In the plan, none of the new classes will require additional classrooms, nor result in any change of teachers, according to district officials. The $14.3 million to pay for the transition was approved by the school board earlier this year and will be an ongoing transition into this school year.

Superintendent Ramon Cortines spoke yesterday at the Edward R. Royal Learning Center and said, “This district moved this year with a TK program. A program that moved from part time for very young children to six hours and we are going to move thousands of more children for next year.”

Cortines added, “Let me tell you the problems — not problems — the issues that we are facing in middle school and high school, they are solved when children first start their education. We need to make sure we put the emphasis on the early education.”

The program involves nearly 14,000 students. The Preschool for All bill, AB 47, that the governor must take action by Oct. 11, would provide sufficient funding to guarantee “every low-income 4-year-old with access to preschool” by 2017. 

The district plan is to provide quality preschools for low income children who turn 5 after December 2 in a six-hour program that runs 180 days, following other elementary school calendars. It sets a 24-students-per class maximum and will be part of the Breakfast in the Classroom program.

The pre-school program will follow the standards included in the Preschool Learning Foundations, not the kindergarten Common Core State Standards. The curriculum has structured and unstructured chances for children to build socialization and communication skills. They don’t plan a nap time, but instead will have story time and quiet games.

Because the children will be in classrooms previously using the SRLDP classrooms, the district doesn’t anticipate any increase in need for classroom space. The district also provided a timeline for professional development training for these transitions for principals, teachers and teacher assistants. A parent engagement program will be developed by January 2016.

The district is also working with 13 schools that have a California State Preschool Program for 3-year-olds in three-hour programs.

The state research showed that preschool programs provided a return of $15,000 for every child served. The state pointed out that investing in “high-quality preschools, the overall savings in prison system expenditures alone are estimated to be $1.1 billion a year due to the reduction in prison population by 13,000.”

To find out which schools are starting with the transition to TK, click here.

And, by next week five schools will receive iPads, laptops and Chromebooks. Another 30 schools are in line for their devices, 19,000 of them, said Sophia Mendoza, the interim director of the Instructional Technology Initiative at LAUSD.

This is all part of the steady progress that the district is making in expanding the use of technology in the classrooms in the aftermath of a botched $1.3 billion iPad program that effectively delayed the accelerated use of technology in classrooms by more than a year.

A report released yesterday by the American Institutes of Research revealed how a litany of problems with hardware, software, distribution, internet connectivity and training denied district students devices and the new approach to learning that district officials had promised. The effort was so plagued by challenges that one of the first things Ramon Cortines did when he replaced John Deasy as superintendent a year ago was rebrand the “Common Core Technology Project” to call it the “Instructional Technology Initiative.”

Change — and improvements – are coming. But slowly.

Cortines said in a statement that the 181-page report “points out areas of needed improvement that I have been aware of since my return to the district last October. Many of the recommendations in the report have already been addressed or are being addressed. We have improved the deployment at the school sites.”

For example, most of the 70,000 tech devices have been delivered to the “one-to-one” schools designated for a device for every student by the time school started in mid-August. By the middle of this month they should all be distributed. That’s quite a bit faster than the months-long process it took to hand out 47,000 devices in the entire 2014-2015 school year.

At a press briefing on Wednesday afternoon with new and longtime leaders in the the district’s technology departments, administrators described some of the progress, as well as the remaining issues facing the district in completing the project. So far, 101 schools are participating in the program to get an iPad, Chromebook or laptop to every student and teacher on campus, and allow them to take the devices home.

The students and teachers are going through a rigorous training (which was previously recommended by the report) to teach them to become responsible “digital citizens.”

“We are showing the students how to take pride and responsibility over the use of these devices, so no, they won’t be using them as Frisbees,” said Bill Wherritt, a Facilities Division official who is overseeing the device deployment to the schools.

Mendoza said that schools next month will have a Citizen Action Week which “is a big kickoff for students, teachers and staff to train them in the behaviors we want to continue to instill in our students, not just for one week, but for the entire year.”

