George McKenna is known for waxing eloquently during the school board meetings, and at the meeting on Sept. 12, he wrote down some of his thoughts. Part of the reason was because the new board President Ref Rodriguez is limiting statements to five minutes per topic by each of the board members, but part of it is because McKenna wanted to put down his thoughts about his philosophy of schools, and charter schools in particular. He read this before discussing the reauthorization of some charter schools on the agenda.

LA School Report asked McKenna to share his statements as a commentary for the site:

I would like to make a general statement regarding the renewal of the charter schools on our agenda today. My concerns are that all of them demonstrate that 50% or more of their students do not meet the state SBAC academic standards.

In one of the schools, 75% of the students did not meet standards in ELA.  They are recommended for renewal because of the “comparison” basis that schools that are similar in demographics or the students’ home school is performing at the same level or worse.

I challenge the Board to adopt higher standards for all schools, charter and traditional.  We should not tolerate low performing schools-charter or traditional. Our business is to fix our schools and do the best for all children. If we are putting children first, we should not accept any school that is failing our children.

We must encourage and help more charter schools and traditional schools to take up this challenge of turning around low-performing schools and helping the students they serve get back on the path to achievement.

The Public Charter Schools Program was created to provide a structure where we could experiment with models of excellence and teaching and learning techniques, without the same rules and guidelines of traditional schools.  An environment of innovation was developed to foster creativity where statutory barriers to accomplishing this purpose have been removed.

Together, as a Board, we should not be considering the minimal level of academic success as an acceptable practice.

I’m not convinced we simply need more “choices” in public education.  We do need great public schools in every community.  We don’t really have any choice at all if our local public schools and our charters are not high quality options.

The idea of “choice” is very American, and it’s also at the heart of modern democracy.  This free market ideology has turned parents into consumers, beyond being public citizens participating in a common good.  Markets do a fine job making and selling things, but they also can create extreme inequality, with winners and losers.  I don’t begrudge any family that makes the personal choice to send their child to any school, whether private, religious, charter, or magnet.  I’m not advocating the elimination of choices.

Choice alone doesn’t guarantee quality and change doesn’t always equate to improvement.  Neither will solve the larger problems facing public education until we ensure that there are no underperforming schools, anywhere.

As elected officials, that is our choice.

—Dr. George J. McKenna III, Board Member

Los Angeles Unified School District

Other articles about George McKenna:

• A recipe for teaching from LAUSD board member George McKenna, who’s been at it 55 years

• A movie, a principal, and a turnaround school: 30 years since ‘The George McKenna Story’

• A view from inside LAUSD’s board: Teaching moments from George McKenna and his McKenna-isms

• Synopsis of ‘The George McKenna Story’: He risked it all to make the grade

By Patricia Rivera

This summer, as the beginning of the school year got closer, I started to feel more and more worried instead of feeling excited. After spending nearly six months trying to find my daughter a new middle school, all I had to show for it was an uncertain position on several waitlists.

My daughter, who just started the eighth grade, had a tough second half of her seventh grade year, when she was bullied by a male student at her local middle school. I had already been thinking about trying to find her a school with better academics, but after the bullying incident, my daughter was shaken up and felt more and more unsafe. So, I set to work figuring out our choices for sending her to a different school as fast as I could.

For people who are not familiar with what it takes to find a new school for their child, the process for a parent trying to figure out their options can be frustrating. I spent the spring and summer going door to door to school offices, making phone calls, leaving messages, searching websites, and talking to family members.

Despite the time commitment and uncertainty, I’ve seen firsthand the change that a new school can bring. In my case, I had already been through it with my two older sons. For my boys, I must have applied to twenty schools, but having them attend better options was worth the work.

My middle son now attends LAUSD’s Diego Rivera Learning Complex. Once I moved him to Diego Rivera, I saw an immediate difference in his attitude and an improvement in his school work. Now a tenth grader, his grades have gone up, he has become more responsible, and he is excited to go to school every day. My eldest son graduated from Southeast High School in June and has just begun his college career at Pomona College.

I’m proud of my boys, and like every parent, I want all of my kids to have the best education possible. For my daughter, I want her to attend an excellent middle school, graduate from a great high school, and go to college. She wants to be a doctor, and has always done well academically. Teachers have pulled me aside and told me that she has a lot of potential. I couldn’t bear for her to stay in a school where she didn’t feel safe.

As I continued my search, I thought about contacting family members in other districts, I signed up for more waiting lists, and I talked to friends with kids my daughter’s age. Since there is no system for easily comparing different public school options, it’s up to individual parents to just try to figure things out on their own. As it got later in summer I grew more and more concerned, but I kept up the phone calls and school visits.

With time passing and no new school nailed down, I spoke to my sister in law, who had worked with a program called Choice4LA, which is run by the nonprofit Parent Revolution to help families navigate their school choices. She recommended that I contact them, and I reached out.

Together with a Parent Revolution organizer, I researched schools in South Gate, Huntington Park, Lynwood, and Compton. We looked into everything and tried to find seats at traditional district schools, magnet schools, charter schools, even a pilot school.

Even though I had applied to many schools and had been placed on multiple waitlists, nothing opened up. So, with a heavy heart I sent her off to her original neighborhood school for her first day. Then, just three days later, I got a call that felt like a miracle. My daughter was accepted into a different middle school, one that performs better than the neighborhood school and one where she will feel safe.

On her first day in the new school, I went to wake her up at 6:30 am and found her wide awake, excited to have a fresh start.

I’ve lived in the same house in South LA for almost twenty years, and my husband and I are raising three children in a close-knit community. There’s so much talk among parents who share information about what is good and what’s not good in the local schools.

In those talks, I’ve spoken to so many parents who feel like they don’t have a voice, who feel like they have no power. I wish that it didn’t matter where you live, that all students could have their choice of excellent schools.

I am lucky that I have the time to go to different schools in person, to call and get updates about my daughter’s position on waitlists, to be able to research and compare scores and gather information. I am also lucky that I happened to find an advocate to work with me through the process. But not every family can take all of those steps, and I worry about the families who get stuck on waitlists year after year without getting into a new school.

Now that I know my daughter is happy with the school she is attending, I can breathe again. I am looking forward to her being in a better school, and making new friends, and pursuing her goal of becoming a doctor.

At the end of the day, I feel lucky. There are many good choices in LAUSD, but those choices aren’t much good if families can’t get their children into first-rate schools. But at least for now, my daughter is happy after her first couple weeks in her new middle school. My next challenge? Finding her an excellent high school.

Patricia Rivera is a mother of three living in South Los Angeles. 

By Carol Arocha

Random wanding has prevented some students from harming others. The weapons may not be guns or bombs, but have no doubt, handmade knives (shanks), clubs, brass knuckles, pepper spray, and other such instruments have been found and removed, saving children from physical harm.

Wanding has helped administrators remove drugs and alcohol from students’ backpacks and lockers.

As teachers and administrators, we are limited as to the amount of scrutiny we can impose on students.

If parents really want to feel secure about their children’s moral and physical well-being, they must step up to the plate and conduct these inspections themselves. Random inspections of their own children’s backpacks, bedrooms, cars, and computers will open their eyes to their own kids’ behaviors — good and bad.

Being a pro-active parent does not make a parent bad. It makes them a smart, responsible, and caring parent.

Carol Arocha is a retired LAUSD assistant principal.

Angela James (courtesy photo)

By Angela James

As a parent in LAUSD, the decision to send my children to public schools was a major one. My own public school experiences, combined with my sense of civic responsibility and the ridiculous tuition costs, certainly influenced by ex-husband and myself in our decision. I am currently an organizer with Schools LA Students Deserve. This short note is in response to some of the comments made on these pages in response to presentations made by teachers engaged with us in our efforts to remove the criminalizing, and educationally barren practice of random wanding.

As soon as I learned that random searches that interrupt class time were being conducted in LAUSD, I instructed my children that I believed they had the right to resist ANY incursions upon their person and that I, as their parent, would back them up. Even as I crafted this individual solution, I realized that the many layers of academic and emotional damage brought on by this practice could not be undone by individual resistance. In fact, I worried that my own offer of support would result in further anxiety. My children and I became involved with Students Deserve because we realized collective problems require collective solutions.

I had no idea about random searches because charter schools in LAUSD, smaller districts, and certainly private schools do not have to conduct them. When one of my children decided to transfer to the local school in our community, I found out how different the experience of schooling could be. At schools like Palisades in a wealthy community, and now a charter school, there are no random searches and you can keep your highlighters and hand sanitizers, while schools like Dorsey in my own community subject students to prison-like conditions.

The basic fact that “random” necessarily means unannounced and unscheduled should immediately suggest the academic harm. Teachers are asked to interrupt lessons, students are asked to take a “commercial break” from instructional time, to line up and submit to this humiliating and useless practice. ALL students at the school are subject to this practice, and the message given by these searches is unmistakable: a student’s education is entirely secondary to our fear of them as potential criminals. The district is asking us to accept them acting as parental representatives and, like them, be motivated by the FEAR OF OUR CHILDREN as criminals.

The crazy-making part of the rationalization used to justify this practice is the claim that this practice is necessary to keep our children safe. The claim that random searches are necessary to keep our children safe is not backed up by ANY empirical evidence. In fact, statistics suggest that young people and social violence have actually not changed very much in the past 30 years. School violence involving guns has always been extremely rare, and it remains so.

What has changed? Fear mongers trot out stories of grieving parents like those at Sandy Hook or some other mass shooting. The tear-stained white faces of parents in Connecticut are used to convince black and brown parents across Los Angeles Unified School District that our children’s education and psychological well-being do not matter as much as their safety.

Make no mistake about it, neither wealthy and whiter districts in our region nor private schools require their students to submit to this. Schools are one of the most powerful institutions society uses to prepare and socialize young people for their future roles in society. National data very clearly show that race, even when controlling for differing levels of student misbehavior and crime, is what really explains the use of intrusive security measures at schools. No systemic studies indicating violence reduction, and NO studies of the academic impact of this practice, have ever been conducted.

This policy, and all it represents, is simply unacceptable. We cannot allow our children to be socialized for lives where the academic and social development of black and brown children are deemed not as important as misguided fears about school safety.

Angela James is an LAUSD parent and an organizer with Students Deserve and Black Lives Matter Los Angeles.

