(Courtesy: LAUSD Board District 5 Facebook page)

Parents whose children attend L.A. Unified schools in Board District 5, where voters will go to the polls next week to choose a new board member, hold widely varying views of their schools depending on the language they speak at home, according to a new survey.

Nearly half of all Spanish-speaking respondents said their child’s school was on the wrong track. They also were three times more likely to say they had difficulty getting help for their children.

English speakers were far more positive about their schools. Those respondents were 14 times more likely to say their school was headed in the right direction. Among English speakers, 86 percent said their schools were on the right track, and the same percentage said it was not difficult to get help for their children.

Overall, only 28 percent of all respondents said their child’s school is generally headed in the right direction; 35 percent said it was on the wrong track.

The survey was conducted by Alliance for a Better Community, a nonprofit organization that advocates for Latinos in Los Angeles. It asked parents and constituents in Board District 5 about their educational priorities and also held focus groups. The group released the results at a candidate forum earlier this month.

Here are six things to know about the survey’s results:

1. All issues were high priorities.

Parents’ top priorities for their children’s schools were teaching quality and safe and welcoming schools. Both received 86 percent of respondents listing them first.

Special education supports and facilities tied for second place. College access and readiness came in third.

The survey’s authors noted that the majority of respondents said all 16 issues listed in the survey were a high priority. Even the lowest-scoring of the issues — support for LGBTQ students — received 59 percent of respondents saying it was a high priority.

Spanish-speaking respondents put a higher priority on supports for English language learners, the budget deficit and equitable school funding.

Among all respondents, equitable school funding and the budget deficit came in ahead of parent engagement and student and staff attendance.

2. There’s a big difference in school perceptions depending on respondents’ home language.

There was a marked difference between how English- and Spanish-speakers saw their schools.

When asked, “Would you say your child’s school is generally headed in the right direction, or do you feel it is on the wrong track?,” 86 percent of English speakers said it was headed in the right direction, compared with only 6 percent of Spanish speakers.

Almost half of Spanish-speakers — 49 percent — said their school was on the wrong track. Only 1 percent of English speakers thought so.

When asked if it is “difficult for you to obtain help for your child from your school and/or the district,” 43 percent of Spanish speakers said yes, compared with only 14 percent of English speakers. Among English speakers, 86 percent said it was not difficult to obtain help, compared with 57 percent of Spanish speakers.

3. Their board member should speak Spanish.

One of the top three most important characteristics in a board member is that he or she speaks Spanish, the survey found.

A vast majority of respondents, 84 percent, said it is important to have a board member who is Spanish-speaker, but only 48 percent thought that person has to be Latino/a or have a Latino background. And 90 percent said their board member should have “a professional background in education.”

4. They’re big on bilingual education.

More than 90 percent of respondents supported each of five statements about bilingual education and support for English learners, such as saying schools should value the native language and culture of every child, and that every teacher should be trained to meet the needs of English learners.

Respondents also wanted graduates to be bilingual.

When asked, “How valuable do you think it is that students can graduate high school being able to speak more than one language?,” 73 percent said it was very valuable, while 17 percent said it was fairly valuable. No respondents answered that it was not valuable at all, and 2 percent said it was a little valuable; 8 percent were unsure.

5. Teachers don’t get enough support.

A majority said teachers are not strongly supported in Board District 5.

When asked, “Do you feel that teachers are supported at your school,” less than 30 percent said they are strongly supported, and 23 percent said teachers are a little supported. About 29 percent said they are fairly supported. Less than 4 percent said teachers are not supported at all.

6. There’s not enough support for English learners and special ed.

The groups of students who respondents said are the least adequately supported were special education students (22 percent), English language learners (17 percent) and those experiencing homelessness (14 percent).

However, English learners also had the highest percentage of “yes” answers to the question of which students groups are “adequately supported at your school” — 58 percent. The next-highest were low-income students, with 53 percent. Tied for third, with 49 percent answering yes, were special education students and gifted students. The student group with the fewest “yes” votes answers were for LGBTQ students — only 30 percent of respondents said these students are adequately supported.

About the survey:

Alliance for a Better Community collected 452 surveys from more than 30 schools and conducted focus groups with 75 parents and students between December and February. Of the respondents, 85 percent identified as Latino or Hispanic, and 56 percent said their home language was Spanish. Six percent of respondents said they were white, and 26 percent said English was their home language. Both languages were the home language for 16 percent of respondents. The rest — 2 percent — said their home language was Tagalog.

The “Board District 5 Report: Elevating the Voices of Board District 5 Constituents” is available in English and Spanish.

• Read more about the election next week in Board District 5: 

Meet the 10 candidates running for LAUSD school board in District 5

At two forums for LAUSD board candidates, students focus on college preparation, while parents want high-quality teachers and safe schools

More money, more charter school scrutiny: Here’s what Jackie Goldberg wants to bring to LAUSD in her bid to rejoin the school board after nearly 30 years

Latinos are the vast majority in LAUSD’s Board District 5. But they likely won’t be the ones who elect their next school board member. Here’s why.

For California students, parents, teachers and education advocates, 2019 looks to be opening with a bang.

In the first full week alone, a new governor will be inaugurated and teachers in the state’s largest school district are poised to strike — and Los Angeles could soon be followed by Oakland.

Also, just months after the record-breaking campaign spending on the gubernatorial and state schools chief races, Los Angeles will hold what’s expected to be another expensive and hard-fought school board election.

Throw in precarious school district finances, an ambitious reimagining of L.A. Unified by its new superintendent, and so-far losing battles to combat declining enrollment and chronic absences, and 2019 is sure to offer edge-of-your-seat viewing for education watchers near and far.

Here are six big school stories we’re watching in 2019:

1. Will Los Angeles see its first teacher strike in 30 years?

On the day after a neutral fact-finding report sided with the district’s salary offer, United Teachers Los Angeles set Jan. 10 as its strike date.

A strike can only be averted if L.A. Unified takes “a dramatically different approach” to contract negotiations, UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl said at a Dec. 19 news conference. Last week, Caputo-Pearl agreed to a UTLA meeting with district negotiators this Monday — the first day of school after winter break.

The nation’s second-largest school district and its teachers union have held polar opposite views of L.A. Unified’s finances during the nearly two years of embattled contract negotiations. The district insists it is on a “fiscal cliff” and in danger of a county takeover. UTLA maintains that the district is sitting on reserve funds that are desperately needed in schools to lower class sizes and hire nurses and other support staff.

A strike would have “a huge impact” on L.A. Unified financially, said Aaron Garth Smith, an education policy analyst for the right-leaning Reason Foundation. Neither side, he said, “is really talking about those long-term debt obligations,” such as hefty health benefits costs. And if L.A. Unified caves to UTLA’s demands, it will only “make a bad situation worse,” he said. “Anything that’s going to be spent is going to push [the district] closer and closer to that fiscal cliff.”

Smith added that “district politics” could even prompt parents who are already frustrated with the quality of education to take their kids elsewhere, exacerbating L.A. Unified’s declining enrollment problem. A strike “is the thing that could push them over the edge,” he said.

Read more on the run-up to a strike:

LAUSD, UTLA back to the bargaining table & more: 8 teacher strike updates you might have missed over winter break

LAUSD parents stuck ‘in the middle’ as Los Angeles braces for a likely teacher strike

New LAUSD guide tells parents how to prepare for a teacher strike and talk to their kids about it

UTLA wanted immigrant parents’ support for a teachers strike. Instead, parents wanted to know, ‘How would this strike guarantee a high-quality education for our children?’

2. Will LAUSD face a financial takeover?

As L.A. Unified braces for a strike by its teachers union which maintains that the district is hoarding cash, district officials are also having to prove to their county overseers that L.A. Unified will be able to stay afloat.

The Los Angeles County Office of Education, which is required to step in if a school district is nearing bankruptcy, has said the district’s continued use of deficit spending — meaning it is eating into its savings to cover its operating costs  — has led to a “drastic” drop in its financial reserves and “continues to be alarming.”

The county gave L.A. Unified until Dec. 17 to outline how it will reverse its march toward insolvency by either cutting costs or finding new revenues.

The county has 30 days to respond, which could put the delivery of the verdict on the fifth day of a teacher strike.

If the county is not satisfied with the district’s plan, it stated that it could choose to either send in a financial expert to collaborate with the district or install a fiscal adviser — someone who essentially takes over all financial decisions for the country’s second-largest school district.

Any new raises could weaken the district’s financial situation. The district has already agreed to a 6 percent raise for teachers — and says it has budgeted for that amount — but both county and state officials have expressed concern that any raises will be too expensive.

“We are concerned that any salary and benefit increase, whether paid from reserves, assignments, or other one-time resources, could adversely affect the fiscal condition of the District,” Candi Clark, chief financial officer of the Los Angeles County Office of Education, wrote in a Sept. 6 letter.

“As we have noted in previous letters, the use of one-time funding sources to cover ongoing salary expenditures is a key indicator of risk for potential insolvency,” Clark stated.

After hearing Clark outline her concerns to the school board in September, one board member predicted staffing cuts coming as soon as 2019. “Next year, we’re going to have to cut people … in massive numbers,” Richard Vladovic said. “If I were the superintendent, I’d be freaking out about this report.”

In another measure of L.A. Unified’s financial health, the district revealed in its annual audited financial report released in December that its unrestricted net deficit had nearly doubled from $10.9 billion to $19.6 billion between 2017 and 2018.

As state Sen. John Moorlach put it in an LA Daily News op-ed: It would take a $4,180 payment from every man, woman and child in the district to relieve L.A. Unified of its liabilities.

Read more on LAUSD’s finances:

LAUSD’s plan to stave off financial ruin and a potential county takeover: Cut 15 percent of central office staff and save $86 million

It gets worse for LAUSD: This week both the county and the state showed up to say, ‘Get your fiscal house in order or else we’re taking over’

‘LAUSD is not too big to fail’: School board members alarmed by LA County official’s dire financial projections — and warnings of the possible appointment of a ‘fiscal adviser’

3. Another Los Angeles school board election, another swing for the majority?

Less than two years after Los Angeles held the most expensive school board election in the nation’s history with campaign expenditures reaching $17 million, voters will again head to the polls in a swing school board election.

As in 2017, big bucks will likely be shelled out by unions and education reformers to win a majority on the seven-member board. Two years ago, a pair of seats were up for grabs, fueling donations and national attention. This time it’s a special election in March for just one seat, and only to fill out a term, through December 2020.

But the direction of the nation’s second-largest school district could be at stake. The new superintendent serves at the pleasure of the board, and with less than a year under his belt, Austin Beutner is poised to reveal his big plan in January for reimagining the school district — which he will need the school board to approve. Beutner was appointed by the board in May and vowed to bring change to a district where less than half the students are proficient in reading and math and slightly over half graduate eligible to apply to four-year California state universities.

Also at risk are ambitious goals the board’s reform majority has promised, like getting every student college or career ready and ensuring all students can read and do math at grade level by 2023.

Ten candidates, from parents to elected officials and educators, have qualified to appear on the March 5 ballot to fill the seat left vacant after former L.A. Unified board President Ref Rodriguez was forced to resign in July after pleading guilty to campaign money-laundering charges.

The backdrop for the early part of the 2019 campaign will likely be a teacher strike now that United Teachers Los Angeles announced in December they will walk off the job Jan. 10. It’s unclear how the pressure and upheaval of a strike, particularly if it’s prolonged, could influence the election.

Read more on the school board election:

10 candidates will be on the ballot in March to fill LAUSD’s vacant school board seat

‘I want my voice heard’ — Showdown in the boardroom as Latino parents balk at an attempt to name a replacement for Ref Rodriguez without their input

The clock is ticking: LAUSD board members have 60 days to decide how to fill Ref Rodriguez’s seat

4. Bilingual education’s rapid growth

In Los Angeles and across California, expanded dual-language schools and classes are expected to produce more and more biliterate high school graduates.

California voters approved Proposition 58 in November 2016, repealing an English-only initiative that had been in place since 1998 and allowing more schools to create bilingual or dual-immersion programs, where English learners along with native English speakers learn to master both languages.

Since Prop. 58’s passage, L.A. Unified, where nearly a quarter of students are English learners, has rapidly added more dual-language programs. There are 145 bilingual programs offered this school year, up from 87 in 2017, and the plan is to continue adding more.

In alignment with Global California 2030, an initiative which calls for increasing the number of school dual immersion programs in California from about 400 in 2017 to 1,600 in 2030. In L.A. Unified, “By 2025, our goal is to have 50,000 students in dual language programs who will be biliterate when they graduate,” Superintendent Austin Beutner said.

“We have more bilingual programs because our parents now feel safe that who they are, and what they’re bringing from home, is going to be honored at their schools while they’re also  learning English and working in our system, so I’m very proud of that work,” Lydia Acosta Stephens, head of L.A. Unified’s Multilingual Department, told LA School Report in an interview in August.

“The shift happens now thanks to Prop 58. The expansion of our dual language programs to support our English learners is not just for them to become academically proficient in English but also to become bilingual and biliterate. We want their parents to know that it’s OK to hold on to their home language,” Acosta Stephens said. “That’s a conversation that English Learning coordinators would be having with parents.”

While national test scores have largely stagnated — the latest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests spawned headlines about a “lost decade” for educational progress among nearly every student group — researchers have found one group whose performance has steadily climbed over the past 10 years: multilingual students.

Typically either first- or second-generation Americans — kids who speak multiple languages — tend to lag behind their solely English-speaking classmates. Since 2003, however, the gap in NAEP scores between monolingual and multilingual Americans has narrowed significantly, both for fourth- and eighth-graders, according to a paper published by the American Educational Research Association.

In an interview with The 74, co-author Michael Kieffer said that the steady improvement was due to teachers’ increased familiarity with the challenges of teaching material to kids whose first language is not English.

“It’s no longer an exception to the norm to have a student who is in the process of learning English. Now it’s the norm to have many students who are learning English, and that may incentivize and encourage educators to attain new schools and try out new strategies and techniques and do things a little differently.”

Read more on bilingual education:

New Study: Multilingual Students Have Made Huge Progress on NAEP Since 2003

New ways of teaching math to California’s English learners are getting results, report says

Dual language programs are so popular that LAUSD plans to double the number of schools offering them by next year

5. Mounting calls for a cap on charter school growth

2019 opens with powerful voices calling for slowing the growth of charter schools. California’s new governor, Gavin Newsom, said after the June primary that he intends to sign legislation requiring charter schools to be more transparent with their finances and operations and to adhere to stricter conflict of interest rules on their governing boards, EdSource reported. He likely won’t offer the same protections of charters as has Gov. Jerry Brown, who generally supported charters and vetoed bills that called for more regulation.

Tony Thurmond, in his first news conference after defeating Marshall Tuck for state superintendent of public instruction, called for a temporary ban on any new K-12 charter schools in the state. He said the state has reached a “tipping point” with too many charters that have financially harmed public school districts, Politico reported. “I believe that we shouldn’t open new schools without providing the resources for those schools,” Thurmond said. “It is time to have perhaps a pause on the opening of new schools until we get clear about how we will fund any new schools. I’ve never used the word moratorium because I believe there may be places where it makes sense to establish a charter school.”

Newsom and Thurmond were elected with the backing of the powerful teachers unions.

