In Los Angeles, the UTLA reached an agreement with the LAUSD and superintendent to extend remote learning as COVID surges and every ICU bed is filled in the city. The billionaire-funded “Parent Revolution” complained (billionaires are parents although they have no children in LA public schools).
With children mired in distance learning and many struggling academically, Los Angeles teachers will take on more live online interaction with students next semester, under an agreement announced Friday. Also under the deal, school nurses will conduct campus-based coronavirus tests.
The pact between the teachers union and the Los Angeles Unified School District was essential for the nation’s second-largest school system; the agreement’s predecessor would have expired Dec. 31. And, based on current infection rates, a return to campus in January is almost impossible under state health guidelines.
“This progress in online instruction reflects the shared learning of all who work in schools about the need to maximize the interaction between teachers and students and their families,” Los Angeles schools Supt. Austin Beutner said in a statement.
“We are gratified to reach an agreement to extend the distance learning agreement, which is what our students need right now,” said Cecily Myart-Cruz, president of United Teachers Los Angeles. “In the face of the upheaval we are all dealing with, educators, students and families need stability most of all.”
The new side letter to the teachers’ contract goes at least part way to addressing complaints from critics — including many parents and some community groups who have called for increased daily live interaction between students and teachers.
“This agreement still leaves Los Angeles Unified with less learning time, less support for teachers, less partnership with families and less focus on racial equity than other large California school districts,” said Seth Litt, executive director of Parent Revolution, a local advocacy group that has provided support for a lawsuit filed on behalf of families who contendthat the district is violating their legal right to an education.
There also are parents who would settle for nothing less than a return to full-time in-person instruction. Others support remaining in distance learning, while some worry that current practices force students to remain online for too long, especially younger ones. No strategy has emerged that offers full academic support and an elimination of risk for school employees and the families they serve. Making strides in that direction has become more complicated as an alarming COVID-19 surge stretches local healthcare resources past their capacity.
The pandemic closed campuses in March, but schools in counties adjacent to L.A. were able to open in the fall, when local infection rates were lower. Campuses that opened during that period can remain open, but not every school system did so. And some districts that reopened have closed their campuses once more.…
A recent district survey of employees represented by the teachers union indicated that 24% are prepared to return to schools; 55% said they are able to go back but prefer to remain in distance learning; 18% said an underlying health condition would make it potentially unsafe for them to return; 2% said they are 65 or older and would explore continuing to work remotely; and 1% said they intend to apply for unpaid leave.
The survey was conducted Nov. 30 through Dec. 6, with 26,305 responses, well over two-thirds of union members. The union represents teachers, librarians, counselors and nurses.
Under the new pact, nurses have to help carry out the district’s testing program. They will receive an extra $3.50 an hour for such work completed in person on a campus and additional pay when the work extends beyond normal hours.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Parent Revolution doesn’t have members anyway, only billionaire-paid operatives. The operation has shifted from one mission/objective to another as the last one fails. Their grantwriting department must be kept really busy and must be quite effective. It’s pretty clear that writing grants to keep the billionaire funding coming is this outfit’s actual mission/objective.
“Parent Revolution” exists to stir up trouble. To a guy worth $60 billion, dropping a few million here or there means nothing. Like one of us putting $.25 in the Salvation Army bucket.
The Rockefeller Foundation’s third National Covid-19 Testing Action Plan calls on the U.S. government to massively scale up Covid-19 testing to 300 million per month for students, teachers, and staff in order to reopen and keep open America’s nearly 100,000 public schools by March. The Plan lays out the largest domestic testing scaleup to date and proposes 14 executive actions for the current and incoming administrations to take in order to rapidly alter the trajectory of the pandemic in the United States. Testing all U.S. public K-12 public schools would cost $42.5 billion, or $8.5 billion per month for the remainder of the school year from February-June 2021.
Parent Revolution is just a bunch of sleazy lawyers getting paid by sleazy billionaires to take public schools to court with lawsuits, not lawsuits ever intended to be won, but lawsuits intended to publicly pressure the school district to harm teachers. They sue for hostile charter takeovers. They sue for firing teachers. They sue for putting teachers’ lives in danger. Sleaze.
One must question why the press always includes a statement from Parent Revolution as if the group has any involvement in education. Interviewing Parent Revolution about LAUSD is like interviewing the North Korean government about U.S. foreign policy. Dirty reporting.
The media quote Parent Revolution without inquiring how many parents belong, unpaid.
Just like quoting DFER without mentioning that it has no members, just a board of hedge fund managers.
