The power elites of Los Angeles won again. Read this editorial in the Los Angeles Times. even his strongest supporters are concerned about his ill-planned $1 billion commitment to buy iPads whose content is unfinished.
But to really get the story at ground level, read the comments.
This blogger writes about the well-orchestrated circus at the crucial LAUSD board meeting. This carrying daisies–a symbol of allegiance to the leader–were well represented and gained preference to speak. Who was missing? Teachers and administrators: they were at work. Parents: who cares what they think?
Superintendent John Deasy made a deal to buy an iPad for every student in the district, at a cost of $1 billion.
The money will mostly be drawn from a 25-year construction bond issue approved by the voters on the assumption that the money would be used to repair the city’s schools. The iPads will be obsolete in 2 or 3 years, but voters will be paying the cost for 25 years.
The iPads are loaded with content from Pearson. The license for the Pearson content expires in three years, at which time the district will have obsolete iPads without content.
Meanwhile, as this teacher writes,
“More and more people are realizing that this iPad deal could ultimately bankrupt the district since the general fund is at rock bottom and has left our district with 40-50 kids in a class, no librarians, less counselors and less custodial and office services. The only pot of money big enough to fund the resupply of iPads and updated software is the general fund, and those costs don’t even address the massive numbers of extra support staff and professional development needed to keep the tech project going.”
I am a teacher at LAUSD, and I am extremely disappointed with the LAUSD Board of Education for extending the contract to this abusive, destructive, deceiving superintendent. He truly does not care for the public education of the community he is supposed to serve. Most of the LAUSD teachers and principals, if not all, are aware of this. We see it on a daily basis as his policies and destructive “reform” touches each school community, especially the teachers that have to deal with such destruction of our profession. And by destroying our profession, he is destroying the education of all its students we are to teach. I am, from the bottom of my heart, via your powerful and informative blog, calling on our Union (UTLA) President Warren Fletcher to prepare and organize the teachers and all its members for a STRIKE to demand, first and foremost, an end to this superintendent and all those he placed in leadership positions affecting the teaching profession. We cannot continue to work and suffer this horrible working environment. We need and deserve a true leader who values teaching and learning, not this arrogant and destructive superintendent. I fear that he will continue to destroy many more teaching professionals and students as he has been doing. We teachers need to organize and help to fight to put an end to him as the LAUSD superintendent. ALSO, DIANE, PLEASE, PLEASE, DO NOT PUBLISH MY NAME FOR OBVIOUS REASONS. I ASK THAT YOU PLEASE PUBLISH THIS AS ANONYMOUS.
After days of turmoil–will he or won’t he?–the Los Angeles Times reports that Deasy and the board are negotiating the terms of his resignation.
Maybe.
If it happens, it will be a very soft landing.
Stay tuned.
Dear Board Members,
As you are well aware, friends of Superintendent Deasy in the business community and the charter corporate community plan a massive rally to show you how badly L.A. needs Superintendent Deasy.
Please do not forget that you were elected by the people of Los Angeles to use your own judgment, not to be swayed by billionaires and their minions.
Superintendent Deasy let it be known that he probably would resign. This in retrospect appears to have been a clever ploy to mobilize the corporate leadership that backs him.
I don’t know Superintendent Deasy, so I don’t now judge him as a person.
What I do know about him is that he does not have the support and confidence of those who do the daily work of educating the district’s children.
You cannot be a leader if the troops don’t trust you.
A leader must be able to inspire, encourage, and support those he leads. Superintendent Deasy has not been able to do this.
If he wants to go, let him go.
Do not allow yourselves to be pressured into capitulating.
If you capitulate, you make yourselves puppets; you place him in charge of the district, and the board becomes an afterthought.
If you allow yourselves to be browbeaten, you will find that John Deasy has become your boss.
This corrupts democracy. The billionaires who tried and failed to buy the elections last spring will have won, even though they lost at the polls.
Time to defend those who elected you.
Benjamin Herold of Education Week has written an excellent overview of the confusion surrounding Los Angeles’ iPad purchase for every student in the district.