Very few teachers at charters belong to a union, and when students leave district schools for charters, they take public funds with them. Declining enrollment in district schools also means a need for fewer teachers.

And in December, two days after setting a strike date, the head of the Los Angeles teachers union called for a halt to new independent charter schools in L.A. Unified. The call for a cap is not part of the union contract negotiations, but Alex Caputo-Pearl said he is bringing it up because “it’s out there in the conversation right now.” He cited Newsom, who “has looked into whether we need to pause,” and Thurmond, “who has proposed a moratorium on charter growth.”

In an immediate response to the announcement, LAUSD said: “This is not a subject of negotiations as charters are governed by state law. We cannot negotiate a cap on the number of charters with a bargaining unit.”

Read more on charter caps:

A day after mediation panel backs LAUSD’s salary offer, UTLA sets a January strike date

Thurmond targets charter schools

Superintendent candidates agree on need to review California’s charter school law

6. Combatting chronic absences

Despite task forces and reports and new initiatives like free tickets to sporting events, chronic absences have increased in each of the past three years in Los Angeles. School districts around the state are struggling to keep kids in school. In Manhattan Beach, parents are even asked to make a $47 donation each time a student misses a day of school.

Those on the front lines of battling chronic absenteeism welcomed last month’s addition of student absence data to California’s accountability tracker, the California School Dashboard. As a result, more school districts in the state could become “models” in tackling chronic absenteeism.

The dashboard rates districts, schools and student groups on performance indicators such as test scores using a five-color scale: red being the lowest to blue, the highest. Last month’s update means schools and districts with high levels of chronically absent students — defined as those missing 10 percent or more of the school year — are now identified with “orange” or “red” colors.

David Kopperud, a programs consultant with the state education department and chairman of the State School Attendance Review Board, told LA School Report that this change could incentivize districts to improve attendance rates in 2019. “I’ve been getting a lot of phone calls from those in the red or orange for chronic absenteeism and having a lot of discussions with them about what they can do,” he said.

Kopperud hopes more “model” school attendance review boards (SARBs) pop up statewide as well to mentor districts stuck in that red or orange designation. Model SARBs are local advisory boards recognized annually by the state for “exemplary practices to reduce chronic absenteeism and increase student attendance,” according to the department. Kopperud would be thrilled to have 30 model SARBs in 2019, he said. There were 16 in 2018.

Struggling districts “can get help from someone who’s actually doing the work,” he said. “That model of successful districts mentoring districts that are having problems with their chronic absenteeism rates is a really good model.”

Read more on student absences:

Saturday school and 1,000 Rams tickets — how LAUSD is trying to turn around a stubborn attendance problem

Easy money for LA schools: Get every kid to class one more day a year and generate $30 million

Taking your kid out of school for vacation? This California beach town asks parents to cough up the cash it loses for every absence

With Nearly 8 Million Students Chronically Absent From School Each Year, 36 States Set Out to Tackle the Problem in New Federal Education Plans. Will It Make a Difference?

REMEMBER 2018?

The 18 most popular articles we published in 2018 about Los Angeles schools & the state of education across California

The 7 hottest California education storylines we’re watching in 2018

The best of 2018 (so far): Our 9 most popular articles about LA students and schools from spring semester

Esmeralda Fabían Romero and Taylor Swaak contributed to this report.

For Los Angeles, 2018 ushered in a new superintendent, new promises to students, new hiring freedoms for principals and new warnings about the school district’s precarious finances.

In education news around California, graduation rates rose but the state showed no improvement in getting its high school seniors eligible for state universities — even though California students enroll in “credit recovery” programs at a rate far above the national average.

Those headlines were among our most-read in 2018. Here’s a look back at the top 18 stories of 2018.

1. ‘LAUSD is not too big to fail’: School board members alarmed by LA County official’s dire financial projections — and warnings of the possible appointment of a ‘fiscal adviser’

That was the bombshell dropped at an August school board meeting when the chief financial officer of the Los Angeles County Office of Education showed up unexpectedly with the message: The county is greatly concerned about the district’s finances — and has the authority to step in if board members don’t take the initiative and ensure the district’s solvency. The CFO punctuated her warning with two words that made board members sit up and take notice: fiscal adviser. If the district can’t prove it will still be in the black in three years, the county warned it would take the unprecedented step of installing a fiscal adviser over LA Unified, who would strip both the superintendent and the school board of power and take over the district.

Related:

It gets worse for LAUSD: This week both the county and the state showed up to say, ‘Get your fiscal house in order or else we’re taking over’

One month after the county CFO’s surprise visit to the school board, she came back — and this time she brought a top state official with the same message: You’re spending more money than you make and the savings you’ve been living off of are about to run out. “Yes, my presence is indicative that this is serious,” the state education department official said. As one board member remarked at the meeting, “If I were the superintendent, I’d be freaking out about this report.”

2. LAUSD board frees principals of struggling schools from having to hire teachers sent to them by the district

As LA Unified moved to help its most struggling students, it gave about one-fourth of its schools the coveted freedom of being able to hire the best teacher for the job. However, the majority of Los Angeles schools are still shackled by a longtime districtwide policy that forces principals to hire from a “must-place” list of “displaced” teachers. But that could change. Board members directed Superintendent Austin Beutner to “work to eliminate the pool of teachers who are displaced one year or more.” There are currently 708 displaced teachers on L.A. Unified’s payroll, and 211 of them had been on the list for more than a year as of June. Coming in January, board members will consider expanding the privilege to all schools so that “no teacher shall be employed at a school without the mutual agreement of the teacher and the school site decision-maker.”

Related:

As LA’s teachers union prepares to strike, here’s something that could be a bigger hang-up than raises: how to identify great teachers

At a special school board meeting in September on teacher quality, board members were briefed on how teachers are hired and fired. They learned that in the previous school year, the “must-place” teachers cost the district about $15 million, and an independent review panel has urged LA Unified to end the pool.

3. Austin Beutner is named superintendent as board members choose strong leadership to tackle LAUSD’s deep academic and fiscal challenges

The elected leaders of Los Angeles’s public schools sent a strong signal last spring that the city needs bold leadership, choosing local businessman Austin Beutner as superintendent of schools. The former investment banker served as first deputy mayor of Los Angeles, then moved across the street from City Hall to the Los Angeles Times as publisher and CEO. He was co-leader of a task force on LA Unified but did not have an education background, yet he brought financial acumen, political savvy, and negotiation skills. The choice showed that board members were ready to shake up the district and reflected an urgent need to improve student outcomes in Los Angeles public schools while staving off weakening finances that could put LA Unified under state control.

Related:

Interview: As LAUSD faces possible teachers strike, new superintendent says, ‘We need parents in that room with us, making more informed, better choices’

As the school year began, the new superintendent sat down with the parent advocacy organization Speak UP to discuss labor talks, parent power and how to solve the district’s financial crisis while putting the needs of kids first.

4. LA’s graduation rate will now be reported in a second way to reveal how many students are actually eligible for state universities

LA Unified made a big commitment to its students and families this year: by 2023 all students will be college-ready, and — to make sure parents can hold the district accountable — it will now report two different graduation rates: the percentage of students who graduated meeting state standards, and the percentage of how many were eligible to apply to state universities. Through unanimous approval of the “Realizing the Promise for All: Close the Gap by 2023” resolution in June, the board members committed to all students — including English learners, special education students, foster youth, and those living in poverty — to provide the support they need to graduate eligible to apply to a state four-year university. The resolution also directed the district to develop tougher school site improvement plans and exempt the principals of the lowest-performing schools from having to hire off the district’s “must-place” teachers list.

Related:

California’s graduation rate rises, but there’s no improvement in students’ eligibility for state universities
California posted a near all-time high graduation rate — 83 percent for the Class of 2018 — but the rate of students eligible to apply for state universities didn’t budge, according to state data released in November. Just under half — 49.9 percent — of the Class of 2018 met admission requirements for the University of California and/or the California State University systems — the same as in 2017. In LA Unified, the graduation rate rose to 76.6 percent. Its rate of seniors eligible for UC and CSU schools rose to 61.9 percent, up from 59.8 percent in 2016-17.

5. Telfair Elementary: The heart of LAUSD’s homeless crisis could become ground zero for change

If LA Unified’s growing student homeless crisis had an epicenter, Telfair Elementary in the northeast San Fernando Valley would be it. Last year the school had the highest percentage of homeless students; so far this year, it’s tied for first place. And as the district explores expanding support for its estimated 16,000 homeless students, Telfair could be first in line for help — and a model for the rest of LA Unified. The school board has directed Superintendent Austin Beutner to study the possibility of housing homeless students and their families on district property, such as in school gyms and parking lots. Beutner reminded board members that “our No. 1 priority is to educate children,” then said he’d like to start at one school, Telfair in Pacoima, instead of a broader surveying of the district’s schools. “If we start at Telfair, and we can prove to everybody here that we can solve [homelessness] at Telfair, then I think we can solve it in more communities,” he said.

Related:

LAUSD board approves study of housing homeless students and their families on district properties

As the district studies using district property to house homeless students and their families, options include designating parking lots and other district spaces for overnight parking for homeless students and families, providing overnight shelter and meals, and building or converting buildings to create temporary or permanent housing.

6. As the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools turns 10, a new report shows this unique turnaround model is driving big gains at struggling campuses

7. LAUSD cuts positions to plug a budget hole without increasing class sizes

8. 12,000 kids will leave LAUSD this year: Los Angeles school board weighs options for how to fill looming financial hole

9. Only one fourth-grader at a school in California can read at grade level; now a lawsuit claiming the state is violating students’ ‘constitutional right to literacy’ is moving to trial

10. 50 years after the Walkouts, Los Angeles Latino students are still fighting for educational equity

11. New fingerprinting requirements are keeping LAUSD parents from volunteering

12. Inside Citizens of the World, the intentionally diverse California school network built around community engagement and students’ unique backgrounds

13. Unexpected trends in California’s student discipline data: Suspensions peak in middle school, black kids more likely to be disciplined in segregated schools & more

14. How a Blue Ribbon high school in downtown LA is daring its low-income Latino students to dream bigger — and guiding 87 percent of them into four-year colleges

15. Exclusive: California Teachers Association projects 23,000-member loss in wake of Supreme Court ruling and slashes its budget

16. 100,000 LAUSD students have no representative. Here are 5 things to know about Board District 5, vacated by Ref Rodriguez’s resignation

17. ‘Just handing out diplomas’? New study shows California students are enrolling in ‘credit recovery’ programs at a rate 60 percent above the national average

18. New report sounds the alarm in California: Only 1 in 8 Latinos has a four-year college degree — and Newsom and state legislators need to act now to boost college graduates by 2030

PLUS:

See how much has changed — or not — in a year, with a glance at the top stories of 2017:

Our 17 most popular articles about Los Angeles schools from 2017

Updated Dec. 11

L.A. Unified is facing a new deadline to prove to its county overseers that it will be able to stay afloat.

By Monday, Dec. 17, the district must submit a revised plan to show how it will address its structural deficit that could render L.A. Unified insolvent within three years, meaning it needs to figure out how to cut its expenses or find more income so it can keep paying its bills. If it can’t, it faces a takeover.

In the budget’s revision that will be presented at Tuesday’s school board meeting, Scott Price, L.A. Unified’s chief financial officer, states that “the district continues to deficit spend, (and) a large portion of the reserves will be consumed in 2019-20 and is expected to be depleted by 2020-21.”

That means two years from now, L.A. Unified will end its school year $4 million short, according to Price’s letter, because its reserves will be exhausted and can no longer be used to plug the estimated $500 million each year that the district says it is spending above what it takes in. L.A. Unified’s total annual budget is about $7.5 billion.

An independent financial analysis commissioned by L.A. Unified also found that the district will be insolvent by 2021-22 and warned that the district’s expenditures are expected to exceed revenues in each of the next five years.

To stave off insolvency, the district plans an ongoing 15 percent reduction of central office resources, saving $86 million over two years, according to the budget revise that will be presented Tuesday. The district also plans to save $3 million ongoing by cutting attendance incentives to the Local Districts, to save $10 million by changing how it procures uniforms and to save $5.7 million on books and supplies.

The school board will vote Tuesday on the revised budget and the cost-savings plans, which include a list of specific central office positions recommended for cutting. The positions and their expected savings — which represent the total annual cost of the position, including salary and benefits — include:

• chief of police, $317,000

• 13 police officers, saving $1.3 million

• a Korean translator, $100,000

• a coordinator of counseling, $160,000

• a deputy budget director, over $200,000

• two directors of special education, who make nearly $200,000 each

• an executive director of special education, nearly $210,000

• a television producer-director, nearly $160,000

The Los Angeles County Office of Education has said the district’s continued use of deficit spending — meaning it is eating into its savings to cover its operating costs  — has led to a “drastic” drop in its financial reserves and “continues to be alarming.”

The county has given L.A. Unified until Dec. 17 to outline how it will reverse its march toward insolvency by either cutting costs or finding new revenues. If the county is not satisfied with the district’s plan, it stated that it could choose to either send in a financial expert to collaborate with the district or install a fiscal adviser — someone who essentially takes over all financial decisions for the country’s second-largest school district.

After the county receives L.A. Unified’s budget revision, it will respond within 30 days, a county spokeswoman said.

The district’s weakening financial health is central to why the district and its teachers union have not been able to come to an agreement in its protracted contract negotiations. United Teachers Los Angeles is planning to strike in January if a last-minute deal is not cut. Last week, mediation efforts ended, and after a report that is due Friday is issued from the fact-finding panel, the union is free to strike.

L.A. Unified and UTLA have painted starkly different pictures of the district’s finances: District negotiators say accepting all of UTLA’s demands, which include higher salaries and lower class sizes, would “immediately bankrupt” the district and lead to teacher layoffs. UTLA says the district is overstating its financial woes and is “sitting on” money that is desperately needed in the schools.

In related news, on Tuesday Dr. Candi Clark, the Chief Financial Officer of the Los Angeles County Office of Education, sent a written statement addressing allegations by the union that she had not written her own remarks when she addressed the school board in August.

Here is her statement:

“As Chief Financial Officer for the Los Angeles County Office of Education, I prepared my own budget comments provided at the Aug. 21 meeting of the LAUSD Board of Education.

“After sharing concerns that morning regarding LAUSD’s budget in a meeting with Supt. Beutner, I decided to stay and share my comments at the Board of Education meeting scheduled for later that day. I also decided to take my list of concerns and put them in a statement to the Board. 

“In addition, my concerns about the LAUSD budget have been conveyed in letters to the district prior to and after the Aug. 21 Board meeting.

 “While at the district office, I asked to use an LAUSD laptop because I had not brought my own. At my request, the completed statement was sent to my LACOE email address for my files.

 “I expanded on these same concerns at the Sept. 11 meeting of the LAUSD Board, and these issues were also the focus of remarks by Nick Schweizer, Deputy Superintendent of Public Instruction, California Department of Education.

 “The fiscal solvency of LAUSD remains an ongoing critical issue, and LACOE is committed to working closely with the district to address these concerns.”

