A recent UTLA demonstration. (Photo: UTLA website)

UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl welcomed teachers to the new school year and urged them to get involved in a media campaign for late August, according to a recorded robo-call that went out last night.

In the recorded message by Caputo-Pearl sent out Sunday night before teachers return to school, he complimented teachers for the “amazing people and work in our public schools” throughout the district.

He also said union chapter meetings will be held starting the second week of school that will discuss the unprecedented media campaign and call for possible demonstrations later in the school year. The school district may be involved with a nationwide “walk-in” in October as they did last year.

• Read more: UTLA president’s aggressive 10-point plan for upcoming battles

The UTLA president also repeated his call that “billionaires should not be driving the public school agenda,” talking about wealthy Californians who the union says undermine public schools.

The robo-call is meant for the 31,000 teachers represented in district schools and some charter schools at LA Unified.

Starting late August and running through the month of September, the UTLA public relations campaign will include billboards, posters and online messages that will feature union members, students and parents from the district.

Their social media campaign will use #wearepublicschools. The plan for the campaign is to create a “positive public narrative around the great things happening in our district public schools, featuring educators, students and parents, while beating back the corporate charter narrative and to share our vision for fully funded neighborhood community schools.”

On the street, about 100 teachers rallied against the effort by the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation that would more than double the number of charter school students in LA Unified over the next eight years. Some protestors wore masks of Broad, former superintendent John Deasy and members of the Walton family (of Walmart), who are also involved in the expansion effort. Some of the teachers sang to “I Will Survive” and chanted “Billionaires can’t teach our kids!”

Meanwhile, at the board meeting inside, a coalition of union leaders stood behind Max Arias, executive director of Local 99 of the Service Employees International Union, as he stood with Juan Flecha of the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles (AALA), representing principals, Alex Caputo-Pearl of the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA); and other labor leaders. Arias gave an impassioned speech against Broad’s “secret charter plan to take public out of public schools.”

Referring to difficulties parents had in Philadelphia when the charter schools took over traditional schools, he said, “Students will have to leave and go far away to go to school, and there will be a loss of arts and music education, a loss of skilled cafeteria workers and fewer adults at every campus.”

With a capacity crowd of more than 150 in the meeting room, Arias challenged the Broad Foundation to change direction. He read the foundation’s education mission statement to help all children and said, “We invite Eli Broad to become part of the solution and join the district and build on the success of the district. Not politicize and privatize it.”

Another speaker, Rusty Hicks of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, said the group was upset that Broad’s plan “is extreme, our students are not commodities,” adding, “Students deserve better.”

On the invitation of board member Scott Schmerelson, former board president Jackie Goldberg addressed the meeting. A former member of the state assembly and the LA City Council, she said, “I came after reading about the attempt of what I see is to privatize and destroy public education.”

Goldberg added, “I was an advocate of school choice from the very beginning, this was not a bad idea. The original goal of charter schools was try to help better approaches to teaching.”

LAUSD has a complex set of charter schools under its control. Affiliated charters are still under the UTLA bargaining agreements, but independent charters are exempt from other district rules, and many of them are non-union. LAUSD has more students in the charter system than any other school district in the country, about 100,000 students.
Goldberg said LAUSD should require the charters to share best practices with other schools. “It’s not supposed to be a race for dollars,” she said.

Goldberg is now part of TEAch, Transparency, Equity and Accountability for Charters, a nonprofit that she said is not anti-charter but is a group educating families about charter schools.

“I think a lot of parents don’t know that a charter school doesn’t have to meet the same strict earthquake safety standard that major hospital and schools have,” Goldberg said. “You are elected by the public. We need accountability, we need transparency,”

The demonstration follows the release today of a Broad-commissioned poll, showing that a large majority of city residents want more choices — charters — for their children’s education. The plan calls for 260 new charters within eight years to serve as many as half the children attending LA Unified schools.

“Broad is working with the Waltons of Walmart and other billionaires to destroy LAUSD,” UTLA says on its website. “We are demanding that the School Board join us in rejecting Broad’s parasitic plan. Losing 50% of LAUSD enrollment would trigger a severe loss in funding for crucial resources and programs for our students, cost tens of thousands of LAUSD jobs, and create a race to the bottom that will hurt all schools and all students.”

The foundation denies any destructive intent.

“Los Angeles families have made it clear that they want high-quality public school options, and we want to support them in their efforts to access educational opportunity,” Swati Pandey, the foundation’s communications manager, said in a statement. “Our only interest is in supporting the growth of high-quality public schools.”

The board is scheduled to consider approvals and five-year renewals of 15 charter schools and the creation of two magnet schools.

The two new gifted magnet centers are scheduled to open in 2016 at Kennedy High School and Taft High School. Kennedy, located in Granada Hills is a Gifted, Highly Gifted, High Ability Medical Magnet for grades 9 through 12. Taft, located in Woodland Hills, is a Gifted, Highly Gifted, High Ability Science, Technology, English, Arts and Math Magnet Center for grades 9 through 12.

“We are committed to expanding excellence in district choice options across our communities,” board president Steve Zimmer told LA School Report. “Taft and Kennedy may be the first but they certainly won’t be the last. And I expect that we will, aligned with our equity mission, focus in the near future on proposals that address in district choice options for children living in the most severe conditions of poverty and segregation.”