Before a school can get these devices, they have to have a strategic plan showing how the computers will be used for instruction, how parents will be involved and have a person assigned to track the devices and oversee training.

Mendoza and Linda Del Cueto, chief of Professional Learning and Leadership Development, were among the tech executives who attended a principal’s meeting yesterday to explain some of the procedures. Principals were surprised that the process could be so quick.

“We are improving and expanding to not just a one-to-one device school but expanding technology district wide,” Del Cueto said. “We are very deliberately making connections with local district staffs, speaking at principal meetings and making everyone aware of what we are doing.”

In the two years since the tech program has begun, 150,000 devices have been bought by the district, and schools have purchased another 85,000 outside of the program through local fundraising, grants and donations.

“Technology is growing very, very quickly right now,” Wherritt said. “When we see teachers clamoring for technology in the classroom, and volunteering for training, we realize just how important this is. Our goal now is to build on our investment and do the best we can for our students.”

At the moment, they have to get WiFi for all the schools. Some Internet connections are spotty, if at all. The school board approved high-speed wireless networks for every school district wide, and the report showed challenges remain. As one example, the report found that 40 percent of the elementary schools did not meet the district’s bandwith specifications, and many schools had trouble getting online.

Wherritt said that only 19 schools still have internet issues, and “those remaining schools are scheduled to be finished between now and the first quarter of the next calendar year.”

Meanwhile, there’s no prediction about when and whether every child in LAUSD will have a device, as previously envisioned. That decision, and that plan, will come from the Instructional Technology Initiative Task Force formed in April. Their first meeting is scheduled for Sept. 10.

Cortines said, “As I have stated before, we remain committed to the use of classroom technology by our teachers and students.”

Cortines observes the MiSiS team

Now that the MiSiS crisis seems to be in the rear-view mirror, Superintendent Ramon Cortines is focusing on another difficult issue for LAUSD — class sizes.

“We are now beginning to make necessary adjustments to class size,” he said in a statement released today. “For instance, we can open a new class and assign an additional teacher if it is over-enrolled. We can also transfer students to a class that is under-enrolled. Our goal is to stabilize classes and schools as soon as possible – certainly within the next two weeks.”

When he took over the school district again last year, Cortines was appalled by some of the class sizes. At one point district records showed that there were 1,500 middle school classes and 1,200 high school classes with more than 45 students.

Since then, the district and UTLA, the teachers union, hammered out a new labor agreement that set the average class size for K-through-3rd grades at 24 students, while high school classes could have a maximum of 46 students, but a preferred average of 42.5.

Some of the records show that a class is over-enrolled, but may not be. “Some students may be registered, but have not shown up for class,” Cortines explained. “Other students may be enrolled at more than one school. Principals, counselors and other school-site staff are verifying records, and eliminating no-shows and duplicate students from MiSiS. At the same time, our human resources team has begun verifying that schools have the appropriate number of teachers.”

Overall, Cortines reiterated what he told LA School Report earlier this week, that he was happy with an “extraordinary first week of school.” He wanted to congratulate school-site heroes – both classified and certificated employees – for their hard work, as well as parents and guardians for their confidence in the schools.

“I am especially pleased with how well the My Integrated Student Information System program is working,” he said in the statement today. “Not only has MiSiS supported scheduling and attendance, it also has allowed us to quickly identify classes that are over- and under-enrolled. These imbalances are common during the opening days of school, but MiSiS has provided us with the information more rapidly than in past years.”

He added, “As we did during the weeks leading up to the start of school, we are working together to provide the best learning experience for our students.”

LA Unified Superintendent Ramon Cortines gives the annual superintendent’s address at Garfield High School

In what is likely to be his final major address as LA Unified superintendent, Ramon Cortines delivered a jocular cheerleading speech today that was absent any bold vision of new ideas or new directions for the district.

Focusing on “unity” and “family” for LAUSD, he made no mention of the effort to find a new superintendent, how long he planned to stay in his position, budget issues or any other major challenges facing the district as schools get ready to open on Aug. 18.