• Read more:

LAUSD parents stuck ‘in the middle’ as Los Angeles braces for a likely teacher strike

LAUSD’s ‘signs of fiscal distress’ trigger two new warnings, including risk of going broke within three years

It gets worse for LAUSD: This week both the county and the state showed up to say, ‘Get your fiscal house in order or else we’re taking over’

‘LAUSD is not too big to fail’: School board members alarmed by LA County official’s dire financial projections — and warnings of the possible appointment of a ‘fiscal adviser’

This article was updated Dec. 11 with comments from the Los Angeles County Office of Education’s Chief Financial Officer, Dr. Clark. 

Eleven days after the election, Tony Thurmond accepted a concession call from Marshall Tuck and will become California’s state superintendent of public instruction.

A spokesman for Tuck’s campaign confirmed Sunday that the race was over and that Tuck had conceded Saturday morning in a phone call to Thurmond.

Thurmond tweeted out his thanks to voters on Saturday and said in a statement, “I intend to be a champion of public schools and a Superintendent for all California students. I ran for Superintendent of Public Instruction to deliver to all Californians the promise that public education delivered to me — that all students, no matter their background and no matter their challenges, can succeed with a great public education.”

I want to thank the voters of CA for electing me to serve the 6 million students of CA. I intend to be a champion of public schools & a Superintendent for all CA students. I want to thank Marshall Tuck for his gracious call to congratulate me & wish me well. Time to get to work!

— Tony Thurmond (@TonyThurmond) November 17, 2018

Thurmond, 50, is a state assemblyman and a former social worker and school board member in the San Francisco Bay area. He had the backing of the powerful teachers union and other organized labor groups throughout the state. Every state superintendent in the past 24 years has won with teacher union support.

Tuck, 45, had an 86,000-vote lead after Election Day, but as provisional and mail-in ballots were counted, that margin evaporated, and Thurmond’s lead is now nearly three times what Tuck’s was. Results will not be official until all votes are counted — about 2 million remain — and are certified in December.

About 9 million votes have been counted, and 3 million of those have come since Election Day.

The 325,000-member California Teachers Association, “phone-banked, texted, canvassed and volunteered for candidates like Tony who want quality public schools,” President Eric C. Heins wrote in a news release. “It’s clear that educators played a pivotal role in this election.”

The state superintendent job lacks partisan affiliation, carries little statutory power and has not historically set its occupants on a path to higher office. But the record $60 million spent on the race proved it was a sought-after bully pulpit. A win for Tuck would have given education reformers a public counterweight against Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom, the new state board of education that he will appoint, and the Democratic majority in the state legislature — all of which were elected with union backing.

• Read more: California’s campaign for state superintendent costs more than most Senate races. Here’s why

The race centered on California’s debate over school choice, pitting Thurmond against Tuck, who was supported by the California Charter Schools Association Advocates and wealthy reformers. Both are Democrats, oppose for-profit charters, and called for more transparency measures. But Thurmond suggested that a “pause” on new charter schools might be necessary until new revenues are found to offset the dollars that districts lose when their students move to charters. Tuck argued that school districts should not be allowed to reject new charter petitions because of the financial hardship that might result.

Both candidates also agreed on adding more recognized subgroups of students who are underachieving — such as African Americans — to the state’s Local Control Funding Formula, which provides additional funding for English learners, low-income, homeless and foster students. They also agree on free preschool for all children across the state and additional mental health support for students.

But Tuck had vowed to fight for changes in how school districts are allowed to spend the extra funding. The current superintendent has said the money can be used for across-the-board raises for teachers. Tuck wanted to end that. Thurmond declined to say if he would continue it, CALmatters reported.

Bill Lucia, president and CEO of EdVoice, said by email Monday, “We wish Mr. Thurmond nothing but success in delivering on campaign promises made to parents with children being failed by the current system. The first test will be whether he follows through or reneges on the explicit promise to reverse Superintendent Torlakson’s ill-advised decision to redirect funds for across-the-board pay raises from extra help intended for English learners and kids in poverty. Fixing broken California public schools will require tough and unpopular decisions that will likely upset the special interests that funded his campaign.  Hopefully, he can find the courage to stand tall and do it.” EdVoice is a California education advocacy organization that supported Tuck’s campaign.

The heated contest featured disputes over negative advertising and became the most expensive race in the nation for a state superintendent — for the second time. Tuck narrowly lost in 2014 to Tom Torlakson, who served two four-year terms and is now termed out. That race cost $30 million. This time, the candidates raked in twice that — more than any House race this cycle and all but a handful of the most expensive Senate races. Tuck took in the lion’s share, outspending Thurmond roughly 2-1.

Tuck was president of Green Dot Public Schools, a nonprofit charter management organization started in 1999 in Los Angeles, as well as the founding CEO of the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, a network created a decade ago by former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa after his failed attempt to take over the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Tuck wrote to his supporters Saturday, “I just spoke with Assemblymember Thurmond and congratulated him on his victory. I offered to help him be successful and wished him the best in his new role. Given it has become clear that we are not going to win this campaign, I felt it was in the best interest of California’s children for me to concede now so that Assemblymember Thurmond has as much time as possible to plan to take over as State Superintendent (all votes will still be counted but conceding allows candidates to move forward).”

He added, “I recognize that change is very hard and politics, particularly when you lose, can be disheartening. I remind myself that winning the election isn’t the end goal. The end goal is that all children in this state and country, regardless of background, get access to quality public schools. Reaching that goal is going to take a lot of work and absolutely requires us to get over this loss quickly. We must continue to be extremely determined to do our part to help our children.”

The Education Trust—West, an education advocacy organization, in a statement Monday pressed California’s newly elected leaders to “move urgently and aggressively to tackle the obstacles that limit student opportunity and achievement.”

“We cannot continue to be complacent with a system that provides more counselors, more computer science courses, and more A-G courses for affluent schools than schools in lower-income communities — to name just a few of the injustices impacting California students,” said Elisha Smith Arrillaga, Ed Trust—West’s interim co-executive director.

The organization congratulated Newsom and Thurmond and said it hopes “to see the same spirit of urgency and excitement we saw during the campaign season applied to building an outstanding school and college system … to usher in evidence-based, robust changes that will bring much-needed, long-awaited educational justice to California students and communities.”

Carrie Hahnel, interim co-executive director, added, “California schools can truly serve every student, but only if our elected officials work together strategically and collaboratively, in partnership with stakeholders on college campuses and in our school communities, to once and for all close our state’s unacceptable opportunity gaps.”

*Updated Nov. 9

LA Unified’s budget has been approved for now by its county overseers, but they gave the district a new deadline for it to address its structural deficit or face a takeover.

In a letter delivered late Thursday, the Los Angeles County Office of Education said the district’s continued use of deficit spending — meaning it is eating into its savings to cover its operating costs  — has led to a “drastic” drop in its financial reserves and “continues to be alarming.”

“LAUSD continues to show signs of fiscal distress,” the county’s letter states.

The county gave LA Unified until Dec. 17 to outline how it will reverse its march toward insolvency by either cutting costs or finding new revenues. If the county is not satisfied with the district’s plan, it stated that it could at that time choose to either send a financial expert to the district to work with it or install a fiscal adviser — someone who essentially takes over all financial decisions for the country’s second-largest school district.

The district’s reserves are being depleted so quickly that they are projected to drop 90 percent in two years — from $778 million this year to $76.5 million in 2020-21, according to the county. This year, LA Unified’s reserves are just over 10 percent, but by next year they’re projected to decline to just under 6 percent and then to 1.04 percent in 2020-21. School districts are required by the state to keep a 1 percent reserve. Falling below 1 percent is what triggers a county to take over a district’s financial decision-making.

The district is facing down the threat of a strike by its 30,000-member teachers union, which has so far rejected contract offers and is pushing for higher pay, lower class sizes and more support staff in schools like librarians, nurses and counselors. The county’s letter states that any new raises could put the district at risk.

• Read more: 

It gets worse for LAUSD: This week both the county and the state showed up to say, ‘Get your fiscal house in order or else we’re taking over’

‘LAUSD is not too big to fail’: School board members alarmed by LA County official’s dire financial projections — and warnings of the possible appointment of a ‘fiscal adviser’

The letter comes at the same time as a separate independent financial analysis commissioned by LA Unified officials which found that the district could run out of money by 2021-22.

The county’s concerns centered on how much more the district is spending than it is taking in. The deficits “are primarily due to revenue loss associated with declining enrollment, the increasing costs related to pensions, Special Education encroachment and facilities maintenance,” the county stated in its letter, which is addressed to board President Mónica García. García declined to comment.

The county projected that the district’s current 486,000-student enrollment will drop more than 5.5 percent — or by 26,000 — in the next two years. It said the district “must carefully monitor its enrollment trends and adjust its financial projections accordingly … as well as develop long-range facilities plans to address corresponding declining enrollment.”

The county is requiring that the school board vote on an updated budget and fiscal stabilization plan by the Dec. 17 deadline. It also must report on 15 independent charter schools that have negative balances.

The county also repeated its concerns about how LA Unified will be able to afford 6 percent raises for its workers, which it has already negotiated with two-thirds of its labor unions and has offered to its teachers union. Contract negotiations with United Teachers Los Angeles are now in what’s called fact-finding — the final stage before a strike can be called.

UTLA maintains that the district has reserves nearing $2 billion and can meet its demands. The district said the union’s proposals would cost $800 million and bankrupt it.

Scott Price, LA Unified’s chief financial officer, said in a statement Friday that “the district’s $1.8 billion in the reserve fund is being used to fund salary increases for teachers, counselors, employees and class sizes, and the challenge is the money will be gone within three years.”

“As we have noted in previous letters, the use of one-time funding sources to cover ongoing salary expenditures is a key indicator of risk for potential insolvency,” the county stated. It listed those “indicators of fiscal insolvency” as “deficit spending and failure to maintain adequate reserves and fund balance, and insufficient consideration of long-term bargaining agreement effects.”

The county said that while it is approving the district’s budget, “we are looking for the Governing Board to take all necessary actions to balance the District’s budget. The drastic reserve reduction continues to be alarming and of great concern to LACOE. Our previous letters have stated that should LAUSD’s structural deficit spending trajectory continue, and the County Superintendent determines that a more intensive approach is necessary, the County Superintendent has the authority to assign a fiscal expert or a fiscal advisor with stay and rescind authority over board actions in order to stabilize the District’s financial situation.”

NEW INDEPENDENT ANALYSIS

The county’s stern warnings mirror those in the latest 68-page independent analysis of the district’s finances, the fifth report to find the system is in deep fiscal trouble.

The analysis, obtained by LA School Report, was conducted by Houlihan and Lockey Financial Advisors at the district’s request. It stated that the school system will be insolvent by 2021-22, when it will have a $419 million deficit. By 2022-23, the deficit is projected to be $880 million.

The analysis also warned that the district’s expenditures are expected to exceed revenues in each of the next five years.

In a September letter to the school board included in the new report, CFO Price said the district sought the third-party validation of its own assessment that if the district continues to spend more money than it brings in, its savings “will be exhausted in the early months of the 2021-22 school year. At that point, the district will be bankrupt,” Price wrote. LA Unified is spending between $450 million and $700 million more a year that it is taking in, he added.

Price wrote that the analysis confirmed the district’s own budget and outlook projections. The financial consulting firm is the fifth outside group to have studied LA Unified’s finances and stated that the school district will run out of money if changes are not made.

The teachers union maintains that the district had $1.863 billion in reserves at the end of the 2017-18 school year and can afford to meet its demands, which include 6.5 percent raises, class-size reductions and hiring more school nurses, counselors, social workers, librarians and other staff. UTLA called the district’s increased salary proposal in its latest offer on Oct. 30 “insulting” for not matching its demand to lower class sizes.

The union voted overwhelmingly in August to authorize a strike once other measures are exhausted. Its president called last week for members to “continue to organize and build strike readiness” and announced a Dec. 15 march in downtown LA.

*This article has been updated with a revised letter from the county sent Friday which deleted “inaccurate revenue and expenditure estimates” as an indicator of fiscal insolvency. It also adds a statement from Scott Price.

Rams teammates visit Sutter Middle School this week to celebrate Know Your Classmates Day. (Photo: LAUSD Twitter)

*Updated Oct. 17

LA Unified is continuing to lose about $630 million a year because students aren’t coming to school. So this year, district officials are rethinking strategies and trying new ones, including Saturday school to make up lost days and handing out 1,000 tickets to Los Angeles Rams football games for students with excellent attendance.

In California, districts are paid for every day students attend school. When they’re not in class, that’s a big loss of income for schools, as well as lost learning for students. LA Unified needs help both financially and academically: It’s projected to run out of money in two and a half years, and fewer than 1 in 3 students meets state standards in math.

So on Tuesday, the school board spent an afternoon listening to data as well as to principals who have had some success at reducing student absences.

First, they had to get the hard facts:

• Last year, 14.7 percent of students, or 70,000 of the district’s half a million students, were chronically absent, meaning they missed 15 or more days of school.

• That totals more than 1 million days of lost instruction last year — and 1 million days of lost funding.

• For every day of school that is missed, it takes a student three days to catch up.

• Chronic absences have increased in each of the past three years.

• The chronic absence rate grew fastest among black students and those receiving special education services. At one middle school, 1 in 3 black students was chronically absent in each of the last three years.

• The percentage of students with excellent attendance — seven or fewer days missed in a school year — continues to decline, dropping to 66.9 percent last year.

• The percentage of students with excellence attendance fell the most among those who live in poverty.

Also troubling is the fact that the percentage of students who are chronically absent has been climbing even as the district’s enrollment has steadily shrunk. This school year’s enrollment of 486,000 is 14,500 below last year’s. A higher percentage of a smaller pool of students has been absent each of the last three years. And the district has been far off its attendance targets for those years.

There was some progress in the first full month of this school year, however. In September, excellent attendance increased 2.2 percent and chronic absences declined 1.5 percent, compared to September 2017.

“The good news so far is we are doing better than last year,” Superintendent Austin Beutner said.

Student attendance matters and I’m pleased to see we’re making progress. While it’s still early in the year, chronic absenteeism is down and overall attendance is up. https://t.co/QiIsGZLuGi

— Austin Beutner (@AustinLASchools) October 17, 2018

One big success that was piloted last spring in Local District South was the addition of Saturday school so kids could make up class. In May, 441 students made up missed classes, said David Baca, director of district redesign, and the program is expanding this year.

Finding out that the state Department of Education would accept Saturday school attendance and pay LA Unified for those days “was a game-changer,” said board Vice President Nick Melvoin, who led Tuesday’s Committee of the Whole meeting.

Broader use of incentives is also coming this year, including tickets to Rams, Dodgers and Sparks games for staff as well as students with excellent attendance. Already this year, the Rams have donated 1,000 tickets — all the more coveted now that the team is 6-0.  

Thanks to @RamsNFL and @BeyondDiff for sponsoring #KnowYourClassmates Day at Sutter Middle School in @LAUSDNorthwest. pic.twitter.com/igIlRmlrmt

— L.A. Unified (@LASchools) October 16, 2018

District leaders are also making home visits to boost attendance: 900 visits so far this year have brought 140 students back to school. And the district has convened parent leaders, who are volunteering to help come up with new ways to boost attendance.

One school that is working to increase attendance also posted higher test scores this month. At 107th Street Elementary School in Watts, part of the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, student attendance increased 7 percentage points, as did the percentage of students meeting state standards in English language arts. Math scores went up 6 points. Attendance among the school’s staff also increased last year, up 15 percentage points.