• Read LA School Report’s coverage of random wanding: 

Daily weapons searches: LAUSD to reassess its policy

Exclusive: More kids will be searched for weapons at LAUSD schools this year

Calls mount to end mandatory random searches at LA schools

Exclusive: Loaded gun found at school during random wanding search; charters want practice ended

Security Gets a Boost Throughout LA Unified Schools

Max Arias is executive director of SEIU Local 99: Education Workers United. (Courtesy: SEIU)

By Max Arias

It is no coincidence that this year, Los Angeles’ largest Labor Day march will begin in front of Ramon Cortines High School. The popular narrative is that labor unions and public schools are on opposing sides; that somehow addressing issues of wages, hours, and working conditions is at odds with putting kids first. But union workers have been challenging that notion for years. 

Take, for example, the members of SEIU Local 99. They are the school cafeteria workers, bus drivers, special education assistants, custodians, and others who provide essential student services at LAUSD. SEIU Local 99 members’ connection to their schools goes far beyond work. More than 50 percent of these school workers are also parents of children attending LAUSD schools. A majority — more than 75 percent — are also graduates of LAUSD schools. Their commitment to their neighborhood schools and the students they serve is deep and personal. And it’s that commitment that fuels their activism as union members and their deep desire to ensure all students have access to a quality public education.

SEIU Local 99 members led the fight to preserve and expand Breakfast in the Classroom and after-school supper programs because they know that, for many students, school meals are often their only meals of the day. They negotiated the breakthrough $15/hour minimum wage at LAUSD that created a pathway out of poverty for thousands of families. Union members also supported initiatives to expand wellness clinics in our schools. We’ve been an active voice for immigration safe zones and were the most visible “boots-on-the-ground” to ensure the passage of Propositions 30 and 55 which secured state funding and stopped devastating cuts to education.

It is impossible to disconnect the needs of students from the goals of labor. We’re currently in contract negotiations with LAUSD, and every one of our bargaining priorities aims to increase supports for the students we serve. Special education assistants, for example, are leading the fight to stop a cut of nearly 80,000 hours that will severely disrupt the care and support they provide to some of the district’s most vulnerable students.

Custodians are also advocating for staffing levels that will ensure cleaner, healthier schools. The district has not restored many of the custodial positions that were lost during the Great Recession. By LAUSD’s own admission, custodians are only staffed at roughly 40 percent of the levels needed to meet the district’s cleaning standards. Many custodians worry that this severe understaffing has led to the shuttering of school bathrooms and other cost-cutting measures that are creating a health hazard for students.

Community representatives, who are key to parent engagement in our schools yet are limited to part-time status, are advocating for increased work hours that will allow them to help more parents with everything from understanding how to better prepare for their child’s academic success to assistance with deeply personal issues like domestic violence.

Wages are, of course, a key part of contract bargaining. But as parents and workers who live in the communities where we work, fighting for fair wages is all about ensuring students have the stability at home that they need to succeed in school. As parents, SEIU Local 99 members are trying to put food on the table for students. They’re trying to keep a roof over students’ heads and clothes on students’ backs and save for students’ higher education. They are trying to do this on low wages, few hours, and patchy healthcare coverage. Classroom lessons are important, but a child is not ready to learn if she lacks clothes or food or shelter. As the second-largest employer in Los Angeles County, we believe LAUSD can go a long way to ensure economic equity for our families and communities — and the children we serve.

So this Labor Day, yes, we’ll be marching for fair wages, better staffing, and good jobs. We’ll be marching because we can’t push for academic achievement in schools that can’t be kept clean. We’ll be marching because you can’t promote parent partnerships and not staff the very programs that help schools and parents connect. We’ll be marching because we can’t aim for 100 percent graduation only to have many of those graduates head into jobs that pay poverty wages. We’ll be marching because these “labor issues” are our children’s issues.

Max Arias is the executive director of SEIU Local 99: Education Workers United. Nearly 30,000 SEIU Local 99 members work at LAUSD.

Haena Shin

By Haena Shin

Teachers can tell when they are effective. In my first year as a special education teacher in a pre-kindergarten setting, the signs were small but profound — a nonverbal student who started to greet me in the mornings, a student who didn’t know how to hold a pencil properly who learned to write full sentences about books he read, a student who memorized over 100 sight words, and a student who didn’t know his numbers who began to start adding and subtracting.

My principal also noted this growth, and his vote of confidence helped me earn a Rookie of the Year award at Los Angeles Unified School District while I was teaching on an intern credential.

It’s this experience that makes me seriously doubt the California State Board of Education’s new plan to label thousands of teachers as “ineffective” based solely on the credential they bring to the classroom, not their or their students’ performance. In fact, many of the fellow intern credentialed teachers that I have taught with have not only shown mastery of classroom management and instruction but also exceeded the expectations of their administrators and were recognized at their school sites.

By September 18, every state must submit a school quality plan to the U.S. Department of Education under the Every Student Succeeds Act or ESSA. One component of the plan addresses teacher quality, in an effort to inform parents and taxpayers if schools are providing strong teachers to all of our students.

Earlier this month, the board of education proposed that all teachers who complete a traditional teacher training program and hold a “full” license would be considered effective, regardless of how they or their students are performing. All teachers enrolled in a nontraditional, intern credential pathway – like the one I was in my first two years – would be considered ineffective.

Born and raised in Koreatown, I was aware that not all students were getting the same quality of education. As a student in LAUSD, I noticed this disparity when I saw friends in more affluent communities receive funding for summer abroad trips to Europe and engineering programs. Respectively, I would hear stories of students in less fortunate communities who had to sit on the floor during the first month of school and share textbooks due to a shortage in school supplies.

As I approached graduation from UCLA, I wanted to address that inequity by becoming a teacher. I looked at graduate school programs but realized I would need to work for a couple of years before I could afford to take the traditional path. That’s when I discovered a nontraditional program that would allow me to work as a salaried teacher for up to two years, under the supervision of instructional coaches, while I earned my full credential. It offered an AmeriCorps grant to help offset my education expenses if I worked in a high-poverty school, exactly where I felt I could make the most difference. And I was surrounded by a network of experienced and resourceful educators who offered their knowledge and expertise in the classroom.

My experience is not unique. Thousands of teachers of color and individuals who, due to family obligations, need a salary while going to school enter the teaching profession on one of California’s 77 accredited intern pathways each year. In fact, the intern pathway is California’s most diverse pipeline – nearly half of intern credentialed teachers identify as people of color, compared to 34 percent of the teaching workforce and 76 percent of students.

This fall, I start my third year in the classroom. All of my students are diagnosed with Autism, varying on the spectrum. Each has an individual learning plan tailored to their needs and abilities. I will meet with my school administrators and parents regularly to chart their growth. It strikes me disingenuous for the state to claim I was ineffective my first year but will be effective this year and every year going forward without ever looking at any benchmarks.

I urge the state board to adopt a definition of teacher effectiveness that considers students’ learning and growth. It is imperative that the state board continues to validate teachers based on the growth of their whole students academically, mentally, and emotionally. Especially in high-need communities where teacher shortages continue to remain a problem, we must empower and support the teachers who strive to make a difference.

Haena Shin was a 2015 Rookie of the Year at LAUSD, earned her master’s degree in urban education from Loyola Marymount University, and served in the 2015 Teach For America-Los Angeles corps. 

Rashidah Shakir-Blackshere and her son. (Courtesy: Speak Up)

By Jenny Hontz

The LAUSD Board votes Tuesday on a resolution to oppose the creation of an innovative new state-authorized STEM middle and high school intended to increase the pipeline of qualified under-represented students of color and women attending elite STEM universities and entering science, technology, engineering and math professions.

The resolution against this proposed school, which would be located in Los Angeles and operated in partnership with UCLA, demonstrates a reflexive opposition to innovation and ignores the desperate need for underserved kids to have more high-quality school options in math and science.

District 1 Board Member George McKenna and District 3 Board Member Scott Schmerelson are sponsoring the resolution opposing AB 1217, the state bill that would create the new school. The resolution claims that with 97 existing STEM magnet programs, Los Angeles is “already addressing the need for STEM education.”

There’s just one glaring problem: McKenna and Schmerelson fail to address the quality of those programs. Speak UP asked McKenna’s office to share the percentage of students that are meeting state proficiency standards in math at LAUSD’s STEM schools that admit all students – not just those serving kids chosen to attend because of high test scores.

“That would not be relevant,” said Sharon Robinson, McKenna’s chief of staff.    

We beg to differ. A quick look at the data suggests that Los Angeles has a serious need for higher-quality options. Right now, 75 percent of LAUSD 11th grade students are failing to meet or exceed state standards in math.

LA’s existing STEM schools are also underperforming in science. The average number of proficient students in schools that have “science” in their name was 51 percent, which is below the LAUSD average of 53 percent and the county average of 60 percent, according to analysis published last November by LAUSD math teacher Benjamin Feinberg on his School Data Nerd blog.

California is the fifth worst state in the nation in terms of 8th-grade science performance, according to a report card from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. 

And while Latino and black students represent 56 percent of total secondary enrollment in California, they only represent 28 percent of those enrolled in a calculus course, which is considered the gateway to university-level STEM degrees.

Part of the problem is the shortage of teachers qualified to teach high-level math and science.

This new STEM school proposes to address that problem by tapping university professors and science and tech professionals to teach alongside credentialed teachers – something magnet and charter schools are not able to do in the large numbers this school envisions. Universities such as Caltech and MIT have signed letters supporting the creation of this school.

Parents also see this as an incredible opportunity for kids. Speak UP member Rashidah Shakir-Blackshere, who lives in Board District 1, has a third-grade African-American son interested in studying aerospace.

“STEM education is not just about technical aptitude. It’s about building confidence in problem solving and critical thinking,” she said. “What better way to foster that confidence, especially in underserved, largely minority communities, than by hands-on collaboration with scientists and engineers?”

Shakir-Blackshere teaches at LA Trade Technical College and sees first-hand how much her community needs better high school math instruction. Eighty percent of the new students test in at a remedial 6th-8th-grade level in math and have a hard time catching up. “If they’re coming in at an 8th-grade level, something is missing in their formative years,” she said. “They’re stunted.”

As for a new public STEM school run in partnership with UCLA: “I only see good things coming out of it,” she said.

