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Glenn Sacks: Why the L.A. Strike Is Good for Workers and Students

By dianeravitch
March 25, 2023 //
8

Glenn Sacks teaches social studies at James Monroe High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District. He is one of the UTLA (United Teachers of Los Angeles) representatives for his school and also a strike captain in both 2019 and 2023. I was pleased to join the 2019 strike and walk the picket line with UTLA. Wish I could have been in L.A. for this one too.

The public schools of Los Angeles were closed this past week by a three-day strike, led by the low-wage staff represented by SEIU 99—about 30,000 workers, including bus drivers, teacher aides, custodians, cafeteria workers, gardeners, and special education assistants. The UTLA struck in support of the SEIU; UTLA’s 35,000 members include teachers, counselors, therapists, nurses and librarians.

A tentative settlement was reached after Mayor Karen Bass intervened to mediate. The SEIU was seeking a 30% wage increase, and they won it. The agreement must be approved by the membership.

Glenn Sacks reported the unions’ victory directly to me:

Friday afternoon SEIU and LAUSD reached an agreement which addresses SEIU’s central demands. The agreement includes:

• a 30% wage increase

• Retroactive pay of $4000-$8000, depending on job classification, including a $1000 bonus for all
• Increase to average annual salary from $25,000 to $33,000
• 7 hours of work guaranteed for Special Education Assistants
• Fully paid health care benefits, including family coverage, for Teacher Assistants, Community Representatives, After School Program Workers and others)

The average pay for SEIU workers went from $15.00 an hour to $22.52 an hour.

As the UTLA often says: “When we fight, we win.”

Sacks wrote this article for FOX News. Good for him for getting published in a place usually dominated by anti-union views!

I don’t blame our bosses for being surprised.

For decades Los Angeles Unified School District’s workforce has been divided into eight different unions. Our contracts expire at different times and labor law often ties our hands, so LAUSD plays us off against each other, to the detriment of all employees.

Service Employees International Union Local 99 represents 30,000 LAUSD bus drivers, teaching assistants, maintenance workers and cafeteria staff. Recently SEIU announced a three-day “Unfair Practice Charge” strike based on its well-founded accusations that LAUSD’s mistreatment of SEIU workers violates California labor law.

LAUSD probably expected that with teachers coming in to work, along with personnel brought in from LAUSD headquarters on an emergency basis, they could roll right over SEIU, as school districts often do to campus workers in similar situations.

Except this week, Los Angeles teachers said “No.”

Over half of LAUSD’s SEIU workers have children in LAUSD. Many of our students have aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins and older siblings who work at LAUSD.

There is only one way UTLA educators could keep faith with our students, their families and the workers whose labor enables us to educate our students — by honoring SEIU’s picket lines.

Our sympathy strike (aka “solidarity strike”) is very much in line with the traditions of American labor. American labor unions were built through labor solidarity, and in recent decades, unions have been undermined because union leaders have abjured sympathy strikes.

On this issue, recently one publication often critical of teachers unions unwittingly paid UTLA a complement:

“State law allows one bargaining unit to go on a sympathy strike with another union, but
Bradley Marianno, an assistant education professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said it’s ‘highly unusual,’ for a teachers union to join a walkout with non-teaching employees.

“‘They may issue statements of support, but to join in strike is a different, and relatively rare, matter.’”

SEIU has historically been a much weaker union than UTLA. Their membership is divided into many different job classifications, they are often on campus at different times, and their heavily minority, immigrant and female membership is at a much lower socioeconomic level.

Despite this, SEIU’s performance this week was remarkably strong, reflecting the raw anger of its members over low wages and LAUSD abuses, which were well-documented by the national media this week.

UTLA has its own contract battle with LAUSD, but its robust showing this week also reflects our sympathy for our SEIU colleagues and the fact that UTLA has become a strong, disciplined labor union.

LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho has found himself increasingly isolated, as many key players in Los Angeles education, including Austin Beutner, LAUSD superintendent from 2018 to 2021, school board Member Kelly Gonez, who served as president of the LAUSD Board of Education from 2020 until earlier this year, and LAUSD school board President Jackie Goldberg have all made statements undermining Carvalho in his battle against SEIU.

Earlier this week dozens of CA Legislators signed a letter backing SEIU, telling Carvalho to “resolve this.”

As in 2019, many of LAUSD’s own school administrators made it clear their hearts aren’t in this battle either, with some walking early morning picket lines with us or bringing us coffee and donuts.