Some best practices at 107th Street include recognition for excellent attendance such as “brag tags,” raffles and giveaways, and weekly schoolwide announcements recognizing those with the best attendance. Students who are chronically absent receive home visits and incentives, and meet individually with school leaders and in groups with other students who are chronically absent or tardy.

The school also holds meetings on attendance for parents of students in transitional kindergarten through first grade, a strategy that LA Unified is now adopting districtwide. With 1 in 4 kindergartners chronically absent in LA Unified, the district has begun holding ongoing orientation meetings for kindergarten parents on the importance of attendance.

The Committee of the Whole convened to hear from schools who were leading the way in #attendance in @LASchools. Board District 5 schools, Jefferson High and Linda Marquez High Schools shared their stories and provided insight on how to address this crucial issue. (1/3) pic.twitter.com/g0fuhiG7Gp

— L.A. Unified District 5 (@lausdbd5) October 17, 2018

At one school in Huntington Park that has been piloting programs to increase attendance, enrollment is going up along with attendance. Targeted individual attention to students is persuading them to stay at the school rather than move to the suburbs.

Johnathan Chaikittirattana, one of three principals at the school, Linda Esperanza Marquez High School, said he and his staff model perfect attendance for their students, Speak Up reported. Chronic student absences have dropped from 14.6 percent in 2015 to 3.4 percent last year, while excellent attendance rose from 72.5 percent to 91.2 percent.

One middle school that serves a predominantly black population is using incentives, student recognition, parent reminders and increased mentoring to improve attendance. In each of the last three years at Charles R. Drew Middle School, 1 in 3 black students was chronically absent. But so far this year, the school is is on track to raise that ratio to 1 in 14 students.

Other district strategies to increase attendance this year include 190,000 postcards mailed to households that have students who have been or are on track to become chronically absent, which is expected to bring in $17 million in additional revenue; personal phone calls to parents; one-on-one counseling to students and families most at risk of becoming chronically absent, and “Student Attendance Matters” events, including a “Dawn Patrol” program that will provide targeted support to schools with higher chronic absence rates.

One organization that was credited by LA Unified officials Tuesday for its work with the district on this issue is San Francisco-based Attendance Works, which has been advising key officials in the district for over a decade.

Hedy Chang, its founder and executive director, said in an interview Wednesday that the district is “beginning to get some preliminary results” by going “out through its local districts and working to equip principals so they can do some very key activities.”

“LAUSD is a model of how you can do this work. They target an attendance improvement counselor and they work with the highest needs schools, and they use their data to develop a comprehensive approach to improving attendance. They’re using prevention and early intervention.

“One of the problems that face many districts is they think a single counselor can improve attendance at a single school, but they can’t do it all by themselves. It requires an entire school to support the effort,” Chang said. “To get change in the chronic absences level, you have to have a team organized at the school site that can have a school-wide approach, monitor data and make sure kids are getting the supports they need.”

At LA Unified, “What they’ve historically been able to do is help a smaller number of schools reach kids early before their absences pile up. (Now) they’re trying to expand that to many more schools in the district,” but “LA Unified is like a state department, they’re huge.”

* This article has been updated with an interview with Attendance Works founder Hedy Chang.

• Read more on student absences:

LA parent voice: My daughter has perfect attendance, but my goal is to help all parents take responsibility for making sure their kids are in school

LAUSD loses ground in its fight against chronic absenteeism, but foster youth attendance is up

Easy money for LA schools: Get every kid to class one more day a year and generate $30 million

With Nearly 8 Million Students Chronically Absent From School Each Year, 36 States Set Out to Tackle the Problem in New Federal Education Plans. Will It Make a Difference?

Los Angeles moved one step closer to a strike Friday when mediation efforts ended and LA Unified filed an unfair labor practice charge against United Teachers Los Angeles for refusing to participate in good faith.

The two sides now move to a process called fact-finding. Each side has five days to select a representative to the fact-finding panel, then the state’s Public Employment Relations Board selects a chairperson. The three-person panel has 30 days to submit a non-binding report. The district will then be free to impose its last offer, and the union will be free to strike.

In a statement after Friday’s third mediation session, the district said UTLA sought to end mediation after the first session.

“By UTLA’s own admission, the only reason UTLA participated in mediation was to ensure that it could move quickly to a strike. UTLA has never negotiated in good faith.”

The district said UTLA’s demands would bankrupt LA Unified “and lead to the unprecedented layoffs of about 12,000 employees, including teachers.”

Here is the district’s question-and-answer fact sheet about the contract negotiations.

In its own statement, UTLA said it had made a good faith effort to reach an agreement, “but unfortunately LAUSD officials did not do the same, failing to offer any substantial proposals to reinvest in our schools.”

“The district thinks they can buy us off with a modest pay raise, but our fight has never been just about salary,” UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl said in the statement.

Here is UTLA’s “facts we do know about the district’s financial state.”

Statement from General Counsel David Holmquist: Today, the Los Angeles Unified School District filed an unfair labor practice charge against UTLA for refusal to participate in good faith in the statutory impasse procedures. pic.twitter.com/JbbJN0AUIz

— L.A. Unified (@LASchools) October 13, 2018

LA Unified will eliminate $43 million in administrative salaries as part of an emergency cost-cutting plan to stave off its fiscal overseers.

The cuts won’t be at school sites this year, but rather at the central and local district offices. The number of jobs that will be lost will be left up to each department, but they represent an overall 15 percent reduction.

The specific positions will be identified in January, with the people in those jobs receiving notices in March and leaving by the end of June.

The job cuts are one half of a two-part strategy to right-size the district’s budget, which is projected to be on the verge of bankruptcy in two and a half years. They also come as the district is negotiating raises for teachers under the threat of a strike, and after it has approved salary increases of about 6 percent for two-thirds of its workforce.

Because it faces a fiscal cliff, LA Unified had been put on watch by its overseers at both the state and Los Angeles County, and the county had given LA Unified until Monday to detail exactly how it plans to stay out of the red.

The county’s main concern was getting details on how the district will cut $72 million from this year’s budget and another $72 million from next year’s budget, which is required for the district to have a 1 percent reserve at the end of the 2020-21 school year.

LA Unified is coming up with those savings in two main ways, said Chief Financial Officer Scott Price: jobs cuts and dodging a state fine.

The 15 percent across-the-board cut in staff at the district’s central office and in its local district offices will save $43 million. That’s just for this year though. The district will have to cut enough jobs to equal $43 million again next year.

Last June, when the budget was presented, the district said it planned a 15 percent job cut that would eliminate or reassign about 500 positions, but it said then that fewer than 70 people were expected to lose their jobs.

The second cost-saving measure is getting out of paying a state fine for having too high a ratio of administrators to students. For LA Unified, that fine is $35 million a year. The district differs with the state about how to count administrators.

The district has now received the waiver for this school year and for the last two years, but it has not yet secured it for next year.

“We will make sure that does happen,” Price said. “But if we can’t, we will make additional cuts, like restricting travel and cutting back on providing cell phones.”

• Read more: It gets worse for LAUSD: This week both the county and the state showed up to say, ‘Get your fiscal house in order or else we’re taking over’

The school board voted unanimously last Tuesday, with no discussion, to approve the budget revisions.

LA School Report talked to Price on Friday, the day the district’s revised budget was hand-delivered to the county. The county has until Nov. 8 to decide whether to accept the revisions. If it is not satisfied, it will put in motion a series of steps that could eventually lead to a fiscal takeover of the district.

The county’s main message, Price said, was, “We’ve got the recurring budget deficit, our reserves are dwindling, we’re using one-time funds to pay ongoing expenditures, and our reserves were only at $1.5 million. That sounds like a lot of money to folks, a million dollars sounds like a lot, but in a $7.5 billion budget, being only $1.5 million above your (required) 1 percent reserve is not a lot of reserves.

“I believe our budget will be approved, but the county is saying, ‘We are watching very closely what you are doing.’”

In a half-hour interview, Price also talked about those reserves and the contract negotiations with the teachers union, including the union’s assertions about the size and durability of those reserves.

His comments have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Would you summarize for parents what the county is asking you to do and when you will do it?

Dr. Price:  The county asked for some clarifications on our Fiscal Stabilization Plan. So the Fiscal Stabilization Plan that we had, had called for a 15 percent cut across the board in our district and local district offices. The county asked for more information on that.

So we went ahead and broke down the numbers that would be required, by division, to make the $43 million cut that that 15 percent represents. We went ahead and did that as part of the Fiscal Stabilization Plan that was approved by the board on Tuesday.

The other thing that the county asked us for was some information about some of the charter schools that we have. Some of them have fiscal plans that have a third year that is questionable, so we worked with our charter schools division and that also is being delivered to the county office today.

Can you say how many charters that is?

It was 12 out of the 230 or so.

What other savings are in the plan?

One of the pieces of our original Fiscal Stabilization Plan also calls for getting a waiver for our administrator-to-teacher ratio.

We were able to secure that for the current year, and we secured it for the prior two years. We’re working and hoping to find a way to address that in the out years, but that’s about $35 million a year, so they asked, What happens if that doesn’t happen?

Well, we’re going to make sure that it does happen. So we went ahead and worked out a plan that would take additional cuts from the district office. If we are not able to secure that waiver, then there will be some restrictions on travel and other types of expenditures like that in the district office, like not providing cell phones.

Do you anticipate the county will approve your budget?

Yes. …  It’s technically a good budget. But here’s the thing. We do have the recurring deficit and the county points that out, and they should point it out. We point it out every time we give our budget talk. We have a recurring deficit, our reserves are shrinking, and we have a long-term problem that we need to address.

So the county is coming in and talking to us on the technicalities on the budget. They ask us for the details on these things in order to clarify and bring to the forefront and let us know, let the district know, “Listen, we know you have a recurring deficit and a problem that you have to take care of. Your reserves are dwindling, you’re using one-time money to pay for an ongoing cause, and you have an issue here that you have to address on the longer term.”

That’s the biggest message of the county coming in, and if we don’t address those they will need to move to the next step. What will happen is, I believe that our budget will be approved and in the technical sense, but the county is saying, “We are watching very closely what you’re doing.” So when we get the first interim (budget report) in December, they’re going to say, “OK, you gave us more details on this 15 percent in the district office. We know that you have to announce layoffs early in the year 2019 to make the March deadline,” but, “You have to have more details for us in the first interim report of what you’re going to do because otherwise we won’t believe that you’re actually going to do what you say you need to do to make things happen.”

So, the bigger message is, we’ve got the recurring budget deficit, our reserves are dwindling, we’re using one-time funds to pay ongoing expenditures and our reserves were only at $1.5 million. That sounds like a lot of money to folks, a million dollars sounds like a lot, but in a $7.5 billion budget, being only $1.5 million above your one percent reserve is not a lot of reserves.

So, the county made sure that they came in and communicated to us and the board that we are on watch, basically and they are want to make sure that we know that they know.

Would you say there will be significant layoffs next year?

Right. Unless there’s a significant change in the state budget. … We’re working on other ways to cut the expenses and find efficiencies, and now there’s a bigger plan at work. If we can find ways to get more efficient and make some reductions, we’re going to work as hard as we can so that we can reduce that amount of people that we would have to lay off.

Do you anticipate that when the actual jobs that will be lost are announced at the end of June, will that be more than the small number of the last couple of years?

Yes. When I first came in just under a year ago, they had announced a 30 percent cut to the district office which turned out to be about, when all was said and done, about a 22 percent cut overall. It was people and other efficiencies, it was a mixture.

We’re going to have to have detail in January exactly what positions we’re going to be cutting. We will have to know in January what those are. We don’t just announce them in June, we’d have to know where we’re going before that.

You said when we last talked a month ago that parents would not see any cuts this year. Is that still the case for this current year?

The cuts that we’re talking about, the 15 percent, are all at the district and local district office. None of those are scheduled for school site type of cuts. That was one of the things that we wanted to stay away from. That’s the plan right now, that it’s all going to come out of central or local district offices. Just like the last cut did, that was the 30 percent cut right when I got here that they’d already organized and done.

When we last talked, you said that the budget had set aside what is equal to a 6 percent raise across the board. Since then, the district has increased its offer to the teachers union, and yet the county and the state officials both expressed concern that the new contract will be too expensive. Have you adjusted the budget to reflect the new offer?

We still have set aside what’s equivalent to the 6 percent, which is the 3 percent in 2017/18 and the 3 percent in 2018/19. That’s set aside for both teachers and for other groups that haven’t yet settled.

• Read more: LAUSD sweetens its offer on teacher raises, continues to call for a new category in evaluations to identify highly effective educators

The $1.8 billion in district reserves — is this a record amount, as the union has said?

What the county has as reserves is what’s called your unassigned balance. We start the 2019-20 school year with about $700 million in reserves. The union counts what is counted as carry-over money for schools, what is carry-over money for supplemental and concentration grants and other pieces that you’ll see in those budget documents. They count those as our reserves. But as the board sees it, the carry-over for supplemental concentration grants, school carry-over for funds they haven’t spent, those are funds set aside for specific purposes that aren’t the general savings, the reserves that we have. That’s what the dispute is. It’s not really a dispute. The union wants to include certain other things that the county doesn’t include as what our reserve is and the state doesn’t include as what our reserve is.

They’re looking at different numbers of funds that are set aside for specific purposes that are committed for specific purposes. If you look at the original budget documents, you’ll be able to see all those set aside. We make sure we’re transparent and clear about what those are and why they’re there.

It’s money at school sites, it’s donations at school sites that have been made, those type of carry-overs that are part of our larger number the union is claiming is available for them.

• Read more: 

LAUSD cuts positions to plug a budget hole without increasing class sizes

115 administrators are reassigned, but LAUSD may not see much decrease in staffing levels next year

Gavin Newsom, left, and John Cox. (Photos: Getty Images)

Parents of color want California’s next governor to place a higher priority on improving public schools, a new poll finds. But as the two gubernatorial candidates held their first and perhaps only debate Monday, education barely came up.

Republican businessman John Cox three times mentioned that the state’s schools are failing children, but there was no follow-up discussion. Gavin Newsom, Democrat and lieutenant governor, brought up schools only as part of his defense of sanctuary cities, which he said offer protections that make parents “more likely to get their child an education and drop them off at school” and to get immunizations such as for the flu.

“We didn’t talk about education, but the schools are failing our children. That is a future that we are giving up,” Cox said in closing.

“We need to make sure that California leads the way on education, on affordability, on water,” Newsom said in his final statement. He included prenatal care, early Head Start and preschool in his “most important thing for the next governor.”

Even the moderator of the hour-long radio forum, KQED’s Scott Shafer, acknowledged important topics that weren’t addressed, listing first education, along with pension reform and health care.

But a new poll of the state’s Latino, black and Asian Pacific Islander parents revealed that 9 out of 10 say improving K-12 education should be a high priority for the next governor. More than half said it should be an extremely high priority.

• Read more: With education sidelined in a Newsom-Cox governor’s race, focus on California’s schools shifts to battle for state superintendent

The poll, released last week and conducted by Goodwin Simon for The Education Trust—West and UnidosUS, found that improving public schools ranked higher than expanding access to health care and addressing the lack of affordable housing on a list of priorities for the state’s next governor.