The entire tone of the opposition to the school suggests a hidebound mentality that puts bureaucratic rules before the needs of kids.

“It’s not a matter of not wanting to try something new,” Robinson said. “It’s a matter of the process and procedure of doing it. And there are guidelines in the state of California.”

The McKenna-Schmerelson resolution makes the tired argument that a state-run school will siphon dollars away from the district and existing LAUSD STEM schools. “If we have 100 kids in the building or 300 kids, we still have to turn on the lights,” Robinson said.

It’s high time that LAUSD reexamined that assumption and its stubborn adherence to a failed status quo. If a program is losing enrollment because it’s not successfully educating students, perhaps it’s time to consider turning off the lights and creating something new and better instead. 

Improve failing programs, expand the seats available at more successful programs or cut bureaucratic staff when enrollment declines. But please don’t limit quality choices for parents and kids. That’s not a kids-first solution to LAUSD’s fiscal problems.

In fact, opponents of this bill may be squandering an opportunity to help all of LA’s kids. The visionaries behind this new STEM school hope to have university professors and industry experts conducting teacher trainings to increase the pipeline of qualified STEM teachers in LA, benefitting all kids.

Fourteen other states, including Illinois, North Carolina and Texas, have established similar state-run STEM high schools that have trained thousands of teachers and produced graduates who attend the nation’s best STEM universities and who go on to be leaders in STEM fields.

Los Angeles currently has no public schools serving under-represented populations that are considered regular feeder schools to top STEM universities. This is a chance to change that.

Because the school would require a new state-authorizing model, lawmakers may have legitimate questions about transparency, accountability and local control. But that’s no reason to reject this plan out of hand, especially given the auspices behind it and the fact that other states have similar models that are successful. 

As for fears about oversight quality because of the distance between LA and Sacramento, let’s not forget that we already have schools authorized and overseen by the state, such as New West Charter, which is successful and in demand.

The bottom line: California has the country’s largest tech workforce, and its largest city should be producing graduates who are qualified to enter the field. And as Silicon Valley and Silicon Beach struggle to create a more diverse workforce, this new school, if allowed to succeed, could be part of the solution.

We urge board members not to stand in the way of progress. 

Jenny Hontz is in charge of content and communications for Speak UP, which is launching Speak UP Board Watch this week, a digital hub for parents to track LAUSD Board decisions and take action on behalf of a kids-first agenda.

Roy Romer at a groundbreaking for the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools. (Photo: José De Paz)

“Wooooow. They built this just for us?”

By Glenn Gritzner

This week, a significant milestone is being achieved for the students of LAUSD that deserves to be celebrated. The final school — Bell High School — is coming off the year-round calendar, meaning that every school in LAUSD will now be on the traditional nine-month calendar.  

Combined with the end of mandatory busing, this means every student can now attend school in his or her own neighborhood, receiving the proper amount of instruction every year.  

It may sound basic, and it’s a little difficult to explain just how we got here and why it’s so important, but the taxpayers of this city agreed to spend more than $20 billion to do it, resulting in the largest public infrastructure investment in U.S. history. The fact that the goal has finally been achieved is worth talking about. It’s a story worth telling.

I’ll never forget the day the first new comprehensive high school opened in Los Angeles in over 35 years. It was 2005, and it was on the site of a former Santee Dairy milk processing facility, hence its name to this day: the Santee Educational Complex.  

Thinking about Los Angeles in 1970 and Los Angeles in 2005 is to think about two very different cities. The Los Angeles of 1970 had 640,000 K-12 LAUSD students; in 2005, the district had just peaked at nearly 750,000. (Fun fact: In 1970, LAUSD was nearly 50 percent white and 22 percent Latino. Today, 74 percent are Latino and 10 percent are white.)

So the district grew by more than 100,000 students, yet did not build a single new comprehensive high school during that time — and barely built new schools of any variety.  

LESS SCHOOL, MORE BUS TIME

So what did the district do to accommodate all those new students?  

Two major things: First, they started busing students out of neighborhoods where there was no room in the local school to neighborhoods that had more space. This isn’t the “integration” busing that was so controversial in the 1970s. This was busing for no other reason than the fact that the local school couldn’t hold them. And Los Angeles isn’t a small place.

So think about the implications of that. Children would have to get up often an hour or even two hours earlier. They would walk or be driven to their local school, except they wouldn’t walk in the front doors. They would then get on a bus and ride usually a very long way to a school in a different neighborhood with kids who didn’t live near them.

A 2011 celebration at South Region Elementary School #6, now Marguerite Poindexter LaMotte Elementary. (Photo: José De Paz)

And they were the “other” kids, usually from the “worse” part of town. They couldn’t participate in after-school activities. They couldn’t hang out with their friends after school. Their parents would have to drive that same hour or two for back-to-school night or to visit their child’s school.  

At its height, 16,000 kids did this every single day. It’s just a really tough situation for both students and parents — and does a lot to negatively impact their education.

The second thing they did is institute a “year-round,” or “multi-track,” calendar. The way it works is that only two-thirds of a school’s students attend at any one time, while the other third is “off track.” There is no traditional summer, just a series of shorter breaks throughout the year.  

The term “year-round” is misleading because it sounds like more school. But the year-round calendar is actually 17 fewer instructional days per year — 163 versus 180. In order to meet state-mandated levels of instruction, the school day would be extended because the state requires a certain number of minutes per year.

But think about it — are you more productive for a few extra minutes at the end of a long day, or do you get more done when you start fresh? So a child who attended a multi-track school from kindergarten through 12th-grade — which many did — would get the equivalent of one less year of instruction during their schooling.  

In addition, for kids on certain tracks, the matriculation to the next grade would happen over the course of a weekend. So a kid could end 10th-grade on a Friday and start 11th-grade on Monday.  

And finally, especially at the high school level where extracurricular activities are so important, it was very difficult to have students from different tracks consistently work on or participate in anything together since some students were constantly cycling in and out.  

In short, while people adapted to it and in some cases even started to prefer it, this calendar was never instituted to improve instruction. It was only meant to fit more kids into the same school.

SHEER WILL

Enter Roy Romer.

Romer had been a three-term governor of Colorado, head of the National Governors Association, chair of the Democratic National Committee, and chair of the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. One of his signature policy issues had always been education. Bill Clinton called Romer his “partner in education reform” in his post-presidential memoir.  

Knowing his passion, during the run-up to the DNC Convention, some civic leaders approached him about whether he would consider being superintendent of LAUSD, where a new reform-minded board was looking for a change agent.

In a move few could have predicted, this then-71-year-old who had been to the pinnacle of U.S. politics — for instance, Romer had hosted G-8 summits at his house, and Al Gore had recommended him to Clinton for VP before being chosen himself — took the job, starting in late 2000.

When Romer started, building schools was the last thing on his mind. He had chaired the National Goals Panel on Education when he was governor. He had championed wide-ranging curriculum reforms. He was passionate about the importance of reading and literacy.  

So when he came to Los Angeles, he was shocked by what he saw. Overcrowded classrooms.  Kids on buses two hours each way to school. This crazy multi-track calendar. How could he expect teachers to teach and students to learn if they literally didn’t have the space to learn in?

So Romer used the one resource at his disposal to solve the problem that nobody else had tried: sheer will. How else to explain why the district hadn’t built these schools earlier? LA had passed a bond measure in 1997, but that was mostly to repair existing schools.

School board member Mónica García at a 2013 ceremony at 9th Street Elementary School and Para Los Niños Middle School. LAUSD’s chief facilities executive, Mark Hovatter, is at far left in the dark suit. (Photo: José De Paz)

Nobody had ever stood up and said, “This is unacceptable,” or had the courage to ask LA voters to make a significant investment in new schools. Especially when it wasn’t particularly simple to explain why they were needed.

On top of that, building new schools wasn’t going to be easy. Look around. LA doesn’t exactly have a whole bunch of empty, clean plots of land waiting for a school to be built on them. Which meant that school board members were going to have to vote to exercise eminent domain, forcing people to sell houses and businesses so that schools could be built where they were needed. Not exactly the most popular thing for a politician to do — the City of LA hadn’t exercised eminent domain in any meaningful way in years.

And this investment would not be evenly distributed throughout the district. In fact, the voters in wealthier parts would pay the lion’s share of these new taxes, while these shiny new schools would get built in the needier areas. So, again, certain board members would be asked to vote on eminent domain, and to ask voters for new taxes, and yet not be able to show their own constituents what they would be getting for their money.

A SAN FERNANDO VALLEY-SIZED HURDLE

Finally, if that wasn’t enough, when Romer’s first chance to put a bond on the ballot came up in 2002, the San Fernando Valley had garnered enough signatures to run a ballot measure looking to secede from the City of Los Angeles. And polls showed that, while secession wouldn’t have applied to LAUSD as a separate governmental entity, many voters thought it did, and that this issue drove voters to the polls. Surely, these voters who were, by and large, older and more conservative wouldn’t vote for new taxes and new schools when they didn’t even want to be part of the district in the first place.

Yet Romer was undeterred. We either cared about kids or we didn’t, he said, and he was ready to put that question in front of Los Angeles. So we put the largest local school bond that had ever been proposed on the November 2002 ballot.

I was special assistant to the superintendent and, more relevantly, ended up being the district’s point person running all the bond campaigns. (My life fundamentally changed the day Romer randomly looked at me at an evening event we both happened to be attending and said, “I don’t know why, but every time I look at you, I think about my bond. Let’s talk.”)

A 2013 ceremony at Michelle Obama Elementary School in Panorama City, in the San Fernando Valley. (Photo: José De Paz)

I had to put together a bond package that met the district’s needs, that could get seven votes on the board (because nobody wants a divided board when it comes to putting taxes on the ballot), that passed the smell test with activists and other community stakeholders, and that still had a fighting chance to get approved by voters. No easy feat, but we got it done, and the board voted unanimously to put Measure K on the ballot.

Conventional wisdom was that we had an uphill battle, and that was charitable. The previous 1997 bond measure had come under fire for being under-budgeted and under-delivering on its promises, so we had to include money in this bond to make up for those gaps.  

