LAUSD Superintendent Michelle King’s strategic plan.

Superintendent Michelle King will present her strategic plan for LA Unified to the school board on Tuesday, a 16-page document outlining three years’ worth of goals and expected improvements but lacking specific details on how to accomplish them.

This is the draft of a long-anticipated plan that is supposed to address academic improvements and budget concerns in a roadmap that King said she has been working on since she was first appointed to the position in January.

The board members may not be happy with the single-digit percentage increase goals if Tuesday is anything like a committee meeting two weeks ago where board members skewered an upbeat report on improvements. That report was made by King’s chief academic officer, Frances Gipson. The elder statesmen of the board, George McKenna, Richard Vladovic and Scott Schmerelson — who had all been LA Unified teachers and principals — expressed dissatisfaction with the district’s test scores and called them “frustrating,” “depressing” and “disappointing,” despite the reported improvements.

For the 2016-17 school year, King is proposing a 5 percentage point increase in math scores, from 28 percent meeting or exceeding standards this year, to 33 percent. In English, she hopes for a 4 percentage point increase to 43 percent from 39 percent meeting or exceeding standards. For each of the following two years, the goal is to increase both math and English scores by 2 percentage points each year.

In a breakdown of the 10 largest school districts in the state, the California Department of Education’s scores of the 2016 California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP) tests show there’s still much improvement needed. LA Unified ranked 4th among the largest 10 school districts for improvement, and most of the other districts have at least a score of 40 percent in one or both of the tests.

While the plan does not address the district’s significant problem of declining enrollment specifically, among the stated highlights of the plan is a 24 percent increase in magnet, Linked Learning, dual-language, STEM and STEAM programs, as well as a 30 percent decrease in chronic absenteeism. Other main goals are 100 percent of schools providing arts education and restorative justice programs. King also wants every parent to have access to a Parent Access Support System Portal (PASSport) by the end of the year so parents can monitor students’ grades.

The district’s impending deep deficits were also not specifically addressed.

King noted in the introduction that the plan had input compiled from 68 meetings attended by 2,655 people including teachers, parents, students, civic leaders, employees, board members and community and labor partners.

The ultimate goal for graduation rates is 100 percent. King’s report said they have yet to set a goal of how many students they want to be concurrently enrolled in at least one community college class. They also have yet to set a goal of the desired percentage of graduates who are bilingual and bi-literate.

In a striking similarity among many of the stated benchmarks in the strategic plan, King is calling for increases of 2 percentage points per year. For example, the percent of English learner students who reclassify as fluent English proficient should increase to 20 percent in 2016-17, to 22 percent in 2017-18 and to 24 percent by the end of the 2018-19 school year.

The plan calls for the percentage of students getting a C grade in their required A-G courses to rise from 42 percent this year to 48 percent in 2016-17, 50 percent in 2017-18 and 52 percent by 2018-19. The percentage of students passing the Advanced Placement exams is to rise to 40 percent next year, 42 percent the following year and 44 percent the third year.

In other areas, benchmarks are decreasing by 2 percentage points per year, such as for English learners who have not been reclassified in five years. In 2016-17 it calls for 19 percent, dropping to 17 percent in 2017-18 and to 15 percent in 2018-19. Chronic absences are to drop to 11 percent in 2016-17, to 9 percent in 2017-18 then to 7 percent in 2018-19. Days lost to suspensions are to decrease from 6,097 to 5,036 by 2018-19.

King’s plan also talks about getting parents and the community more involved in education, providing safer schools and continuing to support the whole child with health centers, mental health clinics and other services.

Other goals include developing “collaborative district partnerships” and “streamlining processes will lead to expanding school-driven partnerships.” School and staff members are to “promote the value of an LA Unified education” by handing out fact sheets, brochures and flyers at schools and training staff to communicate about district accomplishments and success stories.

One item under “tools and resources for success” is “financial incentives for schools,” with no further details. New York City schools experimented with schoolwide performance bonuses, but they were discontinued in 2011 after three years.

The school board members will be able to ask questions at Tuesday’s meeting. There will also be time for public comment.

The plan will be presented Tuesday to the Committee of the Whole, which is made up of all seven board members and is supposed to offer a forum for deep-dive reports that would take too long during the already lengthy monthly board meetings. This meeting is scheduled to be held at the USC Caruso Catholic Center at 844 W. 32nd St. at 9:30 Tuesday and is open to the public.

Pedro Noguera presents his recommendations to LA Unified board members and superintendent.

Internationally renowned education expert Pedro Noguera warned members of the LA Unified school board and superintendent that unless more serious measures are taken, the nation’s second-largest school district is destined to lose more students.