Carvalho, humbled by the firestorm he foolishly ignited, has pivoted, shifting from stonewalling and even mocking SEIU workers towards a humble, “I feel your pain” posture.

Some of our critics claim our strike hurts our students, yet meeting SEIU demands will improve our schools.

To pick one example among many, each day special education students are deprived of two hours of their special education assistants’ time. Why?

LAUSD keeps these paraprofessionals at only six hours a day, so they won’t be considered full-time employees. This petty chiseling at the expense of our students typifies the way LAUSD mistreats its SEIU employees.

Other critics assert that parents have turned against teachers unions. These people are kidding themselves.

Polls show LAUSD parents support educators. A Loyola Marymount University poll taken earlier this year asked “LAUSD teachers requested an increase in salary. If labor negotiations cannot reach an agreement, would you support or oppose LAUSD teachers going on strike to meet their demands?”

Among those living within LAUSD’s boundaries, 76% supported teachers. Among those aged 18-29 — people who most likely attended LAUSD schools not long ago — 88% supported teachers.

Moreover, throughout this week of picket lines and massive rallies, the public showed they were behind us with continual honking horns, raised fists and shouts of approval.

As we walk to and from rallies in our union colors, we’ve had truck drivers and firefighters walk up to us, pat us on the back, and tell us, “Good luck.”

Leaving one rally a construction worker walked up to me, shook my hand, and said, “Give ’em hell!”

We did.

Categories California, Inequity, Injustice, Los Angeles, Students, Teachers, Unions

Los Angeles: Successful Public School Wants Co-Located Charter School to Leave

By dianeravitch
January 27, 2023 //
8

Erin Aubrey Kaplan writes in the Los Angeles Times about a successful public school—Baldwin Hills Elementary—that wants a co-located charter school to leave their space. Kaplan notes that there is a long history of feuding between public schools and charters, but this conflict is a first. The public school has parent and community support for reclaiming its space.

She writes that the fight is forcing a question:

Will the Los Angeles Unified School District find a way to support — even magnify — that rarest of success stories: a high achieving predominantly Black neighborhood school?

For the last seven years, Baldwin Hills Elementary School, a nearly 80-year-old campus in the Crenshaw district, has had to share digs with a charter, New Los Angeles Elementary.

New L.A. has about 200 students; Baldwin Hills twice that, but the neighborhood school’s sense of infringement isn’t just about the comparative sizes of the two student bodies.

BHE features ambitious programs. It houses a gifted magnet and serves as a “community school,” with “wraparound” healthcare and family support services. It’s also a so-called pilot school, which gives it the autonomy to offer unique classes such yoga, chess and orchestra. And it’s a designated STEAM campus — science, technology, engineering, the arts and math. In 2020, the state Department of Education designated Baldwin Hills, where 82% of the student body is Black, a distinguished school.

Not surprisingly, BHE parents and teachers tend to be organized, involved and deeply committed to growing what is regarded as an unqualified school success. To do that, they say, the school needs to get back space that was deemed nonessential and ceded to New L.A.: The charter, they say, must be relocated.

Back in October, members of Neighbors in Action for Baldwin Hills Elementary, a BHE parent-community-teacher coalition, sent a letter to LAUSD outlining their colocation complaints.

Sharing the campus, they wrote, “has greatly diminished the school’s ability to meet students’ social-emotional needs and mental health wellness, and hampered access to the academic programs that the school has been tasked with providing.”

Because of space constraints, Baldwin Hills is out a computer and robotics lab. Orchestra classes have been conducted on the playground blacktop. Students have to eat lunch hurriedly in a time-shared cafeteria. The bathrooms are overcrowded and sometimes unsafe.

In short, Baldwin Hills is an unfolding success story, in spite of colocation. “If we can do this in a stifled environment, imagine what we could do in a regular environment,” says Love Collins, a parent who switched her third-grader from a private school to Baldwin Hills.

The BHE coalition insists the district could find a way within the rules to relocate New L.A. (For it’s part, New L.A. claims to be looking elsewhere for a “permanent” school site.)

Community schools, for example, are supposed to be exempt from colocation, a rule the parents believe should apply at BHE despite the fact that Baldwin Hills wasn’t designated a community school until after New L.A. had moved in.

It’s a point that feels strengthened by recent developments. Two years ago, a new state law, AB 1505, gave school districts — charter school “authorizers” — expanded criteria in deciding whether to deny space to new charters or renew the leases of existing ones.

So far, LAUSD’s response has been underwhelming. Half a dozen district representatives came to Baldwin Hills for a town hall after the October letter, but as a second letter the coalition organizers sent to the district points out, none of their specific complaints or proposed solutions were addressed.