We talked a lot about overcrowding and busing and the ills of the multi-track calendar, but the truth was that we could never get enough money to build all the schools we needed with one bond measure, so we weren’t going to be even close to actually solving the problem with this bond. We had money for repairs, but much of that was for basic infrastructure that, while critically needed, was often not visible or compelling — HVAC systems, fire alarms, asbestos removal.  

The 2012 naming event for Carlos Santana Arts Academy in North Hills, in the San Fernando Valley. (Photo: José De Paz)

And politically, Valley secession was on the ballot, so a big chunk of motivated voters would be hostile to anything LAUSD. Voters statewide had recently approved lowering the approval threshold for local school bonds to 55 percent from the previous two-thirds threshold, so maybe, just maybe, we could squeak by. But a whole lot of people were very skeptical and continually told us so. I can’t count the times somebody said, “Why don’t you just wait?” For us, students had already waited long enough.

Well, turns out that people weren’t giving Los Angeles voters enough credit. Measure K passed with 68 percent of the vote. We cleared the two-thirds hurdle, even though we didn’t need to (especially rewarding in the face of all the “taxpayer advocacy” groups who howled that we were “cheating” by availing ourselves of the lower threshold).

DO IT AGAIN

That first campaign was a ton of work. But March 2004 was the next ballot on which we could legally run another bond given LAUSD’s unique boundaries, meaning we would have to start planning just a few months after passing the first bond if we were going to put another one on the ballot.  

Some advised Romer that we couldn’t go to voters again so soon, but the job wasn’t done. Kids would still be on buses, still be on multi-track calendars, still be in overcrowded classrooms.  

So off we went, with yet another, even larger, bond measure. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had put a deficit-reduction measure on the ballot that topped $15 billion and didn’t do anything but help balance the state’s budget. It was a “hold your nose and vote for it” measure, and countless people told us there was no way voters would approve billions more for schools after having to punch their ticket for this monstrous statewide measure.

But, again, people underestimated Los Angeles voters, and we passed — though this time with “only” 63 percent.

But we still weren’t done. Schwarzenegger decided to call a special election the following year where he ran a series of eight hugely unpopular initiatives, attempting to do everything from reducing tenure for teachers to limiting pensions for firefighters and nurses. Virtually every public employee union and certainly the entire Democratic Party were determined to defeat the entire slate. In fact, the Democratic Party’s message was “vote no on everything.”

An important side note here is that, for technical reasons, the only time the district can put a bond on the ballot that qualifies for the 55 percent threshold is during a statewide or countywide election. So Romer was hesitant to let a “qualifying” election go by given the dearth of opportunities. But in that politically toxic environment, most everyone in the district, including me, advised Romer against it. We had gone to the voters twice in 16 months, and now barely another year had gone by. It was just too much.

Y FOR “YES”

In retrospect, this was a moment. In education, everybody says — and generally means — that they are in it to help kids, to make sure students have the best shot at a productive and rewarding future. But actually turning those words into actions is where the rubber meets the road — and is what separates rhetoric from reality. That’s where education is hard. And our reality was that even with two very successful and huge bond campaigns, we still didn’t have enough.

Thirty-plus years of inaction meant we had to build anywhere from 120 to 150 schools, depending on population growth and birth rates (the final number ended up being 131), if we wanted to get every kid off the bus and every kid back onto the traditional calendar. Not most kids. Not almost every kid. Every kid.

Romer saw that. And, more importantly, he had the will and the courage to act on it.

A 2013 ceremony at 9th Street Elementary School and Para Los Niños Middle School. (Photo: José De Paz)

I’ll never forget the moment I was standing in his office and giving him the advice that we should wait another year for all the reasons I listed above and more. He looked at me and said two things, one of which was borne out of his commitment to students and one borne out of decades of experience. “Do we have enough to build every school we need to end busing and get off year-round?” (knowing full well the answer), and then, “One thing I’ve learned in politics is that when you have a shot, you have to take it. If you don’t get there, we can try again. But we can’t let this election pass us by.”

And so off we went, running — yet again — the largest local school bond in U.S. history. We called this one Measure Y because not only did it stand for “yes,” but we wanted to signal that it would finish the job. (I don’t remember if Z was taken or we just thought it sounded weird.) And the voters delivered yet again — this time, putting us just past that magic two-thirds threshold that further validated their commitment to serving kids.

And with that, finally, we knew we could deliver on the promise. Another bond, Measure Q, was passed by a subsequent regime in 2008 that was much larger, and focused almost exclusively on the district’s massive repair needs, which is just as admirable and just as necessary. But mid-2002 to late 2005 feels today like one long campaign where we traveled to every community in all 26 cities that LAUSD serves, from Chatsworth to San Pedro, Venice to South Gate, educating people about not just “overcrowding” but what that really means to parents and students, and the difficulties that mandatory busing and the multi-track calendar had brought to trying to provide high-quality instruction. It was “back to basics” before Mayor Garcetti popularized the term.

FULFILLMENT OF A PROMISE

Do new buildings do anything on their own to make for better schools? Of course not. But we know it’s a heck of a lot harder to teach kids well when they’ve had to sit for two hours on a bus to get to school, or when they are cycling in and out of various tracks, getting fewer days of instruction, or where you have to pack classrooms to the gills. We couldn’t hope to make the progress we were committed to without something as basic as the space to do it in.

And new schools do send important signals about our commitment to communities, especially low-income communities. Standing in front of a brand new school on the very first day it opens is an experience like no other. The excitement, the wonder, the curiosity, and even the surprise on the faces of these students and parents are priceless.  

Students at the 2006 ceremony for South Region Elementary School #7, now Tweedy Elementary. (Photo: José De Paz)

I’ll never forget the little boy, probably a second- or third-grader, walking into one of our new schools in South LA on his first day, looking around with the most bewildered yet happy expression on his face. To no one in particular he says, “Wooooow. They built this just for us?”  

Now think about how that little boy is going to react when his teacher asks him to pay a little more attention, to do his reading, to learn something new. He will have so much more incentive to further his education because we believed in him, and we showed him that. We did something about it.

The specifics of how these schools got built is another story worth telling entirely. The eminent domain struggles. The fights with developers and others who wanted to do something else with the land. The outreach to impacted communities. Relocating thousands of families. And all of this happened with very little controversy and no major scandals. While spending billions of public dollars.  

We were building the equivalent of the entire San Diego school system on top of the Los Angeles school system, while that system continued to function. It was the nation’s largest public works project, and how it actually happened is fascinating and offers a whole other series of lessons — and good stories.

But now, when the last LAUSD school goes off the multi-track calendar, when the last bastion of students will get their full year of instruction on the same schedule with the same teachers, it is more than just “everybody starts on the same day now.”  

It is the fulfillment of a promise made over a decade ago. In ways both large and small, both seen and unseen. A commitment inspired by a strong-willed and committed superintendent, supported by several different iterations of LAUSD board members, endorsed and helped along by a cadre of civic leaders, passed by Los Angeles voters, and carried out by some of the most committed, ethical, trustworthy public servants I’ve ever known (most of whom had been Navy Seabees — part of that next chapter).

It was a promise made to every LAUSD student. And this week, we delivered on that promise to the very last ones.

• For a list of all the schools in the building program, click here. 

• More from LA School Report: Maywood school is the last to open in massive building project. But dwindling enrollment makes today’s LAUSD a very different district.

• Back to school, ALL together now: For the first time in 36 years, all LAUSD district schools will start on the same date

Glenn Gritzner is a partner at Mercury, a national public affairs firm, in the Los Angeles office.

Disclosure: The 74, the parent of LA School Report, works with the New York office of Mercury.

By Seth Litt

On July 12, the California Board of Education met to discuss the state’s plan to comply with the new federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which must be approved and submitted by September. Board President Michael Kirst opened the conversation with a defense of the draft plan, which offers no commitment on how the state will improve its lowest-performing schools and little urgency for when these improvements might happen.

Kirst said, “Why cede control over an evolving state accountability system to the federal government? The state plan is essentially a contract with the federal government.”

This was a telling explanation of California’s education status quo.

He was right that the plan is essentially a contract. A contract, after all, is an enforceable commitment, something that binds people to one another. And, since contracts are enforceable, it’s clear that people at the highest levels of California’s education leadership hope to duck accountability by drafting a plan light on specifics and mute on any commitment to close the racial and economic opportunity gaps that plague our education system.

This is being done in the hope that California will retain maximum freedom to do things as it sees fit — or, as Sacramento has dubbed it, The California Way. However, it is becoming evident that a core tenet of The California Way is avoiding any obligations to the children who attend the state’s lowest-performing schools, lest anyone in power be held responsible for ensuring that our schools improve and all students have effective teachers.

Despite Sacramento’s bad faith, the families in the Parent Power Network, who come from California’s historically underserved communities, have a different perspective. Families don’t see California’s ESSA plan as a heavy-handed contract between the state and the federal government. They see the plan as the opportunity for a contract between California and our state’s children.

Experience tells them such a contract is essential. They know firsthand what it’s like to wait for schools to improve and see no changes. Some have seen children across decades being failed by the same underperforming school. Along the way, they’ve received plenty of promises and plans. But public school families have learned the hard way that unless they get an enforceable commitment from a principal, a superintendent, or even the governor, the only guarantee they have is that nothing will improve.

These families have also learned that even when the state government affirms a commitment to make schools better, the forces of the status quo will line up to stand in their way. In 2010, California passed the Parent Empowerment Act, a law that gave families the right to take collective action to improve the lowest-performing schools in the state. When families throughout Southern California attempted to use the law, districts tried every trick they could think of to block change, grasping unsuccessfully for cynical and technical reasons to deny families their rights.

In Anaheim, families sued the school district and won. The district appealed, and in a sweeping and binding ruling, the appellate court ruled that families have a right to use the law. When California’s Supreme Court declined to hear the district’s appeal this month, the right of parents to improve California’s lowest-performing schools was, once and for all, affirmed.

In Los Angeles, the new school board has taken an important step by committing to an agenda that puts kids first. Whether or not local and state boards step up to do the same, parents will continue to use the rights provided by California law and affirmed by the courts to ensure that their children get the education they deserve.

Our state Constitution, the contract between Californians and their government, promises a free and equal education to all students. Every day, hundreds of thousands of teachers from Eureka to El Centro show up to shape the future of children, and every day parents entrust their children to teachers because they trust the commitment of educators to students. The promise of a free and equal public education represents the best of us, our social contract at work.