“Parents of color really want educational justice in California, and they expect the next governor to prioritize that,” said Elisha Smith Arrillaga, co-interim executive director of Education Trust—West, which released results from polling 600 parents of color, evenly split among black, Asian and Latino.

Three out of 4 black parents called improving K-12 education an extremely high priority, as did 2 out of 3 Latino parents. And more than half of black and Asian Pacific Islander parents, and about half of Latino parents, said K-12 schools are on the wrong track or they were unsure if they were on the right track.

• Read more: Education is a critical area for Latino voters to exert influence as immigration furor fuels newfound political activism, experts say

“A lot of the research on parents and students doesn’t reflect the demographics of our state,” Smith Arrillaga said. “We wanted to make sure this poll reflected the parents of students that are in California’s K-12 schools, and right now, seven out of 10 students in our K-12 schools are Black, Latino or Asian American/Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander.”

The poll also addressed parent engagement, which schools are held accountable for in order to receive federal funding. The new Every Student Succeeds Act requires outreach to all parents and meaningful involvement with parents.

Parents of color are giving feedback at schools and feel comfortable calling for changes, but they said they face barriers and are at times doubtful that they can prompt meaningful change.

“The schools only let parents participate so much,” said one mother in the poll’s news release. Another said, “I’m not sure who I could even offer feedback to. I know that there are school board meetings, but those occur during school nights around dinner time, so it’s extremely inconvenient for me to go.”

Among all groups, a strong majority — at least 8 in 10 — said they are likely to offer feedback to their children’s school. And 9 out of 10 black and Latino parents and 7 out of 10 Asian Pacific Islander parents feel comfortable pushing their child’s school to make changes.

But just over half of black and Latino parents, and just 1 out of 3 Asian Pacific Islander parents, think it’s very possible for parents to make a difference in improving school performance.

“Clearly parents are offering feedback to their children’s schools, but unfortunately they don’t always feel their input is making a difference,” Carrie Hahnel, EdTrust—West’s interim co-executive director, said in the news release. “Schools and districts must authentically engage parents as partners in improvement, and this is especially the case for schools serving primarily Black, Latino, and Asian Pacific Islander students whose parents are far too often ignored.”

• Read more on the California parent poll here.

]]> https://www.laschoolreport.com/lausd-sweetens-its-deal-on-teacher-raises-continues-to-call-for-a-new-category-in-evaluations-to-identify-highly-effective-educators/ Wed, 26 Sep 2018 22:49:58 +0000 http://laschoolreport.com/?p=52087

Superintendent Austin Beutner at his introductory news conference last spring at Belmont High School.

*Updated Sept. 27: After today’s first mediation session, LA Unified announced that the next session is set for Oct. 3.

LA Unified sweetened its salary offer to the teachers union just before Thursday’s first mediation session, but it did not back down on teacher quality demands — including a call for a new category in evaluations to identify highly effective teachers.

The district’s offer was met by outrage from United Teachers Los Angeles, which shows no intention of backing off its threats to strike.

The new offer was approved Tuesday morning in closed session by the school board and made public late Tuesday. The two sides will meet with a mediator Thursday. The teachers have been working without a contract since July 2017. In their last contract, in 2015, they received 10 percent raises. They had not received raises for eight years during the Recession but still received salary boosts based on years of experience and for taking additional educational courses.

• Read more: As LA’s teachers union prepares to strike, here’s something that could be a bigger hang-up than raises: how to identify great teachers

The district is offering 6 percent raises over two years to all teachers. Even though the district faces bankruptcy in three years and has been warned by both the county and the state, LA Unified’s chief financial officer has said 6 percent raises have been factored into this year’s budget and the district can afford them. But other union demands would cost $1.5 billion beyond the raises and can’t be sustained, the district says.

The district’s public statement on its new offer did not include some of its previous negotiation positions, but an email Wednesday from the district’s labor team confirmed that they are still on the table.

Those include adding the new teacher evaluation category and a refusal to cede decision-making authority over conversions to magnet schools, student testing, and principals’ budgets.

• Read more: LAUSD more than doubles new magnets this year, but teachers union calls for contract changes that would halt their growth

If the district decides to drop any of those, the next chance to open negotiations with the union will be when the new contract runs out in July 2020.

The district’s statement said the new offer “provides for a fair pay raise for teachers, additional teachers in high-needs schools, teacher pay aligned with student needs, and increased transparency in the UTLA contract.” It “shows our commitment to helping students most in need,” Superintendent Austin Beutner said, “and creates a pathway for LA Unified and UTLA to avoid a strike that would hurt LA’s most vulnerable students and families.”

In a response posted on Facebook, UTLA called the new offer “a stunning example of disrespect to LAUSD educators and students,” citing salary increases that are “contingent on district finances, increased workload and cuts to salary point opportunities, while also making it more difficult to qualify for secure healthcare in retirement.”

Here’s what the district is offering:

Salary and benefits:

A 6 percent raise over two years, made up of a 3 percent raise retroactive for 2017-18, plus another 3 percent raise for 2018-19. A 6 percent raise would match the raises the district’s other labor unions received this year. On Thursday, the day mediation that began with the teachers union, the district announced it had reached a tentative agreement with the Teamsters, for the same raise as it is offering the teachers.

The district’s previous offer was a 2 percent raise and a 2 percent bonus. The union wants a 6.5 percent raise that would be retroactive to July 1, 2016.

This year’s raise would be contingent on whether the district’s budget report next spring shows positive projected ending balances for 2018-19 and 2019-20.

The proposal also includes a provision for extra work and/or training starting this school year.

Teachers could also earn extra pay for taking courses, but only in areas that the district prioritizes, such as science, the arts, foreign languages, and technical education. Currently, teachers are eligible for pay raises for taking a wide range of classes, something school board members have been repeatedly urging to change.

The requirement for eligibility for health benefits in retirement would increase by two years under the formula that adds up an employee’s age and years of service. This would align with the district’s other employee unions. All eligible retirees and their dependents receive free lifetime health benefits, with no co-pays or premiums.

Class sizes:

The proposal reduces class sizes by four students in core subjects in 15 middle schools and 75 elementary schools. These high-needs schools are determined under a new Student Equity Needs Index. Starting this school year, the schools are also receiving extra funding and a waiver from having to hire teachers off the district’s “must-place” list.

• Read more: LAUSD board frees principals of struggling schools from having to hire teachers sent to them by the district

As Gov. Brown allocates more education funding, LAUSD moves to make sure its neediest schools benefit the most

Contract language transparency:

The district is calling for a summary document in all final contracts that will provide a clear outline for families and the general public “to increase transparency and understanding.”

Katie Braude, executive director of the parent advocacy group Speak UP, called on the district to do more on teacher quality.

“Unfortunately, this contract offer does not do enough to ensure that every student has a quality teacher in front of the classroom,” Braude said. “It would lock us into the status quo for another two years, leaving intact the parts of the contract that value seniority over teacher performance. Teachers and parents agree that regular and meaningful evaluations improve teacher quality and effectiveness. Teachers we work with feel unsupported when they don’t get that regular feedback. Teachers should not go five years without being evaluated, and no school should be forced to hire a teacher against their will. No one benefits from that situation.”

@BizFed urges @LASchools and @UTLAnow to do everything they can to avoid a strike. @BizFed represents 390,000 businesses that employ nearly 4 million people throughout Los Angeles County and believes a strike will harm their members’ employees and their children. pic.twitter.com/v7TLhAbB5S

— L.A. Unified (@LASchools) September 27, 2018

*This article has been updated with the district’s agreement with the Teamsters on Thursday, Sept. 27, and with the next mediation date of Oct 3.

As LA Unified and its teachers union enter into mediation this week and the union prepares for a strike, their differences over how teachers are evaluated could be harder to resolve than how much pay raises will be.

The district wants to add a new category of teacher ratings, called highly effective, as part of its strategy to raise student achievement, attract and retain good teachers, and keep families in the district. The union has steadfastly opposed identifying top performers or paying those teachers more, and it wants the district to replace the current teacher evaluation system, which has three tiers of ratings, with one that was created more than two decades ago and does not include ratings.

The two sides “fundamentally disagree” on this issue, the district says. “You continue to reject any effort to recognize highly effective teachers,” it stated in its response to the final offer of United Teachers Los Angeles.

The new superintendent, school board members, and parent and advocacy groups have all focused on teacher quality in the weeks running up to mediation.

“An ineffective teacher can cause students to lose more than a year of learning, which is setting students up for failure,” Superintendent Austin Beutner said this month in his first major policy speech, calling for a high-quality teacher in every classroom and a more efficient way of moving ineffective teachers out.

• Read more: What’s the value of being able to identify highly effective teachers? Q&A with Daniel Weisberg, education advocate and chief executive of TNTP

UTLA maintains that teacher evaluations are a distraction during this year’s contract negotiations. As one union officer told LAist after Beutner’s speech last week, addressing “ineffective teachers” is “a policy narrative that has come and went.” UTLA did not respond to requests for comment for this article.

The district is prepared to match the salary increases it recently approved for its other labor unions, but it wants to move the needle on teacher quality as it strives to improve student achievement.

“I think given what we are prepared to offer in terms of compensation, similar to other units, around 6 percent, it would be fair to get something in return,” Nick Melvoin, vice president of the LA Unified school board, said in an interview Thursday.

“It’s important to talk not solely about salaries when there are a lot of other things that we’re trying to do. This is in the context of a district that needs massive improvement. We want to use this as an opportunity to drive the district forward, not just give raises or compensation, but think about what we also believe to be important to raising achievement.”

But would the disagreement over adding a top category for teacher evaluations “be the reason we would walk away from negotiations? Probably not, because we believe we can settle and it’s important to keep schools open,” Melvoin said.

“Obviously, we do not want a strike,” Deputy Superintendent Vivian Ekchian said Monday. “The delivery of instruction in our classrooms and the high quality attached to it is our No. 1 priority, and we’re here to recruit the best, assign appropriately to schools where they can be more successful, and offer the support necessary for them to continue to build competency so that every student in every classroom has a high-quality teacher. … But it’s a joint responsibility. We have to build capacity together.”

DISAGREEMENT OVER HOW TO EVALUATE TEACHERS

There has been little change in at least a decade in how the district assesses its teachers, though in 2015-16 it added a third category, exceeds standards, to two pre-existing rankings: meeting standards or below standards. Without a third category, the district could have lost federal funding.

Three years ago, during the last contract negotiations, then-Superintendent John Deasy tried to add a category for highly effective teachers. UTLA argued that Deasy was trying to lay the groundwork for merit-based pay and took the issue to the state labor board. A judge ruled in the union’s favor.

The district currently uses the LAUSD Teaching and Learning Framework, which has 61 elements,  to assess teachers. UTLA wants the district to use the California Standards for the Teaching Profession, which doesn’t have teacher rating categories.

As Ekchian explained, that document was created in 1997 and lacks the detail of the current framework: “I think we’ve come a long way since then and we have built a better forum, more detailed, with the student in mind.”

The current “framework is specifically addressing the expectations for effective teaching practices in the classroom, so it’s very detailed in terms as of what one should be able to see in the classroom,” Ekchian said. “The California Standards for the Teaching Profession is also a valuable document, and our work is aligned with that, but it’s not as specific. So you have an overall goal, but it’s not what we’re looking at: We have reflective questions, we have conversations about teaching practice, we also speak to the policies that the teachers have to adhere to in the school district. So ours is far more detailed.”

Board member Kelly Gonez, who was a teacher, said Monday that “we could better differentiate and add a fourth tier,” but she was concerned about the tone of some of the discussions around teacher quality.

“I think it’s important to talk about teacher evaluation. It’s a critical tool for growth,” Gonez said. “I think we know, unfortunately, that there are large gaps in opportunities and in achievement across our district. And so one of the things that we think might be a great way to help improve our struggling schools is making sure that we have high-quality teachers in every classroom,” as well as making sure “we’re supporting them so they stay in the classroom, that we help them develop so they reach their full potential, and that we’re retaining them.

“But it’s also about making sure that teachers see the value in the system, and they have to find it useful in order for that to make an impact in their classrooms. It has to be a fair process, it has to be authentic, and it has to be focused on student outcomes, rather than indicating that we are looking for bad teachers. Because I think the vast majority of our teachers are working really hard to support our students.

“Unfortunately, I hear from some teachers that they feel like they’re not being not feeling valued, and it’s on us. We absolutely want to focus on improving their quality, but we need to make clear that we value our teachers.”

FOCUS ON QUALITY

School board members discussed teacher quality at their meeting last week and were briefed on how teachers are hired and fired. Only the first part of what was supposed to be a four-hour examination of the topic was delivered, with the rest put off until a later date.

The data showed:

• It takes three years to fire an ineffective teacher.
• 96 percent of teachers met standards last year, with 22 percent exceeding standards.
• 4 percent of teachers were below standards.
• About a third of the district’s roughly 25,000 K-12 teachers are evaluated each year.
• 400 teachers have not been evaluated for at least five years.

In the last five years, the number of teachers deemed to have “below standard performance” has risen slightly but remains mostly unchanged — roughly 4 percent.

Last year, 295 of the district’s 7,623 teachers, or just under 4 percent, were rated below standard, slightly more than the 242 teachers who received that rating in the 2013-14 school year. By contrast, 22 percent — 1,696 teachers — exceeded standards last year.

One reason for the stagnant number of teachers in the “below standard” rating could be that only about a third of educators are evaluated every year at LA Unified, which is similar to nationwide trends, officials said Tuesday. But in LA Unified, principals and teachers can decide to extend the period between evaluations to five years.

The district interviews about 5,000 teacher candidates each year and has had to hire about 2,700 a year, in part because it’s losing about 1,500 a year. In 2015-16, the district hired 2,545 teachers, and 1,586 left.

INFREQUENT EVALUATIONS

After the presentation, Melvoin asked if the list of the 400 teachers who have not been evaluated for at least five years could be made available to parents, but he was told there is no place for that information to be released. Parents cannot view or weigh in on teacher evaluations, or even see how often educators at their school are rated.

“It takes us three years to evaluate someone out of the district,” board member Richard Vladovic said. “Where is the apology letter to parents? It takes three years, and we’ve destroyed the lives of 150 kids.”

District officials acknowledged that in private industry, most employees are evaluated annually. They said principals have been sent a list of teachers who must be evaluated this year, including those who are untenured, those who were disciplined last year, and those who have not been evaluated for five years.

“We recognize that there’s no other place that we’re aware of, in private industry in particular, where someone’s evaluation process is every five years,” Ekchian responded. She said the district is “working toward more streamlined (evaluations), and more often.” Long Beach uses evaluations as a tool for professional development, “and that’s our next step, to be aligned with that.”

Vladovic questioned whether the current evaluation system was actually making things better.

“Does it result in better teaching?” he asked. “No, it hasn’t made a difference. The perennial schools are still failing. It hasn’t produced the results we want. It has not produced improved student achievement. It hasn’t made us more accountable. And it’s killed off our principals who are now gun-shy from doing it.”

FEWER EVALUATIONS AT LOWEST-PERFORMING SCHOOLS

If the district’s average evaluation rate is low compared to the private workforce, it’s even lower at the 44 LA Unified schools with the worst test scores.