The cost–anticipated ultimately to be in excess of $1 billion–is one concern at a time when classes are overcrowded, and many schools are in need of repair, and thousands of teachers were laid off.
The uncertainty about how the iPads will be used, whether at home or in school; the uncertainty about the quality of the Pearson content; the certainty that the license on the Pearson content will expire in three years; the confusion about whether it was proper to divert funding from a 25-year construction bond to purchase tablets…..all of this and more should be closely scrutinized.
Instead, the district and its leadership will be bogged down in an extended discussion of John Deasy’s future; whether he resigned or only threatened to resign; whether the business community and the mayor can prevail; whether Deasy will ultimately make the board powerless by asserting that his power base is stronger than theirs, even though they were elected by the people.
One happy note: Pearson is happy with Los Angeles’ decision to give Pearson control of the content of the iPads.
I hope you can gain access to the article behind Education Week’s paywall. Here is a sample:
But the new software from the publishing giant Pearson that has been rolled out in dozens of schools is nowhere near complete, the Los Angeles Unified School District is unable to say how much it costs, and the district will lose access to content updates, software upgrades, and technical support from Pearson after just three years.
The situation is prompting a new round of questions about an initiative already under withering scrutiny following a series of logistical and security snags.
The Common Core Technology Project, as Los Angeles Unified’s iPad initiative is formally known, is among the first attempts in the country to marry digital devices with a comprehensive digital curriculum from a single vendor. The ambitious effort makes the 651,000-student school system a bellwether for districts seeking a soup-to-nuts solution that implements the new Common Core State Standards, increases students’ access to technology, and moves away from paper textbooks.
“I think it’s the front end of a wave,” said Karen Cator, the CEO of the Washington-based nonprofit Digital Promise and a former director of the U.S. Department of Education’s school technology office.
But just weeks before the Los Angeles school board decides whether to authorize the initiative’s second phase—expected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars—implementation problems related to the new digital curriculum are rearing their head.
Pearson’s Common Core System of Courses, meant to eventually become the district’s primary instructional resource in both math and English/language arts for kindergarten through 12th grade, currently consists of just a few sample lessons per grade, resulting in widespread frustration and confusion among classroom teachers.
In addition, the amount the district is paying to Pearson remains a mystery, leading to increasingly pointed questions from the school system’s divided school board, which called a special meeting to discuss the overall iPad initiative next week.
A leading member of the bar and a member of the California Board of Regents is urging the Los Angeles school board to retain Superintendent John Deasy, who recently threatened to resign. The letter was signed by George Kieffer, a Schwarzenegger appointee to the state Board of Regents in 2009. Business leaders are working hard to hold on to Deasy, despite his poor relations with the educators of Los Angeles and the recent iPad fiasco. Even the mayor weighed in to support Deasy.
Clearly, the power structure wants Deasy. And they don’t care what educators think about his leadership.
The letter read:
Dear Members of the Board of Education:
This letter is to inform you of the tremendous sense of disappointment, approaching anger, that the Los Angeles community is feeling today because of the inability of the School Board to develop a plan with Superintendent Deasy to move forward together for the benefit of the students of the Los Angeles Unified School District (“LAUSD”).
LAUSD has seen important gains across the board in student achievement over the last few years. Under LAUSD Superintendent Dr. John Deasy’s leadership, the District has improved student test scores and other student success indicators such as the number of students accessing college preparation courses. It has also seen decreases in student drop-out rates and truancy rates.
The District is embarking on a massive roll out of professional development and technology tools that will prepare teachers and students to implement the new, and highly more rigorous, state education Common Core standards and student assessments. Further tests to Dr. Deasy’s leadership will be presented as the District prepares to develop its Local Control Accountability Plan (LCAP), as part of the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) that was passed by the State Legislature and signed by the Governor earlier this year. The LCFF is a much needed step in the right direction to ensure that all California schools receive equitable funds from the state.
