, but very close to an actual quotation). I did, and they did, and I enjoyed 6 years of working in South Central with some of the most wonderful teacher and students I could hope for. Care to guess with whom I had my interview/meeting on that fateful day? HINT: Check into who was Superintendent of Schools for Santa Monica/Malibu around ’04-’05.
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LAUSD’s terrible, horrible secret: Teacher Jails
http://www.examiner.com/article/lausd-s-terrible-horrible-secret-teacher-jails-1
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This man is an obvious sell-out/crook. Pretty sad. I feel sorry for the staff and students.
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Re: “Can anyone explain?”
Q. Why did Hitler invade Poland?
A. Because he wanted Poland’s stuff.
Asking for explanations is one sort of rhetorical technique for inducing critical thinking, but when all thinking people have the passed the point where the explanation is obvious then I think it merely confuses people, as if there were some other reason yet to be found.
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This is not an issue of younger, less costly and inexperienced teachers taking jobs from skilled experienced teachers. That’s a CTA-perpetuated myth and its pure bullshit. Great teachers don’t have to worry about being replaced by anyone, we don’t need tenure and we certainly don’t need the “protection” of a union. This IS about ridding the system of bad teachers, who every single day contribute to the lifelong struggles of countless students. Our current system makes it impossible to fire even the C- teacher next door, who is not a teacher worthy of instructing my children or yours. Yet we leave these people, and much worse, with a classroom full of students, year after year and decade after decade. It’s a joke, and no one would accept such mediocrity from “professionals” in any other field.
Teachers’ unions, while certainly not fully responsible for all the ills we face in public education, are certainly also not part of the solution. Far from it. These overly-bloated organizations have themselves become every bit the top-down, rule-bound, heavy-handed, greedy, slow-moving, rigid, form-over-substance bureaucracies they claim to fight against. And if you don’t think the union’s ranks aren’t staffed with an army of highly compensated “representatives” that rivals the administration of LAUSD, you are kidding yourselves. Of course, try to find the salary of your local CTA rep and you’ll be looking for a long time because CTA doesn’t fully disclose how it spends the dues it extorts each month from us, its members.
None of the above changes the fact that Superintendent Deasy is a self-promoting, ego maniac who cheated the system to get his “doctorate” and continues to slick-willy his way through life without consequence. But if he can somehow manage to weaken the otherwise impenetrable fortress of the teachers’ union, I’m ok with Deasy lining his pockets and building his résumé for his next conquest. If he’s a means to an end, so be it.
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Excuse me. I taught high school English for 11 years in LAUSD while only earning one year of tenure. I still maintain contact with over 350 former students on Facebook. At least half a dozen of them have become teachers in Los Angeles and elsewhere in California.
While I would never claim to be god’s gift to the teaching profession, neither do I believe that I was a bad teacher. Yet I was laid off abruptly by LAUSD and have never had a chance to regain my status in the District. When you’re laid off, you can’t apply for any open positions within its schools until your name rises to the top of the District’s rehire list. Several thousand of us remain buried on it and will never get back in. One of my former students is now teaching English at the school where I taught her in ninth grade. So don’t tell me that young, inexperienced teachers aren’t taking positions once occupied by veteran teachers. I’ve seen it happen over and over to colleagues whose professionalism I respect.
As for the unions, I’m frankly dissatisfied with the submissiveness of United Teachers Los Angeles. Complain all you want about teachers unions. I think you’ll find plenty of teachers who’d agree that they’re slow-moving and too bureaucratic. However, when I hear teachers and greed linked together in a sentence, I have to laugh. Nobody gets rich teaching.
I’d still like to get back into a classroom. The last 18 months have wreaked havoc on my finances, but I still believe that teaching is what I was cut out to do. If you’re doing it correctly, it’s a seven day a week job. Figuring how to motivate adults-in-training to become lifelong learners can be a rewarding experience. And I don’t mean that in a monetary sense.
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My guess is you were laid off because of seniority rules, which require districts to keep who they must, not who they want. That’s “fair” from a union perspective, but about as far from child-centered as it gets. You could be God’s gift to teaching and it would not matter, because the due process rules defined through collective bargaining and statute are more interested in what’s best for adults than what’s best for students.
