The character Maz, and the inspiration Rose Gilbert, from Palisadian-Post.

* UPDATED

She gave $1 million to Palisades Charter High School for classroom renovations and building a community pool. She was LAUSD’s oldest full-time teacher when she retired at 94 and one of the oldest ever in the nation.

She taught the children of Frank Sinatra, Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin and Robert Mitchum. And, her students included budding film director J.J. Abrams and a future production designer, Rick Carter.

It’s Abrams and Carter who have now immortalized their teacher Rose Gilbert as the tiny big-hearted, but stern alien, Maz Kanata, in the blockbuster movie “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” Maz generously offers help to the heroes of the film, reflecting the teacher’s generosity, and looks a bit like her, too.

“I think it’s a wonderful tribute and appropriate for a local school hero,” said principal Pamela Magee who knew Gilbert well. “It’s nice that J.J. (Abrams) memorialized someone important to him in this way, and now other generations of kids who didn’t know her will discover her.”

Magee saw the movie before she was aware of the connection, but noticed the resemblance, and plans to be “one of the multiple-viewers of the film.” She said the school will no doubt make some plan to let students know about the connection to Gilbert when they return next week.

Abrams told The Palisadian-Post that the inspiration for the new character came from his late high school English teacher. “The character of Maz was originally based on the great Rose Gilbert,” he said. “We really wanted the story to feel authentic, despite being a wild fantasy. I mentioned Rose in an early story meeting as a sort of timeless, wise figure that I’d actually known in my life.”

The alien character is voiced by Lupita Nyong’o, who won an Oscar for “12 Years a Slave” and was named People magazine’s “Most Beautiful Woman” of 2014. But, there are some similarities to the teacher.

“Yes, Maz’s large glasses in the film are allegedly similar in size to the ones Gilbert was known to wear throughout her 51 year tenure at Palisades Charter High School,” according to the Post.

She taught in room B204 and was known as “Momma G.” After she retired, at the age of 94, she had a drama room named after her at the school. She inherited money from her husband and donated it to the school. Part of it was used for a community pool named after her daughter, Maggie, a swimmer who died unexpectedly in 2004.

Abrams graduated from the school in 1984, and Carter had her as a teacher 15 years earlier. Abrams said, “While we experimented with many looks and styles before settling on the character’s final design, Rose was always at the center of the inspiration of Maz. Rick and I had hoped to contact Rose and show her what we were doing, but she sadly passed away while we were in the prep of the film.”

Gilbert died on Dec. 16, 2013, just 10 months after she retired, at the age of 95. Both Carter and Abrams attended the funeral. The school’s flag was lowered in her honor when she died. She worked at the school since it opened in 1961. Earlier, she taught at University High School in west Los Angeles.

“She was such a character and always very generous,” Magee said. “I’m sure she would have loved the tribute.”

* Added principal’s comments

Garfield Senior High School teacher Kevin Murchie

As a boy, Kevin Murchie saw the award-winning film “Stand and Deliver,” the true story of Jaime Escalante, the Garfield Senior High math teacher who inspired his Latino students to overcome gang violence and poverty in east Los Angeles.

A Caucasian boy growing up in the upper class community of La Cañada Flintridge, Murchie said there was no way he ever thought he would one day become a teacher, and certainly “no way did I ever think I would be teaching at that school someday.”

But some life changing events led Murchie to realize in his mid-20s that he wanted to teach, and after 11 years at Garfield, his dedication recently earned him some national recognition when he became one of only 53 teachers to receive the prestigious 2014 Yale Educator Award.

A former Garfield student, Janet Juarez, a freshman at Yale who credited Murchie with inspiring her as a student, nominated him. Since receiving the award, and since LA School Report posted a story about it last week, Murchie said he has been inundated with messages from former students.

“I don’t think I ever really understood the power of social networking until that article came out,” Murchie told LA School Report during a phone interview. “In a two-day period I heard from more students over my career than I ever had. I mean, I didn’t even realize they remembered who I was. But I got emails, texts, all kinds of things. It was quite amazing.”

Murchie taught Juarez in Advanced Placement English and was also the faculty advisor for the student-run paper, The Scuttlebutt, which Juarez served as editor in her senior year.

“Besides increasing our societal awareness, Mr. Murchie helped many students, myself included, appreciate writing,” Juarez said in a press release. (Efforts to reach her for this story were unsuccessful.)

Murchie came to teaching through a circuitous route. After attending La Cañada High School, he went to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, first majoring in hotel management, then business.

“I didn’t set out to be a teacher. I spent most of my college trying to get out of reading books,” he said.

Then, during his last semester of his senior year, he took a course on the history of rock and roll.

“One day this teacher played this interview with Bob Dylan, and this reporter from Time magazine was trying to label him a folk singer, and Bob Dylan didn’t want any of that. He said, ‘I’m a trapeze artist.’ And my head exploded,” Murchie recalled.

“I kind of realized in that moment I had never done anything original in my whole life. I had never had my own thought. I’d just been doing what everybody else told me to do. It literally changed my life. I went home, I broke up with my girlfriend, I went to the library and checked out [Jack] Kerouac’s ‘On the Road,’ [Alan] Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and bought Bob Dylan’s ‘Nashville Skyline’ and tried to figure out who I was.”

After graduating, Murchie said he spent several years unable to land a job he liked in the business world. He moved to San Francisco and kept searching for a path that would be meaningful to him.

“One day in the shower, I guess I had the epiphany that lately all I had been doing is reading books, so what if you got paid to read and talk about books? I drove over to UC Berkley and I walked into the lit office and I walked up to the secretary, and I will never forget it, because I just blurted out, ‘I think I want to be a teacher,’” Murchie said.

While he didn’t end up at UC Berkley, he did end up at San Francisco State, where he eventually got into the graduate English program. Eleven years ago, hoping to get into a doctorate program but needing a job, he landed an interview at Garfield to teach high school English. Before the interview, he studied the school’s test scores and demographics, feeling well-prepared when it began.