This year, there have been lots of reasons to be proud to be a Californian. The reckless actions of the Trump administration have sparked fierce resistance in our state, and California’s elected officials have doubled down on their commitments by protecting the rights of immigrants, caring for the environment, and standing up for affordable health care.

How embarrassing that vulnerable children stuck in our worst schools somehow don’t figure into this shared compact, as our education leaders will commit to nothing.

Seth Litt is executive director of Parent Revolution, a Los Angeles nonprofit organization that supports public school families to make change with their choices and voices.

Dr. Emilio Pack, who founded STEM Prep Schools, works with a student. (Courtesy)

By Emilio Pack

The new goal charter networks have adopted — boosting the college graduation rate for their alumni — is a wise one. It’s definitely time to move past the short-sighted goal of only ensuring they win admittance into a college.

But in rushing to meet this new goal, it’s easy to overlook an awkward but important truth: Not all college degrees produce success for our students. What they major in may matter as much as winning a degree.

Let’s review the history behind this new goal.

At Alliance College-Ready Public Schools in Los Angeles, where I served as a founding principal and director of New School Development, the network initially focused on high school graduation rates as an organizational priority. Progress toward this goal was quick and measurable. Today, several Alliance high schools boast impressive graduation rates of 100 percent.

• Read more from The 74 and The Alumni: Exclusive: Data Show Charter School Students Graduating From College at Three to Five Times National Average

Almost immediately, the measure of success shifted to the percentage of students accepted into a four-year university. Again, Alliance rose to the challenge, and now 95 percent of its students who graduate from high school go on to college. The overwhelming majority of these students are minorities and come from low-income households. However, like many other districts and charter organizations across the country, these students are struggling to complete their degrees within six years. Many do not complete them at all.

Not surprisingly, charters are now shifting their resources and strategic planning to address this issue. Every charter colleague I have spoken to is steadfast in their commitment to increase college graduation rates.

But is this the right approach?

Or, like the goals of high school graduation and college acceptance before it, will we quickly realize that college graduation doesn’t guarantee success? These are the very questions that we asked ourselves in founding, developing, and operating my current organization, STEM Prep Schools.

If a district or organization succeeded in attaining 100 percent college graduation within four years, it would be as noteworthy an academic accomplishment as any. However, practically speaking, all college degrees are not made equal, and in today’s job market, if these college graduates had degrees composed of Chicano studies, philosophy, communications, and psychology, shouldn’t we be a little concerned about their future employment opportunities?

I don’t want to disparage anyone with these majors. I was actually a psychology major myself and know firsthand that getting a job was a struggle. A four-year college degree in no way guarantees long-term success and employment.

In fact, we see thousands of students graduate with massive debt and unable to secure a high-quality job. This can be absolutely crippling for a family living at, or on the fringes of, severe poverty.

At STEM Prep Schools we believe it’s not just about getting a degree but rather does that degree open a pathway for what comes next for these graduates. We will fall short of making the economic and social changes necessary to disrupt the current status quo, a system that locks poor students of color out of the job sector, if we do not make a conscious effort to expose minority students to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) early on. STEM is the fastest-growing job sector, offers some of the highest pay, and desperately needs diversity.

Approximately 84 percent of the STEM workforce in the U.S. are white and Asian males, which means only 16 percent of the remaining workforce is African American, Latino, and/or female, combined. At STEM Prep Schools, we are setting our bar at the number of students who graduate college with a STEM degree and become professionals in a STEM-related field.

In order to accomplish our mission, we are developing in our students the research and inquiry skills necessary to be successful STEM professionals. We are exposing students to rigorous inquiry-based courses and lessons where they are able to explore the content on their own, be allowed to productively fail, and use their critical thinking and research skills to investigate or solve a problem/scenario.

Additionally, high school students engage in an elective course of study that includes engineering, biomedicine, and computer science. Other aspects of our model include industry internships and exposure to industry mentors who look like the kids we serve, African-American and Latino.

We do all of this because we are not just an educational institution but also one that believes in fighting for social equity.

While STEM has become a bit of a cliché in education, make no mistake — this is the future of the job market. A future that looks awfully bleak for students of color and those living in poverty unless we boldly raise the bar for measuring success.

Emilio Pack is founder and CEO of STEM Prep Schools in Los Angeles. A video interview of Pack discussing his work can be found at The Founders.

This article was published in partnership with The74Million.org.

By Beth Hawkins

Few education policy battles have burned as hot as debate over the practice of requiring traditional public schools to share under-used space with charter schools. Co-location, as the practice is called, is often cited as damaging to students in mainline district schools.

But groundbreaking new research from Temple University Assistant Professor Sarah Cordes finds that at least in New York City, the arrival of a charter school has a positive effect on students in the traditional school already located in the building.

The first peer-reviewed research released on co-location, the study looked at nearly 900,000 students in grades 3-5 who attended a traditional public school in an attendance zone that included a charter school serving at least one of those grades between 1996 and 2010. Many of the schools studied shared a building with a charter school, something that’s common in cities where real estate is at a premium.

• Read more: Exclusive: Charter co-locations across multiple school campuses are down by more than half, but LAUSD process still lacks transparency

Other researchers have asked preliminary questions such as whether co-location facilitates the sharing of innovations birthed in successful charter schools, but Cordes says her research shows that just the existence of an option sparks change.

“Just the presence of an alternative does it,” Cordes told The 74 in a far-ranging interview. “It doesn’t really matter how great that alternative is, it’s just the fact that that alternative is there, it’s in the building and people see it every day.”

(74 Flashcards: 13 Things to Know About Charter Schools)

Seven notable findings from Cordes’ research, about how charters are affecting nearby mainline district schools:

1. Location, Location, Location: The closer the charter, the bigger the academic boost

Some 75 percent of kids attend school within a mile of their home. And New York City charter schools must give preference to students living within their attendance zone. The closer a charter school is, the more pressure its opening creates.

A co-located school is constantly visible, notes Cordes: “The closer the school is, the more it’s on the minds of the people in the building.”

The closer a charter school is to a traditional public school, the stronger its positive impact. Students attending traditional public schools in buildings that also house a charter school perform 0.083 standard deviations—a statistical measure that allows researchers to make apples-to-apples comparisons—better in math and 0.059 standard deviations better in reading. Students in traditional schools located up to half a mile from the nearest charter school perform 0.021 standard deviations higher in math and 0.020 higher in reading.

To put that in perspective, research on class size indicates that being in a small class increases test scores by as much as 0.2 standard deviations. The co-location study suggests that being close to a charter school increases student performance between 1/10 to 2/5 as much as being in a small class.

2. When a traditional public school shares a building with a charter, more of its students advance to the next grade

The study found small upticks in student attendance at traditional schools as well as a 20 to 40 percent drop in the number of students held back for not performing at grade level. Students in traditional public schools that share buildings with charters are half as likely to be retained—not advanced to the next grade—than those in traditional schools located further from a charter.

3. The students most at risk benefit the most

Cordes found that demographic changes in schools do not account for the increases in performance. Impoverished students and children with disabilities do as well or better when a charter school locates nearby or in their building.

Her findings also disprove a common accusation that charters leave nearby traditional public schools with a disproportionate share of the neediest students. In fact, Cordes found that when a charter opens nearby, special education students leave traditional schools at the same rate as their nondisabled peers.

4. The traditional school’s safety, climate, and morale improves

Contrary to popular belief, which holds that charter schools siphon off the highest-performing students and those with the most motivated parents, Cordes found that families in traditional schools in co-locations report higher levels of engagement and safety. Teachers report higher academic expectations and more respect and cleanliness.

More research is needed to determine why. “It could be disgruntled parents go and parents who are happy with the school stay,” says Cordes. “It could also be the discipline and culture of the charter school seeping over.”

Other possible factors include the space-sharing plans charter schools wishing to co-locate must come up with, which could make the entire building more orderly and a rule dictating that improvements made to the facility by a charter school must extend to the entire building, Cordes notes.

5. Nearby charters drive up per-pupil spending at traditional public schools

Traditional public schools sharing a building see an increase of almost 9 percent in the amount spent on instruction per pupil—likely because of the aforementioned dip in enrollment. Traditional schools within a half mile of a charter see an increase of 4.4. percent, with schools located within a mile experiencing a 2 percent bump.

Traditional schools in this study did lose students to charters, but they were spread across multiple classrooms and did not result in a loss of staff. Cordes found that enrollment in co-located traditional schools dropped by approximately 30 students. (Traditional schools located within half a mile of a charter school lost about 13 students.)

Cordes offers a caveat: Per-pupil spending on instruction goes up when student-teacher ratios fall. But depending on how a school is staffed, that doesn’t always mean smaller class sizes.

6. Charter proximity seems to matter more than charter quality

Overall, “spillover effects” are significantly greater when the traditional school is within half a mile from a high-quality charter school, defined as one whose students on average perform at or above the 75th percentile citywide. The charter school’s quality matters less, however, when the programs are co-located.

7. Rhetoric vs. reality

The results beg big questions. The factors driving the positive changes require much more study, and Cordes is anxious to learn whether the impact is the same in cities such as Los Angeles and Philadelphia, where a much higher percentage of students attend the jointly housed schools.

But the findings of the new study suggest that New York could benefit from more charters, and in particular new programs housed alongside their traditional counterparts.

“I really went into this not knowing what I would find,” says Cordes. “So much of the talk about co-location is so negative, I was somewhat surprised to see the effect was as positive as it is.”

This article was published in partnership with The74million.org.

Nancy White Horse

By Nancy White Horse 

As parents, we spend a lot of time worrying about our children’s education: we nag them to finish their homework every night, we push to pair them with the best possible teachers, and we lay awake at night hoping they are going to be prepared for their future. However, we often ignore one of the largest, yet invisible, obstacles to a child’s education in Los Angeles: air pollution.

We are a city inundated by pollution-spewing cars, buses, and trucks—with a big opportunity at our fingertips to switch to clean, electric transportation.

As a mom in the most notoriously smoggy cities in the country—Los Angeles—I constantly worry about the air my 10-year-old daughter breathes. I think about it as we pass by morning traffic on our walk to school, at soccer practice, and at bedtime. I think about it especially when I have to pull out my own inhaler. As an asthmatic myself, who has recently been diagnosed with chronic bronchitis, I hope they never have to live their lives struggling to breathe like I do.