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Any administrator worthy of his or her title (and salary) already weeds out those people who should not be teaching: it has happened several times in my small school over the course of my career. We DO need the due process that tenure provides, otherwise we could be fired capriciously. How can we effectively advocate for children if we are afraid to speak our minds at staff meetings? I doubt very much that there are as many incompetent teachers out there as you think, but, more likely, teachers teaching in difficult circumstances.
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Oh P-L-E-A-S-E! Someone, ANYONE, share the names of all those superstar teachers who would be capriciously fired for speaking their minds at faculty meetings, if they didn’t have the protection of tenure! This is exactly the type of fear mongering CTA wants us to believe in, because it is part in parcel of what keeps them in business. Read research such as “The Widget Effect” and see what tenure and unionization really do for us in the 21st century.
Personally, I’ve always felt that if the union was really so valuable to my career, it wouldn’t have no problem allowing me to pay dues voluntarily. Fat chance of THAT ever happening, as CTA knows many of us wouldn’t be giving them a dime if it weren’t for mandatory dues under “agency fee”.
As for principals weeding out the bad teachers, my only comment is there’s a lot more weeding to be done. And good luck to any principal who tries to “weed” a tenured teacher. Look at the data on teacher dismissals in California. In the very rare instances when it does happen, the teachers in question are so egregiously horrific that dismissal is the least of their problems. Even then, most of those cases are settled for tens of thousands in taxpayer dollars, long before a final decision is rendered. The cost in time and money is staggering.
The system is broken, badly, and the public is finally starting to realize it. We teachers have “protections” and “rights” that go far beyond those of the students we teach. It’s shameful and every teacher “worth their salt” knows it. Instead of us all cowering behind the due process of tenure and so-called protection from the fat-cats in CTA, how about stepping-up to let quality teaching speak for itself in a truly free marketplace? I say the potential rewards far outweigh the risks and spending a career living in fear of some random and retaliatory action on the part of a faceless bogeyman in the school or district office is a waste of my and my students’ time.
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We obviously teach in two very different school districts and are members of two very different unions. Although I teach in a small rural school, I have seen several tenured teachers forced out of their jobs, one of whom had the temerity to spend more time on a unit of study because her students were not getting it. The curricular timetable was more important than the needs of the students. To be fair, some teachers were dismissed for good reason. Tenure did not protect anyone. My union, in fact, refused to help those teachers who were being dismissed for adequate reasons.
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Thanks for showing understanding; I appreciate it. I also believe bad teachers shouldn’t be protected by tenure, let alone anything else. And there are bad teachers. We all know who they are. I also believe the teachers unions should lead the way in reforming the process by which a teacher is evaluated and, if necessary, dismissed. This is an area where UTLA has really dragged its feet and should take the lead.
Have a nice New Year and good luck with your students.
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Paul: Human nature being what it is, there are many who would gladly accept the benefits of union efforts and at the same time avoid joining and paying dues. Human avarice is not such a rare condition.
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You are so wrong. Dirst of all the ACLU took away seniority rights whille Duffy was UTLA president. He failed to attend the meeting so teachers were not represented and we have not been ever since. Teachers are now facing any number of threats, particularly those who are close to vesting in life time health care and full retirement. While I tend to agree with many things you are implying, your information is largely based on propoganda spread by reformer who want to privatize. Unfortunately, they do not think like we do. To them, teachers cost too much and are too mouthy for underlings. This is not how business operates. Try as you might, you will never get them to understand that education is not a business.
The way they rid themselves of teachers is pretty wicked and yes, a teacher witch hunt has been well under way and escalating since at least 2010 probably before.
Teacher jail is now done in shifts, with llliteraly 100s doomed to lose more than just a job. A guy is now being held there becuase he had bacterial soap in class. Another is on his 3rd year . He was accused of doing something he did not do. Cops cleared him quickly and decided to charge the co worker for abuse of process . The district know it but they do not care. He is a few months away from vested.
I
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Lehrer: I agree, wholeheartedly. I watched my last principal, arguably the best I ever worked for, weed out three teachers from a staff of 45 over three years. She followed the contract to the letter and succeeded each time. I fail to understand how teachers can be protected from incompetence and arbitrary or malicious action by administrators, if there is no continuing contract/due process. But then, many of those who demand an end to tenure/due process don’t care if teachers are subjected to either.