“And I remember the principal at the time said, ‘Well, is that all you know about Garfield?’ I said, ‘Yeah,’ and I was a little surprised because I had just spat out all these facts. And she said, ‘Well, what about ‘Stand and Deliver’? I just looked at her like, that was here?” Murchie said.

Murchie explained he believes the key to inspiring students is to be very prepared and bring a lot of energy into the room. He says he rises every day at 3 a.m., arrives on campus at 6:15 a.m. and often spends several hours before school preparing his lessons.

“Coming from La Cañada, it’s vastly different than Garfield,” Muchie said. “The kids need something else. Yeah, they need teachers, but there is also a certain amount of cultural literacy that’s in there that you have to explain to them. There is a certain amount of parenting that they need. There are a lot of days, more days than I would like to admit, when you have students crying to you about problems that they’ve got. I’m sure a lot of teachers get that.”

While Murchie said he was grateful for the award, he said he doesn’t necessarily feel worthy of the attention.

“It’s hard, because I feel like there are a lot of good teachers at Garfield,” Murchie said. “We all probably have students like Janet. I was fortune that one of mine took to time to do what she did, but that could have been anybody.”

Previous Posts: Garfield High teacher selected for Yale Educator Award

Called Grants HQ, the website puts hundreds of millions of dollars in educational grants online in one place and is available only to LA Unified’s approximately 30,000 educators.

“Teachers want the grants,” Andrea Kobliner, a grant advisor with the program told LA School Report. “This is really the only grants website that is just geared for education, only for LAUSD teachers, and helps them by actually classifying the grants.”

Previously, hunting down grants required the arduous task of searching the Internet on many sites to find one that specifically fits an educator’s grade level and eligibility, according to Kobliner.

The program also offers free grant-writing workshops to teachers, which have been oversubscribed, she said. Two upcoming workshops this month and next are already full, with a waiting list of over 90.

At least seven successful grants totaling $12,370 have been handed out to LA Unified educators through the site. Kobliner said she thinks the actual numbers may be higher but teachers are not obligated to report their successes. “It’s kind of tricky, as we’ve asked everyone when they apply for grants… and then if they win an award to please notify us,” Kobliner said. “That doesn’t seem to be the case, and we have no other way to get the information unless they tell us.”

Kobliner said six of the seven confirmed grant winners had attended a workshop.

Kobliner said the site has 1,153 registers users and at the moment about 275 available grants. She recalled recently putting up a new available grant on the site at 9:30 a.m.

“By 11:30,” she said, “we had 257 hits on it.”

The nearly $1 million donation will go to 769 teachers, who submitted proposals for projects and materials. The donation included pencils, books, laptops, musical instruments and other supplies.

“There’s something magical about the idea of a single moment when every teacher’s dream can come true,” said Charles Best, founder of DonorsChose.org. He says Google’s offer to “flash fund” also provides a “singular opportunity to tell people about the site, and creates more teachers participation as well as more citizen giving.”

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti helped make the surprise announcement yesterday at Marina Del Rey Middle School.

“Our school teachers give their all every day to ensure that Los Angeles students reach their full potential,” said Garcetti, according to a press release. “We’re grateful for their ongoing dedication and passion that’s inspiring the next generation of Angelenos – and I’m thrilled that the help of Google and DonorsChoose.org will help every student reach their dreams a little faster.”

Teachers at the school expressed gratitude at the generosity of the donation.

“Anything from pencils to technology, it’s going to help the kids in the classroom. Any professional with a well-supplied toolbox will be more effective,” history teacher David George told ABC7. “I’m blown away by the generosity. It’s super cool.”

Google has enacted similar “flash funding” campaigns over the last few months in San Francisco, Atlanta, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Austin, and Kansas City. On Tuesday, Seattle area schools became the latest to benefit from the campaign.

DonorsChoose.org is a non-profit founded in 2000 to help classrooms in need. Teachers at half of all the public schools in America have created project requests, resulting in more than a million people donating $260 million to different projects.

Despite a recent press report indicating LAUSD was below the average, it turns out on many measures, when compared with other urban districts in California, the district appears competitive.

Of course, how to measure (average salaries versus starting salaries) or which districts to include (size versus region) can change the numbers. But here are a few of the findings using the pool surveyed by NCTQ. Click here for a full comparison.

QUESTION:
What is the annual salary for a fully certified first year teacher with a bachelor’s degree?

QUESTION:
What is the annual salary for a teacher with a master’s degree on the highest step of the salary schedule?
QUESTION:
What is the maximum portion of the employee’s health insurance premium paid by the employer?

Click to enlarge image

Principal Steven Martinez of John Burroughs Middle School in Hancock Park figured the worst that could happen is that his school’s new iPads wouldn’t connect to the Apple TVs that staff bought to enhance lesson plans.

He figured wrong.

On Friday, he learned that his school is not getting iPads at all.

“I don’t understand what’s going on,” Martinez told LA School Report. “We want the iPads, and we were waiting for them to come any day now.”

John Burroughs is one of 27 LA Unified schools next in line to get iPads that were part of the district’s grand plan to put a digital device in the hands of every student. Superintendent John Deasy halted the plan in late August after questions over whether he and a former deputy, Jaime Aquino, manipulated the bidding process that gave the $1 billion deal to Apple and its software supplier, Pearson.

He announced that a new bid process would begin soon, but the largest number of schools that won’t get iPads soon, 11, are in George McKenna‘s District 1 — the poorest of LA Unified’s seven districts.

“Whatever is going on just get them to us because we’re ready to run over here,” Martinez said, a reaction that suggests, despite the controversy, not everybody in LA Unified opposes the iPad program.

In fact, Martinez’s school went to great lengths in generating excitement for them.