Instead, he used the opportunity at Garfield High School to poke fun at himself and others in an amiable light-on-policy speech that had the effect of contrasting his approach and personality to the man he bookended as superintendent, John Deasy.

“Be patient, I’m old,” he laughed when he dropped his papers during the speech. Cortines turned 83 last month. “I’m doing it a little bit different than I used to but you’re used to that.” And, at one point when his microphone went out, he said, “I knew they’d cut me off.”

Cortines discussed some of the same issues he raised in a speech in 2000, such as poor graduation rates. He said he still believes that decentralizing the district and giving more local control “offers the best framework for success for this district.”

He teasingly threatened to read the entire 191-page decentralization plan, but said, “I will summarize it in a short easy phrase: Invest in LAUSD.” And to accentuate the point, he reminded the audience that the letters of LAUSD should stand for: Language, Achieve, Unity, Schools and Determination.

He also used his speech to describe his impressions of some of the school board members sitting in the front row: “I remember going to regular meetings at Dr. (Richard) Vladovic’s field office, a Starbucks in San Pedro,” Cortines said. Then, he noted that Mónica Ratliff was away in Europe and said he remembered her “asking just one more question after we tirelessly answered 20 before.”

He kidded the new board president Steve Zimmer for “meticulously answering every question in detail.” He cited George McKenna for always “conveying his point with poetry and passion” and Mónica García for shouting “Hello people!” when greeting an audience.

He introduced union leaders in the audience and chided the few who were absent, including the UTLA’s president Alex Caputo-Pearl. “They will be in detention in my office,” he said.

Cortines introduced about two dozen people who worked to fix the MiSiS computer system when he took over the district last October with the data system in disrepair. He repeated a line from a district press release of last week, saying, “MiSiS is the heart of this district. After months of tireless repairs, our heart has some new stents, replaced valves, a pacemaker, and reduced cholesterol, and it is pumping much stronger.”

He talked about dividing up the district into smaller districts, saying, “I’ve reorganized the district, and that will be the last time for me.” And he encouraged administrators and teachers to communicate respectfully at all times, and “report improper conduct.”

“There is a handful, and only a handful, of staff who have acted improperly and that simple mistake can take away public trust in the district and cost us millions of dollars,” he said.

Cortines’s friendly manner was apparent before and after the speech, as well, waving to people in the audience, greeting many of them personally, even posing for pictures.

“I feel like a high school principal on the first day of school,” he said.

“We heard exciting news that the district is going to transfer both the principal and assistant principal,” said Alfonso Flores, an educational consultant and founder of Excellent Educational Solutions. “This is the best possible outcome and it shows what can happen when the teachers and community come together.”

The parents and teachers were among the first to unite to use a Parent Trigger campaign under the Parent Empowerment Act. If more than 50 percent of parents at a low-performing school sign a petition, the parents can then enact change, including removing its leadership or converting it to a charter.

Flores works with former California State Sen. Gloria Romero at the nonprofit California Center for Parent Empowerment. He said the threat of the Parent Trigger campaign caused LA Unified to act despite years of complaints. Romero helped the parents and teachers with their petition campaign.

Flores told LA School Report that Superintendent Ramon Cortines “was gracious when meeting with parents and teachers. He listened to all the complaints. Then, he came back and made the greatest announcement that we could imagine.”

Parents and teachers will both be involved in a committee to pick the new principal, according to the district. And, Cortines promised that more resources will be coming to the school.

The deadline to apply as principal is tomorrow. The school includes about 630 students, with a 99 percent Latino population, 57 percent English Learners, 9 percent with disabilities, 4 percent gifted and 84 percent economically disadvantaged. The position pays between $87,678 and $109,487.

The Fishburn administrators had apparently refused to use some financial resources allocated to the school and in some cases returned thousands of dollars that could have been spent on Fishburn students and teachers.

“We were happy to hear that Mr. Cortines said he would relocate that money and return it to the school because it was done in retaliation to the parents,” Flores said.

In past years, petitions to remove the principal were ignored by both LAUSD officials and school board members. Parents said the retaliation by school administrators included the shutting off of school water fountains, closing student restrooms or refusing to stock toilet paper, and keeping parents with special needs students waiting up to three years to give them an Individualized Education Plan (IEP).