All of these and other important initiatives are crucial to ensure students are succeeding academically and graduating prepared for college and 21st century competitive careers.
We believe that John Deasy has the unique skills and commitment necessary to move the district forward on each of these topics. The leadership of the business community and the non-profit community strongly supports Superintendent Deasy and we encourage the School Board to meet with him immediately to work out a plan to continue his tenure as our Superintendent of Schools.
In the next few months, and for the first time in several years due to an increase in funding, the Board will make critical decisions about the budget and technology programs. It will be very difficult to make good decisions for our children if we do not have a strong and experienced leader in the Superintendent’s office.
Firing Superintendent Deasy, or making his life so miserable that he has no choice but to leave, is not in the best interests of the students of Los Angeles. We urge you to pull the board together and make every effort to retain one of the top Superintendents in the country.
Sincerely,
________________________________
Sent by: Lucy Smith
Secretary to George Kieffer
Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP
As parent activist Karen Wolfe explains here, Los Angeles is in the district of a power struggle over control of its public schools.
Wolfe says the voters elected school board members to reflect the will of the people.
Superintendent John Deasy has threatened to resign as his way of pressuring the elected board to do what he wants and to get the business community to demand that the board let Deasy take charge. Even the new mayor has told the board to leave Deasy alone and stay out of his way.
This is an extraordinary situation. The power elite of Los Angeles wants the elected board to hand control over to Deasy. You can be sure that in every one of their corporations, the CEO serves at the pleasure of the board, not the other way around.
What is the purpose of having a board election if real power is vested in the superintendent, not the board?
John Deasy was hired to carry out the will of the elected board, not to cow it into submission.
A teacher in Los Angeles who calls himself Geronimo left the following comment on hearing that Superintendent Deasy planned to resign, then declared that he was only thinking about resigning and might not resign after all:
“If the saga of LAUSD wasn’t soap opera-y enough, the Number One Diva of LA–no, not Kim Kardashian, but Superintendent John Deasy–is forcing the entire city this weekend to witness his woeful performance of “Hamlet.” Early reports on Thursday night had the melancholy prince resigning thus creating premature joy with teachers (or his subjects as we’re known under his regime) in the hopes that our city’s long national nightmare was finally over. Alas, the sigh of relief was short-lived.
“Although there probably has never been a more self-aggrandizing, yet endlessly self-pitying superintendent than John Deasy, we will now have the spectacle of observing who is going to beg this prima donna to stay. Some of the city’s most powerful denizens are already lining up to kiss his ring, weeping and imploring this man to continue to grace us with his wisdom and infantile temper.
“The cry has already gone up among the Establishment, “Don’t leave us now, John!”
“So our city now goes into high-wire drama until Tuesday when the beleaguered, intimidated and castrated School Board meets for Deasy’s contractual “performance review”. It is only afterwards that Deasy will inform the world on his plans. The “leak” of his resignation was clearly designed to put pressure on the School Board to “listen” to the will of the “people” (um, note WHICH people) and do the right thing and say, “We can’t live without you, John. Please come back and forgive the savages who have said such mean things about you.”
“The truth about the California Educational Reform movement is that it is different than almost anywhere else in the country. In other parts it’s the Republicans who are running Education Reform. If you look at the map, they control all the state legislatures in the south where the weakest teacher unions exist and most of the legislatures throughout the Midwest. Those cuckoo birds would never fly in California.
“What has happened in progressive California is that there is a clear split on the Left. Here, it’s the Moneyed/Connected/Privileged Neo-Liberal Left vs. the Working Class/In-the-Trenches Left. Sure Michelle Rhee and John Deasy can each out-boast other who is more pro-gay or pro-immigration and who has the most Democratic Party merit badges on their scout uniform. But when it comes to Education Reform, they are as Far Right Wing as Scott Walker, Rick Perry or Bobby Jindal.
“And they are just as dangerous, disingenuous and damaging.