For months, the BHE group has solicited the support — or simply a call-back — from their LAUSD District 1 board member, George McKenna. When he was principal at Washington Prep, McKenna had a well-earned reputation for advocating for students of color and instituting a culture of high expectation. But neither he nor his staff has met with Neighbors in Action for Baldwin Hills Elementary.

“I very much support the parents and programs at Baldwin Hills Elementary, and always have,” McKenna says. “It’s a wonderful school.” What he doesn’t say is anything about the colocation conflict.

But the coalition is not scaling back the pressure for more definitive support.

“All we’re asking district to do is find another place to house [New L.A.], and don’t renew their contract at Baldwin,” says Jacquelyn Walker, a longtime teacher at Baldwin Hills who became its community school coordinator last year.

Underlying the many practical arguments here is a philosophical one: If Black lives truly matter, Baldwin Hills deserves — is, in fact, entitled to — as much space as possible.

With BHE, LAUSD has an organic model of Black success that the district should be nurturing, not stunting. In Walker’s words: “Allow us to thrive, give us the opportunity to do what we can do.”

The stakes for students of color are simply too high to do anything less.

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Class size, Community Schools, Democracy, Education Reform, Los Angeles

Los Angeles: Parents Complain About Sharing Their Schools with Charters, Loss of Resouces

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2022 //
21

Parents in South Los Angeles are angry that their schools have been forced to share their space with a charter school. This practice, called co-location, creates tension and rivalry. Robin Urevich of Capital & Main tells the story:

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, some 50 public schools share their campuses with charter schools. It is often a contentious relationship. But now parents and teachers at Baldwin Hills and Trinity elementary schools in South Los Angeles, asserting that such arrangements jeopardize their children’s education, are demanding the Los Angeles Unified School District board end them for the 2022-23 school year. Baldwin Hills Elementary shares its campus with New Los Angeles Charter Elementary School, while Gabriella Charter School 2 is located at Trinity Elementary.

Students at Baldwin Hills take violin lessons on the playground during recess because there is no other space, said Jacquelyn Walker, Baldwin Hills’ community school coordinator. A program that offers fresh produce and clothing to kids and families who need them was forced to move to a nearby school for the same reason, Walker said. Private rooms are sometimes unavailable for counseling kids and families in crisis.


“We lost our computer lab,” said the Rev. AmberMarie Irving, DD, whose son is a second grader at the school. “If that happened at a majority Caucasian school, all hell would break loose,” Irving said.

“We’ve worked tirelessly to find a permanent home that is not on an LAUSD campus,” said Brooke Rios, executive director of New LA Charter School, which has about 198 students on Baldwin’s campus, according to Rios. “We’re aware of the tension,” she said.

Designated a 2020 California Distinguished School, Baldwin Hills is one of just three elementary schools in the district with a majority African American student body that includes a magnet school for gifted students. The school emphasizes science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics. It boasts robotics, engineering, yoga and chess classes, and higher than average test scores. But teacher Marie Germaine said the district has undermined the school’s efforts with the space sharing arrangement. “They want us to accept our own suffering and our own demise. We refuse to accept it.”

Germaine, Walker and Irving were among parents and educators from Baldwin and Trinity who demanded the district get charter schools off their campuses when they addressed the school board on Nov. 1, the deadline for charter schools to request space on district campuses for the upcoming school year. Baldwin and Trinity are both among some 34 LAUSD community schools that are designed to be neighborhood hubs, offering services to children and families after traditional school hours. United Teachers Los Angeles treasurer Alex Orozco said that in 2019, the district agreed to avoid co-locating charter schools on such campuses, but hasn’t done so.

Trinity Elementary is at the other end of the achievement spectrum; it is struggling as one of 100 schools that LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho has targeted for improvement, said teacher Tanya Flores. However, Flores said it is hard to improve when kids do not have adequate space for learning. A fifth grade class meets in the auditorium and a section of the school library serves as a makeshift second grade classroom, she said.

Parent Yuvicela Ruiz said when her fifth grade son’s special education class was moved to another school because of lack of space at Trinity, “it hurt him academically and emotionally. It showed that my son’s education is not valued by the district,” she said.

*   *   *

Relationships between charters and the traditional schools with which they share space have long been fractious. Sharon Delugach, chief of staff to school board member Jackie Goldberg, said sharing campuses can be “like having a really horrible roommate.” Delugach said few co-locations are successful. “There are places where they’ve managed to have a civil relationship, but there’s rarely a positive one.”