About 1,800 mostly low-income students attend Burroughs, and the campus is offering several specialized programs tied to the iPads, including a magnet program for Korean and Spanish dual language and a large special education program. For more than a year, Martinez has organized multiple training workshops for teachers, instructional coaches and parents “to show them the capabilities of an iPad.”

The iPads were due to arrive later this month.

Martinez is hardly alone in his exasperation and disappointment. Shannon Haber, a district spokeswoman, told LA School Report the office that oversees the distribution of iPads was inundated with complaints after news reports announcing the abrupt halt.

“The phones were just ringing off the hook,” she said.

The schools closest to the iPad finish line were were informed only that the delivery has been “delayed,” according to an email from district officials. But it is unclear when the district expects to buy any new devices, iPads or otherwise

Haber suggested it could take more than six months — the time it took the school board to approve the purchase of iPads and laptops for high school students in the second phase of the rollout.

The district has distributed approximately 62,000 devices under the current contract, which includes Pearson’s curriculum. Another 47,000 were purchased without the software for use in the state’s new Common Core standardized tests. The cost to the district is approximately $61 million.

A principal at a school in the west Valley who asked not to be identified because most staff and parents don’t know about the recent change of plans said she’s trying to figure out how to break it to them.

“I want to be able to tell our parents and school community in a way that doesn’t depress us for the rest of the year,” she said. “But to be honest, I’m holding out hope for a Plan B for the schools that were promised this a year ago.”

It’s a devastating blow, she said, in light of the massive expenses the school has taken on. Over the last nine months the school has been upgrading its wireless infrastructure and making big ticket purchases to maximize the potential of the tablets to align with the principals of Common Core.

“We spent about $100,000 implementing smart technology that was directly tied to our students having one-to-one devices,” she said wearily.  The installation was completed a week before the school year began.

Teachers have been building lesson plans on their district issued tablets since March as they were encouraged to do by the district. Now, she says, “they’re dragging their old text books back out.”

At “Back to School” night last month, the principal said teachers were showing off the new technology to oohs and ahhs of parents. “Now I have to tell them it’s not happening and they’re going to be so disappointed.”

It is not a task she’s looking forward to, but with the program done, by the end of the week, she said, “I have to put the final fork in it.”

School administrators are required to report final enrollment numbers to the district by Sept. 12, a date officials with AALA, the school administrators union, say is too soon to assess accurately how many students attend each school.

“That’s right around the corner,” Dan Isaacs, an AALA official told LA School Report. “And from what we’re hearing from principals and clerical staff who have been working lots and lots of overtime to enter the information into the system, it’s just not enough time,”

The headcount tallied by the cutoff date, called “norm day,” determines the number of teachers, counselors, and assistant principals assigned to each campus for the remainder of the year.

A report issued late last week by AALA estimates that as of Aug. 25, “there are at least 45,000 students on campuses for whom the district cannot account.” These students show up as being enrolled in a particular school, but they do not have proper course schedules, according to AALA.

“That could leave some schools with too many teachers or too many assistant principals, and others with not enough,” Isaacs said.

But LA Unified’s Chief Strategy Officer, Matt Hill, says the union is using inaccurate data.

“The numbers referenced in AALA’s newsletter were based on an unofficial attendance report not designed for tracking enrollment counts,” he told LA School Report.

He explained that one reason attendance reports appear low is “because some teachers had been taking attendance on paper since the first day of school and had not yet transferred attendance from paper into MiSiS.”

MiSiS is the district’s new student-tracking computer system that continues to pose technological challenges for district officials trying to get it up-and-running smoothly.

Hill said teachers have another 10 days to enter attendance data into the new system.

AALA President Judith Perez has called on the district to postpone the deadline but Superintendent John Deasy said the series of MiSiS setbacks have not slowed the march toward “norm day.”

“We will norm up as we always do,” Deasy told LA School Report.

Previous Posts: Deasy planning to hire his own liaison for MiSiS project; LA Unified computer problems hampering special ed teachers; Teachers in panic over LAUSD’s new computer tracking system

The packet includes suggested activities for students in elementary, middle and high school.

“We encourage youth to consider issues much larger than themselves in order to learn and grow. In this instance, we want to allow our students to reflect, discuss and debate with the guidance of adults at school,” Superintendent John Deasy said in a statement from the district.

The material, developed by the District’s Human Relations, Diversity and Equity team, was designed to help teachers facilitate student dialogue and lead lessons on conflict resolution.

Superintendent John Deasy

As LA Unified teachers continue their complaints about the district’s new student data management program, MiSiS, Superintendent John Deasy said today he plans to hire an independent liaison to  keep him informed of corrective actions.

“This is not my area of expertise so I have to be sure, when I think something is not optimal, that I have my own person working on this to tell me if we are doing this smartly,” Deasy told LA School Report. “I want a third party who is knowledgeable about changing student informations systems, to give insight into are we making enough changes, are we making our changes correctly.”

Deasy said the person he will hire — within a week or so — will report directly to him and will not require board approval. He also said he intends to meet next week with a new court-appointed monitor charged with overseeing the development of a district-wide student tracking system. The previous person serving in that role died.

Since 2012, the person directly in charge of MiSiS is Bria Jones, according to Bria Jones. On her LinkedIn profile, she identifies herself as head of a small Arizona company hired by the district as “IT Project Director.” She claims she “Provide[s] day-to-day project direction and management of the MiSiS team.”

How she came to the district as the only candidate for the job was among questions that board member Tamar Galatzan included last week in a written request to Ken Bramlett, the district’s Inspector General, seeking an examination of the MiSiS program.

Efforts to reach Jones through the district and her LinkedIn account drew no response.

In an eight-minute telephone interview today about Jones’s role in the MiSiS launch and subsequent problems, Chief Information Officer Ron Chandler told LA School Report that “there are several project managers on the project…her role is to oversee different parts of the development of specifications and code development.”