“We are no longer ignored or invisible because of this great law,” said parent leader Mirna Borquez.

The official school website still has the transferred principal, Beatriz Bogan, listed. The interviews for the new principal are expected to start in mid July.

Ray Cortines

*UPDATED

LA Unified Superintendent Ramon Cortines warned the teachers union, UTLA, today that urging its members to boycott three upcoming faculty meetings violates the terms of a directive from the Public Employees Employment Board.

In a harshly-worded statement Cortines said attending the meetings is “a required professional duty under the LAUSD-UTLA contract agreement” and a boycott would violate a 1990 directive issued by PERB that arose out of “previous unlawful boycotts of required duties.”

That order, he asserted, “still holds today.”

Cortines’s warning came in response to a “Chapter talking points” memo dated March 10 posted to UTLA’s website that states, “Every UTLA Area will be holding afterschool meetings for chapter chairs and activists to plan faculty meeting boycotts in March and April and ensure 100% participation. The meetings are expected to last from 60 to 90 minutes.”

In addition to the press release, Cortines made the same points in separate letters to UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl and to LA Unified employees.

“Nothing could be more detrimental to the extraordinary educational progress that this District has made in recent years,” Cortines said in the statement. “As we await the involvement of a mediator in negotiations, I urge UTLA to stop this irresponsible and unlawful effort, and instead work with the District to complete negotiations so that all employees can devote their entire focus to the District’s core mission of educating students and ensuring student safety.”

The union responded to Cortines late this afternoon with a statement that said the boycotts represent another of its “escalating actions” to achieve negotiating demands.

“UTLA members have boycotted faculty meetings many times in past years and we have no intention of backing down now because of threats by Cortines to retaliate against employees who participate,” the statement said.

The union and the district are currently in contentious contract negotiations that were recently declared to be in an impasse as the sides remain an estimated $800 million apart on key issues like teacher pay and class size. Over the last six months, the union has ramped up pressure with a series of monthly actions that have included press conferences, picketing at schools and a large rally last month attended by thousands in downtown’s Grand Park.

However, no “escalating actions” for the month of March had been announced by UTLA, and Cortines in his statement expressed hope that boycotting faculty meetings wasn’t the next step. LA School Report reached out to Caputo-Pearl earlier this week to learn if more such actions were planned for March but did not receive a response.

Cortines said he was concerned that the meeting boycotts could be “the first step . . . toward a planned strike against our students, parents, and school communities.”

In his letter to Caputo-Pearl from Cortines warned: “Pursuant to this contractual commitment, coupled with the attached 1990 PERB Decision and Order referenced above, we must insist that UTLA now take all reasonable steps to cease and avert the current UTLA-threatened boycott of faculty meetings.”

*Updated to include information from UTLA’s website about the planned boycotts, and UTLA’s response to Cortines’s warning.

LAUSD Superintedent Ramon Cortines

Responding to a barrage of requests from district superintendents around the state, including a recent appeal from LA Unified Superintendent Ramon Cortines, state education officials will consider a delay in using the results of the 2014-15 Smarter Balanced computerized test as means of measuring academic growth next year.

“This will be a public discussion beginning with the next scheduled State Board meeting in January,” Keric Ashley, a deputy to Tom Torlakson, the Superintendent of Public Instruction, said in a written statement.

He added, “Regardless of this public discussion of the API, schools and parents will receive scores and the Superintendent strongly urges all schools to continue their preparation for the computer-adaptive assessments coming in the spring.”

The outcomes of this year’s reading and math tests are supposed to be used to establish a base in calculating Academic Performance Index (API) scores in 2015-16. But, at a meeting with the California Department of Education in November, leaders from several statewide educational organizations suggested a year-long postponement. They argued that many districts need more time to implement the state’s new Common Core curriculum while others do not posses the technological infrastructure to carry out the exam.

In a letter to Torlakson last week, Cortines joined a growing group of local superintendents’ seeking permission to ignore the test results for “high stakes accountability purposes.”