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I know of no teacher who would argue that the union should protect the jobs of incompetent teachers. The profession as well as students suffers when bad teachers are allowed to remain in the classroom. Why people continue to believe otherwise astounds me. Are things really that bad in other districts?
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I never worried much about being punished for what I said in public. But then I’m Irish; caution and forbearance were never part of my lexicon. I did encounter opposition from some administrators and some public officials. But then, I had a continuing contract law behind me that said that, if I was to be reprimanded, placed on probation, or non-renewed, it had to be because of my teaching skills, not my public comments. Since those were never seriously in question, I managed reasonably well. I can only imagine what it’s like for those without due process. As for me, I probably would have been disciplined or fired; but it’s unlikely I’d have kept quiet. But that’s just me.
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Brian: Bad teachers are not the reason for tenure. Due process protects all teachers from arbitrary and capricious actions. It would be discriminatory to accept the dues of a teacher who is threatened with being fired and then not provide him/her the same service it provides all teachers. Know also that associations work daily to counsel poor teachers out of the profession. Those actions are not part of the public record, as the employee has a right to privacy. But the effort is made, just the same. In my district of 1200 teachers, the association had counseled out of the profession eight teachers in the last two years. Those are not easy paths to take and the teacher is under no obligation to accept the union’s recommendation.
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My next door neighbors both work for Google. Neither of them has tenure and neither of them seems to worry about invisible retribution from ” the man” for speaking out on anything. In fact, they claim Google management encourages employees to speak-up, contribute and engage in meaningful dialogue. I know many people who work in all manner of professions in organizations large and small; they don’t appear to be living in fear of losing their jobs for arbitrary and capricious reasons.
Only in education have we been brainwashed to believe our due process rights are in constant jeopardy and under imminent attack, from the rogue administrator who has it in for us because we dared speak our minds.
I’m not buying it and though I can’t speak about all teacher unions as a collective, I can say from experience that UTLA and its parent organization, CTA, is more like a bunch of self-serving thugs who are far more interested in self-preservation than promoting quality education for students. After all, students don’t pay dues. And how convenient it is that we continue to justify protecting mediocre teachers by laying blame for their incompetence at the feet of students, their parents and society. That dog won’t hunt anymore, because people are starting to see and understand all these so-called protections and due process laws for what the sham they have become.
As for me and my colleagues, the vast majority of whom are outstanding educators by any and every measure, let’s try flying without a net and see what really happens. Will our ranks be arbitrarily decimated by unscrupulous administrators or will life for us be as it is for the rest of the working world? Who knows? But like I wrote earlier, I think the potential reward is worth the potential risk.
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Paul: I respect your opinion, though I choose to disagree. I’m curious how long you have taught and I presume from your comment that you teach in California.
But you seem to have little knowledge of the institutional history of public education and teachers’ unions in general. Prior to the advent of unions, there were thousands of examples of discrimination against teachers around the issues of gender, pay, assignments, disciplinary action and firing. The original unions contained both teachers and administrators. It’s only been the last 3-4 decades that have had teachers’ unions without administrators. The union contracts of today were begun in those earlier decades and expanded during the late 60’s and early 70’s. There were documented cases of discrimination that led to those contract changes and the process of getting them was long and slow.
As for the accusation of union thugs; I have two things to say. I witnessed a group of union leaders who fit that description in the mid-60’s while attending a machinists’ union meeting in Yakima. They were despicable. I’ve seen no one of that caliber in my teachers union experience. Most of the people who I encounter using the teacher union thugs remark are my fellow Republicans who hate unions in general and are hardly unbiased.
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Why? Because he can. of course.
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You must know that Deasey is another Broadie!!
And FYI: Jerry Brown is also a privatizer!! Ask anyone from Oakland Unified what he did to schools while he was mayor of Oakland.
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Banning high school is being divided into two schools this fall, deary ignored a letter from Janice Hahn and Joe BJacobi and our community. He ignored our children getting molested at Dr la Torre school in Wilmington and now he is ignoring our vote as parents , which was 70percent against it. We are having a meeting February 13th at 6:30pm at banning high with Joe Biscayne address is 1527 lakme avenue Wilmington CA 90744
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http://www.lamag.com/features/2012/09/01/the-takeover-artist
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