At the district’s lowest-performing schools, more than two-thirds of teachers were not evaluated last year, according to Parent Revolution, a nonprofit advocacy organization that in June released an analysis of three years of teacher evaluation data at LA Unified.

Only one of those 44 schools evaluated more than half their teachers, and only 17 teachers were rated below standards. From 2014 to 2017, 23 of the schools gave every teacher who was evaluated a satisfactory rating, even though the schools had the lowest test scores in the district.

After Parent Revolution released the data, Melvoin called for more regular evaluations of teachers.

At Tuesday’s school board meeting, Melvoin asked if there was a way to incentivize teachers to teach in the highest-needs schools. Ekchian said the contract doesn’t prohibit it and that the district can offer $3,000 for a teacher to go to a high-need school, another $3,000 if he or she stays there for five years, and $5,000 if the teacher earns a master’s degree.

But she pointed out that the challenge was “not just recruitment, but retention.”

Melvoin also asked about the requirement that teachers be hired first from a “must-place” list. Last year, the “must-place” teachers, who have been displaced from their schools but not rehired at another school, cost the district about $15 million, and an independent review panel has urged LA Unified to end the pool.

In June, the board unanimously passed a resolution that exempts the principals of the lowest-performing schools from having to hire off the must-place list, and officials reported Tuesday that those schools are now taking advantage of that freedom.

• Read more: LAUSD board frees principals of struggling schools from having to hire teachers sent to them by the district

But at Tuesday’s board meeting Ekchian raised the question of cost. When schools hire teachers who aren’t already on the payroll, the district would have to cut other things to be able to afford it, she said.

A 2011 survey found that “the majority of principals in LAUSD were rarely or never satisfied with the teachers they were forced to hire from the must-place list,” said Kency Nittler, manager for teacher trends at the National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and policy group. Its survey found that 3 in 4 principals said they were unable to hire their teacher of choice because they needed to hire from the must-place list and that those teachers were rarely, if ever, a good fit for their school.

PARENTS AND TEACHERS MEET

The parent advocacy organization Speak UP has been organizing a series of collaborative meetings between LA Unified parents and teachers to discuss ways to create a contract that both values teachers and puts kids first.

There was broad consensus in the group that teachers should be evaluated and given productive feedback more frequently, that stakeholder feedback and student growth should be a part of evaluations, and that teachers should be rewarded for excellent performance. The group has been discussing its findings with district officials ahead of mediation.

“Parents and teachers agree that more frequent and meaningful evaluation benefits both teachers and kids,” Lisa Stevens, a teacher at Sotomayor Center for Arts and Sciences who facilitated the meetings, wrote in an email.

“We also agree that teachers who are doing a great job should be able to move up the pay scale more quickly without having to take so many classes that may not have anything to do with the subjects we teach. Overall, we found it constructive to hear each other’s perspectives, and we’re encouraged that parents and teachers can work together, have a productive dialogue and find so much common ground,” Stevens said.

“As we start to ensure that there’s an effective teacher in every classroom, which I think is the key to raising the district from 30 percent proficiency in math to 100, and 40 percent proficiency in English to 100, and 47 percent A-G graduation to 100 — the key to that is a great teacher,” Melvoin said last week. “We want to understand where they are, who they are, how they became great, and figure out how to learn from them. My hunch is that there’s so much great teaching and learning going on within the district that sometimes we just have to learn from what’s happening as opposed to just reinventing the wheel.”

He added, “Parents should know where are these teachers, and is there an equitable distribution. Are there certain schools with none of the highly effective teachers, are there certain communities where there are less of them?”

Eckhian said the issue of teacher evaluations is not the only area where the two sides differ, “but at the end of the day, human capital is very important, and our building competencies amongst our teachers is very important to the district. It’s not interpreted as punitive, it’s not interpreted as a hammer, it is really truly building the capacities and commitment of teachers who are serving our students.”

Last year, 96 percent of teachers met or exceeded standards, with about 22 percent in the top category. Just under 4 percent, or 295 of the district’s 7,623 teachers, were rated below standard — a percentage that has risen slightly but has remained mostly unchanged for the last five years.

To raise student achievement, attract and retain good teachers, and keep families in the district, LA Unified is seeking to add a fourth category: highly effective. It is one of the points in its negotiations over a new teachers contract where the district says it and United Teachers Los Angeles “fundamentally disagree.” The two sides enter into mediation this week as the union prepares for a strike, which its members voted last month to authorize.

• Read more: As LA’s teachers union prepares to strike, here’s something that could be a bigger hang-up than raises: how to identify great teachers

LA School Report talked with Daniel Weisberg, chief executive officer of TNTP, an education nonprofit that helps school systems address educational inequity, about teacher evaluations. His answers have been lightly edited for length.

Question: If LA Unified is able to add a new category — highly effective — in its teacher evaluations, what effect would that have? Even if there isn’t an option of paying those teachers more, what benefits are there to being able to rate teachers as highly effective?

Weisberg: Even if there’s no pay attached to it, my prediction would be that you could increase the retention of your best teachers by rating them highly effective.

The recognition, I think, would result in more highly effective teachers deciding to stay in LAUSD, and so that would be a good thing even beyond the pay.

One of the things that actually cause great teachers to stay is being recognized for being great and being asked to stay. And being rated highly effective is a way of recognizing a great teacher’s value. I think it would be useful in that respect.

Categories like highly effective are being used quite broadly nationwide. That was one of the reforms that so far has stuck. You’re seeing rating systems mostly with four or five categories.

My prediction would be, that If you look at the performance of the teachers who are in that top-rated category, it would be better than the rest of the teacher workforce. In other words, principals and others are able to identify with reasonable accuracy the best teachers, and there is value in recognizing them as being the best.

Even if there’s not pay attached to it, it might be that the district looks at a highly effective rating as one of the selection criteria for assistant principals or coaches or central office people.

Could being rated highly effective be a type of shield for a teacher who might find himself or herself in a difficult work situation with a principal or parents, or feel they are being wrongly accused of misconduct?

It could be a shield. If you have a great teacher who is rated highly effective five years in a row, and only a fraction of teachers get that rating, if there is any issue with performance that arises after that or with or misconduct, the teacher’s prior record is going to be taken into account. And if it is a stellar record, then that’s going to weigh in favor of that teacher. Obviously, it all depends on the specific facts and what’s being alleged, but if I am being accused of being incompetent or being accused of having committed misconduct, and I think it is off base, I am going to be feeling a lot more secure if I can say I’m in the top quartile of teachers in LAUSD, and I’ve been there for the past several years, as opposed to saying I’ve got a satisfactory rating just like almost every teacher in the system.

How would you explain this issue to parents?

Parents know that there are some teachers who are just head and shoulders above everybody else, and what I would say to parents is, if we have teachers who are head and shoulders above and doing incredible work with kids, would we want those teachers to get recognized as being great, or would we want them lumped in with everybody else?

UTLA might say it’s unreliable, it’s a popularity contest, but there are ways about how you design a rating system that will matter. But generally, if you set up the opportunity to recognize the best teachers, a decent evaluation system is going to do a pretty reliable job of identifying those teachers, and that’s a good thing.

You have a new study coming out this week. How does it relate to LA Unified and teacher evaluations?

The report is about student experience as reported by students, and how the quality of instruction, the quality of assignments, teacher expectations, and the level of student engagement affect student experience and student achievement.

Teachers obviously have a big influence on student experiences, so The Opportunity Myth connects to efforts to better support and reward teachers pretty directly. For example, kids who start the year behind grow by almost eight additional months of learning in a single year when they’re supported by teachers with high expectations. So high expectations is something we should recognize in great teachers and encourage among all teachers.

When you ask kids about their experiences — in the moment, in the classroom, not just, “Hey do you like school,” but, “What do you think of this lesson” — what they will tell you reflects that kids are the best experts we have on the quality of education. They gave us very sophisticated and nuanced feedback, not, “I love school or I hate school.” The biggest differences we saw in the quality of student experience as reported by students were not between schools, they were not between districts. They were between classrooms. Kids are detecting differences — a big variation, teacher to teacher and lesson to lesson.

And the extent to which kids are engaged in lessons matters to student achievement — we found that students who were engaged gained 2.5 months of learning in a single year. Information about student experience as reported by students would be enormously helpful to school leaders, superintendents and, especially, teachers themselves.

• Read more from The 74: America’s Achievement Gap — Made, Not Born? What a Study of 30,000 Students Reveals About Lowered Expectations and Poorer Quality Instruction for Kids of Color

As the Los Angeles teachers union is poised to strike amid stalled contract negotiations, LA Unified’s new superintendent, Austin Beutner, held his first big policy speech Thursday before about 100 parents in the library of the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools.

Beutner outlined what needs to change in the nearly 570,000-student district, as well as the “opportunities within our grasp.” He emphasized that while there are big challenges facing the district, with its teachers’ support, every school can be “a place of great teaching and learning.”

“This needs to be about making sure every student gets a great education, not arguing while students and families bear the brunt of the consequences,” he said.

Here are highlights of Beutner’s speech:

What he wants:

“For every school to be a place of great teaching and learning, and that each of our students be on a path to college or a 21st-century career.”

What needs to change:

“We are not living up to our values in public education. In a generation, we have gone from leading the country in education funding to being near the bottom.”

• Of 100 students who enter our high schools, 12 will drop out, 77 will graduate from high school, and only 12 will graduate from college — any college, two-year, four-year, or online.

• For those who are still English language learners in 11th grade, only 2 percent are on grade level in math and 5 percent in English.

• For students with disabilities who are segregated from their peers, less than 2 percent are able to read, write, and do math on grade level.

What he is calling for:

• equity for all students

• quality teachers in every classroom

• transparency in all schools and the district

• a shared commitment to grow beyond the current limits of the district’s financial resources.

Equity:

• Fund schools based on attendance, rather than enrollment, which hurts the schools serving students most in need.

• Make it easier for parents to volunteer without sacrificing student safety.

Quality teachers:

• Make sure “our best teachers … feel appreciated, are rewarded”

• Pay teachers more

• Provide necessary support so teachers can excel

• Protect tenure, but “we need a transparent, efficient, and fair process to manage ineffective teachers out.”

• An ineffective teacher can cause students to lose more than a year of learning

• More than 80 percent of effective teachers maintain standards for good attendance, but more than 40 percent of ineffective teachers do not.

Transparency:

• Clear performance expectations for every school

• If schools don’t meet fair expectations, they need to be held accountable.

• If schools are doing a great job, we should help them serve more students.

• Labor contracts must be available for parents and students to view. There should be less negotiating in secret and more conversations in public.

Money:

• Better track how resources are spent at individual schools and at the district level.

• Support a 2020 ballot measure to increase state funding to schools.

• Lobby for more funding from Sacramento. “We want smaller class sizes, better pay for teachers, and additional counselors, librarians and support staff in every school – but we will need more money to pay for it.”

“We can only spend what we have,” Beutner said. “We’re facing a fiscal cliff. It’s not theoretical and it’s not debatable. If nothing changes, we are headed for insolvency in the next two to three years. If that happens, a fiscal adviser will be appointed by the state and we’ll no longer have local control over our schools. Budgets will be slashed, class sizes will rise, and decisions won’t be made in the best interest of our students and families. Los Angeles Unified is not too big to fail, and no one is coming to save us if we do.”

After the speech, Myrna Castrejón, executive director of Great Public Schools Now, said:

“I think his proposals about guiding the district toward an effective work agenda are very accurate. … In this moment of friction with the teachers union, the dominant issues are whether or not there is money, how much money is needed to fund the district, and who is going to blink first. But Beutner’s speech pointed to the same priorities that I have constantly heard among parents. Of course we value teachers, but we know that not all teachers in the classrooms of greatest need are the best in their field. How will the district ensure that those children who need more experience, greater capacity, and commitment from teachers receive the best of the best?”

pic.twitter.com/I0BWqCUjLN

— L.A. Unified (@LASchools) September 13, 2018

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We can provide equity for the students in our schools, quality teachers in every classroom, transparency in our schools and all we do, and a shared commitment to grow beyond the current limits of our financial resources. pic.twitter.com/y6IJ2gtvfa

— Austin Beutner (@AustinLASchools) September 13, 2018

Student members of the Schools and Communities First coalition rally outside LAUSD’s boardroom on Tuesday in support of a resolution to endorse a 2020 ballot measure to help fund schools.

LA Unified board members were jolted last month when a top county official showed up unannounced to say, You’re spending more money than you make and the savings you’ve been living off of are about to run out.

It got worse this Tuesday, when she came back and brought a top state official with the same message.

“Yes, my presence is indicative that this is serious,” said Nick Schweizer, deputy superintendent of public instruction for the California Department of Education, who joined Candi Clark, chief financial officer of the Los Angeles County Office of Education, at Tuesday’s board meeting. The two warned LA school board members that time was running out for them to get their house in order — or they will lose control over it and the state will eventually take over.

First step to avoiding a takeover: Cut what you spend

LA Unified has to act now, and it has three choices, the officials said: Make more money, cut what you spend, or do both.

One choice LA Unified has not made is to cut jobs. “It is our choice not to reduce our workforce in the current year,” school board President Mónica García said.

“We are looking at the impact of those choices, and you’re right, it is your decision whether or not you choose to reduce over here or reduce over there. But when we look at a budget and we see for example your fund balance is doing this, is going straight down, that tells us that there needs to be some additional shift,” Clark said.

“It’s very clear that you are living off the reserves. That’s not wise, that not fiscal prudence, … that doesn’t get us to the path of fiscal solvency. And so while the choice may be to keep an expenditure over here, the expectation is that the board is going to look at other expenses and make some adjustments either up or down, or revenue enhancements, but it can’t be simply looking at the fund balance and continuing to see it dwindle down below the requirement.”

Dr Candi Clark, CFO of @lacoeinfo, sent a sobering message to the @LASchools Bd today:

The window is closing for LA Unified to address our fiscal situation. #LAUSD cannot continue to drain its reserves. We must increase revenues, decrease spending, or do both.

— Nick Melvoin (@nickmelvoin) September 11, 2018

Clark, who is legally required to act if a school district will run out of money within three years, has given LA Unified until Oct. 8 to adjust its budget, including detailing exactly how the district expects to make the $73 million in cuts it has vowed to carve out of the next two years’ budgets.

If the county isn’t satisfied, it will “disapprove” the district’s budget. (This week, Clark gave the $7.5 billion budget a “conditional” approval.) The next step is assigning a financial expert to assist the district, then imposing a fiscal adviser, which would be unprecedented for LA Unified and would strip both the superintendent and the school board of power. Clark outlined that step when she showed up unexpectedly at last month’s school board meeting.

The final step would be state takeover, which happened in neighboring Compton in 1993 and Inglewood in 2012. And as Schweizer warned Tuesday, “LAUSD is in a worse condition than many others.”

One board member sees staffing cuts coming as soon as next year. “Next year, we’re going to have to cut people … in massive numbers,” Richard Vladovic said Tuesday. “If I were the superintendent, I’d be freaking out about this report.”