“We do not feel that our students have had adequate time practicing on the testing devices,” Cortines explained.

As a result, he added, “I would like to ask that any data or scores derived from [testing] not have a negative impact on state and/or federal funds that are allocated for the students in LAUSD.”

The Smarter Balanced tests have replaced California’s statewide exams as the state is transitioning to the Common Core State Standards. All students in third through eighth grade and high school juniors are required to take the exam. In all, nearly 350,000 LA Unified students will take the test in April.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan

As if the recent efforts to fix MiSiS weren’t enough, LA Unified Superintendent Ramon Cortines has called the feds.

In an email to school board members and their staffs on Friday, Cortines said U.S. Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, offered the district a lifeline.

“I spoke with Secretary Duncan today regarding various issues related to our District,” Cortines wrote. “The Secretary expressed his desire to provide support to our District, as needed, and agreed to send a team in December to work along with LAUSD staff to assess and advise on technology related issues.”

Matt Hill, who oversees the implementation and development of the plagued student data system, confirmed that Duncan’s team will be working on MiSiS. But it is unclear how many officials the feds are sending, how long the team will be here and what their specific tasks will be. 

Over the past two months, Cortines has pumped about $11 million into patching up software glitches, paying for thousands of hours in overtime and boosting staff to issue transcripts and report cards on time. Another $3.6 million has been allocated to buy new computers for schools whose hardware was too old to operate MiSiS.

Just last week, the Bond Oversight Committee also agreed to spend another $12.1 million in construction bonds to cover the cost of MiSiS improvements through February. The board will vote on the expenditure at the next school board meeting.

Microsoft is chipping in, too. The district developed the current MiSiS system using software and programs it licenses from the Seattle-based company. Earlier this month Microsoft deployed two executives and 16 employees “to augment the MISIS team (which already contained some Microsoft people), develop further clarity of the problem, set goals, and craft strategies to meet those goals.”

The district said that in addition to sending immediate help, the company is exploring a long-term relationship with LAUSD in which Microsoft would potentially lead the MISIS efforts.

Duncan is also keeping the door open for LA Unified. According to Cortines’s email, “The Secretary reiterated that if the District needs more staff assistance, more will come.”

Superintendent Ray Cortines

A decision by LA Unified Superintendent Ramon Cortines to proceed with the next phase of the district’s controversial iPad program appears to contradict statements he made a month ago, opposing the use of construction bond money to pay for devices pre-loaded with curriculum.

Three days ago, Cortines gave the go-ahead to spend capital improvement funds to outfit another 27 schools with tablet devices and 21 campuses with laptops.

Tom Waldman, a spokesman for the school board, said Cortines is not in the office this week and would be unavailable to clarify any apparent discrepancy.

In January, months before Cortines replaced former Superintendent John Deasy, the school board unanimously approved $114 million to expand the program. But ever since Cortines took the reins last month he has come out swinging against idea of using bond dollars for the Pearson software that the board approved for the iPads bought from Apple.

He went so far as calling it “stealing.”

On his first week on the job he issued a statement on the subject saying, “I still need to meet with the Common Core Technology Project team to learn more about the plans in place but I think we will need to identify alternative sources to fund the curriculum ongoing.”

He also told the LA Times, “I don’t believe the curriculum should be paid for with bond funds, period.”

But in the latest statement on the new round of purchases he wrote, “Our students deserve the best tools available to meet the requirements to be successful in the 21^st century workforce…Without the appropriate tools, they will be disadvantaged compared to their peers across the entire nation.”

Board Member Monica Ratliff, who chairs the Common Core Technology Project Committee, and has been a strong critic of iPads and the Pearson curriculum, also declined to respond. Her chief of staff said she would have no comment “at this time.”

Under the new round of purchases — officially called phase 2B – principals at each school will have “more options” and won’t have to settle for iPads if they prefer an alternative, according to the district. But so far, the district has not opened the bidding process to any new vendors or curriculum developers.