Chandler confirmed that Jones is involved in district’s efforts to fix glitches in the program that have left thousands of LA Unified students without school or class assignments and access to other school services. District officials say “99 percent” of students are unaffected by the problems.

“She’s leading part of the team and she’s done a great job,” Chandler said, but he declined to identify others among the “several” involved.

A spokeswoman who was on the call cut it short, saying Chandler had to leave to attend a meeting.

Jones was recommended to oversee the MiSiS project at an annual salary of $280,800 after district officials determined there were no other viable experts to handle the complexities of the program, according to a district procurement official, George Silva.

Silva told LA School Report that Chandler’s office sought multiple candidates for the position, and finding no others to meet the complexity and urgency of the project, solicited opinions from experts in the IT field, and that led the district to Jones.

“You can’t run a project of that complexity without the right manager,” he said, adding that sole-source contracting, while rare, is sometimes required when the needs are specific.

The district Inspector General’s Annual report to the board for the 2013 fiscal year, wrote that Jones’s proposed rate of $135 per hour as Project Manager “is not supported and not reasonable.” It recommended that the procurement office justify why it should award a single-source contract to Jones’s company “without competitive procurement, which is normally required for a professional services contract of this size.”

At the time, school board president Richard Vladovic was alone in raising concerns over the deal.

In her LinkedIn profile, Jones describes herself as someone who is “known for transformational leadership, cutting-edge technology deployments, business enablement services, company strategy optimization, and business benefits realization.” She boasted that her contributions to the MiSiS project include “restoring trust in the project outcomes and on-time deliveries.”

Her self-evaluation notwithstanding, the MiSiS project has caused any number of problems for teachers and principals across the district, drawing particular fire from the teachers union, UTLA, which prompted Galatzan to ask the Inspector General to examine why the system was launched despite its flaws.

“I demand to know what happened and how this got so messed up,” she told LA School Report last week. “Because until it happened, the board had no inkling that the system wasn’t ready to go live.”

Jones has had a long career in IT, based on information she included on LinkedIn. She has worked on projects in a variety of industries including insurance, pharmacy, video rentals and education. She says: “She tackles thorny project issues and shows IT professionals how to motivate their teams toward new levels of achievement.”

Yet her work for LA Unified has not played out perhaps as smoothly as with previous clients.

MiSiS is an extension of previous computer programs used by schools to track student information. As the latest iteration, it is more complex than its predecessors, requiring more understanding and training for users.

Within six months of Jones’s hiring, problems were apparent, according to contemporary notes of a working committee that oversaw the project development. They were given to LA School Report unsolicited.

The notes show that in a series of meetings over the next six months that included the principals union, AALA; the teachers union and the district, various logistical, technical and financial were cited for disrupting a smooth development schedule.

Another document included in the notes, an AALA Update in March of this year, included the headline, “ADMINISTRATORS APPREHENSIVE ABOUT MiSiS PROJECT.” It referred to a February letter from AALA President Judith Perez and AALA Administrator Dan Isaacs to Chandler, warning that the software for MiSiS “is not ready for rollout and that we are at high risk of a failed implementation . . .”

They further said AALA members “felt that in a rush to meet deadlines, insufficient attention was given to the functionality that end users require.”

The letter also expressed concern that the MiSiS project had “become shrouded in secrecy.”

Chandler wrote back a month later, according to the AALA Update, which was in the notes, and apologized for any perception of exclusivity and assured the AALA officers that budgets and timelines are being met.

As manager of the project, Jones noted in her profile that in the first two years that she contributed to “maximizing the orchestration of team resources,” to “promoting persistence and project discipline” and  to “coaching and mentoring Technical Project Managers by giving constant feedback and advice.”

The feedback she might not have contemplated is the criticism from teachers and officials who say they are still struggling to get the new system up and running.

Previous Posts: LA Unified computer problems hampering special ed teachers; Teachers union blasts Deasy again for new computer system; Teachers union says computer glitch cost students first day

Now, one organization is tackling the issue head on: Half of this year’s Teach for America (TFA) recruits are people of color.

In Los Angeles, the ranks of TFA’s minority teachers are even greater. According to the organizations’s latest numbers, 70 percent of incoming teachers in the metro LA area, which includes LA Unified and other surrounding districts, identify as non-white; nearly half received federal Pell Grants, which are given to low income students; half are the first in their families to graduate from college, and 10 of the new teachers are recent immigrants who earned federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals status, which means they are eligible for employment.

“I’ve seen the difference it can make when a student is able to see him or herself reflected in that teacher in the front of the classroom,” said Robert Whitman, principal at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles Unified.

Whitman has hired a number of Teach For America corps members in the last three years, including 13 who are starting in the school year that began last week.

Last year, people of color accounted for 56 percent of incoming teachers and 60 percent came from low-income communities.

The shift to non-whites in teachers is a result of the group’s change in recruiting strategy. The organization has been heavily criticized in the past for dispatching fleets of young, white, mostly affluent college graduates to poor schools made up predominantly by students of color.

This time, applicants were also screened for “a deep belief in the potential of all kids, often informed by experience in low-income communities” and “perseverance in challenging situations.”

Several studies have found that teachers of color can serve as role models for students of color, and when students see teachers who share their racial or ethnic backgrounds, they often view schools as more welcoming places. Students of color also do better on a variety of academic outcomes if they are taught by teachers of color.

The most recent data from the U.S. Department of Education, based on 2011-2012,   pegs California’s teacher “diversity gap” at 43 points: While 72 percent of students were of color, only 29 percent of teachers came from a minority group. In LA Unified, 74 percent of students were Hispanic, while just around 34 percent of teachers were Hispanic.

By the latest LA Unified statistics, for 2013-2014, nearly 60 percent of district teachers were non-white.