“The future is dire,” Noguera told the Committee of the Whole on Tuesday afternoon. He pointed to entire neighborhoods in Philadelphia with abandoned schools. “It’s not there aren’t enough kids, they lost the commitment to education. I hope that doesn’t happen in this city.”

The challenges LA Unified is facing, he said, include declining enrollment because of the growth of charters and demographic shifts, chronically under-performing schools, structural budget deficits and the need to increase public support for schools.

Noguera has written 11 books and more than 200 articles about education and focuses his research on how economic conditions impact schools. He served as a school board member at Berkeley Unified and is now a Distinguished Professor of Education in the Graduate School of Education and Information Sciences at UCLA.

Committee chairman George McKenna invited the professor to make a presentation to offer advice and give examples of what other schools do.

“I appreciate you coming to tell us the truth, even though we may not want to hear it,” McKenna said. “We have to take this situation seriously, really seriously.”

School board president Steve Zimmer attended the committee meeting although he was on his way to Washington, D.C., for the rest of the week to help lobby for the district. He told Noguera, “There is no more important city in this world for you to be in, and I’m glad that you’re here and work with us.”

Zimmer noted that Noguera discussed the district’s concerns about competition for students between traditional and charter schools. “As you spoke,” Zimmer said, “it was actually quite emotional because I think we have been through a time where we have misunderstood the role of competition and in that misunderstanding have caused some injury and caused it to be potentially more difficult to build the foundation of trust.”

Nearly 16 percent of LA Unified’s students are enrolled in 211 charter schools, and that number would grow significantly under a plan to increase charter enrollment in the district, which the school board unanimously opposed in January.

Noguera said, “Like it or not, schools are competing for kids, and public schools don’t even realize it. Like it or not, that’s the set-up.”

He pointed out his granddaughter goes to a traditional LA Unified school where the parents are only allowed to drop children off between 7:45 and 8:15 a.m., while the charter school around the corner allows drop-offs as early as 7 a.m.

“For a busy working parent, like her mom is, and in a city like this where transportation is a big issue, that is not a small factor,” Noguera said. That alone could be a reason for a family to choose a charter school over a traditional school.

“Public and charter schools are collaborating, but that is not happening enough,” Noguera said. “It has to be OK for principals to say, ‘I need help,’ and not have that being used against them. Otherwise, they will just hope that no one knows what the situation is.”

He called for “collaborative problem solving,” which must come from the central office. “They must let everyone know they are not here to scrutinize, but want to help you and show you how to figure it out and solve the problem.”

That includes the charter school and traditional school situation, he said. “Trust comes from collaboration,” he said.

Noguera on a visit to Hollenbeck Middle School.

Superintendent Michelle King asked how to replicate what is successful at schools, and he described a program in San Diego where leaders visit schools once a quarter and offer support to principals and teachers about best practices.

Noguera cited a 90-minute math class he had visited at Hollenbeck Middle School
whose teacher had complete control of her class and allowed students to help each other. Meanwhile, a class across the hallway had students who were unable to focus and were being disruptive.

“It took a while for that teacher to establish the class,” he said, pointing out that many of the students were English-language learners living in East Los Angeles. “She had to determine which kids could work together and which ones can’t work together.”

He recommended that the district structure time so teachers can learn from other good teachers. McKenna brought up celebrated teacher Jaime Escalante whose rough approach with students was highly criticized. His story was told in the 1988 film “Stand and Deliver.”

“Why is it so difficult to replicate good work?” asked McKenna, who like Escalante taught math in LA Unified. “Jaime Escalante’s work was frowned upon. What makes it difficult to go across the hall and learn from each other?”

Noguera answered, “That is a common problem, because of the isolation of teachers.”

Among Noguera’s suggestions for the school board were:

• Support and recognize high-quality teaching.

• Focus on morale.

• Provide incentives for teachers and administrators with a track record of effectiveness to work in “high need” schools and communities.

• Publicize your success.

• Prevent educational issues from becoming overly publicized.

Monica Ratliff asked about the bonuses and incentives given some teachers to work in more challenging schools. Noguera said the incentives don’t even have to be monetary but could include more planning periods or other bonuses.

“We should look into this,” Ratliff said.

Noguera pointed out that some answers are within the district already but aren’t being shared. He said some schools might be very good at converting English-language students into the general school population, but the district doesn’t have a way of tracking which schools are better at it.

He and other university education experts are visiting schools throughout the LA Unified district.

“I hope this will be an ongoing collaboration with the district,” Noguera said.

The recommendation came from Christine Wood, the assistant general counsel and litigation research coordinator for the district, at a Committee of the Whole meeting yesterday, as a way to match a policy other districts use.

