As a general rule, to which I have never seen an exception, classroom teachers know more about what is happening in the schools than editorial writers and pundits.
Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times published an editorial chastising critics of Superintendent John Deasy and accusing them of wanting to go back to the “good old days” when the teachers’ union–United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA)—had more influence than it does today.
But this teacher has a different view of the “good old day.” This is a message for Karen Klein, education editorial writer of the Los Angeles Times:
I have been a teacher for over 20 years. Most of my teaching career has been spent in East Los Angeles. Teaching in this community has never been easy. I don’t know what “nostalgia” I’m supposed to feel about the past. If the author had referred to the “good old days” when my classroom was swept, vacuumed and mopped regularly, I might agree. If the good old days meant having a full time librarian, psychologist, speech therapist and other support staff, I might agree. If the “good old days” meant not having brownish water come out of aging pipes most mornings, then I might agree. If the “good old days” meant having all the children’s bathrooms clean and available for over 1,000 students, stocked with soap and toilet paper, I might become nostalgic too. The fact is our learning and working conditions have never been worse. This became evident with the sweltering heat as schools’ primitive air conditioning systems broke down. But the author places no blame on our superintendent. No- it’s “greedy” teachers like me who purchase supplies for my classroom, including small brooms and baby wipes for kids to use. I remember the “good old days” when I didn’t need to purchase my very own roach motels to keep them from infesting learning materials in my closets during the summer and during the school year as a result of kids eating in the classroom. I really “miss” the days when I didn’t have to pay for my own quality professional development in order to keep up with new advances in education. Thank you L.A. Times for taking me back to the ” good old days.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
How financially involved with the LA Times is Mr. Broad?
I’m not aware that he has any financial involvement. He’s tried to buy the paper several times in the past, and was the biggest competing bidder in the sale that ultimately went to Sam Zell.
Then I assume the editorial board’s labor positions reflect Sam Zell’s hostility towards unions, at least when it involves teachers.
Zell’s gone. He bought the papers with a debt-equity structure reminiscent of Blue Star Airlines. The Tribune Company collapsed under the debt and went into bankruptcy. (Pop quiz: what former Goldman Sachs partner and media banking titan advised the Tribune Company on the sell to Zell and helped finance it?)
The LA Times’s current CEO has close ties to Broad, though. He was a partner in Broad’s most recent attempt to buy the paper.
Just reaffirms what i’ve often stated here: Consolidation of extraordinary wealth & income is real problem. That’s the problem that must be resolved since money buys power.
He has been obsessed with the Times for years. It keeps being bought and sold but Broad’s influence is present . Hard to say how much of it he actually owns but he owns LA. He is hording a lot of modern art and when local museums got sick of his meddling, he took his art back . He is building a shrine to himself in DTLA. As usual taxpayers are pretty much footing the bill whether they like it or not. Broad ( who put Deasy in and holds BOE hostage) has a lot of control of LAUSD and operates as if he owns the schools he was involved with building ( # 9, RFK, ROYBALS ETC) . This DTLA arts district is going to displace thousands of homeless people on skid row. Other cities have built housong for their homeless but Broad gentrified everything everywhere he could and wants that stretch of tragic humanity out before the BROAD opens, instead wmpty condos will take the place of missions, clinics and churches. So where will the homeless end up? In hoods , in doorways, under freeways , in ditches and pauper pyres . The city will have a whole new set of issues to contend with but all it does is apoease Broad just as LAT does . He loves Deasy. So LAT loves him too. It is notable that LAUSD finished the first of 3 apartment complexes that are designed to house emoloyess. Those employees are ovbvipusly the TFA interns that are taking teachers’ places . So as teachers are indeed landing on skid row , their displacement will be repeated when the goon squads come with hoses to wash away the truth about LA and its emperor, Broad.
This coincides with some of my earlier postings on this site: The privatization of public education (and demonization of teachers/unions) is a symptom of a much bigger problem that is the incredibly unequal distribution of wealth & income providing the monied class with inordinate political power.
Broad is LA’s own Mr. Potter. What we need is a George Bailey to challenge him.
Gayaneh, where is George Bailey when we need him?
