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Chicago Teachers Union Blasts Duncan for His Criticism of UTLA

By dianeravitch
January 16, 2019 //
27

This statement was released today by the Chicago Teachers Unuon, the pioneers of #RedForEd in 2012.

Now is a good time to remember CTU President Karen Lewis and her inspirational leadership of the 2012 strike.


Duncan take on LA educators’ strike shows he knows nothing of real student needs

CTU blasts former U.S. education secretary for arguing Los Angeles teachers’ should back off demands in face of ‘lack of resources’ in state with fifth largest economy in the world.

CHICAGO, January 15, 2019—

Chicago Teachers Union President Jesse Sharkey issued the following statement today in response to public pronouncements – including in The Hill – by former U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Los Angeles educators, who began a strike on Monday.

“Arne Duncan has never taught a day in his life. He sent his children to an elite private school with small class sizes and great resources. He landed his job as CEO of Chicago Public Schools through insider ties – where he pushed policies that hurt our public school students’ access to the very same resources his own children had. He’s pushed endlessly for school privatization, and he’s been a national proponent of the teacher blame game as a way to dodge the real need for more resources for public education. Now he wants to silence Los Angeles teachers who are demanding the very supports for their students that Duncan’s children received. That’s the height of hypocrisy.

“LA teachers know what their students need: smaller class sizes, more staff for special education and bilingual education, and the resources and wrap-around supports that allow low-income students of color to thrive as life-long learners and productive adults. Duncan has instead promoted the opposite, by starving neighborhood public schools, promoting privatization and austerity, and purging Black educators from our classrooms. Public education is a right. Duncan has treated it like an afterthought, and has zero credibility with the parents, educators and community residents who care about equity for ALL public students.

“When he’s shilling for management, nowhere does Duncan mention the toxic impact of right wing tax policy on Los Angeles’ Black and Latinx students. He conveniently fails to mention Eli Broad or the Broad Foundation and their scheme to orchestrate the mass privatization of Los Angeles public schools. Instead, Duncan says the union should ‘cooperate’ more with the very management that is seeking to undercut public schools through mass charter expansion. That mirrors his statement almost a decade ago that the devastation of Hurricane Katrina was the ‘best thing’ to happen to New Orleans’ public schools, because it opened the ground for mass charter privatization. As in Chicago under Duncan and his successors, privatization in New Orleans has slashed the number of Black teachers, and more than ten years on, New Orleans’ Black working class parents, students and residents charge that the experiment has failed them. Duncan’s policies profit private operators – and undermine parent voice, public accountability and the educational needs of students.

“Just as Duncan regularly shortchanged CPS by refusing to identify and raise progressive sources of revenue that our schools need, he massively expanded selective enrollment schools for well-off white students. He continued those policies as education czar, to the detriment of school districts across the nation.

“The educational policies he put in motion in Chicago and pushed in Washington have helped drive out thousands of Black families from Chicago, families who struggled to find stable schools for their children at the same time they confronted racist, classist city policies in housing, policing and economic development. As a principal architect of Chicago’s disastrous school closure experiment, Duncan was CEO during the first wave of massive charter expansion in Chicago – forcing neighborhood public schools that had been under-resourced for decades into brutal educational hunger games that have left neighborhood schools starved for resources. As US Education Secretary, he promoted the misnamed ‘Race to the Top’, publicly blaming teachers for the dire consequences of racist school funding practices and endless austerity. He’s dismissed class size as an issue – an excuse to purge thousands of Black public educators in Chicago, at a time when a growing body of research shows that our schoolchildren need more, not fewer, educators of color.

“We need the opposite of what Duncan brought to the table in Chicago and what he proposes in LA. We need smaller class sizes, respect for veteran teachers of color, progressive forms of revenue to adequately support public school students, adequate staffing for special education and bilingual education, and a school nurse in every school. We need an end to the failed school privatization experiment. And we need respect for the voices of parents and educators who are sick of being shortchanged by the political elites that Duncan serves. Instead of asking Los Angeles teachers to shut up and accept less for their students, Duncan should be denouncing the very policies he implemented that have so profoundly harmed public education across the nation.”