Truth in packaging is needed.
and often only blindly POOR reporting
Los Angeles reporters are apparently in need of some assistance distinguishing what words mean, so the groups should be called Whitney Tilson For Education Deform and Gates-Broad-Walton-Wasserman Revolution, or just call both groups The Billionaire Boys Club and everyone will understand who we’re talking about.
Yes, yes, yes. The media has been complicit in giving these groups legitimacy by mis-identifying them as parent groups instead of billionaires’ advocacy groups. And then the media adds insult to injury by presenting the ONLY opposition to these billionaire-funded privatizers as “teachers union”.
Public school parents – the vast majority of parents in this country – absolutely do not exist for education reporters unless that parent is placed in front of them by one of the billionaire- supported “parent groups”. The white education reporters seem to believe that every student of color in urban public schools is failing, but that charter schools take the lucky kids who randomly win seats via a lottery and turn them all into high performing scholars.
Darn those “white education reporters”!
There really isn’t a media protocol for distinguishing a membership organization from one without members — of course that’s sort of irrelevant because it’s easy for a well-funded operation to find ways to list people without their approval and claim they’re “members.” (Before Michelle Rhee took the money and went semi-underground, her Students First organization listed everyone who had ever gotten onto their email list as a member — that included me and Diane Ravitch, as I recall.)
And there isn’t a media protocol for calling out an Astroturf operation — also not one for correctly identifying propaganda operations such as the Hoover Institution (and many others) rather than labeling them think tanks, implying that they’re scholarly research resources. The standard is just to describe the operations the way they describe themselves.
There should be media practices for all these things. Sometimes reporters genuinely don’t know, but seasoned reporters who’ve been on the education beat obviously do.
I also think that when editorial writers have praised something or other, such as the Parent Trigger or some miracle charter school that collapses, basic journalistic ethics should require them to write a mea culpa, including apologizing to any critics of the fizzled so-called miracle that they’ve bashed.
I have no influence on any of these things despite working in an MSM newsroom (metaphorically speaking, since we’re all working from home). When I retire I’m speaking out about them.
Also, to be honest, I co-ran a 100% volunteer project 20 years ago for purpose of debunking all the hype about formerly hailed-as-a-miracle Edison Schools, and I and my partner in the project called it Parents Advocating School Accountability, PASA. We never pretended it had members, and if anyone asked, we said it wasn’t a membership organization. I suppose we could be accused of the same thing — except entirely volunteer, zero funding from billionaires or anyone else. (My partner-in-crime’s husband did the website, which 20 years ago wasn’t so easy for non-techies to do.) So I guess it’s complicated. PASA press releases WERE quoted in news coverage sometimes, and based on my own standard, it should have been described as “not a membership organization.”
Thank you for explaining, caronlinesf. That clarified a great deal. The fault lies with Parent Revolution and DFER for having low to no standards of transparency.
Well, I think the media DOES need to develop a protocol for dealing with this crap. It’s kind of like how they really didn’t have a protocol for dealing with a POTUS who lies constantly and all the other stuff he does. And sometimes they really aren’t aware. A young reporter colleague wrote about an immigration issue and quoted the Center for Integration Studies as though it were a scholarly research source. She was horrified when I pointed out that it’s an openly anti-immigrant group and is on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of hate groups (the reporter’s parents are immigrants).
carolinesf,
Thank you for your always informative posts. You are right about the media, and it’s been far worse after a generation (or is it 2?) of “journalists” who seemed to have internalized the Fox News idea that their job is no longer to report facts, but to report what “both sides” say are true without giving any particular weight to other side. Doing good reporting is hard, but doing what passes for journalism these days, reporting “leaks” or quotes from sources or and getting a quote from “the other side” is not.
(In my opinion, your own organization met the criteria of being transparent — you didn’t hold yourself out as a membership organization and it is impossible to list everything thing an organization isn’t in a press release! And you were honest and forthcoming if someone wanted to know more. )
Anyway, I’m looking forward to you retiring and doing media criticism and hopefully teaching journalism students how not to be unwitting (or willing) tools of propaganda. One of the best media critics I have heard is Jon Stewart!
an often overlooked part of the invasive and ongoing school “reform” game
Parent Revolution has been around for awhile. Their main goal was to promote the Parent Trigger law which allowed public schools to engage in a process that included putting their school out to bid to charter operators. It didn’t work as expected, and the law, which I believe is still in effect, has died an appropriate death. But the challenge to increase charters is very much alive. Enter the “new” Parent Revolution. The lawsuit mentioned in the LA Times is also being supported by a similar organization called “Innovate Public Schools, and both have received generous grants from the Walton Family Foundation. That’s the part missing in this article. Without that information, the general public will assume that Parent Revolution is a grassroots organization that represents the community. Nothing could be further from the truth. Again, just look at the list of their billionaire pro-privatization funders.