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Disruption, Education Industry, Los Angeles

Los Angeles: Teachers at 4 Charter Schools Plan to Strike Today

By dianeravitch
April 28, 2022 //
9

This just in:

FOR PLANNING PURPOSES
ADVISORY FOR THURSDAY, APRIL 28   

On-site Contact
Rosalina Cardenas 

C: 213-280-1144

E: rosalina@cardenasgroup.net


Follow Up ContactGlenn Goldstein

Organization & Field Services, AFT
C: 510-735-4815
E: ggoldste@aft.org

Charter educators to strike on Thursday, April 28, as management continues to deny right to unionize

Educators demand Alliance College-Ready Public Schools begin negotiations on the educators’ first contract after three years and multiple PERB violations

Educators at four Alliance College-Ready charter schools will be going on a one-day Unfair Labor Practice strike on Thursday, April 28, in response to the Alliance Board of Directors continued refusal to negotiate the educators’ first contract after multiple orders by the Public Employment Relations Board to bargain.

WHAT: One-day Unfair Labor Practice strike

WHEN & WHERE: Thursday, April 28, 2022

· MAIN EVENT (rally with speakers, followed by march) — 11:30 a.m.
2301 S Union Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90007 (MAP)

· Picketing starts at 7:15 a.m. Main picket location is Gertz-Merkin 6-12.
2023 S Union Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90007

WHO: Teachers, counselors, and education professionals from Alliance College-Ready charter schools, and rally speakers (below).

· Emcees: Brittany Cliffe and Erin Belefski (UTLA Alliance educators)

· Jamie Garcia, UTLA Alliance educator from Burton Tech High School

· Jackie Goldberg, LAUSD School Board Member District 5

· Gloria Santos & Manuela Chaidez, parents of Alliance students

· Ron Herrera, President of the LA County Federation of Labor

· Jeff Freitas, President of California Federation of Teachers

· Cecily Myart-Cruz, President of UTLA

VISUALS: Strike picket signs, banners, educators leafleting the community, rally, speakers, DJ, march after rally to school for afternoon picket.

A supermajority of educators at the four Alliance charter schools (Alliance Burton Tech, Alliance Gertz-Merkin, Alliance Leichtman Levine Family Foundation ESAT, and Alliance Morgan McKinzie High School) voted to unionize over three years ago with United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA). Since that time educators have gone on multiple occasions to the Alliance Board of Directors to get the board to begin negotiations, but they have refused to bargain.

On February 28, 2022, the California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) announced that Alliance College-Ready Public Schools is in violation of the Educational Employment Relations Act (EERA) for refusing to bargain with educators and once again ordered Alliance to negotiate.

However, the schools’ leadership have yet to meet with the educators to negotiate for their contract. 

Teachers, counselors, psychologists, and parents at the schools are coming together to ensure the highest quality of education at Alliance. Educators love their schools and students, and they believe that — through the collective voice that union membership and the bargaining process provides —  they can advocate for small class sizes, teacher and counselor recruitment and retention, health and safety, and a commitment to social, emotional, and educational support for students that will help build the schools Alliance students need and deserve.

###

 

About Alliance Educators United

 

Alliance Educators United is a movement of dedicated and passionate teachers, counselors, and education professionals in the Alliance College-Ready Public Schools committed to fulfilling the mission and vision of a college-ready education for all Alliance students. We are forming a union with United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) to have a collective and effective voice in the decision-making processes at our Alliance schools.

 

About UTLA

 

United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) is 35,000 educators in Los Angeles dedicated to quality public education

Categories Los Angeles, Unions

Glenn Sacks: Los Angeles is a Model for Keeping Schools Open

By dianeravitch
January 18, 2022 //
23

Los Angeles public schools have the most ambitious COVID testing practices in the nation. “The district operates the most ambitious school coronavirus testing program in the nation, with more than 500,000 mandatory tests administered every week for all students and staff.” Even so, the Los Angeles Times reported, one-third of all students stayed home.

Glenn Sacks, a social studies teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District, explains the COVID protocols that have enabled the district to keep its schools open safely.

He writes:

At Los Angeles Unified, everybody gets tested every week, and anyone who doesn’t have a negative test result can’t come to school. We’ve proven this can be implemented and made routine with only a modest amount of disruption.

Los Angeles Unified’s James Monroe High School, where I teach, is typical. Every Thursday a COVID testing team sets up in our multipurpose room. All students are tested – one week all the English teachers take their classes, next week the math teachers, etc.