Eli Broad leaned VERY heavily on the board to hire and then extend Supt. Deasy’s contract. Whether he attached strings to his suggestion, I do not know, but he supported the Arts High School.
Great wrting about the “good old days.”
The la times editorial staff must be a bunch of Broadies with no clue as to what goes on in LAUSD if the DZ years are golden to them. I don’t know how involved Broad is with the newspaper but he runs DZ and the BOE at LAUSD. What people won’t do for political and financial support in their pursuit of their next job. i wish the ‘good old days’ at the LA Times were back where reporters actually investigated and we’re afraid of losing their jobs from telling the truth. Where there was not such a cozy connection between editorial policy and the interests of the moneyed class. Where taxpayers could read what actually was happening in the city and commend the newspaper for exposing it. Yes, the ‘good old days’ is missing here as well as LAUSD, huh.
Just to let you all know…Karin Klein had made comments at City Watch Today on my recent article there, entitled LA Times Love Affair With John Deasy. You might want to read the article and her comments.
After rereading all her recent editorials of the past few weeks including the endorsement of Marshall Tuck/the good/bad old days/the union indictment/etc, and my article, I find the only changes I might make are the date of her egregious editorial Deasy v. the BoE, which I mistakenly said was published last Sunday but actually was published last Tuesday. And also I might change my statement about Eli Broad’s possible influence to “perhaps’ rather than “surely”….but other than that I stand firm in my opinion.
As we all recognize, editorials are the opinions of the writers, and are not statements of facts. It is alarming that she might want to silence my voice altogether. What kind of freedom on the press allows that kind of challenge?
Please read the article at City Watch Today and post your own comments there, as we all do here.
As my students would say “Klein got pwned!”
Disagree, respectfully. This teacher, like most LAUSD teachers, will continue to be treated with contempt and neglect while Klein will continue to publish right-wing political propaganda. If you are rich or employed by the rich, there is no penalty for saying things that are not true, so long as you serve the rich.
An incisive comment from the late Moms Mabley:
“They’re always talking about the good old days, the good old days. Well, I was there. Where was they?”
And very old and very dead and very Greek guys could also give new meaning to the phrase ‘tired old cliché” [even if they helped invent them]:
“Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”
So in contrast to the self-styled “education reformers” and their enablers and enforcers and pushers, let’s be thoughtful and use facts, logic and compassion whether we’re talking about yesterday, today or tomorrow.
For example, a cogent comment from ‘the good old days’ that aptly describes the current disruptive innovation/VAMania/forced ranking/top-down bullying management style of the “thought leaders” of the “new civil rights movement of our time” aka education rheephorm:
“You don’t lead people by hitting them over the head — that assault, not leadership.” [Dwight D. Eisenhower]
John Deasy would have been well advised to have heeded this advice before unjustly firing Ms. Patrena Shankling.
Even if the advice was from ‘the good old days.’
😎
Deasy should’ve “heeded” Eisenhower’s advice. Doubt Deasy has any interest in listening to anything that doesn’t enrich him financially.
Karin Klein is synonymous with everything that is wrong with the LA’s Power Structure.
I’m sure she is a “liberal” who advocates for Civil Rights and wants a fair and just society for everyone.
It’s just that she, like so many other Neo-Liberals of her ilk, protects her children at the expense of others.
Dick Cheney with all five of his draft deferments for Vietnam–and other GOP all-stars like Jeb Bush, Newt Gingrich, Lindsey Graham, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Bill Kristol, Karl Rove and Bill O’Reilly, for all their bellicose posturing and willingness to send OTHER people’s kids to fight–they got the well-deserved moniker of “ChickenhHawks”.
There are plenty of “ChickenChalks” in the debate over education.
Karin Klein is just one ChickenChalk who thinks LAUSD’s Superintendent John Deasy is the Right Choice for the city’s school system, but the unionized, rich Laguna Beach school system that her daughter attends gets thousands of advantages that she doesn’t believe would serve LA’s kids. NEVER ONCE in all her editorials has Klein advocated for smaller class sizes, greater class choices, more field trip opportunities, less testing and more progressive education pedagogy.
Is this too personal and out of bounds? Klein’s relentless advocacy of my kids DIRECTLY affects all of their lives and she is in a position of tremendous power to affect ALL of them. Like the ChickenHawks who push for war with little personal skin in the game, it doesn’t get any more personal for my kids so tough it out here, Ms. Klein.