Categories Accountability, Chicago, Class size, Duncan, Arne, Funding, Los Angeles, Unions

What’s at Stake in L.A. Teachers’ Strike: The Survival of Public Education

By dianeravitch
January 15, 2019 //
36

The New York Times editorial and opinion pages have been a cheering section for charter expansion for years. I have tried and failed to get articles about the dangers of privatization on the op-Ed page. The last time I tried, my article was rejected, then posted online by the Washington Post (whose editorial board also favors charter schools). After that rejection, I swore I would never again submit an article because I knew it would be turned down. Imagine my surprise when I opened the New York Times to find the article below. Miriam Pawel, an independent historian and a contributing opinion writer for the Times, was allowed to explain the real dynamics behind the teachers’ strike: demographic change; high poverty rates; overcrowded classes; underfunding of the schools; and an aggressive charter industry, led by Eli Broad and other billionaires, willing to spend vast sums to privatize more public schools and kick out the unions.

Online, thisis the subtitle of the article: “Can California provide sufficient resources to support an effective public education system? Or will charter schools cripple it?”

What is so remarkable about this article is: 1. The New York Times printed it; 2. Pawel connected the dots among demographic change, underfunding of the schools, bloated class sizes, and the district’s deference to charter expansion; 3. Pawel acknowledged that the rapid growth of charters is the direct result of the intervention of billionaires like Broad, who poured $54 million into two losing statewide races last fall. I couldn’t have said it better.

Miriam Pawel writes:

LOS ANGELES — For decades, public schools were part of California’s lure, key to the promise of opportunity. Forty years ago, with the lightning speed characteristic of the Golden State, all of that changed.

In the fall of 1978, after years of bitter battles to desegregate Los Angeles classrooms, 1,000 buses carried more than 40,000 students to new schools. Within six months, the nation’s second-largest school district lost 30,000 students, a good chunk of its white enrollment. The busing stopped; the divisions deepened.

Those racial fault lines had helped fuel the tax revolt that led to Proposition 13, the sweeping tax-cut measure that passed overwhelmingly in June 1978. The state lost more than a quarter of its total revenue. School districts’ ability to raise funds was crippled; their budgets shrank for the first time since the Depression. State government assumed control of allocating money to schools, which centralized decision-making in Sacramento.

Public education in California has never recovered, nowhere with more devastating impact than in Los Angeles, where a district now mostly low-income and Latino has failed generations of children most in need of help. The decades of frustration and impotence have boiled over in a strike with no clear endgame and huge long-term implications. The underlying question is: Can California ever have great public schools again?

The struggle in Los Angeles, a district so large it educates about 9 percent of all students in the state, will resonate around California. Oakland teachers are on the verge of a strike vote. Sacramento schools are on the verge of bankruptcy. The housing crisis has compounded teacher shortages. Los Angeles, like many districts, is losing students, and therefore dollars, even as it faces ballooning costs for underfunded pensions.

California still ranks low in average per-pupil spending, roughly half the amount spent in New York. California legislators have already filed bills proposing billions of dollars in additional aid, one of many competing pressures that face the new governor, Gavin Newsom, as he begins negotiations on his first state budget.

Unlike other states where teachers struck last year, California is firmly controlled by Democrats, for whom organized labor is a key ally. And the California teachers unions are among the most powerful lobbying force in Sacramento.

On paper, negotiations between the 31,000-member United Teachers of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Unified School District center on traditional issues: salaries that have not kept pace, classes of more than 40 students, counselors and nurses with staggering caseloads. But the most potent and divisive issue is not directly on the bargaining table: the future of charter schools, which now enroll more than 112,000 students, almost one-fifth of all K-through-12 students in the district. They take their state aid with them, siphoning off $600 million a year from the district. The 224 independent charters operate free from many regulations, and all but a few are nonunion.

When California authorized the first charter schools in 1992 as a small experiment, no one envisioned that they would grow into an industry, now educating 10 percent of public school students in the state. To counter demands for greater regulation and transparency, charter advocates have in recent years poured millions into political campaigns. Last year, charter school lobbies spent $54 million on losing candidates for governor and state superintendent of education.

In Los Angeles, they have had more success. After his plan to move half of the Los Angeles district students into charter schools failed to get traction, the billionaire and charter school supporter Eli Broad and a group of allies spent almost $10 million in 2017 to win a majority on the school board. The board rammed through the appointment of a superintendent, Austin Beutner, with no educational background. Mr. Beutner, a former investment banker, is the seventh in 10 years and has proposed dividing the district into 32 “networks,” a so-called portfolio plan designed in part by the consultant who engineered the radical restructuring of Newark schools.

“In my 17 years working with labor unions, I have been called on to help settle countless bargaining disputes in mediation,” wrote Vern Gates, the union-appointed member of the fact-finding panel called in to help mediate the Los Angeles stalemate last month. “I have never seen an employer that was intent on its own demise.”