]]> https://www.laschoolreport.com/in-a-shift-teach-for-america-is-hiring-more-non-whites/feed/ 0 https://www.laschoolreport.com/teachers-in-panic-over-lausds-new-computer-tracking-system/ https://www.laschoolreport.com/teachers-in-panic-over-lausds-new-computer-tracking-system/#comments Fri, 08 Aug 2014 22:44:13 +0000 http://laschoolreport.com/?p=27340 LA Unified has agreed to delay parts of a new student data management system that was set to launch districtwide on Tuesday, the first day of school, after the teachers union and other district employees raised concerns that the technology is riddled with glitches.

But UTLA says it’s not enough, and union officials say they expect widespread chaos when school opens.

The system, called MiSiS — My Integrated Student Information System — is designed to track every aspect of a student’s academic career by integrating a variety of existing computer programs. The plan is for teachers and administrators to track more easily attendance, grades, health and counseling records from a single location. The system would also allow parents to access their children’s grades and attendance records and even monitor class assignments.

LAUSD was forced to develop the program as a result of a lawsuit to ensure that paper files on students wouldn’t be lost.

But now, as the system is ramping up, UTLA officials are saying they’re being flooded with complaints, mostly from school counselors in charge of enrolling students. They say the new comprehensive program is not as user friendly as expected, offering fewer tools than existing systems, which currently meet the criteria of the lawsuit.

“It’s a dinosaur in what’s supposed to be 21st century technology,” Colleen Schwab, Secondary Vice President of UTLA told LA School Report. “It’s far, far inferior to what they’re using now, and our teachers and counselors are in a panic.”

As one example, Schwab said counselors at Sun Valley Middle School Magnet reported that they came in one morning to find electronic records for two thirds of the students who had already been programmed were wiped out.

“I have counselors who tell me they’re waking up at three in the morning to log into to the system because there’s less traffic, and they think they might have a better chance of getting the information to stick,” she said.

The district’s Chief Information Officer, Ron Chandler, insists that the problems are not so widespread.

“The majority of our schools have already enrolled students and set class assignments,” he told LA School Report. “The students who will most likely be affected by the new system will be students who are totally new to LAUSD.”

Chandler acknowledges MiSiS has a number of problems. “This is easily one of the most complex technology programs going on in the planet right now, of course, it’s challenging,” he said.

But he argues the district’s hands are tied in what it can do to slow the roll out because any changes must be approved by a federally appointed independent monitor overseeing the MiSiS implementation.

“The district can’t make decisions on it’s own. It has to be a conversation involving all parties,” Chandler said.

For now, K-5 teachers can hold off on using MiSiS to record student grades until November while 6-12 teachers have a reprieve through January.

“In the meantime, we’re going to continue training teachers pretty much everyday,” Chandler said.

Union officials said that implementation of the computer system should be part of contract negotiations that are now underway with the district, as a way to ensure that educators are not burdened with additional problems.

UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl said, “That the Superintendent was considering rushing into this continues a distressing pattern of running headlong into technology fiascos that drain the budget and aren’t good for students—like the iPad rollout and the Common Core testing experiences.”

By the district’s accounting, about 700 have been brought aboard for the school year starting Aug. 12, and district officials are looking to add up to 100 more. That would give the district about a third more new instructors than they had at the beginning of the academic calendar last year.

The hirings mark a big change from the last five years or so. Instead of reducing the overall number of instructors, the district is using an influx of new state money this year to fill gaps that have ballooned class sizes, angering teachers, parents and the teachers union, UTLA. Hiring more teachers for the coming year became one of UTLA’s major rallying cries.

“There’s a flurry of hiring happening at some of our schools still,” Justo Avila, Chief Human Resource Officer told LA School Report. “New teachers are being added in pretty much all subject areas across all grade levels.”

From a UTLA perspective, the hirings are a “a positive step and a sign of a better economic reality for our schools,” said UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl.

“But even with these new hires,” he added, “LAUSD students still face class sizes that are not down to their pre-recession levels. This round of hiring also excludes key positions—such as nurses, counselors, psychiatric social workers and teacher librarians—that our students need to support their social-emotional health. UTLA is trying to tackle these shortfalls right now in contract negotiations with LAUSD, as part of our vision for the Schools L.A. Students Deserve.”

About 50 to 75 of the newly-filled positions are by previously laid-off teachers, who have the right to new jobs that open up, according to Avila. He disputed Caputo-Pearl’s assertion that the district has not filled other positions, saying additional counselors and other health and human services positions have been hired, as well.

As of July 30, LA Unified had hired the following teachers:

• Elementary – 325
• Special Education – 153
• English – 80
• Social Science – 52
• Mathematics – 50
• Science – 23
• Foreign Language – 5
• Art/Music – 2
• Physical – Education – 2
• Others – 7

LA Unified’s teacher turnover rates reached as high as 50 percent during years of the recession, officials said, so Avila says the district is holding new teacher orientations in an effort to stem attrition, which he called “five days of super-onboarding.”

“We took a look at our turnover data and our resignation of teachers — what they are having challenges with — and sort of built a training to address some of those issues so future teachers will be better prepared to handle those challenges,” he said.

Over the week-long training, new teachers participate in new multiple professional development sessions including discussions on instructional methodologies, receiving Common Core training and learning new classroom management skills.

“Our teachers also have a lot of social-emotional needs and we want to make sure to address those, too,” Deborah Ignagni told LA School Report, adding that freshman teachers will be getting self-care and well-being advice.

In addition to new teachers, the district is also adding 150 assistant principals in some of LA Unified’s neediest schools and across elementary schools.

“We’re going to be in really good shape when the new years starts,” said Avila.