Yes, their original reason for being was to promote the Parent Trigger. When that fizzled out*, Parent Revolution flailed around and came up with a new mission/objective, and now they may be on their third or fourth at least. As I say, their real mission/objective is to keep the grant money flowing in. *There’s been such a series of hostile breakups in the Parent Trigger-pushing world that it’s impossible to keep track of them, former allies turning against each other. There was some operation consisting of former Parent Revolution allies-turned-enemies that did push though a Parent Trigger in Orange County, Calif., but it’s not clear if they’re still in operation, or what’s happening with that Parent Triggered school. But clearly the once-showered-with-gushing-praise Parent Trigger has fizzled out, overall.
Teachers were sent back in with no protection, all over the USA. This study put a price to the protocols required to keep staff safe. Of course, it was rejected by the current administration.
“The Rockefeller Foundation’s third National Covid-19 Testing Action Plan calls on the U.S. government to massively scale up Covid-19 testing to 300 million per month for students, teachers, and staff in order to reopen and keep open America’s nearly 100,000 public schools by March. The Plan lays out the largest domestic testing scaleup to date and proposes 14 executive actions for the current and incoming administrations to take in order to rapidly alter the trajectory of the pandemic in the United States. Testing all U.S. public K-12 public schools would cost $42.5 billion, or $8.5 billion per month for the remainder of the school year from February-June 2021.”
Off topic, but the CDC is issuing its vaccine prioritization recommendations today.
It appears that non-healthcare essential employees — including cops, firemen, grocery clerks, post-office employees, and regardless of health or age — are all being given the same prioritization as people over age 75. People aged 65-74 and people with high-risk co-morbidities will have to wait until those groups are done.
Many states already have made initial plans that de-prioritize the elderly even further, putting all people aged 65 and over (excluding high risk nursing home/care residents) behind these essential workers.
This is pretty outrageous in my view but this train is leaving the station.
Outrageous?
Yes, in my opinion it’s outrageous for healthy 28-year-olds to be prioritized over 74-year-olds. Especially given that many of the healthy 28-year-olds are working remotely.
Rockefeller Foundation put a big number on the price of Protecting teachers and staff.
“The Rockefeller Foundation’s third National Covid-19 Testing Action Plan calls on the U.S. government to massively scale up Covid-19 testing to 300 million per month for students, teachers, and staff in order to reopen and keep open America’s nearly 100,000 public schools by March. The Plan lays out the largest domestic testing scaleup to date and proposes 14 executive actions for the current and incoming administrations to take in order to rapidly alter the trajectory of the pandemic in the United States. Testing all U.S. public K-12 public schools would cost $42.5 billion, or $8.5 billion per month for the remainder of the school year from February-June 2021.”
UTLA is to be commended, standing strong for the health and wellbeing of students and educators in the face of those who buy school board elections and favorable media coverage with astroturf groups, seeking insane amounts of screen time and standardized testing for more data and more profit. A class grievance has been filed by UTLA because of the added unnecessary standardized tests, and the union has been rightly firm at the table, keeping the students’ instructional minutes and class schedules stable through the changing of semesters in the new side letter agreement. UTLA is also strong at the table negotiating how instruction will look if we go back to school with a hybrid schedule.
When, in January, we negotiate hypothetical hybrid teaching, we need to fight to have adequate safety and quality of instruction regulations in place: to keep from having roving teachers or roving students and to keep from having to manage concurrent online and in-person instruction. And most of all, we need to persuade our county and state leaders to work to make a return to school reasonable instead of opening schools prematurely. That’s why UTLA wrote an open letter on Thursday to the County Board of Supervisors calling for a circuit breaker: a hard shut down in January to try to get Los Angeles’ Covid numbers down. We are the epicenter of disease in the world right now. We cannot simply throw everyone back into classrooms.
I just now got a robocall from Scrooge — I mean Superintendent Beutner. He wants everyone to “stay connected over the holiday.” Funny when your boss calls you at home during your vacation to say he hopes you’re having a good break from work. Ha ha! — ha? ha. He already has students turning in make up work on Christmas this year. He wants us students and teachers to work over the break. Is there a Scrooge Award?
Out of curiosity, I checked out the demographics of the last Parent Trigger instituted by Parent Revolution in southern California. It was Palm Lane Elementary in Anaheim Elementary SD which may be the last one in the whole state. I found very disturbing numbers. While their district lost about 5% of students since the 17/18 school year, Palm Lane lost 50%. What happened at this school?????