It’s a vicious cycle: The more overcrowded and burdened the regular schools, the easier for charters to recruit students. The more students the district loses, the less money, and the worse its finances. The more the district gives charters space in traditional schools, the more overcrowded the regular classrooms.

Enrollment in the Los Angeles school district has declined consistently for 15 years, increasing the competition for students. It now educates just under a half-million students. More than 80 percent are poor, about three-quarters are Latino, and about one-quarter are English-language learners. On most state standardized tests, more than one-third fall below standards.

For 20 years, Katie Safford has taught at Ivanhoe Elementary, a school so atypical and so desirable that it drives up real estate prices in the upscale Silver Lake neighborhood. Ivanhoe parents raise almost a half million a year so that their children can have sports, arts, music and supplies. But parents cannot buy smaller classes or a school nurse. Mrs. Safford’s second-grade classroom is a rickety bungalow slated for demolition. When the floor rotted, the district put carpet over the holes. When leaks caused mold on the walls, Mrs. Safford hung student art to cover stains. The clock always reads 4:20.

“I was born to be a teacher,” Mrs. Safford said. “I have no interest in being an activist. None. But this is ridiculous.” For the first time in her life, she marched last month, one of more than 10,000 teachers and supporters in a sea of red.

Monday she walked the picket line outside a school where just eight of the 456 students showed up. Now her second graders ask the questions no one can answer: When will you be back? How will it end?

It is hard to know, when the adults have so thoroughly abdicated their responsibility for so long. Last week, the school board directed the superintendent to draw up a plan examining ways to raise new revenue.

This strike comes at a pivotal moment for California schools, amid recent glimmers of hope. Demographic shifts have realigned those who vote with those who rely on public services like schools. Voters approved state tax increases to support education in 2012, and again in 2016. In the most recent election, 95 of 112 school bond issues passed, a total of over $15 billion. The revised state formula drives more money into districts with more low-income students and English learners. Total state school aid increased by $23 billion over the past five years, and Governor Newsom has proposed another increase.

If Los Angeles teachers can build on those gains, the victory will embolden others to push for more, just as teachers on the rainy picket lines this week draw inspiration from the successful #RedforEd movements around the country. The high stakes have drawn support from so many quarters, from the Rev. James Lawson, the 90-year-old civil rights icon, to a “Tacos for Teachers” campaign to fund food on the picket lines.

If this fight for public education in Los Angeles fails, it will consign the luster of California schools to an ever more distant memory.

Miriam Pawel (@miriampawel), a contributing opinion writer, is an author, journalist and independent historian.

Categories Accountability, Broad Foundation, Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, Class size, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, Los Angeles, Privatization, Union

Arne Duncan Blasts UTLA and Opposes Strike

By dianeravitch
January 13, 2019 //
69

Glenn Sacks, a high school teacher, read Arne Duncan’s editorial blast at the UTLA teachers’ strike and concluded that the former Secretary of Education really knows nothing about conditions of teaching in the Los Angeles public schools.

Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan Slams LA Teachers for Strike 

Sacks begins:

“The closer we get to a strike, the more pressure is put on us to call it off. In a recent article in The Hill, pro-charter/anti-union former Education secretary Arne Duncan criticizes United Teachers of Los Angeles, citing the Los Angeles Unified School District’s alleged financial problems. Yet the neutral, state-appointed factfinder on the dispute contradicts many of LAUSD’s (and Duncan’s) claims.

“For example, Duncan tells us LAUSD “is headed toward insolvency in about two years if nothing changes…It simply does not have the money to fund UTLA’s demands.” But arbitrator David A. Weinberg, the Neutral Chair of the California Public Employment Relations Board fact-finding panel, while noting the challenges LAUSD faces, found that the District’s reserves skyrocketed from $500 million in 2013-2014 to $1.8 billion in 2017-2018. Three years ago LAUSD projected that their 2018-2019 reserve would be only $100 million—it’s actually $1.98 billion. We’ve heard these alarming claims for many years–for LAUSD, the sky is always falling, but somehow it never falls.

“Duncan tells us LAUSD “has an average of 26 students per class. Of the 10 largest school districts in California, only one has a smaller average class size than Los Angeles.” These numbers are disputed by UTLA. Moreover, even if 26 is correct on paper, Duncan should know that student-to-teacher ratios count special education and other specialized teachers who normally have much smaller classes than regular classroom teachers. Class sizes are significantly larger than standard student-teacher ratios indicate.