These are not to be confused with the dual immersion schools such as the Mandarin-immersion program in Zimmer’s district.

“Dual immersion programs are an important part of this equation,” Zimmer said. “I continue to look forward to both a comprehensive district wide plan for expanding language immersion programs and a specific proposal for supporting our programs in the Venice complex.”

Among other items, Superintendent Ramon Cortines will have his staff give an update on the district science scores (spoiler alert: they are pretty poor). The board will be asked to certify a final Environmental Impact Report for district-wide school repairs and construction for a total of $7.8 billion. The board will also discuss replacing the melting turf at athletic fields at half a dozen schools.

In another issue, the board consider approving final offers to charter school organizations seeking to share space with public schools under the state Prop 39 protocols.

Board members also have a bunch of resolutions to get approved. The most prolific at this meeting is Mónica Ratliff who has proposed resolutions recognizing National Disability Employment Awareness Month, Substitute Educators Appreciation Day, National Homeless Youth Awareness Month, Native American Heritage Month, America’s Safe Schools Week, National Retirement Security Week, Celebrating College Awareness and a Study of Parent Centers. Ratliff will also be co-sponsoring National Coming Out Day with fellow board members Mónica García and Ref Rodriguez.

Then, there are the little things (kidding), like the approval of $5 million for seven vendors doing anti-bullying campaigns, $338,000 for bathroom partitions across the district, and the approval of 9,213 routine personnel promotions, transfers, leaves and terminations.

Among the lawsuits that the board will discuss in a morning closed session is a case involving the district’s responsibility in a case involving molestation that went on at Edison Middle School. The teacher was found guilty, and LAUSD was found not responsible for the sexual liaisons that took place on and off campus.

The closed session begins at 10 a.m., with the open session scheduled to start three hours later.

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UTLA’s call for protest at Broad Museum

A few days after the posh parties with the likes of Reese Witherspoon, Orlando Bloom, Ed Ruscha and Frank Gehry to celebrate the opening of the new Broad Museum, the LA Unified teachers union, UTLA, is planning a protest at the museum on Sunday, aimed at its namesake: Eli Broad, one of LA’s leading philanthropists.

More specifically, the union is demonstrating against a plan by several foundations, including his, to create more charter schools in Los Angeles.

“We are protesting Broad’s plan to pull half the students out of public LAUSD schools and put them in unregulated schools that are not accountable to the public,” UTLA said in a press release. “The students left behind would suffer greatly. There simply would not be enough funding to go around.”

Broad has become a major target of teacher unions for his efforts nationwide to reform public schools through charters and an academy that trains executives to run them. The former LA Unified superintendent, John Deasy, was a Broad trainee.

The union also contends that Broad of “secretly funded groups” that tried to defeat Proposition 30, a state tax initiative that has generated millions of new tax dollars for California public schools.

“Broad and his billionaire pals wreaked havoc on public education in New Orleans,” UTLA president Alex Caputo-Pearl said in a statement. “His education ‘reform’ there resulted in massive inequities and civil rights violations for students. Segregation was reinforced and special education students were left behind.  We do not intend to stand by and let him do the same thing in Los Angeles.”

One speaker scheduled speaker at the protest, according to the union, is “a parent from New Orleans who knows firsthand how Broad and his billionaire pals can destroy a public school district because they did it in New Orleans.”

Whether Broad and other reformers involved in New Orleans schools after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 “wreaked havoc” or “destroyed” the school district is a matter of perspective, according to at least one study.

After the storm, the public school system was effectively dissolved and control of most of the city’s schools was placed into a state agency. Under the new agency, all the teachers were fired — most of them were union members — and management of most schools was turned over to charter organizations. The Broad Academy trained some of the people who were in charge, and most of the union teachers were replaced by young and inexperienced teachers from outside the state, none of whom worked under a union contract.

In his study, Douglas N. Harris of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans argues that while many of the lowest-income and minority students did not return to New Orleans after Katrina for a variety of reasons, academic performance in the city schools rose among those who remained.

Another study found academic performance “has improved significantly — particularly among the schools that were once among Louisiana’s lowest-performing campuses”  but also said “far too many New Orleans charter schools are not yet adequately preparing students for college and careers. There is much work to be done.”

The California Charter School Association joined the protest against the protest with a press release yesterday, calling for Caputo-Pearl to “stop disrespecting parents who want to choose the best school for their children.”

For his part, Caputo-Pearl has challenged Broad to a “public debate on public education . . . . any place, any time — and that includes outside his new museum on September 20.”

The charter group said, “If Caputo-Pearl wants to debate anyone, he should start by debating the parents of the more than 100,000 Los Angeles students who have chosen charter public schools” in LA Unified.

Whether Broad intends to accept Caputo-Pearl’s challenge remains unclear. The Broad Foundation did not respond to messages seeking comment. Nor has the Foundation made any public comment about its charter expansion plan since word of it leaked last month, except to say some of the descriptions about its intent were incorrect. It has made no effort to correct those descriptions.

The UTLA protest is scheduled to start at 9:30 a.m.