A policy paper by Educators 4 Excellence (E4E), a group founded by two former Teach for America teachers that has funding from the Gates Foundation, suggests instructors willing to work in hard-to-staff schools should earn higher salaries, and the district should provide extra pay for educators who take on leadership roles and demonstrate an “effective” application of professional development and impact on student growth.

The proposal has gained the enthusiastic support of Superintendent John Deasy and the raised the interest of two school board members — Monica Garcia and Steve Zimmer. All three attended an event yesterday to present the ideas. It’s unclear yet how the union’s new leadership would regard such changes,

“I don’t just automatically get to set policy, otherwise I would take your papers in and stamp them,” Deasy told the audience of more than a hundred educators.

He congratulated E4E members on their “forward thinking ideas” but cautioned them saying, “This is minority thinking in LAUSD.”

The policy recommendations — including teacher pay tied to student performance — are intended to stem a potential teacher staffing crisis: Waves of teachers will soon retire, enrollment in education graduate programs is down nationwide and the average teacher turnover is five years.

Before running out to attend a nearby high school graduation, Deasy gushed over the plan calling it “phenomenal, enlightened, progressive, and innovative.”

The team responsible for drafting the proposal studied the pay structures of school districts in Colorado, North Carolina, Washington D.C. and New York City, which have implemented some of the same ideas.

“Our steps and lanes system just isn’t working,” Angela Campbell, a member of the policy team and science teacher at Polytechnic High School told LA School Report.

The district determines teacher salaries based on years of experience — known as steps — and degrees and professional development credits earned — lanes. Science, math and special education teaching positions, which are hardest to fill, receive a bump in pay.  (Before the recession these teachers were also entitled to a retention bonus every few years.) These terms have been set over decades of negotiations between the district and UTLA.

“I’m interested in what [UTLA President-elect] Alex Caputo-Pearl has to say about this,” Garcia told LA School Report.

“I’m interested in in improving student outcomes and improving graduation rates,” she continued. “If that has anything to do with differentiated pay structures, then I am extremely interested.”

Over the summer, E4E’s policy team will gauge the interest of other board members. They have plans to meet with each member as well as the Superintendent.

Via the Los Angeles Times | By Teresa Watanabe

The Los Angeles Unified School District does not need to release the names of teachers in connection with their performance ratings, according to a tentative court ruling issued Thursday.

A three-judge state appellate court panel tentatively found a stronger public interest in keeping the names confidential than publicly releasing them. Disclosure would not serve the public interest in monitoring the district’s performance as much as it would affect the recruitment and retention of good instructors and other issues, the ruling said.

The Times, in suing for access to the names, had argued that parents and others had a strong public interest in learning the performance ratings of identifiable public school teachers under the California Public Records Act.

Read the full story here.

Matt Damon with Diane Ravitch

When the actor Matt Damon stood before a capacity crowd inside the Cal State Northridge student union last night, he smiled sheepishly and said he wasn’t surprised to see so many star-struck supporters in attendance. After all, he said, he was introducing the education historian and anti-corporate reform activist Diane Ravitch.

Ravitch was appearing as part of a nationwide tour to promote her new book, The Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools, and was welcomed to the campus for the school’s Education on the Edge speaking series. She spoke the night before at Occidental College.

In this appearance, she blended wit and sarcasm to attack the pillars of the reform movement, using the simple refrain, “This is a hoax.” She drew strong support from an audience of more adults, many of them teachers, than students in the 770-seat auditorium.

Race to the Top? “This is a hoax.”

“A race has a few winners and a lot of losers,” she said. “American education should be about equal opportunity, not a race to the highest test scores.”

Standardized testing? “This is a hoax.”

“Test scores reflect who is in the classroom,” she said, “not the ability of the teacher.”

Technology will save all our problems? “This is a hoax.”

“You could buy iPads for everyone in the district; you could even spend $1 billion dollars,” she said to roars of laughter, a clear response to LA Unified. “But as this money is spent, there are schools that are crumbling and there are class sizes over 40, and frankly that’s just wrong,” she added.

Martin Gonzales and Michael Ontell, both veteran teachers at Liggett Street Elementary in Panorama City, said they showed up because they were familiar with Ravitch’s previous writings and because they were emailed a notice by their union, United Teachers Los Angeles. Both bought Ravitch’s book after the event, though they opted out of the long line for a signature and a photo-op. (LA Unified board member Monica Ratliff, however, could not resist the opportunity).

“I support her on all counts and appreciate that she’s research-based,” Gonzales said. “The fact that she’s admitted her previous beliefs were wrong also shows a certain degree of intellectual honesty.”

When asked whether Damon’s public school advocacy is undermined by the fact that he sends his children to an elite private school, both were admittedly taken aback and were now unsure of his ideological ground. Another teacher, who wished to remain anonymous, said that Damon’s choice to send his kids to private school “chips away at public education.”

“If he believes in public schools then he needs to put his kids in public schools,” she said. “This is a grassroots movement and it starts with parents who collaborate with their children’s teachers, and parents who go to their district superintendent to tell him what it is we need to fix.”

Previous Posts: Ravitch and Rhee: Same Goals, But Very Different Approaches; School Board Approves New Application for Race to the Top; LA Unified Removes iPads From Hackers’ High Schools; Commentary: Deasy-Style Reform Stresses Kids, Educators.

An online voting system in Virginia

Less than 23 percent of the 40,000 members of United Teachers of Los Angeles cast ballots in the final round of voting for union president in 2011, the union’s last leadership election. Even fewer, 15 percent, voted in the preliminary round.

A new, online voting system could change all that, says a group of teachers who are taking their case to the membership.

“We’re proposing that all the city-wide elections would be online,” said Marisa Crabtree, a UTLA Chapter Chair and member of the House of Representatives for the East Area. She is spearheading the initiative, which will be presented to union members at the annual UTLA Leadership Conference this weekend at the Westin Los Angeles Airport. “We want to encourage people to vote more and that comes from a more flexible, user-friendly system,” she said.