“At my high school, for example, we have over 30 academic classes with 41 or more students, including nine English/writing classes with as many as 49 students, and three AP classes with 46 or more students. One English teacher has well over 206 students—41+ per class. A US Government teacher has 52 students in his AP government class. Writing is a key component of both classes—the sizes make it is impossible for these teachers to properly review and help students with their essays.”

Duncan makes clear that he sides with management and against UTLA. Betsy DeVos and Duncan are on the same side. Why are we not surprised.

Categories Class size, Duncan, Arne, Education Reform, Los Angeles, Union

Leonie Haimson: Teachers in Los Angeles Are Right to Strike for Smaller Class Sizes

By dianeravitch
January 11, 2019 //
19

Leonie Haimson knows the research on class size, and she explains here why Los Angeles teachers are right to strike for smaller classes. The higher the needs of the students, the more they need smaller classes. Yet in our society, only the very wealthiest students attend schools where class sizes may be as low as 12 or 15.

She writes:

Though some people make the claim that class size doesn’t really matter for a great teacher, it does. Research conclusively shows that small classes benefit all students, but especially disadvantaged students of color, who reap twice the benefit from small classes.

In the Hill newspaper, former U.S. education secretary Arne Duncan, who worked under former president Barack Obama, wrote an op-ed in opposition to the strike and in defense of the district’s position in which he made several questionable claims. The first was to support the district’s statement that LAUSD has smaller average classes than any other large California district but San Francisco. He wrote:

“On class size, Los Angeles Unified has an average of 26 students per class. Of the 10 largest school districts in California, only one has a smaller average class size than Los Angeles.”

There is conflicting data on this, but suffice it to say that information on the LAUSD website supports the union’s position that average class sizes are probably far larger than 26 in every grade but K-3, with averages of more than 30 students per class in grades 4 through 8, and more than 40 in high school classes.

She adds:

The argument currently between the union and the district is not about average class sizes but maximum class sizes — and more specifically, whether the district should adhere to any limits on class size at all.

There is a waiver in the current contract that allows the district to ignore any and all class size caps, as long as they claim financial necessity — and the administration has take advantage of this waiver every single year since the great recession in 2009. That year, the district issued massive teacher layoffs, which increased class sizes in nearly every school. Since then, the administration has continued to use this loophole in the contract to unilaterally decide to violate previously agreed-upon contractual caps, despite the fact that the district has experienced budget surpluses for many years in a row.

Haimson is founder of a group called Class Size Matters, and she knows the research better than anyone else I know.

This is one of those common occurrences when teachers know what their students need. And they know it better than the non-educator/equity investor who now is in charge of the Los Angeles schools or the basketball player who used to be Secretary of Education.

Categories Class size, Education Reform, Los Angeles

Alex Caputo-Pearl: Why LA Teachers May Be Forced to Strike

By dianeravitch
January 7, 2019 //
10

Alex Caputo-Pearl is president of the United Teachers of Los Angeles. He explains why teachers may strike.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-caputo-pearl-teachers-strike-20190106-story.html

He writes:

Teachers in Los Angeles may be forced to strike on Jan. 10.

The Los Angeles Unified School District has a record-breaking reserve of nearly $2 billion that should be spent on its resource-starved students. Yet Supt. Austin Beutner, a multimillionaire with experience in corporate downsizing but none in education, argues that the reserve is already accounted for in future spending, and that cuts should be made. He simultaneously refuses to talk about charter school regulations, calling the issue a “shiny ball” that distracts from the real issues.

District officials have cast the impasse as a funding problem. But at its heart, the standoff between L.A. Unified and United Teachers Los Angeles is a struggle over the future of public education.

Consider the conditions within the district. Class sizes often exceed 45 students in secondary schools; 35 students in upper elementary grades; and 25 students in lower elementary grades.

The district does not have nearly enough counselors, psychologists or librarians to give students the support they need, and 80% of schools don’t even have full-time nurses. Unnecessary standardized testing is pushing the arts and ethnic studies out of the curriculum.

Parents have little say over how funding is spent at their schools. Charter schools, which are operated mostly by corporate chains, have expanded by 287% over the last 10 years, draining more than $600 million from non-charter schools every year. Salaries for educators are low compared to surrounding districts, a significant disadvantage as L.A. Unified tries to recruit and retain teachers during a national shortage.