The testing was rocky at first and some teachers, myself included, complained about the wasted time. Yet within a few weeks it was running efficiently, and testing now usually takes only 10 to 15 minutes.

All teachers and support staff are also tested. Everybody gets their test results back in 24 to 48 hours, delivered via email and also on our “Daily Pass” phone app.

Each morning all students and staff must generate a Daily Pass, which certifies that they have a current, negative test result and are thus eligible to enter campus. The students line up and present their Daily Pass’ QR code to the administrators and support staff for scanning, and the lines move quickly.

When there is a positive test result, administrators are notified, and the student isolates. There is contact tracing – all teachers have submitted their classroom seating charts to the administration, so when there is a positive test result, administrators can quickly identify the students most likely to be exposed.

Masks are readily available for students and staff, as is hand sanitizer. We have proper ventilation and filters, and each school site has a COVID Task Force in which both union representatives and administrators participate.

Sacks hopes that the finger-pointing and blaming will end. There is a safe way to reopen schools.

Categories Health, Los Angeles, Safety

Los Angeles Times: The “Unentitled Kids”: California’s New Generation of College-Bound Stars

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2022 //
35

Teresa Watanabe wrote a wonderful story about kids in a public school in Los Angeles who are college-bound, despite their demographic profiles. They don’t have college-educated parents or SAT tutors. What they do have is a school—the DowntownMagnets High School— where the professionals are dedicated to their success. Read about this school and ask yourself why Bill Gates is not trying to replicate it? Why is it not a model for Michael Bloomberg or Reed Hastings or the Waltons? Why do the billionaires insist, as Bloomberg said recently, that public education is “broken”? Despite their investing hundreds of millions to destroy public schools like the one in this story, they are still performing miracles every day.

They represent the new generation of students reshaping the face of higher education in California: young people with lower family incomes, less parental education and far more racial and ethnic diversity than college applicants of the past. And Downtown Magnets, a small and highly diverse campus of 911 students just north of the Los Angeles Civic Center, is in the vanguard of the change.

Last year, 97% of the school’s seniors were accepted to college, and most enrolled. Among them, 71% of those who applied to a UC campus were admitted, including 19 of the 56 applicants to UC Berkeley — a higher admission rate than at elite Los Angeles private schools such as Harvard-Westlake and Marlborough.

This month, the Downtown Magnets applicants include Nick Saballos, whose Nicaraguan father never finished high school and works for minimum wage as a parking valet but is proud of his son’s passion for astrophysics.

There’s Emily Cruz, who had a rough time focusing on school while being expected to help her Guatemalan immigrant mother with household duties. Emily is determined to become a lawyer or a philosopher.

Kenji Horigome emigrated to Los Angeles from Japan in fourth grade speaking no English, with a single mother who works as a Koreatown restaurant server. Kenji has become a top student and may join the military, in part for the financial aid the GI Bill would provide.

“The main thing my kids lack is a sense of entitlement,” said Lynda McGee, the school’s longtime college counselor. “That’s my biggest enemy: the fact that my students are humble and think they don’t deserve what they actually deserve. It’s more of a mental problem than an academic one.”

What the students do have is a close-knit school community, passionate educators and parents willing to take the extra step to send them to a magnet school located, for many, outside their neighborhoods.

Principal Sarah Usmani leads a staff mindful of creating a campus environment both nurturing and academically rigorous; she has scrounged for money for a psychiatric social worker to help with mental health problems, an attendance counselor to stay on top of absences, an intervention counselor to monitor whether grades drop and an additional academic counselor.

And the students have McGee, who since 2000 has helped shepherd thousands to higher education.

On a recent morning, students lined up to see her in the campus College Center, an inviting space with comfortable sofas, a bank of computers, colorful pennants and stuffed toy mascots from dozens of colleges.

Never mind that it was Thanksgiving break. UC and Cal State application deadlines were just a week away, and McGee’s students needed her.
Ms. McGee, I need a fee waiver! I’m not sure about a major. How do I figure out my weighted GPA?

“I can say no to evening, weekend and holiday work, but that means someone won’t go to college,” McGee said. “There are too many kids, good kids who will take themselves out of the process, and they’ll go to a community college with a 3.9. I can’t carry that guilt.”

McGee keeps close tabs on as many students as she can, often suggesting they consider options other than “the religion of the UC,” as she says many parents, particularly Asian Americans, regard the renowned public research university system.