According to the American Lung Association, six out of the ten most polluted cities in the US are in California, including Los Angeles. Because children breathe more air per pound than adults and spend a greater amount of time playing outdoors, kids are particularly susceptible to air pollution. Children who go to school, live or play near major roadways are at risk from the toxic emissions that come from natural gas and diesel cars, buses, and heavy-duty trucks. These emissions include nitrogen oxide, ozone and particulate matter that can cause asthma or decreased lung function. In Los Angeles County, one in 11 children suffers from asthma. Among African American children in Los Angeles County, the situation is even more dire: one in five African American children lives with asthma.

Asthma and pollution-related health problems have a big impact on how our kids learn. A 2014 report from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health showed that, on average, students with asthma missed 5.7 – 6.5 days of school. Not only does poor air quality impact our children’s health, but also their education—and thus their future—by robbing them of a whole week of class.

In my neighborhood in South LA, it didn’t feel like there were many ways we could protect our kids from unhealthy air. Then I started getting involved in environmental activism.

Now, I know that the best way I can protect my children and clean up the air our family breathes is to demand strict air quality and emissions rules from local leaders. And it’s my job as a mother to push them.

On July 27, the Los Angeles Metro Board of Directors will consider whether to switch their entire fleet of buses to a 100 percent zero-emissions electric by 2030. Getting those greenhouse gas and smog forming emissions out of our air means fewer doctors appointments, asthma attacks, missed school or work days, and less money spent on asthma medication. Most of all, it means fewer worried mothers stressing about the air we breathe.

I hope Metro continues their legacy of taking a stand for clean air. In the 90s they were the first major public transportation agency to switch to lower emission natural gas. More than 20 years ago, that was pretty good, but today we can do so much better. We have zero emission electric buses ready to go.

Bus and car pollution may not be the first thing you think of when you look at everything our young students face but getting 2,200 dirty, polluting buses off of our streets will go a long way towards helping our kids breathe, and learn, easier.    

As parents, we’re often asked to take a stand and demand the best future for their children and clean air is no exception. Nothing is stronger than a mother’s love — it can stop a bus.

Nancy White Horse is a South LA parent and former liaison for the Los Angeles City/County Native American Indian Commission.

State Assemblyman Tony Thurmond, D-Richmond. (Courtesy)

By Chris Bertelli

California State Assemblyman Tony Thurmond is running for California Superintendent of Public Instruction but it might be hard to tell why based on a couple of recent votes on one of the most important education issues facing the state.

The East Bay Democrat sits on the Assembly Education Committee, which would seem like an excellent platform for someone running for state schools chief to take a leadership role. However, on the politically thorny issue of teacher tenure he has — in capitol vernacular — taken a walk.

In April, the committee considered AB 1220, authored by Thurmond’s Democratic colleague Shirley Weber from San Diego, that would have extended the number of years required for a teacher to earn tenure in California from two to three years. In addition, the bill would allow up to an additional two years of probationary status and extra training for promising teachers who had not quite earned permanent status. As the bill analysis notes, California is one of only 12 states with a such a short time period for earning tenure and this provision was one of the central issues in the recently overturned Vergara decision.

AB 1220, as it was written and heard in the committee in April, had broad support from traditional education interests like the Association of California School Administrators and the Riverside County Superintendent of Schools, as well as community-based organizations like the United Way of Greater Los Angeles, Children Now, Alliance for a Better Community and InnerCity Struggle. In all, 14 organizations and several individuals officially registered their support for the bill to just two in opposition: the powerful California Teachers Association and California Federation of Teachers. When it came time to vote, Thurmond abstained (often referred to as “taking a walk” because of the practice of leaving the committee room when it comes time to vote) and the bill received the minimum votes needed to progress through the legislative process.

AB 1220 wasn’t done with committee shenanigans, however. Because of the nebulous potential for a fiscal impact on the state budget, the very powerful Assembly Appropriations Committee was able to grab it and gut it. The bill that passed out of that committee has little resemblance to the original bill, restoring the two-year tenure requirement but adding a potential third probationary year with several conditions. Even this watered down version wasn’t enough, however, to avoid CTA opposition and the union continued to hammer away at it while the bill picked up more education establishment support from the likes of the California PTA and the California Association of School Business Officials.

With CTA still opposed, the bill cleared the Assembly but with a whopping 15 abstentions, including another from aspiring educational leader Thurmond. It now moves to the Senate where it faces an uncertain future.

Leaving aside the fact that the most fundamental job of a legislator is to vote on legislation, vote avoidance on important educational bills by someone who wishes to lead the California Department of Education is an especially bright red flag. Thurmond’s official Assembly website, as well as his campaign website, make no mention of his abstentions. Indeed, the issue doesn’t come up at all.

Given the lopsided support in favor of the bill, both in its original and in its amended form, it’s reasonable to conclude that Thurmond could not risk angering bill supporters by voting against it, nor did he wish to disappoint a potentially powerful political patron, CTA, by voting for it. A profile in courage, this is not.

An alarming inequity characterizes California’s public education system: 65 percent of economically disadvantaged students and a stunning 75 percent of African-American boys are not meeting state standards for reading and writing, and 77 percent of low-income students aren’t meeting state math standards. The quality and distribution of teachers in our schools are fundamental components to addressing this crisis. This is no time, Mr. Thurmond, to take a walk.

Chris Bertelli is the founder of Bertelli Public Affairs, an education public affairs consultancy based in Sacramento. He specializes in working with clients focused on improving educational equity in California public schools.

David Tokofsky (Courtesy photo)

By David Tokofsky

Now that the dust of the school board election has settled and the mailers are in the recycling bin, the tough job of setting policy for the nation’s second-largest school district lies ahead for the new and returning members of LAUSD’s Board of Education. It is always good to ground policy on accurate historical understanding, so let’s get the record straight before moving forward.

Last month, guest commentator Evelyn Aleman Macias wrote here that:

“In 2015, some of our school board members voted to lower the student requirements for A-G college prep coursework from a C grade to a D. As a result, more than half of LAUSD’s 2016 graduates were not eligible for [California State Universities (CSUs) or University of California admissions (UCs)]. Our own elected officials failed our children.”

This is incorrect. Only the top nine percent of a graduating class can matriculate to a UC, and CSUs only admit the top 30 percent of in-state graduates. It is the California university system that requires students to get a C or better in their “A-G” required courses. No board action could affect whether struggling high school seniors would get accepted to college. 

What really happened: The board raised graduation requirements so that resources were spread more equitably and all students could register for the prep courses required by CSU and UCs. Finding that some students struggled with the more rigorous coursework, the Board of Education then decided to maintain the minimum requirement of a D grade to pass so that students would not be deprived of a high school diploma and the ability to find work that requires a diploma. Certainly beats “credit recovery” without any deep content.

How did we get here?

Over a decade ago, LAUSD graduation rates were lower than suburban areas and numerous schools in lower-income neighborhoods did not even offer all the classes needed to fulfill the A-G requirements.  So parents and community organizations began a bullhorn campaign to achieve equity in LAUSD schools: Every student, no matter what school she or he attended, should be offered the A-G required courses. The district heard the call — and responded! The way to ensure that students enrolled in and completed these classes was to make them graduation requirements. Thus demand rose at all schools and the requisite resources were dispersed. But deep planning does not come from bullhorn-driven policy initiatives.

In the meantime, retention and graduation rates jumped over 20 points. But is it realistic to expect that the kids who would have been dropouts in years past will all be getting Cs or better in college prep courses?

The answer for now, as it turns out, is no. Some kids are managing to meet the A-G requirement but struggling with the materials. The board was faced with a dilemma: Having met the equity demands of our parent activists back when today’s graduates were in kindergarten, should these students be deprived of a diploma when they stayed in school and signed up for the A-G requirements but got even just a single D grade?

Of course not. THAT would be failing our students. So having raised the course requirements, they maintained the grade requirement, so that kids who were doing it right and trying hard could still get the diploma and look for a job. Board members George McKenna, Mónica García, and President Steve Zimmer drove the sensible change from the nonsensical knee-jerk bullhorn activism.

Now, many more students are completing their A-G requirements at their local school. More LAUSD students are applying and succeeding at California universities than in the past. And mind you, two-thirds of college students in California attend community colleges. Until the taxpayers build three more UCs and 10 more CSUs, it is a costly fantasy to talk about all our children attending a university.

All this goes to say: The district is improving and must continue to do better. We must not be distracted by division and should make sure we get our information from credible sources. Thoughtful education policy is no picnic — there are almost never easy answers. Here’s hoping current and future leaders do the hard work required to make good decisions that will help all our students succeed.

David Tokofsky served on the LAUSD Board of Education for 12 years and is currently a strategist in the education field. He is a part-time consultant for the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles (AALA), the school administrators’ union, was California’s 1992 Teacher of the Year while at John Marshall High School, and coached LAUSD’s first National Academic Decathlon Team in 1987.

]]> https://www.laschoolreport.com/commentary-boosting-las-grad-rates-is-about-more-than-education-its-tackling-inequity-head-on-and-giving-students-the-support-they-need/ Tue, 06 Jun 2017 20:52:22 +0000 http://laschoolreport.com/?p=44383

Dou’Jae Rice graduated last year from Hamilton High School and is finishing her first year at UCLA.

By Deborah Marcus

When Dou’Jae Rice’s father was killed during her sophomore year of high school, the pressures of providing for her family could have forced the straight-A student to drop out. But that didn’t happen. Instead, Dou’Jae was able to tap into a network of support at LAUSD’s Hamilton High School that kept her on track to graduate. Today, she’s wrapping up her first year at UCLA and plans to become a lawyer representing low-income people.

Like Dou’Jae, so many students in Los Angeles face daunting obstacles every day. Many don’t know where their next meal is coming from. They struggle with homelessness. They bear witness to violence at home or in their communities. They miss weeks of school each year because of illness or family obligations. And layered on top of all of this are historic and systemic inequities — tied to race, immigration, and policing — that lead to poverty.

It should come as no surprise then that tens of thousands of students in LA — particularly students of color in low-income neighborhoods — struggle in school and are at risk of dropping out. Unlike Dou’Jae — and despite the compassionate and dedicated efforts of teachers, counselors and principals across the district — too many are unable to get the services and attention they need to stay in school and graduate.