With the vast majority of our students coming from low-income neighborhoods of color, there is no way to describe the persistence of such conditions other than racial discrimination.
Working together with parents, the teachers union has put forward proposals to address many of these issues. Over 20 months of negotiations, the district has responded with inadequate counter-proposals.

Meanwhile, Beutner has moved ahead with what we believe is his agenda to dismantle the district. Through an outside foundation, he has brought on firms that have led public school closures and charter expansion in some districts where they have worked, from New Orleans to Washington, D.C. This approach, drawn from Wall Street, is called the “portfolio” model, and it has been criticized for having a negative effect on student equity and parent inclusion.

It is for many of these reasons that 98% of L.A. Unified’s educators voted to authorize a strike. Parents are actively supporting the teachers. There were many parents among the estimated 50,000 people who attended the UTLA March for Public Education on Dec. 15.
Beutner has attempted to narrow the issues mainly to salary. Educators will not be bought off. We need a host of improvements for our students.

Beutner has also said that the district doesn’t have reserves that will last longer than two to three years. The reality is that L.A. Unified had a reserve of $1.86 billion at the end of the 2017-18 school year. Its latest budget documents show the reserve growing to $1.97 billion in the 2018-19 school year.
The district warns about a fiscal cliff, but its warnings ring hollow. Three years ago, district officials projected that the 2017-18 reserve would be $105 million. They were off by more than $1.7 billion.

L.A. Unified has also overestimated its spending on books and other supplies over the last five years to the tune of hundreds of millions, meaning more money is available. The district has also failed to collect the full amounts owed by charters that are located on its campuses.

My colleagues and I agree with Beutner on at least one thing: The real long-term solution is for Sacramento to increase statewide school funding. It is downright shameful that the richest state in the country ranks 43rd out of 50 when it comes to per-pupil spending.

We have been working to change this. Beutner should help by supporting legislation to close the carried interest loophole, which has allowed hedge fund managers to inappropriately classify income as capital gains. This could bring hundreds of millions to schools annually.

He should also build support among the wealthy for Schools and Communities First, which closes the corporate loophole in Proposition 13 and could bring up to $5 billion in new annual funding to public schools. This is on the 2020 ballot.

United Teachers Los Angeles’ struggle for a fair contract is just one part of a broader movement for students, families and schools. We will engage in whatever talks are possible before Jan. 10 to avert a strike. But for talks to be successful, the district needs to commit to improve public schools.

I have taught in Compton and at Crenshaw High School. I have been in my own children’s classrooms. And I have visited hundreds of other schools. There is wonderful promise in the students at all of our schools. But although they are surrounded by wealth, students across the city are not getting what they deserve

Enough is enough. Invest in our students now.

Categories Class size, Education Reform, Funding, Los Angeles, Teachers, Unions

Nancy Bailey: Arne Duncan Can’t Stop Peddling the Dangerous Corporate Reform Dogma

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2019 //
47

Nancy E. Bailey is turning into a superstar of education blogging. She is a retired teacher and she has a firm understanding of corporate reform and its dangers.

In this post, she reviews Arne Duncan’s stubborn embrace of dangerous corporate reform.

I will copy only a portion of the post. I urge you to read it all, because it is priceless as an evisceration of failed “reformer” ideas. You should also see her links, which are many.

She writes:

With Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, it might be tempting to see Arne Duncan as an educational expert, but Duncan has never formally studied education, or been a teacher. Duncan paved the way for DeVos.

EdSurge recently brought us Arne Duncan’s 6 lessons about education. They are nothing but the same old corporate reforms that have destroyed public schools and the futures of children for years.

The lessons are wrong.

Here are his claims and my anti-arguments.

He emphasizes early childhood education and the economy.

While there’s a school-to-work connection, especially with older students in high school, teaching young children should be about their development, not promoting the economy.

Too often this message results in pushing young children to work at a higher level than they’re capable.

The report of which Duncan refers is by James J. Heckman, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago. It highlights the economy and the nation’s workforce.

Here are the subheadings of the article.

*Early childhood development drives success in school and life.
*Investing in early childhood education for at-risk children is an effective strategy for reducing social costs.
*Investing in early childhood education is a cost-effective strategy for promoting economic growth.
*Make greater investments in young children to see greater returns in education, health and productivity.

His thoughts about equity are misleading.

Duncan argues that poor children need something different than what wealthy students find in their schools.

But poor children deserve well-run schools, with resources and qualified teachers, not strict charter schools run by management companies and novices.