It’s all about fit, she tells them. If you like personal relationships with faculty, consider smaller private colleges. Think about leaving California to stretch yourself. She gently nudges students with low GPAs away from pinning their hopes on hypercompetitive UCLA and Berkeley and suggests well-regarded but more attainable alternatives: Cal State Dominguez Hills, Woodbury University, Mount St. Mary’s College, Dixie State University.

But she also needs to make sure her top students are aiming high enough.

The day before UC’s Dec. 1 deadline, McGee called Nick into the College Center to check in. The soft-spoken senior and his family live on an annual income of $30,000; at one point, when his father lost his job and the family faced eviction, they had to turn to relatives for help. His parents instilled in him an ethic to never waste — not money, not food, not college opportunities.


At Downtown Magnets, Nick entered the International Baccalaureate program, staying the challenging course when his friends dropped out. He tackled his weakest subject, English, by poring over Harvard professor Matthew Desmond’s exploration of evictions and poverty, to master academic language, text analysis and oral expository skills.

Physics is where Nick soars. His face lights up as he describes his hunger to unravel the mysteries of the universe: why it expands and whether it will stop; how stars become black holes.

Nick has earned a 4.47 GPA, making him the school’s fifth-ranked senior. He didn’t realize that until McGee called him in to tell him.

“You are in the top five, and this is a very competitive senior class,” she said. “If you want to apply to the Ivy Leagues, go for it! Know your worth, and give yourself the opportunities.”

Ivy League schools offer large financial aid packages that can make them cheaper than UC for low-income students, a point McGee amplifies by handing out lists of schools that meet full financial need without loans.
Nick had applied to UCLA, UC Berkeley, UC Irvine and UC San Diego, along with Stanford. But McGee’s encouragement expanded his thinking beyond top California colleges to the Ivy League.

“I didn’t think I could apply to the Ivy Leagues,” he said. “I didn’t have that much confidence. Hearing from Ms. McGee that I can, I’m going to try.”

The story goes on to offer many other stories of students who came from homes where money was scarce. At Downtown Magnets High, they learned to believe in themselves, and they had the support and guidance to make good choices.

Don’t write off public schools. They have been the gateway to opportunity for millions of students, and they still are.

Someone please send this story to Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, the Waltons, Reed Hastings, John Arnold, Laurene Powell Jobs, and all the other billionaires who waste their money on charter schools, instead of paying attention to successful public schools like Downtown Magnet.

Categories California, Democracy, Higher Education, Los Angeles, Students, Supporting public schools

Will the New Superintendent of Los Angeles Expand Charter Schools?

By dianeravitch
December 24, 2021 //
15

Jack Ross of California-based Capital & Main posed the question: Will Alberto Carvalho, who was recently hired away from Miami-Dade public schools to become the new superintendent of the Los Angeles public schools, expand the number of charter schools in L.A.?

At Carvalho’s first press conference, the first question to him was about where he stood on charter schools. This issue has prompted billionaires like the late Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, and Reed Hastings of Netflix to pour millions into school board races. The current board has a 4-3 pro-charter majority.

Ross wrote:

So where does Carvalho stand? During his 13 year tenure in the Sunshine State, the number of charter schools in the south Florida district rose from 65 to 145 (while more than 30 charter schools also closed). More campuses were converted into magnet programs offering specialized education in subjects like robotics, computer science or performing arts: In 2010, around 41,000 Miami students attended magnets, and by 2019 that number had risen to more than 72,000. The Miami magnets, however, are operated by the school district and not by private owners. “I have always been a proponent, and dramatically expanded, publicly offered, accountable choice in Miami-Dade public schools,” Carvalho said at his press conference, referring to his investment in public magnet schools. “In Florida, charter schools are enabled by Florida statute, and school boards, by and large, do not have great latitude in the approval of charter programs.”

Carvalho liked the story so much that he tweeted it with a comment:


Alberto M. Carvalho@MiamiSup Publicly accountable choice, under the leadership of representative boards, that serve all children, regardless of their diverse abilities, not profits, is a model that has worked well. Will L.A.’s New Superintendent Expand Charter Schools? @capitalandmain

Right below Carvalho’s tweet was a response from Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education.

Opposed to for-profit @miamiSup? Why did largest for- profit Academica more than double # of schools in your district?

Academica is a huge for-profit chain based in Florida that is unusually avaricious and highly political.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Los Angeles, Miami

Miami Superintendent Will Become Los Angeles Chief

By dianeravitch
December 9, 2021 //
7

The board of the Los Angeles Unified School District has hired Alberto Carvalho, superintendent of the schools in Miami-Dade, too PPP become superintendent of the Los Angeles. Carvalho has served in Miami as superintendent since 2008. Mayor Bill de Blasio tried to hire him in New York City in 2018, but Carvalho backed out after the appointment was announced.