“Next year we’re going to have to cut people … in massive numbers. … If I were the superintendent, I’d be freaking out about this report.” @richardvladovic @LASchools pic.twitter.com/Jl4JrrQbib

— Laura Greanias (@LauraGreanias) September 11, 2018

Next step to avoiding a takeover: Make more money

School districts make money when kids come to school — and LA Unified is losing students at a clip of about 16,000 each year. Plus they have a stubborn attendance problem with the kids they do enroll, though they are working to fix that.

So to get more money, school districts need to:

• ask for a raise (LA Unified is actively lobbying the state and federal governments for more money, but no one predicts they’ll get it),

• ask for handouts (like philanthropy, and LA Unified does benefit from some and is working to get more),

• or convince California voters to raise taxes.

That last option is what the district endorsed on Tuesday.

In a “symbolic” move, the board voted unanimously to back the California Schools and Local Communities Funding Act on the November 2020 ballot, which will ask California voters to impose a special tax on commercial property owners.

If voters approve, the tax would raise more than $11 billion for schools and local communities throughout the state of California, including $1.4 billion for Los Angeles County schools, according to the Schools and Communities First coalition, a statewide alliance of 280 community organizations, labor unions, business leaders, philanthropic foundations, and elected officials.

“The measure has been approved to be in the ballot, as we submitted over 870,000 signatures last month in order to qualify the initiative, so today’s vote by the board is symbolic, but their endorsement represents a significant milestone,” Kevin Perez Allen, a coalition spokesperson, said Tuesday outside LA Unified’s boardroom.

Dozens of members of the coalition rallied outside the boardroom during the meeting, calling on board members to throw their support behind the measure. One of them was student Chelsea Rosales, who recently graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School in El Sereno. “For someone like me who comes from a low-income community school, I know what it’s like not to have sufficient resources, not having that support on campus. A lot of students like me need that money back in our schools,” she said while waiting to get inside the boardroom.

“California currently ranks 41^st in per-pupil spending, putting a severe strain on students, families, and teachers of our K-12 schools and community colleges,” board President García, one of the authors of the resolution to support the ballot measure, said in a statement after she won her colleagues’ support. “This initiative will help to boost that funding, especially in the poorest and most needy school districts. It will allow us to have smaller class sizes and restore funding for programs that have been cut in the sciences, arts, and music.”

However, by the time a vote happens in 2020, LA Unified’s savings are expected to be gone — and by law the county will be forced to act before then.

What does this mean for the teacher contract talks?

The county and state officials both expressed concern over a threatened teachers strike and that a new contract will be too expensive.

“We are concerned that any salary and benefit increase, whether paid from reserves, assignments, or other one-time resources, could adversely affect the fiscal condition of the District,” Clark wrote in a Sept. 6 letter to García.

“These salary increases are expected to exceed the projected state-funded cost-of-living adjustment. Because labor costs make up a large portion of the District’s budget, we are concerned that any salary and benefit increase, whether paid from reserves, assignments, or other one-time resources, could adversely affect the fiscal condition of the District.”

But as a representative of United Teachers Los Angeles told the board Tuesday, “The district’s projected deficits in the third year have never occurred.”

Cecily Myart-Cruz, UTLA vice president, told board members that the district’s unrestricted reserves “is now at an astonishing $1.863 billion for the end of the 2017-18 school year, even larger than its previous estimates of $1.7 billion.”

In its response to the district’s financial presentation Tuesday, UTLA noted that “the state requires only a 1% reserve, yet LAUSD has 26.5% in reserves.”

Press Release: UTLA statement on LAUSD’s $1.86 billion in reserves. LAUSD’s financial officials have a history of pointing to an apocalyptic third year out in their budget documents. https://t.co/CpqqRi1HRr #UTLAStrong #Red4Ed #RedforEd pic.twitter.com/kpPqkBmM7W

— UTLA (@UTLAnow) September 11, 2018

However, as Scott Price, the district’s chief financial officer, showed Tuesday, by 2020-21, that dips to just $1.5 million, or 1.04 percent. The county is required to step in if reserves dip below 1 percent in the third year of a district’s budgeting. And as Clark noted, if LA Unified doesn’t cut the $73 million it says it intends to cut — but which it hasn’t shown how it will cut — she will be forced to act.

Remind me, what’s brought LA Unified so close to the fiscal cliff?

In short, LA Unified is losing thousands of students each year because of lower birth rates, high rents, and parents leaving traditional neighborhood schools for independent charter schools or the suburbs; ballooning pension debt; and a halt to one-time funding that the state has been using to shore up schools.

Clark also pointed to the increasing number of students who are identified as needing special education and the cost of maintaining buildings that are serving fewer and fewer students. Also, the district owes a $35 million penalty to the state for having too many administrators compared to how many teachers it has, though the district is trying to get that waived.

Clark wrote, “We emphasize the need for the Board to recognize the long-term impact of the District’s structural deficit spending and are concerned that time-sensitive financial decisions are being postponed indefinitely.”

Esmeralda Fabián Romero contributed to this article.

• Read more:

‘LAUSD is not too big to fail’: School board members alarmed by LA County official’s dire financial projections — and warnings of the possible appointment of a ‘fiscal adviser’

 LAUSD is now diverting $2,300 per student to cover health insurance costs — 36 percent more than just five years ago. Now the school board is rushing to avert a ‘fiscal cliff’

Dr. Candi Clark, the chief financial officer of the Los Angeles County Office of Education, warns board members about district finances at the Aug. 21 meeting.

*Updated Aug. 27

As night drew near last Tuesday, after a drawn-out and divisive four-hour debate on how to replace a disgraced board member, a bombshell was dropped at school board members’ feet.

District finances are of such great concern that the Los Angeles County Office of Education’s chief financial officer showed up unannounced to make sure LA Unified’s board members knew the extent of it.

“The fact is that LAUSD is not too big to fail, so it is up to all of us to resolve the district’s fiscal challenges,” Candi Clark told the board after waiting her turn to speak at the end of public comment. She then warned that the county has the authority to place a fiscal adviser over the district. “Keep in mind, this is the start of our support to ensure that the district remains fiscally solvent.”

The two board members who have served as superintendents at other school districts immediately took notice at the words “fiscal adviser.”

“She just said the magic word, fiscal adviser,” said George McKenna, who had experience with a county fiscal adviser at Inglewood Unified, which the state later took over. “I heard this, and I heard things I had not heard the county come and say before.

“That was the most serious thing that was said all day. I’m shocked, and I’m glad you came, but it wasn’t on the agenda.”

Richard Vladovic, formerly superintendent of West Covina Unified, said, “What that means is that they looked over our forecast. … We have one pot of one-time money that’s already spent. We’re in deep trouble.”

He added, “This blew me away. … I want everybody to know, this is not chicken little.”

WHAT’S AT STAKE

Installing a fiscal adviser would be a serious — and unprecedented — development at LA Unified.

LA County has already taken that step with Montebello Unified, a neighboring Los Angeles-area school district, which now has a county-imposed fiscal adviser after a state audit found poor financial management, the hiring of unqualified staff, inappropriate use of bond money, and failure of the board to heed warnings from the county about deficit spending, as reported in the Whittier Daily News.

While the fact that the county is talking about a fiscal adviser for LA Unified was news to the board members, the details of the district’s bleak finances were not. The district’s CFO, Scott Price, has been patiently relaying it at meeting after meeting this past year. His predecessor, Megan Reilly, had done the same thing, routinely warning that reductions would have to be made. Reilly resigned a year and a half ago to take a similar position at the Santa Clara County Office of Education.

On Tuesday, Clark also warned that cuts are needed.

“While the budget presented to LACOE shows that the district can meet the minimum reserve in all three years, the district has to make $144 million in reductions between 19/20 and 20/21. Those reductions are outlined in the district’s fiscal stabilization plan. However, the problem is that these reductions do not eliminate the structural deficit in the district’s budget, so there is more work that needs to be done.”

She pointed out that LA Unified is required to keep money in reserve, which for the 2020-21 school year must be $3.9 million.

“The only thing standing between the district and a qualified budget right now is $3.9 million, which is next to nothing. This is a major concern for me and my team as we review the district’s budget considering the fact that the district is declining in enrollment, has uncapped health and welfare benefits for all staff and dependents, and the fact that negotiations are still unsettled. We are carefully monitoring negotiations, and we urge the district to continue to make progress towards implementing with fidelity the fiscal stabilization plan.”

The district’s negotiations with United Teachers Los Angeles are at an impasse, and the two sides are scheduled to meet with a mediator Sept. 27. On Monday, Superintendent Austin Beutner welcomed an offer by LA Mayor Eric Garcetti to help in the negotiation process. The district is offering to give teachers a 6 percent salary increase, matching what it has already negotiated with other labor partners. But the teachers union is demanding further concessions that the district says would cost more than $1 billion beyond what the raises will cost and which the district can’t afford, as it is already spending $400 million to $500 million more than it brings in each year.

Union members are voting this week whether to authorize their leadership to call a strike, which one member said in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times has already been scheduled for Oct. 3. “A strike date before mediation and fact finding are completed would be a violation of the law,” the district stated in a response to the op-ed.

But before the two sides sit down with the mediator, LA Unified’s budget will get a thumbs up or thumbs down from the county, which is legally required to oversee the budgets of the school districts in Los Angeles County.

“We are currently in the process of reviewing the budgets of all 80 districts in the county, including LAUSD. This process will be completed by Sept. 15 and at that time we will have more information to provide on LAUSD’s fiscal situation,” Margo Minecki, a spokesperson for the LA County Office of Education, said in an email Friday. She said Clark was not available for comment.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT — AN INTERVIEW WITH SCOTT PRICE, LAUSD’s CFO

LA Unified’s chief financial officer, Scott Price, previously held Clark’s job at the county. He spoke with LA School Report on Friday to explain how Clark — and the district — got to this point, and what could be coming up next.

In the end, he gave some comfort to parents: They will not likely see any changes in their children’s classrooms this year.

Price’s answers have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Can LAUSD afford to give teachers a 6 percent raise?

The current budget has funds set aside for what is equal to a 6 percent raise across the board. So we set those funds aside. We made sure that those were in the budget, because that was the direction we were going.

Currently, UTLA is talking about the 2 and 2 that has been talked about at the table, but the superintendent has made very clear that we are willing to get to the same place we are with the other groups. But we can’t go past that.

Why is the county concerned about this deal if LAUSD can afford a 6 percent raise for teachers?

The package or the proposal that UTLA has on the table is much, much more expensive than what a 6 percent raise would be. So that’s why they are concerned about what’s going on with bargaining right now.

If you look at the proposal that is out there by the teachers, it would actually increase over what is over a 6 percent by almost a billion dollars a year.

So that would be $1 billion over what the 6 percent raise would cost?

Correct. All of their proposals are up on the web — all things we would love to do, class-size reduction, add extra people at our campuses to help service kids. We would love do to all those things. It’s just that we have financial constraints. So we have to live within our budget.

Tell parents what happens if LAUSD doesn’t meet its legal reserves.

There’s a process the county goes through. What happens is if there’s a district that you are concerned about, and you’re looking at their budget and you say, you know, we’re right on the edge here, we could have an issue — then you make sure you start working with the CFO of that district, which they’ve already begun doing.

And you begin to reach out to the superintendent of the district, which is what happened on Tuesday. The county superintendent, Dr. Debra Duardo, and Dr. Candi Clark, the CFO over at LAOCE, had scheduled a meeting with Mr. Beutner (LAUSD’s superintendent) to talk to them about their concerns: Listen, your current budget that you submitted to the county, which still hasn’t been approved by the county, by the way — it’s been approved by our board, but the county has to approve that budget — we have some clarifications we need, we want to make sure that you’re solid here, we want to make sure that you know that you are on the edge.

Which is a good, healthy conversation. So the first step of the process is already begun.

So when they came and met with Mr. Beutner, one of the questions you ask at the county is, How do we make sure people understand that we’re here and we’re starting to look? And Mr. Beutner said, Well, you can come to our board meeting today.

And when I was county CFO, that’s one of the things I did on a regular basis. If we had a district that we were concerned about, I would go, just ast Dr. Clark did, and speak to the board, mention some of the high-level particulars about the budget, and begin that process. And you talk about the next step of the process. And that’s what Dr. Clark did.

She talked about, possibly if things progress along and if for some reason we move past what’s already in our budget, that third year would drop below the reserve level. The county then has some options, to put in either a financial expert or a financial adviser.

The first thing would be to put in a financial expert, which is more of a person that talks to the CFO, the board, the superintendent, and says, You know, you really have to be careful. But they don’t have any real official power to stop what’s going on in the district.

The next level is a fiscal adviser. A fiscal adviser happens or is able to be installed once the district gets to a point where it is clear that they’re not going to be able to meet their financial obligation in the second year. And depending on the severity of that, a financial adviser can be placed by the county.

A financial adviser has stay and rescind power, which means decisions that are coming to the board for ratification or for approval, the county fiscal adviser can say, “Nuh, uh,” to the board decisions.

They can’t go back into old labor agreements, but they can stop ones that are upcoming. So there’s quite a bit of power that a financial adviser has.

When you get to the point where there’s a financial adviser, that means the county has grave concerns and they already have to start the process, or they’re starting to look at the process for the district to get a state loan. And that’s the final stage of the process, which is the beginning of a whole nother process.

If the state has to come in and loan money to LAUSD, then the state basically has to take over the district, and the board becomes an advisory board, the superintendent is fired by law, and even though it’s not in state law, the CFO also gets fired.

So the superintendent and the chief financial officer or chief business officer get fired, the board becomes an advisory board, and the state puts in a state administrator who works as the superintendent but has all the decision-making power.

Have any of these steps ever happened before at LAUSD?

I don’t believe there’s ever been a fiscal expert put here, which is the first step. Not in the time I was over at the county. I’ve been here a little over a year, and I was at the county three years in that position. So, no, not that I am aware of.

If LAUSD is able to reach a deal to give teachers a 6 percent raise, is the county concerned about that deal?

That’s within our budget now.

Here’s what is concerning the county. They see the reoccuring deficit that we have, we’re spending more money than we’re bringing in. So as they look at the budget that we have, they know the projections that the state gives us that we use. If the state projections are correct and as we move forward, the amount of increases that we’ve had in years previous, we’re not going to have those type of increases that we’ve had before.

The state is projecting about a 2.5 percent increase each year, which is a lot lower. We’ve been getting about a 5 percent average over the last few years.

So state revenue increases are slowing by projection, so when you look at how our spending is moving over those three years, when we have to go into the next year, say we stay strong at 6 percent and we get through this year, the next upcoming year, there will have to be cost savings found in order to take care of this reoccurring deficit as we move forward.

What happens when LAUSD goes below the county-required reserve level?

Right now with the budget the way it is, and we even eke out a tiny little reserve above our 1 percent required reserve in the third year. But if we do anything over what’s already budgeted, then that disappears.

So you are put on watch, basically. Right now, the county is looking at all the details of our budget and deciding whether or not they are even going to approve the budget or ask us to make further changes to it to strengthen the budget.

But one of the reasons they are here is they’ve looked at our fiscal stabilization plan and they see that some of the elements there, we are using one-time monies to bolster the line, and so that’s why they’re concerned. They want to make sure that we understand that, which we do.

When will the county either get back to you or approve your budget?

They have to make those decisions in mid-September. And so that’s why they are here now. They’re trying to figure out what they’re going to do exactly. And that’s why they’re meeting with the superintendent and meeting with us.