Most charter schools care more about their bottom line.

Feeding poor children and health screenings should be a part of every school plan.

If Duncan cared so much about grief and trauma in children, why didn’t we see an increase in counselors, school nurses, and school psychologists under his watch?

He claims class sizes don’t matter.

This has been the refrain by reformers like Bill Gates for years and it is false.

Here’s the STAR study as one example in favor of lowering class size.

Lowering class sizes would help teachers have better overall classroom management.

Students would be safer, and children would get a better grasp of reading and other subjects in the early years.

He says teachers matter more than class size.

Real teacher qualifications matter. But that’s not what Duncan is talking about.

He is promoting the faulty idea that a “good” teacher can manage huge class sizes. Of course, this makes no sense.

This is also connected in a roundabout way to replacing teachers with technology. Imagine one teacher teaching thousands online.

Duncan has always been on the side of Teach for America fast-track trained teachers. Consider that they will likely become charter school facilitators, babysitters, when students face screens for their schooling.

He uses teachers as the fix for poverty.

This is an old and dangerous refrain. This message drove No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. It made standardized testing and one-size-fits all common practice.

Teachers can help students, but economic forces are greater than anything a child can learn at school.

Blaming teachers for the problems in the economy, has always been about getting the public to take their eyes off the real culprit of economic woes, the greed of those who run corporations!

Please read on. This is a great post!

Categories Charter Schools, Childhood, Class size, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Economy, Education Industry, Poverty, Privatization, Teachers, Testing

Glenn Sacks: The Case for a Teachers’ Strike in Los Angeles

By dianeravitch
January 4, 2019 //
10

Glenn Sacks, a social studies teacher in Los Angeles, reports that the neutral fact-finders validated most of UTLA’s criticisms of LAUSD.

He says that the time to strike grows near, unless LAUSD changes its positions on critical issues affecting students and classrooms.

He writes:

In the last step before United Teachers of Los Angeles could legally strike against the Los Angeles Unified School District, the California Public Employment Relations Board heard both parties and issued its recommendations for a settlement. While one wouldn’t know it from LAUSD’s statements, taken as a whole the report largely amounts to a lawyers’ brief in favor of UTLA’s positions.

LAUSD triumphantly announced that the report “is consistent with” its September offer to UTLA. Yet the only major area of factfinder agreement LAUSD cites is its offer of a 6 percent raise over a three-year contract. The district only made this offer after 17 months of negotiations–originally teachers were not offered any raise at all.

By contrast, on issue after issue, Arbitrator David A. Weinberg, the Neutral Chair of the fact-finding panel, came down on the side of UTLA.

One of LAUSD’s most egregious practices is its repeated scrapping of contractually-agreed to class size limits. Section 1.5 of the contract allows the district to set aside these limits during a financial crisis. The district abuses this provision by claiming a dubious crisis to invoke 1.5 on an almost annual basis. This wounds children by ripping away dedicated teachers with whom they’ve built important bonds. It also raises class sizes.

UTLA prioritized eliminating this harmful clause, and Weinberg endorsed this. He added, “I agree with the Union argument that lower class sizes are one of the best predictors of successful teaching and student success.”

LAUSD’s salary offer mandates that teachers do an additional 12 hours of professional development. Weinberg agreed with UTLA that this requirement should be dropped.

While LAUSD often claims its teachers receive generous pay and benefits, Weinberg wrote “I agree with the Union’s argument that the bargaining unit deserves to be higher ranked in comparison to other jurisdictions given the combination of a higher cost of living in the LA metro area, and the difficulty in teaching a population of students with so many needs and challenges.”

Categories Class size, Los Angeles, Union

Governor-Elect Newsom: Expanding Pre-K Cannot Take the Place of Reducing Class Sizes!

By dianeravitch
January 3, 2019 //
14

Governor-Elected Gavin Newsom has let it be known that he plans to use California’s large reserves to expand pre-K.

As we have learned in New York City these past few years, expanding pre-K is great, but it is far from enough.

The most pressing problem in California’s schools are:

1. Reducing class sizes in K-12
2. Increasing teachers’ salaries
3. A moratorium on charter schools, which take money away from public schools
4. Providing the counselors and support personnel that schools need

Governor-Elect Newsom should not forget that the billionaires spent huge sums of money funding former Los Angeles Mayor Villaraigosa, who came in third.

And they spent millions more trying to defeat new State Superintendent Tony Thurmond and losing.