On the iPads which she often claims the Times has been cautiously wary over? She’s right. Cautious to the point of not one degree of genuine outrage over any aspect of it. Not over how it was planned. Not how it was implanted. Not the pedagogy of the entire concept behind it. Her writing is always soft spoken in its handling of Deasy. Klein’s constant excuses for John Deasy are in the form of very mild rebukes of an errant, precocious child. She has never come close to suggesting that Deasy should NOT be in his position. She believes LAUSD kids NEED and DESERVE John Deasy.
The LA TIMES has been ferocious in their support of John Deasy only matched by Eli Broad. The only reason Deasy stays in power is BECAUSE of the LA TIMES support. If it evaporated, so would he. The LA TIMES editorial board could not care less about how Deasy came to power. They are completely untroubled by his past close, intimate relationship with convicted education embezzler Robert Felner who guided his entrée into the Big League of Education Reform. They are completely deferential to whatever lunacy he learned at The Broad Academy—the silliest “serious” education institution in America. They are completely okay with his ethics. They are fine with the removal of hundreds and hundreds of teachers from the classroom. They are fine with Deasy’s secretive, autocratic ways.
If only he and the School Board could just make nice, Klein argues. THAT would solve the issue. Klein refuses to even speculate that Deasy HIMSELF, his policies and pathology IS the problem.
Klein would never EVER think she was racist. She would NEVER believe she was classist. But she has never SPECIFICALLY said WHAT part of John Deasy’s education philosophy, his demeanor and his style do you wish your kids got? What education nirvana are my kids so lucky to get with John Deasy that your kids are bereft without? Why not transfer your kid(s) into a John Deasy school so they too can reap the benefits of his wisdom and Civil Rights fervor?
Every single major backer of John Deasy in LA is of the Power Elite. My guess is almost none of them have kids in the LA system. They are the super elite of the economic, media and political world and use their considerable power, money and influence to KEEP Deasy in place. All ChickenChalks.
There is no grass roots support for John Deasy. Not among our teachers. Not among our kids. Not among our non-moneyed community.
But that doesn’t matter to any of these Power folks. THEY know what LAUSD’s kids need.
John Deasy.
In her most recent editorial, Klein defends Deasy by saying “he is better than how it used to be.” Klein is no admirer of teachers’ unions and feels that they have put teacher interests ahead of kids. Her “nostalgia” for the bad old days is off mark because the LA TIMES never has advocated for progressive liberal education for all at ANYTIME.
Klein (like other ChickenChalks President Obama, Arne Duncan and Rahm Emanuel) would never put their kids in a “system” with the kind of pedagogy they prescribe for other kids. Maybe she believes that the system that LAUSD kids get is too fraught and as a good parent, she is being responsible by giving her kid(s) every possible advantage by placing them where they are.
Fair enough.
But her enthusiastic and somewhat crusading support for John Deasy’s methodologies are at odds with what her kids are ever exposed to.
If zip code is destiny, you could not prove this point Ms. Klein any better than with your advocacy of John Deasy.
Your kid(s) get lobster.
You offer my kids potato chips.
I wish your daughter well in life. She is definitely on the conveyor belt of success in America.
You give my kids John Deasy as their best hope.
I know you think it’s a fair trade.
Excellent exposition, Geronimo.
Klein also this week endorsed, in the name of the LA Times, Marshall Tuck, for State Supt. of Schools. This is the Green Dot ex-head, who left under a cloud and who is in the charter school business, rather than the incumbent teacher, Tom Torlakson whom most teachers and UTLA support.
One more coffin nail for Karin who is consistent, even as a neo-lib.
She also has been a big proponenet of the notorious Ben Austin and the Waltons parent trigger law, plus TFA kids being hired to replace well trained senior teachers in inner city schools.
As you say, dear valued colleague, if the LA Times was a true advocate of a free press, instead of a free market, the voters would have a far different picture of what goes on with Deasy and his staff at LAUSD. The public would have marched on Beaudry long ago to demand he be fired and his entire inept staff be replaced.