Alberto Carvalho, who has led Miami-Dade County Public Schools since 2008 and is among the nation’s most experienced and admired school district leaders, has been named the next superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, district officials announced Thursday.

The Board of Education made the announcement after a special, closed meeting. In recent weeks board members have interviewed and deliberated over candidates in a series of closed sessions.

In coming to L.A. Unified, Carvalho, 57, moves from heading the fourth-largest K-12 public school system in the country to the second-largest, taking on one of the highest-profile and most challenging posts in public education…

Born in Portugal, he came to the U.S. at age 17. Carvalho learned English as a young adult and quickly worked his way up from construction and restaurant jobs as he attended Broward Community College. He later won a scholarship to Barry University and enrolled on a premed track. He excelled academically, but took a hard turn in his career path when, in his mid-20s, he interviewed for a teaching position at Miami Jackson Senior High. He was offered a job the same day, a Tampa Bay Times profile reported in 2019.

After four years in the classroom — teaching physics, chemistry and calculus — he became an assistant principal. The superintendent at the time was so impressed that he brought Carvalho to work downtown without his having been a principal. Carvalho oversaw federal programs and later became the district’s chief communications officer. He gained further experience by overseeing grant administration and lobbying state officials.

Under Supt. Rudy Crew, Carvalho launched several initiatives, including a Parent Academy and a School Improvement Zone, focusing on schools with low academic achievement.

After becoming superintendent, Carvalho eventually filled a gap in his resume, serving as a principal. He put himself at the helm of a new campus called iPrep Academy, a pre-kindergarten-to-12th-grade magnet school “designed to promote respect and responsibility among the students and staff,” according to its website. All students are required to take honors classes.

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Los Angeles, Miami

Los Angeles: Parents Support Vaccine Mandate

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2021 //
68

While some parents are disrupting school board meetings to protest mask and vaccine mandates, a parent group in Los Angeles thanked the school board for mandating COVID vaccinations to protect students, teachers, staff, and families from a deadly disease.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 9, 2021


CONTACT: Jenna Schwartz, Co-Founder, 310.994.9764 (c); PSTLAUSD@gmail.com Nicolle Fefferman, Co-Founder, 323.376.6513 (c)
Parents Supporting Teachers Supports Vaccine Mandate for LAUSD Students

Parents Supporting Teachers (PST), the largest parent advocacy group supporting Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) teachers and families, announces its support for the district’s recent approval for a COVID-19 vaccination requirement for eligible students. The vaccine requirement goes one step further to ensure the health and safety of teachers, staff, and students.
“We have been waiting for this and fully support the requirement that all students in LAUSD get vaccinated once they are eligible. With positive cases being reported weekly, the single best Covid mitigation measure is to ensure everyone in the community is vaccinated, both inside and outside of schools,” said Jenna Schwartz co-founder. California law already requires all students in both public and private schools to have certain immunizations, the Covid vaccination would be one more added to the list. It is imperative that in conjunction with this mandate, the district commits to educating and informing reluctant families about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine.

“I am thankful to our Board members for taking the necessary steps to protect teachers, families, and students. The district prides itself on having the safest safety protocols and mitigation measures among all school districts nationwide, including requiring that all teachers be vaccinated by October 15th. Requiring vaccines for students was an appropriate next step and one more added layer of protection we haven’t had yet this year.” said co-founder Nicolle Fefferman.

“At this point there is no denying that being vaccinated is the best defense against Covid-19. While some vaccinated people can still get infected, evidence shows that the vaccines are effective in reducing transmission and preventing severe illness and death. Not only that, but we do have students and staff unable to get the vaccine because of underlying health conditions. This policy helps protect these students and staff by building the community’s immunity to Covid. We hope families will feel safer about sending their children to school,” Fefferman added.

Parents Supporting Teachers also opposes the upcoming California governor recall election. Republican candidates have vowed to rescind mask and vaccine mandates for schools, and if successful would allow Covid 19 to spread throughout schools and our communities, putting the health and safety of all teachers, students, and families at risk.

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About Parents Supporting Teachers: Parents Supporting Teachers is a parent education advocacy group in Los Angeles with over 25,000 followers and is the only organically created group of this size exclusively dedicated to parent communication and education support in the entire LAUSD. Visit http://www.parentssupportingteachers.org to learn more and support our shared vision for equitable and inclusive LAUSD schools.