The New York City Department of Education, the only school district larger than LA Unified, charges for the preparation of electronic records if it takes longer than two hours per request. In Houston, the district can also charge people who request electronic records, and the Miami-Dade County school district charges for time taken in redacting sensitive information from the records.

The LA Unified board isn’t scheduled to vote specifically on any recommendation, but the report put the issue of public record requests in a wider perspective for the board members.

With the collection of emails particularly time consuming, Wood recommended that LAUSD push for state laws that would allow them to have “different guidelines, especially a fee structure, for commercial vs. noncommercial requesters and passing along direct costs for the collection of electronic records, specifically emails.”

Most district records are public except ones dealing with students and personnel.

Last year, the district received 661 requests for public records. Typically, most come from commercial companies, lawyers, labor groups and average citizens. Media requests represent only 19 percent of the total and don’t get priority over any other requests.

“We had a period where we had a lot more requests, and that was during the iPad and MiSiS crisis was in the news,” Wood said. “We also get a lot of requests for attorney’s invoices.”

Other cities get far more requests than LA Unified, the committee was told. New York gets 1,000 requests a year, and much smaller districts like Houston and Miami-Dade get 700 and 1,600 requests a year. The City of Los Angeles gets about 1,000 public records requests a year while the Los Angeles County Office of Education gets only 50 to 60.

The staff dedicated to public records requests includes three paralegals, an administrative secretary and some law students and paralegal interns.

Wood also suggested that the district improve technological support for the requests, help the district transition to a cloud-based storage system to ease the burden of collection management, and post more frequently requested documents on the LA Unified website.

Board member Monica Ratliff said, “I’m very concerned about limiting access to the public records, but I’ve seen some good things come about it, and how things came to light because of these requests. I think that’s really important.”

The district announced in September that Zazueta, the district’s chief lobbyist in Sacramento and Washington, is resigning to join the Association of California School Administrators as director of policy and government relations.

Zazueta said his presentation tomorrow will include a brief update on various bills the district is involved with directly or indirectly.

“I’m going to give them a preview of the process — how we take positions on bills, how we solicit input, and their role in developing the legislative packages, and kind of the timeline we are at right now in the process, the whole notion of sponsored bills that the district tells our office to go and solicit on behalf of the district,” he told LA School Report. “It’s almost like a legislative 101 for the district.”

He also said an overview of specific bills in play should now be a regular item at each Committee of the Whole meeting “even though I won’t be there, is a standing item at every Committee of the Whole, where its going to be a legislative update,” Zazueta said.

The update will include information on both LAUSD sponsored bills and so-called “target bills,” where the district was the target of legislation.

Among the target bills Zazueta said he will be reviewing is Senate Bill 14, which was recently signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown. The law prohibits minor consent as a defense in sexual battery civil actions, which is a stance LAUSD controversially took in a recent civil case.

Zazueta, who has been with the district for nine years, said he expected to remain with the district through the board’s Nov. 10 meeting.

No replacement has been named.

“It’s definitely bittersweet in terms of leaving. Like I told our folks earlier this month, I feel like I grew up here,” Zazueta said. “There’s so much work that came out of our office, but it’s really a reflection of all the changes throughout the district, different superintendents, different iterations of the board, so for all the craziness and turmoil, that is just a byproduct of the process that we undergo here at LA Unified. There’s never a day that I forgot the legislation is result of the work our teachers and principals are doing on the ground.”

After more than a decade of declining enrollment, the impact of which is costing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue losses, the district has a plan to stop, or at least slow down, the exodus: Marketing!

Now, officials just need to decide on a plan.

Each year the district loses an average of 2.6 percent of students attending traditional public schools — that’s about 56,000 students per year. District officials estimate that every 3 percent drop costs the district $100 million in funding.

While reasons for the declines are attributed to lower birth rates, outward migration from the city and the growth of charter schools, the board’s Committee of the Whole, chaired by Steve Zimmer, has taken up the issue to make LA Unified schools more appealing to families.

“We don’t have a strategic plan right now to present ourselves and what we do best,” he said at a meeting on the subject yesterday.

Board member George McKenna floated the idea of strategic promotions that would include hiring a marketing specialist, deputizing local school “ambassadors” to spread the word about successful programs and making better use of the district’s public television station, KLCS.

“We can put candid, taped testimonials where kids talk about, ‘I love our school, and parents can talk about, ‘I love our school,’ ’” he said. “It’s our television station. We don’t have to ask other channels like ABC or CBS or cable channels to give us PSAs; we can do it.”

Other proposals included the expansion of magnet schools and specialized instruction, door-to-door sales pitches, family literacy programs, and the greater investment in early education programs.

Principals also have to start thinking of themselves as Mad Men/Women.

“They need to take on the role of marketers,” McKenna said, and the sentiment was echoed by Zimmer and board president Richard Vladovic.