“The biggest modus operendi that this Moneyed Class Left does is to appropriate the “Civil Rights” mantra while courting big name Democrat Party millionaires who have vested interests in their type of top-down CEO managed school reform. In the future, when I think of who will be on those monuments in Washington for their tireless crusade to protect the rights and opportunities of poor children of color, I definitely picture Eli Broad and John Deasy and the Pearson Corporation.
“Eli Broad knows fine art and music. He’s a philanthropist in that area. In education, he’s a vulture as he buys power and influence in LA supporting HIS style of Reform. With Broad’s money that is hard to turn down, he gets to steer the bus on his terms–Not the kids’ interests or benefits. The Mayors of LA know that and acquiesce to the quid pro quo.
“Meanwhile, back high atop LAUSD headquarters, Deasy constantly denigrates people who disagree with his educational priorities and methodologies. As he primps himself as Deasy X, I would love to hear what Brother Malcolm would say to his grotesque appropriation of “The Movement”. Deasy self-righteously believes an iPad is what our kids need the most. How about giving them what HIS KIDS and all of his rich patrons give their kids? Great class selection, minimal testing, field trips, cool opportunities, enrichment of all kinds, small classes…? It’s abhorrent and insulting what he offers our neediest kids and orders the teachers to follow suit in implementing his noxious brand of instruction.
“So we are all left with the billion dollar iPad as Deasy’s “I have a dream” legacy.
“Pathetic.
“In almost every single interview Deasy has done extolling the virtues of the iPad, he always brings up the example that kids can now go look up “The Arab Spring” to see what textbooks don’t include. I don’t know why he’s latched onto the Arab Spring as his perpetual fall back mantra–His lack of imagination for anything else the kids could look up, perhaps. The Arab Spring is what the kids did when they hacked into the computers! Good for them! They revolted on their own and how does Deasy respond?
“Clamped down on them like any authoritarian figure.
“And more nauseating, each thousand dollar iPad (when everything is finally totaled up) all include those really inspiring Pearson-designed lessons that are supposed to make the kids wildly enthusiastic about learning. No wonder they wander to Youtube or Tumblr or anything else that is remotely interesting to them.
“How do you know the difference between the two worlds on Education Reform on California’s Left Wing? Easy. What they want and have given THEIR kids and what they believe is acceptable for OTHERS’ children. All of them are identical: Arne Duncan. Bill Gates. Mayor Eric Garcetti. Eli Broad. Barack Obama. They would never for a second tolerate the conditions they offer LA’s kids if their own kids were placed in a typical LA classroom.
“Yet we have to listen to them endlessly pontificate on what’s BEST for other people’s kids.
“Deasy, has always been about secrecy and I-Know-Best bullying. His obvious disdain for teacher input has been made clear. Like Michelle Rhee, he is very quick with the “I LOVE teacher” rhetoric–but they have to be HIS kind of obedient teacher who kowtows to his genius. In 2011, Deasy was installed undemocratically by former Mayor Villaraigosa to “shake things up” and yes, he did–but it was more like Fukushima. Teachers despise him not because they are against some mythological status quo–it’s just that HIS status quo is antithetical to smart, creative, thoughtful teaching. The kids know it too and wither under his brand of instruction.
“In Michelle Rhee’s book RADICAL, she specifically singles out California as the big enchilada for her designs on the rest of the country. She has based her operation in Sacramento and believes that if she can transform California, the rest of the country will follow. Not a bad bet.
“When I first heard the news about Deasy leaving, I hadn’t been that relieved since Nixon resigned.
“And now it may be a cruel hoax. I actually don’t know what it will take to really be rid of Deasy, short of a farmhouse caught in a tornado landing on top of him. With this piece of “will he/won’t he” go melodramatics to inflame as much public sympathy for his plight, Deasy is giving everyone a preview of what life will be like if he can be “persuaded” to stay and endure the slings and arrows of his outrageous fortunes.
“Can we PLEASE pull this really bad Laurence Olivier off the stage of LA once and for all?
“Please, inform Mayor Eric Garcetti how you feel:
“mayor.garcetti@lacity.org
“Something is rotten in the city of LA. This show needs to close immediately.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 