The school board just chose a March 5 election date to replace Ref Rodriguez in Board District 5. But the county is citing a $4.5 million cost to the district to run that election. On Tuesday, the county CFO said, “The only thing standing between the district and a qualified budget right now is $3.9 million, which is next to nothing.” So is the county concerned about the cost of that election and how that will impact LAUSD’s reserves?

We will work with those costs. The county office of education will be aware of that. If our budget is approved, they write a long letter, and they put all those things in there: Hey remember this, remember this. And one of those remembers will be, you committed yourself to an election. And everyone understands the cost may be “X,” so make sure you make adjustments for it as you are moving forward. So the letter outlines all those, “be careful, be careful, be careful.”

Will any of those adjustments mean parents will see impacts in their classrooms this year?

It shouldn’t filter down to the classroom. We will be able to make adjustments somewhere to make sure that classrooms aren’t affected by that.

*This article has been updated with Beutner’s statement welcoming the LA mayor’s help with the union negotiation process. 

• Read more: 

LAUSD is now diverting $2,300 per student to cover health insurance costs — 36 percent more than just five years ago. Now the school board is rushing to avert a ‘fiscal cliff’

Antonucci: Bet the ranch — UTLA will strike in October

LAUSD more than doubles new magnets this year, but teachers union calls for contract changes that would halt their growth

The vote was 50-49. He was nominated last September.

Blew, who was educated in LA Unified schools, has been serving as the acting secretary of the department’s office of innovation and improvement. He was director of Student Success California, an education reform advocacy organization affiliated with 50CAN (the 50-state Campaign for Achievement Now), a national advocacy group. He is the former president of Students First, the national advocacy organization founded by former D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee.

Blew served for 11 years as director of K-12 reform investments for the Walton Family Foundation, the nation’s largest funder of charter schools. He has held advisory and governing roles for education reform organizations including the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, the American Federation for Children, and the Policy Innovators in Education Network.

Blew earned his bachelor’s from LA’s Occidental College and an MBA from Yale. He graduated from Reseda High School.

He was part of the team that started one of LA’s first inner-city independent charter schools. Watts Learning Center celebrated its 20th anniversary last fall.

• Read more: Ed Dept. picks including LA’s Jim Blew are confronted in confirmation hearings with same battles that faced DeVos: vouchers, ESSA, Title IX

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation provides funding to LA School Report’s parent organization, The74Million.org.

Like the graduation mortarboards of June, 2018 is flying by. Catch up with the best of the year so far with our top nine stories. (For you math geeks, that’s half the year of ‘18.) Also spin through some of our favorites from our new feature this year, Parent Voices.

THE TOP 9

1. LAUSD’s interim superintendent looks to liberate principals in the most struggling schools from requirement they hire teachers sent by the district

The principals of 227 struggling Los Angeles schools may be about to get a coveted freedom: the ability to hire the teachers they believe will best educate their students.

And read the follow-up story on the LAUSD board vote that extended the hiring freedom to about a quarter of all schools: LAUSD board frees principals of struggling schools from having to hire teachers sent to them by the district

2. #EDlection2018: Your quick guide to the 4 candidates running for state superintendent & highlights from their interviews

Plus read our election night results: California primary results: Newsom and Cox advance to November’s gubernatorial race; Tuck leads Thurmond in battle for state superintendent

3. How a Blue Ribbon high school in downtown LA is daring its low-income Latino students to dream bigger — and guiding 87 percent of them into four-year colleges

4. Exclusive: California Teachers Association projects 23,000-member loss in wake of Supreme Court ruling and slashes its budget

5. With all eyes on Janus, a similar case in California meets quiet defeat — for now

6. 50 years after the Walkouts, Los Angeles Latino students are still fighting for educational equity

7. As the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools turns 10, a new report shows this unique turnaround model is driving big gains at struggling campuses

8. ‘Change must happen’ — Austin Beutner is introduced as superintendent and vows to start with LAUSD’s culture

9. New ways of teaching math to California’s English learners are getting results, report says

PARENT VOICES

And don’t miss Esmeralda Fabián Romero’s new series which launched this year in English and Spanish: Parent Voices.

Here are three of our favorites:

LA parent voice: Homelessness won’t stop me from being involved in my kids’ school

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REMEMBER 2017?

Surprised we’re already halfway through 2018? See how much you remember from last year’s education highlights with Our 17 most popular articles about Los Angeles schools from 2017. And you might also want to catch up with our “Year in Numbers:” 7 charts and graphs that shaped the way we think about LA schools in 2017.

• Read more from The 74: Education by the Numbers: 9 Statistics That Have Made Us Think Differently About America’s Schools This Academic Year

Nick Melvoin, the board’s vice president, asked at Tuesday’s meeting for all schools to be allowed the hiring freedom.

Updated June 15

About one-fourth of LA Unified schools have just won a coveted freedom: the right to hire the best teacher for the job.

However, the majority of Los Angeles schools are still shackled by a longtime districtwide policy that forces principals to hire from a “must-place” list of “displaced” teachers.

But that could soon change. Board members have directed the new superintendent to “work to eliminate the pool of teachers who are displaced one year or more.”

Teachers are “displaced” if they are forced out of a school either because they are deemed ineffective or are bumped by a more senior employee, or if they are returning from a leave of absence and have not yet been hired at a school site.

The displaced teachers continue to draw full salary and benefits, and the district keeps them on the rolls indefinitely, unlike some other districts nationwide that terminate teachers’ employment if they haven’t been hired within a certain timeframe, such as a year.

• Read more from The 74: NYC Teachers Who Lost Their Jobs But Remain on the Payroll Receive Big Raises as Budget Watchdogs Call to Reform $136M Absent Teacher Reserve

There are currently 708 displaced teachers on LA Unified’s payroll, and 211 of them have been on the list for more than a year, the district reported Wednesday in response to a public records request. Last year, the “must-place” teachers cost the district about $15 million, and an independent review panel has urged LA Unified to end the pool.

The new hiring freedom came through Tuesday’s unanimous school board approval of the “Close the Gap” resolution, which seeks to ensure that all students, particularly those with high-needs students, can meet state academic standards and qualify for a four-year in-state university. The resolution also seeks to strengthen school improvement plans, and it requires the district to start reporting its graduation rate in two ways: the percentage of students who graduated meeting state standards, and the percentage of those eligible to apply to state colleges.

• Read more: LA’s graduation rate will now be reported in a second way to reveal how many students are actually eligible for state universities

The primary focus of the resolution is improving the district’s lowest-performing schools, so those are the schools that are getting the hiring freedom.

The resolution states that: “No teachers who were displaced one year or more should be assigned to schools in the lowest performing band of schools based on the School Performance Framework or the high and highest need schools based on the Student Equity Needs Index 2018.”

Together, those schools are estimated to be roughly a quarter of the roughly 1,000 district schools. LA Unified also has 224 independent charter schools, which are not bound by the district’s hiring restrictions.

Nick Melvoin, the board’s vice president, asked why only a portion of the district’s schools should get the hiring freedom.

“What is the purpose of not placing these teachers in the lowest-performing quartile [of schools]? The same logic would apply to all classrooms and all students,” Melvoin said during Tuesday’s board discussion. “I’d like to see us work to not have them in any schools.”

He proposed adding language that would give all schools the freedom, but board member Kelly Gonez objected because of possible financial implications. So a compromise was crafted. The amendment states, “The Superintendent will work to eliminate the pool of teachers who are displaced one year or more, via training, help with replacement, or exit from the District.”

“The logic of my amendment is, If it’s not good enough for some kids, it’s not good enough for all kids,” Melvoin said in a phone interview Thursday. “The biggest thing this is about is mutual consent in hiring. Teachers and principals shouldn’t go where they aren’t excited to go, and school communities shouldn’t have teachers and principals they’re not excited to have.”

He said he will continue to push for all schools to be included. “I will hold him (the superintendent) accountable for that and see what we can do in bargaining. I’ll also continue to raise these concerns at board meetings when colleagues want to create more exceptions, which I think will continue to happen, especially when principals and families reach out about equity.”

At Tuesday’s meeting, board member Scott Schmerelson called for adult schools to be included. He said, “I don’t want us to put displaced teachers in continuation schools.”

Board President Mónica García said Thursday that she “welcomed Mr. Melvoin’s amendment. Again, in working to close the gaps, the resolution did not solve all district challenges. When SENI (the Student Equity Need Index) passed, we understood that was dealing with money and change in policies that is being highlighted now. Bottom line: I would stand with every parent that expects every member of our school staff to be qualified and able to do their job well.”

‘Can you help my principal’

Melvoin said, “One of the things that led to my amendment is, now having visited every school in my district, parents are so excited and grateful for the amazing teachers that their kids have. And yet they’re frustrated when they’re in a class with a teacher that’s less than excellent or they hear from their principal the difficulty in hiring the right teachers. When I usually hear from parents, it’s parents calling saying, can you help my principal because we can’t get this teacher, or we’re losing this great teacher, or we have to place this teacher.”

Melvoin said contract changes will likely be necessary to extend the hiring freedom districtwide.

“I say this as a former teacher: I think we should have a contract that respects teachers as professionals and also kids as the most important actor in the system, and I don’t think our current contract does that. I think that it doesn’t put kids first, and I also don’t think that it’s respecting teachers as professionals. Because if I’m told that I have to go to a school that doesn’t want me, or I can’t stay at a school that wants me, that’s devaluing my service as a teacher, and that has to change. And I think that’s actually going to be the way that we attract better teachers, is by treating them as professionals, and our contract does not do that right now.”

García noted Thursday that the local teachers union, United Teachers Los Angeles, “will have an impact on our ability to negotiate and address systemically” the district’s hiring policies.

Ben Austin, a school reform advocate and executive director of Kids Coalition, which aims to give students and their parents legal rights in decisions about their education, agreed that the district should end the practice of forcing principals to hire from the list of displaced teachers.

“Must-place teachers are Exhibit A for why the LAUSD needs to translate ‘Kids First’ from a hashtag into a civil right,” Austin said by email Thursday.

‘Dance of the Lemons’

The practice of districts shuffling ineffective teachers from school to school is known as “the dance of the lemons.”

In 2010, after a five-month investigation by LA Weekly, then-Superintendent Ramon Cortines announced that “the district plans to substantially cut back on granting lifelong tenure to inexperienced teachers.”

But that hasn’t happened.

The displaced teachers are different than teachers who are facing allegations of sexual or physical misconduct, however they too receive full pay and benefits while they are out of the classroom, which has been estimated to cost the district more than $300 million in recent years.

But the far larger problem, LA Weekly reported, is one of “performance cases” — the teachers who cannot teach, yet cannot be fired. From 2000 to 2010, district officials spent $3.5 million trying to fire just seven of the district’s 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance — and only four were fired, during legal struggles that wore on, on average, for five years each. Two of the three others were paid large settlements, and one was reinstated. The average cost of each battle was $500,000.

During the same time period, when LA Unified fired four failing teachers, 800 to 1,000 underperforming civil service-protected workers were fired at City Hall, LA Weekly found.

The cost of ineffective teachers

An effective teacher is widely seen as the most important factor in a child’s success in school, and even more so for disadvantaged students and those in minority groups.

Requiring principals to hire first from the must-place list “is just a terrible, terrible way to staff a school,” said Daniel Weisberg, chief executive officer of TNTP, an education nonprofit that helps school systems address educational inequity. “There’s no school, no principal, no parent, no teacher who wants to be in a school where somebody is forced on them and may not want to be there and may not be a good fit for the school or the students or the community.”

But in attempting to fix the problem, he cautioned, “It’s squeezing the other end of the balloon. If you exempt (some) schools, those teachers are going somewhere.”

Many LA Unified principals say they are frustrated with being forced to fill vacancies with teachers from the “must-place” pool.

Three-quarters of Los Angeles principals surveyed by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and policy group focused on teacher effectiveness, said they were unable to hire their teacher of choice because they needed to hire from the priority placement list. The same 75 percent of school leaders said that teachers on the must-place list are rarely if ever a good fit for their school.

Kency Nittler, manager for teacher trends at the National Council on Teacher Quality, said their 2011 survey of LA Unified principals found that “the majority of principals in LAUSD were rarely or never satisfied with the teachers they were forced to hire from the must-place list.”

Kate Walsh, the organization’s president, said, “If you’re going to hold schools accountable for results, you need to make it possible for the leader in that building to decide who is going to work there.”

Legal attempt to address ineffective teachers

A lawsuit filed on behalf of LA Unified students in failing schools sought to make it easier for schools to get rid of ineffective teachers.

A ruling by a Los Angeles Superior Court judge in 2014 in the case, Vergara v. California, found that the state’s tenure and seniority systems, which can protect ineffective teachers, harmed all students, but especially poor and minority students, leading to outcomes that “shocked the conscience.” The case ended last year when the California Supreme Court declined to review an appellate court ruling.

The intention to give LA’s high-needs schools a waiver from having to hire off the must-place list was announced by then-Interim Superintendent Vivian Ekchian at a school board committee meeting in March that presented the new “Student Equity Need Index,” which the board then adopted in April as a primary funding model for the district to ensure dollars designated for the highest-needs students actually reach them. This week, Ekchian was named deputy superintendent.

At that same April meeting, board members voted to create an assessment framework that will allow parents to more easily compare schools as well as select the measures by which to evaluate them.

Katie Braude, executive director of the grassroots parent organization Speak UP, noted afterward that the district should report how many must-place teachers are on a school’s staff.

The assessment framework, which Gonez said could lead to school report cards, could “shine a light on things we don’t have any information on at all,” Braude said, such as “looking at teaching staff, how long teachers have been at a school, how frequently they are evaluated, how many substitutes a school has for a year, how many must-place teachers are on staff. … It gives parents an opportunity to make good choices.”

This article has been updated to include the number of independent charter schools and that they are not bound by the district’s hiring restrictions.

Tyler Okeke will serve as LAUSD’s student board member for the 2018-19 school year.

As LA Unified board members thanked Benjamin Holtzman for his service this school year as Student Board Member, Holtzman introduced his replacement: Tyler Okeke.

Here are a few things to know about Tyler, who starts his new post in August.

High school: Harbor Teacher Preparation Academy, which at Tuesday’s board meeting was renamed after one of the seven board members, to Dr. Richard A. Vladovic Harbor Teacher Preparation Academy.

Interests and clubs: Tyler is a rising senior, a debater on the Los Angeles Metropolitan Debate League, president of his school’s Black Student Union, a member of the Los Angeles Mayor’s Youth Council, and founder of the Harbor Political Action Committee.

Statement: “ecstatic to serve my fellow students as a magnifier of their concerns, goal to preregister/register all LAUSD students of age to vote.”

Aspirations: “to attend Harvard University or other Ivy League school to study political science and government with a minor in international relations.”

Welcome new Student Board Member Tyler Okeke, senior from Harbor Teacher Prep Academy. Tyler is a debater on the L.A. Metropolitan Debate League, president of @htpa_lausd Black Student Union and member of the L.A. Mayor's Youth Council. He is ecstatic to serve next school year. pic.twitter.com/BVo7o8uuPF

— L.A. Unified (@LASchools) June 12, 2018