Another complication: Deasy cancelled the contract with Apple and Pearson when he came under fire for communications with company officials before the procurement period. It is unclear if Cortines is now un-cancelling the cancellation. If he has, the district will be paying for Pearson curriculum, which is scheduled for completion at the end of the month,

Although the full timeline for implementation of the latest phase has yet to be determined, Cortines says students will have the new devices by February.

Despite efforts by Superintendent Ramon Cortines and LA Unified‘s Information Technology team to get MiSiS back on track — or at the very least, semi-functional — it seems that the data management system remains unreliable.

The system went down between 2 pm and 4 pm yesterday, he said in a memo to staff. It is unclear what caused the “unexpected outage,” but any data entered into the system during that window that was not saved and will need to be re-entered.

In the memo, Cortines apologized for the disruption and for “putting you through these unforeseen challenges.”

He advised employees working in MiSiS to be “extra vigilant” and regularly save their data “every 15 minutes in the event that another unforeseen incident takes place.” Further, he’s instructed them to maintain backup records for any information that is inputted into the system for the duration of the 2014-15 school year or until further notice.

In the meantime, he has reached out to Microsoft’s top executives to provide assistance with assessing problems with the MISIS, which was developed by the district using the company’s licensed software.

Employees working overtime to address the issue will be compensated.

Twice before he served as an interim superintendent, and he held the post for three years immediately before John Deasy’s tenure.

Cortines understands big city school systems.  In addition to Los Angeles, he was superintendent of New York, San Francisco, Pasadena and San Jose.  But why Ray again?

The answers are straightforward: peacemaking and getting things done.

The school board and the education policy elites (maybe) are tired of toxic warfare.  Cortines has a reputation of someone who can have a constructive relationship with the teachers and administrative unions without being a doormat.  He both charmed and bludgeoned the school board, threatening to resign if they misbehaved.  (Unlike most superintendents, he had a 30-day contract, which he would periodically threaten to not renew.)

And then there is the craft and politics of getting things done.  Most politicians, and most journalists, ignore the politics of implementation.  To them, reforming schools is about getting the right law passed or achieving a favorable court decision.  But as past school reform efforts in Los Angeles illustrate, the heavy lifting starts after decisions are made, not before.

Holding the school board together, implementing an agreement with the union when some teachers balk, attracting administrative leadership: all this is part of the political kitbag of seasoned superintendents.  Cortines is one of them.

When he was preparing to retire the last time, I reflected a bit on what L.A. schools need.  Some of what I said then bears repeating:

Los Angeles needs a professional superintendent with a vision larger than his or her ego. In education reform circles, career superintendents are not in fashion right now. The media and education policy writers swoon before self-styled entrepreneurs and education czars who talk big, ignore history and count success according to how many teachers and principals they fired rather than whether students did better.  LAUSD needs someone with a belief that building an effective organization is more important than swinging a big stick or buying a fix-it program from a vendor.  It needs someone with deep craft skills, and it needs someone who understands that information technology is rapidly changing how students interact with and acquire knowledge.

 

But most of all, LAUSD needs someone who understands what city they’re in.  The politics of Los Angeles is not that of New York or Chicago.  Our political world is that of changing and fragile coalitions.  Chicago and New York are built on the remnants of long standing political machines and around mayors with strong powers….

 

Throughout his tenure, Cortines has kept a relatively low profile.  Unlike Michelle Rhee, the Washington, DC, superintendent and current [former] media darling, Cortines has not posed for a cover picture in Time.  And unlike charter school founder Steve Barr he has not been the subject of a New Yorker profile.  Like most career professionals, Cortines understood that school superintendents are much like sailboat skippers, who use the prevailing winds to take them where they want to go. The lesson for a successor is that superintendents seldom have the power to create the wind, and they never want to be the wind.

Although different in many ways, Cortines and Deasy share an appetite for work at a relentless pace.  He’s called a staff meeting on Monday, at 7:30 AM.

A word to the wise: best not be late.

Charles Taylor Kerchner conducts the “On California” blog at EdWeek.org.  He is an emeritus professor at Claremont Graduate University.