Categories Accountability, Health, Los Angeles, Safety

Los Angeles: School Board Votes Tuesday on Rightwing Funding Scheme

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2021 //
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The board of the Los Angeles Unified School District will vote Tuesday on a funding scheme promoted by conservatives and neoliberals. Its promoters call it “student-centered funding,” but that’s a euphemism for the “backpack full of cash” idea, which encourages school choice. Critics of SCF say it introduces free-market principles into school funding and will benefit charter schools while harming public schools.

Jack Ross of the California-based journal “Capitol & Main” writes about the debate over student-centered funding.

Even though it is flush with cash from several federal relief packages, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) wants to switch funding models next year, instituting a controversial structure called Student Centered Funding (SCF) that ties a school’s funding to its student enrollment. Under SCF, schools are awarded a base rate for each child and receive additional funds if the student is considered needier — if they are learning English, for instance, or if they’re in foster care or qualify for free lunch.

If the student leaves the school, the funding goes with them as if they carried a “backpack full of cash.” This could pit schools against each other in a competition for students and the dollars they guarantee, critics say. The funding switch has its origins with Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s secretary of education, who instituted grants for school districts to explore Student Centered Funding. Los Angeles received one last year…

LAUSD board member Jackie Goldberg says Student Centered Funding will fuel downward enrollment spirals that will shutter underfunded schools in poor neighborhoods. The more students leave, the less money a school has, and parents and children begin jumping ship at an increasing rate. Proponents of the model say SCF gives schools more flexibility to spend their money on what they need rather than locking them into certain programs designed by remote authorities, like the school board or the state or federal government.

Goldberg disagrees. “[SCF] says districts don’t need to spend the money, individual schools do, by trying to assemble the right combination of kids with the right combination of money,” she says. “A child that’s learning [English as] a second language and has a disability, you might get a lot of money for that student. What do you do if you’re a principal? You start recruiting those students — because they bring their money with them.”

LAUSD insists Student Centered Funding furthers equity by placing schools in better control of how they use their money, and by more directly targeting money at the neediest students. “It really is that iterative process of contending with, what do we do now to better serve our students?” Deputy Superintendent Pedro Salcido told the board. “Student Centered Funding really is that next iteration: How do we deepen the work, how do we deepen progress in our schools?”

In LAUSD’s own calculations of how SCF would affect its school budgets under a “fully loaded” funding formula, 348 schools were found to lose money under SCF, while 367 schools would gain…

Sorting the data by percentage of students qualifying for free or reduced lunch reveals further inequities. Ann Street Elementary in Downtown Los Angeles, which tops the list with 100% of its students receiving free or reduced lunch, will lose $3,197 per student and $268,568 in total. It’s not alone: Of the schools with 95% to 100% of students qualifying for free lunch, 29 will lose money under Student Centered Funding, the district found. Between the 85th and 94th percentiles, 141 schools face cuts.

Under a similar student-centered funding policy (lower-cased when we refer to the broader policy; capitalized when we refer to the LAUSD model), Chicago public schools went from 460 librarians in 2012 to 123 in 2020, according to the Chicago Teachers Union. More research on the implementation of student-centered funding in Chicago found teachers felt pressured to take on extra classes because of tightening budgets, while some teachers were just laid off.

“As we lose students, we have less and less resources for the things we need,” one participant says. “The librarian got pulled from being a librarian to be a special education teacher because it was cheaper and because she was certified in that area. So, staff don’t teach what they love, and arts education has to be sacrificed because they are deemed as less important….”

Jill Wynn saw student-centered funding up close. The former San Francisco school board member says the system can flourish — as long as it includes strong protections for low-enrollment schools.

A self-proclaimed charter skeptic, Wynn is a “big fan” of student-centered funding models, which she believes can guarantee extra funding for schools with the neediest children while freeing them from restrictive requirements on how that money must be spent.

But the system works only if it sets in place rules the schools must follow with their money, she explains. When it switched to its own student-centered funding model, the San Francisco School Board mandated that all schools had to use their allotted funds for library services and some music and arts programs, and schools were guaranteed a minimum amount of funding to protect small schools from closure.

What advice would she give to LAUSD if it adopts the model? “Put the guardrails in and make them high,” she says…

A 4-3 pro-charter majority on the school board means opposition to SCF is, for now, probably futile. But with a year until implementation of the new model, and an outraged and organized teachers’ union, the fight over Student Centered Funding is likely just beginning.

Categories Charter Schools, Closing schools, Education Industry, Funding, Los Angeles
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