UTLA’s current voting system is paper-based and differs for various elections. If members vote on a contract change, a chapter chair hosts an in-person election at every school site. Leadership elections rely on snail mail ballots, which have to be turned in by a certain date for counting.

But what if a teacher is absent or out of town? What if a member loses a ballot or forgets to mail it in on time? Ultimately, like most elections, mailing in a ballot can seem too arduous for an important election, especially with newer digital options available.

And since so few UTLA members last voted for a union president, the current voting system needs an upgrade, said Crabtree, who is an English and choral teacher at Abraham Lincoln Senior High School in east Los Angeles.

“Most of the races in the last election were won by 80 to 100 votes,” she said. “They become close races because there were only 8,000 ballots cast.”

The union did not respond to a request for comment.

Crabtree contends that teachers favor an easier, more streamlined voting system.

“I have friends and fellow teachers who are active UTLA members but missed the mail-in deadline or forgot to send it in all together,” she said.

Her fellow teachers are also extremely busy, she added, and having a system that would allow them to vote late at night or during a lunch break would generate more voter participation, especially from semi-involved members.

That’s what spurred Megan Markevich, a middle school teacher at Luther Burbank Middle School in Highland Park and a member of the UTLA House of Reps, to join Crabtree in pushing for a new system.

Markevich says members like her don’t have much of a say in union issues.

“We want more teacher voices on issues,” said Markevich, who is also proposing that the union use the electronic system to survey members on issues.

“Members could vote in the convenience and privacy of their own home without a Chapter Chair looking over their shoulder or influencing them on who to vote for, which happens,” she said.

While details are still in the works, Crabtree and Markevich say they have spoken to a few online voting companies willing to create an easy log-in system, such as the voting systems created for teacher unions in Hawaii and the Volusia County Teachers Association in Florida.

Crabtree said she anticipates pushback on the proposal from union leaders during the leadership conference. “If you change the system leaders can feel threatened,” she said.

Markevich agreed, explaining that an electronic voting system could take away Chapter Chairs’ duties since they are responsible for hosting elections. She also cited unfamiliarity with the system and fears of hacking as other reasons why some might object to a new voting system.

“They will say it didn’t work in places like San Diego, but the fact is that a lot of unions are using it and it has been successful in Hawaii and Florida,” said Markevich.

The conference is for union Chapter Chairs and UTLA leaders, which is why Crabtree and Markevich are expecting a host of questions and comments following their presentation.

“A lot of leaders are not fans of it,” said Crabtree. “Like many other democratic bodies, the union is a little resistant to change and it can be a power struggle.”

But a new electronic voting system could free up people from hosting elections, creating mailers and counting ballots — time that could otherwise be spent “helping kids,” according to Crabtree.

“Overall, people are disappointed with the lack of organizing at UTLA,” Markevich said. “It’s like pulling teeth to get people on election committees. No one wants or has the time to volunteer and this system could free up all that energy and use it to let people know about important issues.”

While other district unions already use electronic voting systems, “L.A. unified could be the largest school union to be the frontrunner on online voting,” said Crabtree.

Crabtree, Markevich and other supporters of the on-line system say they need at least 600 signatures before they turn in the initiative, giving the union two months to vote on it. They said they have 450 and expect to rally enough members to sign on to support the new voting system by the end of August.

“I have personally collected 200 signatures and only one person was hesitant,” said Markevich. “The rest were very excited about it and said, ‘I can’t believe we aren’t already doing this.'”

“Hopefully,” said Crabtree, “that will be our last paper vote.”

Senator Ron Calderon (D-Montebello) sponsored the teacher evaluation bill.

A proposed bill known as SB 441 that would tighten teacher evaluation rules statewide narrowly failed to pass the Senate Education Committee Wednesday — but it’s not completely dead yet.

After hearing impassioned testimony from parents, teachers, and union representatives, the Committee deadlocked 4-4 over approval of the legislation.

But the Committee also voted to reconsider the bill later in an amended form, leaving the door open for a return to the issue.

The bill’s sponsor, Senator Ron Calderon (D- Montebello), described the measure as “modest” in its scope.

Just before the hearing, his Chief of Staff, Rocky Rushing, told LA School Report that the evaluation bill is Calderon’s “attempt to modify the evaluation process and to provide better feedback for teachers to allow them to become better educators.”

The main change the bill would make is to update current evaluation law, which grades teachers on two grade levels, satisfactory and unsatisfactory. Calderon’s bill would create four grade levels, to be decided by school districts.

The bill would also require teachers who have taught more than 10 years to be evaluated at least once every three years. Current law only requires veteran teacher reviews every five years. (Read the bill’s text here.)

During the hearing, a stream of supporters — many of them teachers and parents from the Los Angeles area — spoke before the Committee on Wednesday, urging its members to pass the evaluation bill.

One LA-area teacher told the Committee he supported the bill because he had a more “comprehensive evaluation working at Blockbuster than I do as a public school teacher in California.”

Amy Baker, a LAUSD parent, criticized the state for making “no effort to improve our broken teacher evaluation system” and asked the committee to pass the bill because it was “a modest step in the right direction.”

CTA representative Patricia Rucker admitted that her union is unsatisfied with the current teacher evaluation system, but she insisted that Calderon’s bill “does not fix it.”

Lynne Faulks, representing the CFT and UTLA, said her unions oppose the proposal because it “fails to address central issues, such as developing teacher effectiveness and ensuring measurements are effective and fair.”

Calderon defended his intentions, saying, “Nowhere do I say, in this bill or in my remarks, that I’m putting targets on teachers’ backs… We want to give teachers a tool to deal with changes and become successful.”

The debate continued with both sides arguing their technical points, and committee members seemed torn between both sides.

Eventually they voted the bill down, 4-4, with an agreement to hear the bill later, after it’s amended.