It’s time, as a city and nation, to reframe how we talk about education reform. What we must figure out together is, “How can we support every student at every school in every way and enable them to thrive?”

Left Behind

The barriers thrown up by poverty are a real problem for students in the Los Angeles Unified School District, where about 75 percent of students qualified for free or reduced-price meals in 2016-17. Though graduation rates have risen since 2010, nearly a quarter of students don’t graduate from high school within four years. Too many young people are being left behind, and that’s just not acceptable.

Yet as Dou’Jae’s story illustrates, young people can get the help they need to succeed. At Hamilton and nine other LA schools, a partnership between the school district and the nonprofit Communities in Schools of Los Angeles (CISLA) has achieved stunning results through an approach called Integrated Student Supports. Among participating students at all 10 schools, 93 percent of seniors graduate high school in four years. Results can happen relatively quickly too. At Mendez High School in Boyle Heights, a partnership among school leadership, CISLA, and the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools has boosted the graduation rate 46 percent in just four years, to 96 percent. 

In the Integrated Students Support model, trained professionals are placed in the schools all day and after school to connect students with mentoring, tutoring, enrichment programs, mental health services, clothing, and other services tailored to their unique needs. Each of the schools’ principals works closely with the nonprofit’s staffers to figure out what school-wide issues the principal wants to improve, such as attendance, school culture, or family engagement, and to target those students most likely to drop out.

Moving Forward

Integrated Student Supports makes deep economic sense in these times of shrinking budgets for education and social programs. For every dollar invested in the CIS program in California, $38.40 in public and private benefits is returned. More investment in supporting our students could change the trajectory of kids’ lives — and of our community as a whole. Because when students do better in school and are better prepared for life and careers, that’s a win for everyone: kids and their families, communities, and businesses.

So what’s next? The LAUSD Board of Education should commit itself to addressing the underlying, systemic inequities that keep kids from graduating. The city’s business leaders — as some are already doing — can promote supportive programs for students, from career days, internships, and science and technology enrichment to weekend camps that give students their first chances to get out of the city and see the stars. They can help students see what’s possible in their lives. And schools, communities, and businesses can work with parents, providing them with the supports they need to raise their families out of poverty.

There’s no silver bullet, of course. And Integrated Student Supports are a solution most people don’t think of as education reform. But that’s what we need: holistic approaches that deal with the reality of young people’s lives and use caring adults as a key complement to the vital educational work already happening in schools. With their communities solidly behind them, students like Dou’Jae can thrive in every way.

Deborah Marcus is executive director of Communities in Schools of Los Angeles, which is celebrating its 10^th anniversary.

Imagine starting your college journey with a $75,000 scholarship. If that piques your interest, you’ll want to tune in to a brewing education battle in the Golden State. While the school choice debate has often centered on education outcomes, its fiscal impact in California is also of serious consequence. School choice could literally help send most students to college with a huge portion of the cost already accounted for. The math is actually fairly simple.

Regardless of your view of the problem, both sides recognize California is in serious trouble, and defenders of its current system are drowning in a sea of evidence that the status quo is an abysmal failure. California spends roughly half of its entire budget on education, and the results of its years of additional bureaucracy and tax rate hikes have yielded statistically no improvement. Its unfunded pension liability is spiraling out of control, and almost 40 percent of its schools are failing by the state’s own metric. California currently hovers around 47^th in the country, in math and science. These figures alone necessitate school choice.

School choice can pay for college in California based on its current spending trajectory. The idea is simple: District schools tend to cost the state far more than public charter, private, or homeschool options. We could permit citizens to keep the savings of selecting less expensive options, up to a certain point, and allow the funds to finance a college education.

The cost of private school may surprise you. Make no mistake, there are many inordinately expensive schools that charge in excess of $30,000 a year for tuition. Our own internal research, however, shows that there are even more who charge significantly less. Most private and charter schools, and this includes religious schools, charge around $9,000 per student, per year, when you average them all out (we used Orange County and Los Angeles as these are highly affluent areas). 

Two out of three of the private schools that we surveyed have tuition around this range, with elementary school tuition averaging $6,000 to $8,000 and high school tuition around $12,000 to $14,000 per student. Remember the governor’s own budget proposes $15,000 per student. In addition, these numbers do not account for the significant amount of financial aid doled out, or the multiple student discounts for families sending more than one child to the same school. With these numbers in mind, 13 years of private or charter schooling should cost around $120,000. Compare this to the $195,000 per student as proposed by the governor and you get a hefty savings of around $75,000 that could feasibly be used to send a student to a UC college that charges around $50,000 for a full four years of college education.

There are an infinite number of details to be worked out, but our current system cannot continue as is. California has declared education a right, and it is failing on that promise to many of its students. Rarely in the world has more competition and economic freedom led to worse outcomes for the parties involved. If presented to the public, we think people will want the freedom to choose, once they learn how much money is at stake.

John Kruger is founder and director of The Kids Union, a nonprofit dedicated to raising awareness for school choice reforms.

(Courtesy: Granada Hills Charter School)

By Kevin Mahnken

What Serena Williams is to the Grand Slam, what the John Wooden UCLA basketball teams were to the NCAA tournament, and what Magic Johnson to the NBA finals — that is what Granada Hills Charter High School is to the rarified world of the United States Academic Decathlon: an iconic L.A. powerhouse that could soon run out of room in its trophy case.

With its victory at the 2017 championship in Madison, Wisconsin, in April, the program claimed an unprecedented sixth title in seven years. The event, considered one of the most grueling high school academic challenges, tests nine-member teams from around the country in subjects ranging from math to music to social science to speech. To even reach the final round, a team must proceed through a series of regional and state competitions.

What’s more, as the birthplace of the decathlon and home to its past 15 winners, California is known as the proving ground of great squads. Judging from its homecoming reception, to say nothing of local media, Granada Hills stands as the undisputed ruler of the state. Officials from the Los Angeles Unified School District and the city council welcomed the team back with congratulatory speeches, while the school band hailed them with bagpipes and cheerleaders twirled. Among administrators, the mood could best be described as giddy.

“It’s hard to argue there’s not a dynasty in play here, right?” said Granada Hills Executive Director Brian Bauer in a phone interview. He noted that a former national champion, who recently graduated from UCLA, had been a guest at the day’s festivities; another served as a coach for this year’s roster. “There’s that kind of lineage and legacy, if you will, with the team.”

“Everyone cares so much about this program that even if they leave, they never really leave,” said Jonathan Sturtevant, an algebra teacher who serves as one of Granada Hills’s three principal coaches. “We have an ex-coach from the 2011 team who still works with the kids on interviews. [Emeritus coach] Matt Arnold, who stepped down this year, still did essays with the kids.”

Uncommon devotion and excellent coaching are two of the program’s strengths, but it benefits from other advantages as well. Although decathlon teams are grouped into three divisions based on size, big schools headline the contest, and Granada Hills’ nearly 4,500 students make it the largest charter in the country. Founded as a part of LAUSD nearly 60 years ago, it reportedly boasted the largest student body in the country in 1970. Though its most famous alumni are athletes (gridiron legend John Elway graduated in 1979, and Milwaukee Brewers MVP Ryan Braun followed a few decades later), the school is also considered one of the highest-performing in California.

Bauer successfully campaigned to win charter status for Granada Hills over a decade ago, disappointed with the district’s decision to veto the school’s strict attendance policy. That decision crystallized a back-and-forth struggle in the city between charter advocates, who celebrate the independent schools with the same enthusiasm that Granada Hills pours on its decathletes, and the district’s school board, which has been more wary.

(LA School Report: LAUSD Puts Money and Muscle Behind 3 State Bills That Shackle Charter Schools)

Though he has never looked back since decoupling from LAUSD, Bauer feels that Granada Hills — and perhaps especially its Academic Decathlon program — still benefits from playing in the same academic sandbox as the district.

“There’s something about LA and Academic Decathlon. We separated from the district 13 years ago, but a large part of our success is about competing against some of the best schools in the LA school system. That brings out the best in a number of teams, and it’s motivated our coaches and kids,” he said. Included in that description is two-time decathlon winner John Marshall High School, along with Granada Hills’s white whale: El Camino Real High School, which has romped to an unmatched seven championships in the past 19 years. (One more win and Granada Hills would tie the record.)

In an interview with The 74, three Granada Hills decathletes described their intramural jockeying as fierce but friendly.

“In every competition, we try to remain sportsmanlike: Do the handshake thing, say congratulations every time, no matter what outcome,” said Jordan Barretto. “I think that’s a big part of what this team represents. [Teams like Marshall and El Camino] aren’t really our rivals. We respect them as competitors, but we really see them as people who help us grow.”

“The week before a competition is sometimes the most stressful week we have,” added Aisha Mahmud. “Because we want to win — for the school, which has given so much to us, and for the legacy that Granada has created.”

Asked what he gained from participating in the program, which consumes virtually every minute of free time during competition season, Peter Shin pointed to the close connections forged through rigorous study: “How close we get, and how comfortable we are in front of one another, is something that I don’t think I’ve ever experienced. I have good friends, but I don’t think I’ve ever come to trust them the way I do this team.”

Those relationships are nurtured by the coaches, who see them as a key to mastering the decathlon’s unique setup. Each team must include students with varying academic records: three each from the “Honors” (3.75 GPA and above), “Scholastic” (3.00–3.74), and “Varsity” (2.99 and below) designations. That requirement prevents schools from cherry-picking their top pupils and makes collaboration imperative; Honors students give their Varsity teammates an example to follow, while seniors mentor younger students in the skills necessary to win.

“It’s part of our strategy,” said Sturtevant. “Having the kids work together and fostering that partnership with one another is one of the secrets to our success.”

“My favorite part of the program is what it does for the Varsity students,” the coach continued. By the end of the year, “they just become different people. … A lot of them find motivation they didn’t know they had. They want to succeed and start setting academic goals they may not have thought possible before.”

Jordan, Aisha, and Peter are all seniors. Along with some of their teammates, they’re now enjoying their final week of high school — winding down the academic year, but also finalizing vacation itineraries and getting ready for college. Aisha wants to major in English, Peter plans to study computer science, and Jordan has his eye on an architecture degree. Soon, the demands of the decathlon, including its 12 hours of daily preparation, will be a memory.