Put the money where the kids are.

Pre-K is nice but not enough.

From the LA Times:

Seeking to frame his new administration as one with a firm focus on closing the gap between children from affluent and poor families, Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom will propose spending some $1.8 billion on an array of programs designed to boost California’s enrollment in early education and child-care programs.

Newsom’s plan, which he hinted at in a Fresno event last month, will be a key element in the state budget proposal he submits to the Legislature shortly after taking office Monday, a source close to the governor-elect’s transition team said Tuesday.

The spending would boost programs designed to ensure children enter kindergarten prepared to learn, closing what some researchers have called the “readiness gap” that exists based on a family’s income. It would also phase in an expansion of prekindergarten, and offer money to help school districts that don’t have facilities for full-day kindergarten.

“The fact that he’s making significant investments with his opening budget is really exciting,” Ted Lempert, president of the Bay Area-based nonprofit Children Now, said Tuesday. “What’s exciting is the comprehensiveness of it, because it’s saying we’re going to focus on prenatal through age 5.”

A broad overview document reviewed by The Times shows that most of the outlay under the plan — $1.5 billion — would be a one-time expense in the budget year that begins July 1. Those dollars would be a single infusion of cash, an approach favored by Gov. Jerry Brown in recent years.

Most of the money would be spent on efforts to expand childcare services and kindergarten classes. By law, a governor must submit a full budget to the Legislature no later than Jan. 10. Lawmakers will spend the winter and spring reviewing the proposal and must send a final budget plan to Newsom by June 15.

The governor-elect will propose a $750-million boost to kindergarten funding, aimed at expanding facilities to allow full-day programs. A number of school districts offer only part-day programs, leaving many low-income families to skip enrolling their children due to kindergarten classes that end in the middle of the workday. The dollars would not count toward California’s three-decades-old education spending guarantee, Proposition 98, and therefore would not reduce planned spending on other education services.

Close behind in total cost is a budget proposal by Newsom to help train child-care workers and expand local facilities already subsidized by the state, as well as those serving parents who attend state colleges and universities. Together, those efforts could cost a total of $747 million, according to the document reviewed Tuesday.

An expansion of prekindergarten programs would be phased in over three years at a cost of $125 million in the first year. The multiyear rollout would, according to the budget overview, “ensure the system can plan for the increase in capacity.”
Lempert said the Newsom proposal is notable for trying to avoid battles in recent years that pitted prekindergarten and expanded child care against each other for additional taxpayer dollars…

Another $200 million of the proposal would be earmarked for programs that provide home visits to expectant parents from limited-income families and programs that provide healthcare screenings for young children. Some of the money would come from the state’s Medi-Cal program, and other money from federal matching dollars. Funding for the home visits program was provided in the budget Brown signed last summer, and the Newsom effort would build on that.

The incoming governor is likely to face considerable demands for additional spending, in part because the Legislature’s independent analysts believe continued strength in tax revenues could produce a cash reserve of some $29 billion over the next 18 months. Almost $15 billion of that amount could be in unrestricted reserves, the kind that can be spent on any number of government programs.…

Categories California, Class size, Early Childhood Education

Los Angeles: Why Reduced Class Size is Worth Fighting For

By dianeravitch
December 24, 2018 //
11

Los Angeles high school teacher Glenn Sacks explains why it is important to reduce class sizes and why studies that say otherwise are misleading.

He writes:


As a January teachers’ strike looms, 50,000 teachers, parents, and students marched at a United Teachers of Los Angeles’ demonstration Saturday, demanding that LAUSD address students’ needs. UTLA’s central demand is that LAUSD reduce class sizes. At my high school, for example, we have over 30 academic classes with 41 or more students, including nine English/writing classes as many as 49 students, and three AP classes with 46 or more students. Yet some of UTLA’s opponents assert that class size doesn’t matter, citing studies that did not find a link between class sizes and educational performance.

These studies are significantly flawed. Economist Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach of Northwestern University, a prominent educational scholar, explains:

“The academic research has many examples of poor-quality studies…perhaps the most common misinterpretation is caused by low-achieving or special needs students being systematically assigned to smaller classes. In these cases, a simple correlation would find class size is negatively associated with achievement, but such a finding could not be validly generalized to conclude that class size does not matter or that smaller classes are harmful.”

For example, the current LAUSD norm for Special Education Mild to Moderate classes is 12-14 students. These students take the same standardized tests (albeit sometimes with minor modifications) as General Education students do. To include the small class sizes and low academic performance of these classes to judge the effect of small class sizes on overall student performance is beyond absurd.