With so much competition from private, parochial and charter schools, administrators have to be more aggressive than ever, Vladovic said.

“This is a different time,” he said. “Parents are more mobile. They have more choices…if they don’t like something, they’ll leave immediately,” he said shaking his head.

Board Member Steve Zimmer

For the second year in a row, LA Unified is losing fewer teachers, and district projections indicate that the trend will continue through the current school year.

Vivian Ekchian, the district’s Chief Human Resources Officer, told a committee meeting yesterday that the trend is largely due to more diligent work at the front end of the hiring process. She said the district has revamped the interview system to include a lesson observation and an essay, and the district now requires that applicants have a degree in the subject matter they plan to teach.

Teachers leave their jobs for a variety of reasons, including retirement, dismissal and jobs in other districts.

Ekchian was one of several speakers at a meeting of the Committee of the Whole that was devoted to new strategies for training, hiring and retaining better teachers and including among new recruits teachers whose diversity more closely aligns with the diversity of district students.

The committee heard testimony that LA Unified loses 40 percent of new teachers after three years on the job, with those who leave reporting feeling unsupported in the classroom, undervalued, and under-prepared for the challenges of teaching in under performing schools.

This year the district hired 718 new teachers — mostly elementary and special education teachers — and has lost eight so far.

“We know we need to transform the concept of being a teacher, and that needs to start early in their training and in partnership with the district,” Steve Zimmer, chairman of the committee, said in an interview with LA School Report.

Zimmer said the issue is particularly urgent as baby-boomer teachers retire in greater numbers.

“And these are game changing numbers,” he said. “Three to five years from now we’ll have to replace 12 to 15 percent of the district’s teachers.”

The era of “horrific lay-offs” is over, he said, which is why “the district needs to start developing policies to recruit the next generation of teachers and ensure they stay in our classrooms.”

A spokeswoman for the teachers union, UTLA, declined to comment.

Ekchian told the committee that the district lost 2,641 teachers, about 7 percent of the workforce, through separation and retirement in the 2011-2012 school year and 1,896, (5 percent) last year. The projected loss for the current school year, she said, is 1,333. She did not provide a percentage.

Zimmer spoke passionately about the issues with an almost emotional welcoming statement, focusing on the importance of quality teachers. He admonished district officials who were absent, saying “I’m sad our Administration is not here to learn with us,” but he said nothing about the two board members who were also missing, Monica Garcia and Tamar Galatzan.

Previous Posts: LA Unified board has another long day ahead for meetings; LA Unified Board Considers Common Core — Yet Again; Common Core Budget Approval Put Off for Another Week

Board President Vladovic

Today is expected be another long day for LA Unified School Board members.

Last week’s eight-hour session — only the second board meeting of the school year –was not long enough to hash out the details of the district’s Common Core implementation plan, so they’ve sandwiched in a Special Board Meeting between two others that were already on the calendar.

The first meeting, starting at 10 a.m., will have a short window for public comment but, will then become, for the most part, a closed session for the board, legal counsel and labor contract negotiators. This is also when the board will take up personnel issues, a discussion which will now include the unexpected resignation on Friday of Jaime Aquino, Deputy Superintendent of Instruction and Superintendent John Deasy’s right-hand man. A routine evaluation of the superintendent’s performance is also on the closed-door agenda.

Board members, who said they were “shocked” and “surprised” by Aquino’s sudden decision to leave the $250,000 a year post effective Dec. 31, will address the impending vacancy. However, it’s unclear if the board will have input in choosing a successor for Aquino or if Deasy will single-handedly oversee the search.

Aquino blamed the school board for creating a contentious climate and intentionally blocking his efforts to push forward Deasy’s aggressive reform agenda. Aquino told the LA Daily News the tipping point for him was when the board failed to pass the Common Core budget last week, pushing it off until today.

That indecision is what led to today’s noon Special Board Meeting. It is the third time the board will try to reach a consensus on how to spend $113 million to implement the new English and math curriculum. Board members have not agreed on the best plan for training teachers on the Common Core.

The final session of the day, on the schedule for 2 p.m., is a meeting for the Committee of the Whole, chaired by Steve Zimmer. The committee will tackle the Local Control Funding Formula, the plan that funnels Prop. 30 revenue directly to school districts.

Board president Richard Vladovic, Zimmer and Bennett Kayser want class size returned to pre-recession levels while Deasy, favors restoring summer school, after-school programs and advanced academic classes, in addition to paying down the structural deficit and giving raises to all district employees.

Previous Posts: Deasy Deputy Jaime Aquino Resigns (Updated); Vladovic Leadership Style Suggests Slower Pace is Best; Common Core Budget Approval Put Off for Another Week