Not for Sturtevant, however. As soon as this year’s competition ended, he and his fellow coaches began assembling research materials for the 2017–18 decathlon topic, a study of the art, culture, and economics of Africa. And even as he bade farewell to his departing champions, recruitment had already started for next year’s team.

“That all starts now,” he said wearily. “We’re looking at the list this week, actually.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. 

By Seth Litt

On Wednesday, May 17, Los Angeles families woke up to a new reality for education in the nation’s second-largest school district. Voters in two Los Angeles Unified school board districts voted resoundingly for change, electing two young progressive educators — both of them either current or former teachers — as our newest school board members.

These two new board members, Nick Melvoin and Kelly Gonez, ran on a simple message: Our students deserve better, and to deliver for them we must start prioritizing their interests over those of the entrenched education bureaucracy.

As every state in the country decides how it will approach the work of closing opportunity gaps for our most underserved communities, this election should remind them that voters are watching and that a lack of federal oversight is no excuse for weak plans and casual timelines.

To be clear, voters in Los Angeles just sent this message — it is time to start putting the interests of children first. But sometimes it is not clear whether our representatives in the state legislature in Sacramento are listening.

The latest chapter in the struggle of families against the bureaucracy unfolded a week ago, when families from Parent Revolution’s Parent Power Network traveled to Sacramento to testify in favor of Assembly Bill 1482, which would have made it easier for underserved families to transfer between school districts. Under current California law, parents must get permission from the school district to which they are zoned in order to transfer to a different district. This creates a perverse system where a school district can fail to provide a child with a good education and then can deny their ability to leave. AB 1482 would have taken away the ability of home districts to deny outgoing transfers for low-income students, English learners, and foster youth.

Keshara, the mother of a second-grader and part of our Parent Power Network, told a powerful personal story to the Assembly Education Committee that captured the problems with the current system. Keshara told the seven elected officials how she had overcome homelessness and now works to provide support to other parents through her job with the Women and Infant Children program. She shared that she had moved to the city of Torrance, hoping to enroll her son Mikal in a good school. Unfortunately, despite attending college, working, and living in the city of Torrance, Keshara has an address that puts her one block away from the invisible and arbitrary wall that separates Los Angeles Unified from Torrance Unified.

This means that her son has been zoned to a school with low student performance, lacking the after-school programs that would allow her to balance her own school and work schedules, and is in an area where she has safety concerns for her child. For each of the past two school years, Los Angeles Unified School District has denied Keshara’s permit to transfer, denying her son’s opportunity to attend a quality school, just across the street, simply because he lives on the wrong side of an invisible boundary.

One leading Democrat on the Education Committee, Dr. Shirley Weber, stood strongly with Keshara and supported the bill, capturing the essence of this issue by saying, “It gets to the issue of what every parent wants, their kid to go to school [where] they will get the education they deserve.”

Yet despite this bipartisan support, the bill failed by just one vote, 4-3, meaning Keshara’s son may spend another year unable to access the high-quality public school less than a mile from his house.

The deciding vote was cast by Assemblymember Tony Thurmond, whose core argument, tellingly, was, “Can we take some time to understand the impact on districts?”

We would think that someone like Assemblymember Thurmond, whose district includes 14 elementary and middle schools in the bottom 5 percent of the state, would be a leading advocate for families to have better options within the public school system.

But time and time again, we see that while Sacramento politicians are quick to praise the virtues of “local” control, they really mean “district control” and are more worried about protecting the system as it exists right now than affording families that opportunity to get a great education for their children.

Sacramento made a move in the right direction when it switched to the new Local Control Funding Formula, but it has provided no oversight to ensure that districts are transparent about how money is actually spent, and that the money is actually used to close opportunity gaps by making it to the schools and students for which it is intended.

Sacramento laudably began crafting a new school rating system that could incorporate multiple measures of school performance, but it then took four years to produce an incomprehensible “School Dashboard” that works for bureaucrats but makes it harder, not easier, for families to evaluate school quality.

And Sacramento is currently putting the finishing touches on a statewide education plan that takes advantage of new federal flexibility to eliminate any requirements for districts to improve the schools that have been failing underserved students and communities for a generation or more.

Parent leaders like Keshara will continue to fight to get a great education for their children and all children in their community. They want it today, and their children can’t wait. LA’s election results show that voters are on their side — they want to see a much stronger sense of urgency to improve schools for our young people.

Now is the time for politicians from around our state to decide if they believe in the power of parents or if they will continue to strengthen the power of a bureaucracy that hasn’t yet proven that it can deliver for all children.

Seth Litt is executive director of Parent Revolution. He worked for 12 years in the South Bronx as a teacher and principal, and he founded a charter school for at-risk youth in the court and foster care systems.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. 

By Ramon Altamirano

I was already a freshman at Cal State Northridge before I realized that my schools had failed me.

It was apparent, very quickly, that the prior 12 years of my education had not been on par with that of my classmates. Other students had come to their higher learning with the academic and social skills necessary to navigate the world of academia.

It didn’t take long before I began wondering if I should even be there. In part, this thought stemmed from both having what felt like an inferior education but also rarely having had the experience of being taught by someone who looked like me. This is what called me to teach.

 Unfortunately, this story is all too common for students in Los Angeles and around the country. A majority of my students fall under the federal poverty line and most of them share the same education experiences I had. As a student, I stuck it out, and it wasn’t easy. Earning my degree and eventually becoming a teacher were not only meaningful personal achievements for me, but they have provided a unique opportunity to show the students of my community that there is a path for them.

I am fortunate enough to work at a school that believes in that path too. Walnut Park School of Social Justice employs an equitable approach to educating the whole child. For example, rather than handling behavioral issues in a strictly punitive manner, we address the root causes of discipline issues. Our students learn to take responsibility for their actions, to repair the harm that they have done to the school, the community, and to themselves. It’s important that they realize that their choices matter. What they do matters, because they matter.

After reflecting on my own experiences a student and as an educator, it is clear to me that improving school climate is essential to providing students with an excellent education and a strong sense of self-worth. As a former substitute teacher in some of the neighborhoods in LA that serve our most vulnerable students, I saw up close what a lack of accountability and oversight can do to a learning community. Students view school as an obstacle to overcome rather than an opportunity to seize.

I have been lucky, in my current role, to experience firsthand some of the benefits of restorative justice, such as student accountability. And while this shift has not always been easy to implement, it has helped plant a seed of hope for our students. It has, I believe, helped students begin to view their education with more hope. I do everything I can to build that hope in my own classroom.

I’ve also sought out opportunities to support my students outside of the classroom. I’ve started coaching baseball and football, which has allowed me to get to know students in a different light. Through Educators for Excellence, I’ve begun working with other colleagues across the city to advocate for policies that have the promise of changing my students’ lives. I’ve had the opportunity to be a part of a team aimed at reviewing district policy and arguing for school climate and student equity improvements across LAUSD.

If we want transformational change for our students, we need to advocate for them however we can, whether that’s teaching them in the classroom, coaching them on the field, or fighting to disrupt injustice at the district and state level.

Ramon Altamirano is a member of E4E-Los Angeles and a first-year special education teacher at Walnut Park Middle School of Social Justice.

By Nadia Diaz Funn

The Alliance for a Better Community (ABC), an advocacy organization committed to the advancement of the Los Angeles Latino community, congratulates Kelly Gonez and Nick Melvoin on their election to the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education. With a long, exhausting, and divisive campaign season now behind us, this July Los Angeles will have a new Board of Education — one that will be in place for the next three and a half years.

The seven individuals that make up the LAUSD Board of Education have immense collective power to shape the future of Los Angeles public education. With this power, however, comes great responsibility and opportunity to forge a united path committed to tackling the tough issues facing the district and double down on its commitment to making college and career pathways a reality for all students. 

With climbing deficits, declining enrollment, and long-standing achievement gaps, there is no shortage of work ahead. There are three key areas, however, that are critical in ensuring that all students receive a quality education that the new board must prioritize and act upon with urgency and commitment.

Fulfill the promise of A-G: The students of the Class of 2017 were first-graders when LAUSD made its 2006 promise to graduate every student college and career ready. Eleven years later, with less than 50 percent of graduates eligible to attend our state’s public university system, it has fallen short of that promise. The new Board of Education must work immediately to realign its graduation standards with those of our California state university system. Allowing students to graduate with a “D” significantly reduces their opportunity to attend college and engage in meaningful career pathways that, for many, can mean the difference between poverty and upward economic mobility. Only when the district’s graduation requirements reflect college eligibility for all will its goal of 100 percent graduation have true meaning and significance for our students.

Tackle the deficit: Every single day that passes that the Board of Education does not address the district’s structural deficit of $11 billion (and growing) they endanger our children’s future. Ensuring fiscal solvency, along with selecting a superintendent and establishing district policy, is one of the basic responsibilities of the seven board members. The current and previous boards have shirked their responsibility on this for far too long and our children and community expect and deserve action. We also expect that actions to address the structural deficit are done so equitably and ensure our highest-needs schools and students are prioritized in the redistribution of funding.

Increase equitable access to school options: As the district embarks upon the creation of its unified enrollment system, the board of education must ensure that it is building a system that successfully removes barriers for families who are determining where to send their children to school. Transparency and quality must take priority over marketing and boosting enrollment. Parents are entitled to make informed decisions about where they send their children to school, and that begins with the ability to understand their full range of public school options, including charter schools, compare school performance on key indicators such as math and English proficiency, programmatic offerings, and school climate, and apply and enroll through a simple and transparent system.

The work ahead is big and cannot be achieved in a vacuum. It must be done in authentic partnership with parents, community members, labor partners, philanthropy, civic and business leaders, and education advocates. 

ABC stands ready and able to work alongside the new Board of Education to fight for our children’s future. We are hopeful that together we can transcend beyond the anti-charter/pro-charter narrative that is perpetuated in the media and that distracts us from the real work of creating a student-centered agenda that truly delivers a quality education to all students.    

 Nadia Diaz Funn is the executive director of the Alliance for a Better Community (ABC), a nonprofit organization that promotes the economic prosperity of the Latino community and the Los Angeles region, inclusive of an improved quality of life for Latinos in education, health, and civic participation. She is an LAUSD graduate and worked for LAUSD in various leadership roles.