Senators Bob Huff, Mark Wyland, Ben Hueso and Lou Correa voted in support; Bill Monning, Hannah-Beth Jackson, Carol Liu, and Loni Hancock voted against the bill; and Marty Block abstained.

Previous posts: Union Tells Teachers How to Protest Evaluations; Deasy Requests Changes to Teacher Dismissal Bill; Union & District Clarify Positions on Teacher Evaluation

District 6 Candidates Monica Ratliff and Antonio Sanchez

The May 21 LAUSD Board runoff for District 6 is less than a month away, and Teach Plus, an urban education advocacy group, is hosting a candidate forum on Thursday, May 2.

Both candidates Monica Ratliff and Antonio Sanchez have been invited, but only Ratliff has confirmed her participation so far. The event is interactive, and audience members will have opportunities to ask the candidates questions and offer input on education issues in LAUSD.

The forum is aimed at LA-area teachers, but Teach Plus said other members of the community won’t be turned away at the door if they show up. See full event details here.

Greuel Vows School Reform as Garcetti Seeks End to ‘Division’
Los Angeles mayoral candidate Wendy Greuel laid out her plans to improve public schools on Thursday, pushing for tougher evaluations of teachers and principals, while opponent Eric Garcetti secured endorsements from a handful of African American leaders. LA Times
See also: LA Daily News, LA School Report, LA Times Now, LA Weekly

Education Leaders Divulge What They Want From LA’s Next Mayor
There’s been a lot of talk about what the next mayor of Los Angeles should do for public education. KPCC talked to three leaders in the education field about what they expect from the city’s next leader. KPCC

Imagine That: Happy Ending to a ‘Parent Trigger’ Petition
The “parent trigger” movement underwent a maturation process in its latest campaign, a petition to restructure 24th Street Elementary in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Unlike in previous campaigns, there were no lawsuits against the district, no claims by parents that they had been duped into signing the petition. LA Times Op-Ed

Defiance No Reason to Suspend Students, Board President Says
Administrators in the Los Angeles Unified School District would no longer be allowed to suspend students for mouthing off or other acts of “willful defiance” under a groundbreaking school board resolution set to be proposed next week. LA Times
See also: LA School Report

Bill Makes It (a Tiny Bit) Easier to Fire Abusive Teachers
A bill that would have made it easier to fire teachers accused of molesting students or committing other serious crimes died in committee last summer – a victim of the most powerful force in state politics today: teachers unions. There’s a new version of the bill in the Legislature this year. Pasadena Star News Op-Ed

LAUSD Reform Agenda Gets High Marks From Civic Groups
A new coalition of civil rights groups, led by the United Way, released a poll today showing strong support for reforms taking place in Los Angeles Unified and calling for an even more aggressive approach to improving student achievement and increasing local control of neighborhood schools. LA Daily News

LAUSD Summer Enrichment Programs Reduced Again
The Los Angeles Unified School District announced today that funding limits are forcing it to reduce its summer enrichment programming, which includes academic, fitness and other enrichments like art, music and drama activities. KPCC
See also: LA Times

With Police in Schools, More Children in Court
As school districts across the country consider placing more police officers in schools, youth advocates and judges are raising alarm about what they have seen in the schools where officers are already stationed: a surge in criminal charges against children for misbehavior that many believe is better handled in the principal’s office. NY Times

APU to Hold First-Ever Spanish Language Spelling Bee for L.A. County High School Students
Native Spanish speakers and Spanish class students from throughout Los Angeles County will compete in the first-ever Spanish language spelling bee on at 2 p.m. Saturday at Azusa Civic Auditorium. LA Daily News

CTA Goes Hollywood on Teacher Dismissal Bills
An adage in politics is that if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.  Not so for the California Teachers Association, California’s most powerful political special interest. Their mantra seems to be more like, “If you can’t beat ’em, just overtake ’em.” OC Register Column
See also: SD Union-Tribune Editorial

What’s Really Scandalous About the School Testing Scandal
Even if we eliminate all the cheating, what remains is a broken system built on the dangerous misconception that testing is a proxy for actual teaching and learning. Time

What Will New Evaluation Systems Cost?
The cost of new teacher-evaluation systems is likely to vary based on how states and districts choose to establish student-growth measures for all teachers, according to an analysis from a researcher at the Value-Added Research Center. EdWeek

More Teachers Group Students by Ability
After being condemned as discriminatory in the 1990s, grouping students by academic ability seems to be back in vogue with a new generation of teachers, according to an analysis of federal teacher data. EdWeek

Migrant Program Offers  Lessons for Reaching Latino Preschoolers
Long before President Obama triggered a new national interest in universal preschool earlier this year, a Central Valley-based Head Start program for children of migrant workers has been breaking down barriers that have kept Latino families out of early learning programs. EdSource

Brown’s K-12 Online Agenda Faces Legislative Scrutiny
Gov. Jerry Brown drew national attention earlier this year with his embrace of online learning programs and technology-based instruction. But his plan to rewrite the rules surrounding independent study and allow school districts to collect state attendance funding for asynchronous online instruction may be facing challenges in the Legislature. SI&A Cabinet Report

How to Build a Progressive Education Movement
If proponents of progressive education want to become a credible alternative to the education-testing movement, we need to do the hard work of building a robust movement and persuading mainstream America that there is another path forward. EdWeek Commentary

Public School Reformer Michelle Rhee Sends Child to Private School: Should We Care?
America’s best-known and most controversial education reformer, Michelle Rhee, 43, doesn’t want the public to know where her two daughters go to school. Are they attending public or private? Should we even care? SF Chronicle

Do Cops With Guns Mean Safer Schools?
Leslie Mendoza, now 17, says she felt like she was entering a prison every time she entered her magnet public high school in Los Angeles. Police would even search students’ backpacks and pockets when they came to school late. Daily Beast