We do not need any more Broad Academy demi-gods as Supt. in LAUSD. We DO need a well trained, valid academic, an educator/administrator with a proven track record, as our next Supt.
An example would be Carol Burris, the remarkable principal in NY.
SomeDAM Poet: at the risk of causing the head of some shill or troll explode…
I can imagine a future where every resource-starved Centre of EduExcellence [née public schools] employing eduproduct delivery specialists [née teachers] serving the vast majority of students [aka OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN] has the following posted above the main security entrance:
$tudent $ucce$$ Macht Frei.
Am I going over the top?
Forgive my presumption, but I have in mind one of our best American traditions:
“I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.” [William Lloyd Garrison]
😎
“Eine Kleine Machtmusik”
If Karin Klein thinks my children deserve what Deasy dishes out then she is sadistic. “Dear Karen, place your child in the conditions you claim have been improved during Deasy’s tenure. And I don’t mean a for-profit pop-up charter that pretends to be public. Or better yet, volunteer your time in an district classroom of which you portray yourself an expert. Well you are not an expert until you are in our shoes. Put up or shut up already.”
I do remember when we were resource rich and the schools were clean, our philosophy was child centered, the curriculum was developmentally appropriate, and Principals saw themselves as principal teachers, and there was little standardized testing, and our professional judgement and assessments were respected. there actually were “good old days. I am so happy I’m retired with an indexed defined benefit pension.I’m still fighting for quality education, and as a teacher, know what I’m talking about, unlike these idiots at the top.
David…we are of a similar era. I went all through LAUSD schools, from elementary, to JHS, to HS, then matriculated to UCLA, and have been an educator for over 40 years.. Our schools then were the best in the nation, equal to NY. Of course in those ‘old days,’ we did not have 109 languages spoken in California schools, nor vast immigrant poplulations to educate, nor over 260,000 homeless students.
But now we have corporate rulers, rather than educators in charge.
And the Deasy/Broad results today are abysmal.
Adding up all of Deasy’s mismanagement costs, all paid for by the taxpayers, we are somewhere in the vicinity of 1/2 billion dollars in the hole.
How much waste is the BoE, and the public, willing to tolerate before shutting down these ill advised tech programs, e.g.iPads, MiSiS, and firing Deasy and his staff of mismanagers?
Add to this the plethora of lawsuits (just yesterday another one settled for over $3 Million) by vendors, parents, teachers, and others unknown to us, and we must be verging on bankruptcy…which seemed to be the goal of Deasy and Broad from the get-go. Many in LA have had the insight to suggest this for the last two years.
We started losing custodians, librarians, nurses, and school psychs before Deasy. That’s an economic issue more than a Deasy issue. He’s given people enough fuel for the fire, why use inaccurate criticism?
Agree Jeff that when the economy tanked in 2007-8 schools were hit hard and did deep staff cutting. But with the advent of Prop. 30 funding, RttT funding, Construction Bond funding, etc. it has been a mystery to many educators why in the past almost 4 years, Deasy did not hire back not only teachers, but librarians, nurses, counselors, psychologists, and janitors.
“Inacurrate criticiism?” Then you must be in the 4% who thinks he is doing a good job. I don’t know if I should feel sorry for you or laugh at your ignorant comment. The economy has improved but my conditions at school have not. They are getting worse. More money is coming in but its not spent on librarians, janitors, psychologists etc.. The money goes to hire “experts” who are glad to “opine” about something they might not know about, then they collect their nice paychecks. Money is spent on iPads for all, then they get lost or stolen. Under his watch we now have Breakfast in the Classroom and it has nothing to do with children’s nutrtion and all to do with having the district reimbursed by the federal government for the meals served. We have new Common Core Standards imposed on us but we were not trained for them. There is no accountability like always. Thanks Jeff. Very observant.
I just loved her response. Her rebuttal triggered all these images in my mind as I read it. I felt like I was in her classroom and school.
Thank you for your kind words of support. Teacher morale is low. I usually don’t write in, but I am tired of the state of our learning and working environment. -Aurora
The big picture is its time to repeal California’s rop 13 in order to get cash flow into the California treasury so our state can fund public education properly.
Moderator, I meant to write repeal Prop 13. Thanks.
Nice!