Of particular relevance to LAUSD is Schanzenbach’s finding that smaller classes are particularly effective at raising achievement levels of low-income and minority children, and that these students are the ones most harmed by class size increases. Of LAUSD’s student population, 76 percent live in poverty, and 90 percent are minority.

She concludes, “Class size matters. Research supports the common-sense notion that children learn more and teachers are more effective in smaller classes.”

Critics like to cite student-to-teacher ratios—numbers which generally sound reasonable–to make UTLA sound unreasonable. Yet these ratios count special education and other specialized teachers who normally have much smaller classes than regular classroom teachers do. Class sizes are significantly larger than standard student-teacher ratios indicate.

It makes a big difference whether a teacher’s weekly grading ritual involves grading 180 students’ essays and tests or only 125. The extra time it takes to grade those is directly taken away from our students. Every teacher has a long list of things they’d love to do better or more often for their students, if they only had the time. My list includes:

• Call in the disengaged, failing kid sitting in back—the one researchers say is often hit the hardest by large class sizes—and discuss (and then implement) a plan to get them interested in the class.

• Every class has someone like my government student Jonathan, who participates in class with gusto but routinely underperforms on tests. One solution is an oral exam. It’s a legitimate test—if Jonathan doesn’t know his stuff, there’s no way he could hide it from me.

• Students often send me video clips, songs, memes, and articles related to something we’ve studied. When a student connects a lesson to something that they’ve taken note of in current politics, it fuels their motivation and interest. I try to review and (when appropriate) incorporate them into upcoming lessons.

• Going to their athletic or academic events. Students often ask—they like their teachers to see what they’re doing, and it helps teachers build bonds with their students.

• As I grade tests, look for students who have been struggling but who did well, and text their parents the good news. It’s nice to hear a student say, “Thanks for that. It made my mom happy.” It’s also important to share the positives with parents, as opposed to communicating only when there’s trouble.

All of these things take time. The time that excessive class sizes cost us can turn a great teacher into a good one, a good one into an average one, an average one into a struggling one, and a struggling one into an ineffective one.

LAUSD’s own figures show they could reduce class sizes to pre-2008 levels for $200 million — only 10 percent of their current reserve. There’s much debate by educational researchers about various ways to improve our educational system. But there’s no debate about class sizes. Lowering them would be the quickest, surest way LAUSD could help our students.

Categories Class size, Los Angeles, Teachers and Teaching

Bill Raden from Los Angeles: Buckle Your Seat Belts, Strike Ahead!

By dianeravitch
December 21, 2018 //
3

Bill Raden, education writer for Capital & Main in California, writes about the looming teachers’ strike in Los Angeles.

Fasten your seatbelts Los Angeles, it’s going to be a bumpy strike. That was the subtext to a tumultuous week that saw over 50,000 L.A. teachers, students and families take to the streets Saturday to support a union faced with budgetary saber-rattling by Los Angeles Unified, and that climaxed on Wednesday with United Teachers Los Angeles president Alex Caputo-Pearl setting a January 10 walkout date — unless Los Angeles Unified negotiators meet key union demands for investments in the district’s highest-poverty students.

Caputo-Pearl’s announcement came a day after L.A. Unified superintendent Austin Beutner erroneously claimed that the union had accepted the district’s six percent pay raise offer, as recommended in Tuesday’s report by state-appointed fact-finders who also urged LAUSD to kick in the modest equivalent of a one to three percent salary increase for new hires to reduce class sizes, and for both sides to work together to lobby Sacramento for more state funding.

Fact-finding panel chairman David A. Weinberg mostly punted on 19 of 21 unresolved equity demands that form the heart of what UTLA has framed as a fight to save L.A.’s “civic institution of public education.” The union won some minor points, like the allowing of teacher input on charter co-locations, and on scrapping a district privilege to unilaterally lift class size caps during fiscal crunches. But by accepting at face value LAUSD’s latest claims of imminent bankruptcy, Weinberg left unanswered a critical question: How could LAUSD annually project catastrophic, three-year deficits and still have its unrestricted cash reserves balloon from $500 million to nearly $2 billion during the same five-year period?

“We have watched underfunding and actions of privatizers undermine our students and our schools for too long. No more,” Caputo-Pearl warned on Wednesday.

Categories Accountability, Class size, Funding, Los Angeles, Resistance, Teachers, Union
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