It was the first time scores slipped for the district and California since the state’s students started taking the test in 2003, and the first time scores fell nationally since the test began in 1990.

The national test is given every other year to fourth and eight graders in reading and math. Compared with 21 other large cities, LA Unified was in the bottom third and below average in all categories.

Overall, LA Unified’s decline was slight. Fourth graders scored a 224 in math, four points lower than in 2013. In reading, fourth graders fell one point to 205. Eighth graders fell one point in math to 263 but improved by one point in reading.

There were some demographic improvements, LA Unified pointed out.

“Several of our subgroups made promising gains on the eighth-grade reading assessment – notably, African American, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander and disabled students,” the district said in a statement.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten blamed the performance slip on increased class time spent on standardized tests. Over the weekend, the Obama administration announced a plan to reduce and limit the amount of standardized tests students are given.

“Not only is there plenty of anecdotal evidence that our kids have suffered, these latest NAEP scores again show that the strategy of testing and sanctioning, coupled with austerity, does not work,” Weingarten said in a statement.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan suggested the large-scale implementation of the new Common Core standards may have played a role in the dip.

“We should expect scores in this period to bounce around some, and I think that ‘implementation dip’ is part of what we’re seeing here,” Duncan said, according to the Associated Press. “I would caution everyone to be careful about drawing conclusions … anyone who claims to have this all figured out is pedaling a personal agenda, rather than an educational one.”

Others were less forgiving of the Common Core transition as an excuse for the drop.

“Any way you look at it, today’s NAEP results are sobering. Compared with results from 2013, scores for the nation’s low-income students and students of color mirror those of all other students: mostly flat or declining performance,” said Kati Haycock, president of The Education Trust, in a statement. “While there may be plausible explanations for these patterns — among them the disruptions caused by the transition to new standards — any interruption of the slow but steady progress these groups have made over the past two decades is cause for great concern.”

It was the first major union to endorse any candidate in either party, and the timing of the news seemed to come “at an opportune moment for Mrs. Clinton” just as she is looking to deflate the growing popularity of her chief rival, Senator Bernie Sanders, the New York Times reported.

To get land the endorsement, Clinton, Sanders and other Democratic contender Martin O’Malley, a former governor of Maryland, completed a questionnaire and appeared before the AFT’s executive council. (Republican candidates were invited, but none accepted the invitation.) The decision was also based on internal polling of members, the AFT said, with two-thirds of members expressing support of Clinton.

The endorsement has been met with cynicism in some Democratic party circles. As the Times also pointed out, the AFT is led by longtime Clinton ally Randi Weingarten, and it also backed her losing candidacy in 2008.

Slate, Forbes, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and others have run articles about the backlash the AFT is receiving over the endorsement. The articles point out the 2,300 negative comments posted to the AFT’s Facebook page, the 3,000-plus that have already signed an online petition asking the AFT to withdraw the endorsement, that Clinton’s views on key issues like standardized tests and charter schools clash with the AFT’s positions and that some question if the move is really all about Weingarten’s future political ambitions.

In essence, the critics believe the questionnaire was a pointless endeavor and that Clinton’s endorsement was inevitable given her close ties to Weingarten.

Whether that is true of not, the questionnaires do offer a rare in-depth analysis of the candidates’ views on education, and while they may have been pointless reading for the AFT executive council, they are valuable to any voter who ranks education as a top priority. The questionnaires are lengthy and detailed, and may be the most articulate any of the Democratic candidates will be asked to be on education through the whole election cycle.

To read the AFT questionnaires and the candidates’ answers, click here: Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley.

Randi Weingarten

As the teachers union’s negotiations with LA Unified drag on, one of the nation’s leading voices for teachers appeared at an event last night hosted by district board member Steve Zimmer and made a strong case for union activity and solidarity.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, delivered a fire-and- brimstone-type address to Zimmer’s class at Occidental College, where he is a professor of Policy Debates and Controversies in Public Education.

During her hour-long remarks, she dropped to her knees, religious-revival style, raised her hands to the sky and thanked teachers for their commitment to children. In alluding to the local school board elections a month from now, she framed them as a battle between the virtuous and the unvirtuous, saying that only by running with a righteous agenda, “can we reclaim the promise of public education.”

“I don’t care if it’s the Broad [Foundation] or the Walton [Family Foundation] or whoever the hell is against us, we can stare them down with our righteousness,” she said, her arms outstretched. “It is community that gives us the moral certainty to make the fight for public education. At one point, an “Amen” came from the back row of the auditorium.

At its core, her speech was a Unionizing 101 seminar, offering a How-To on reversing the current tide of anti-union sentiment taking hold across the country. The cornerstone of her advice: Engage the community early and often — a message that resonates in Los Angeles, where the union-district talks have produced little progress over the last six months of negotiations.

The audience included several people who are already true believers — Zimmer’s board colleague, Bennett Kayser, who is currently embroiled in a relection bid against two challengers, one of them strongly-supported by charter schools; UTLA President, Alex Caputo Pearl; UTLA’s chief negotiator, Betty Forrester and Josh Pechthalt, president of the California Federation of Teachers.

While the event was open to the public, no high-ranking district officials attended.

Weingarten also appeared with Caputo-Pearl and Kayser at a rally this morning at the Slawson Southeast Occupation Center.

Speaking last night, she said the greatest mistake by labor unions in general is that most turned away from the community at large, becoming insulated and ignoring what was happening to the people outside of their particular union or industry. As workers in other sectors have lost job protection rights, pensions and other benefits, she said, they have become resentful of the groups who have managed to hang on to theirs.

The job of union members, therefore, is to demonstrate how good working conditions are uplifting for all, she said.

Caputo-Pearl also briefly addressed the group, laying out his union plan to mobilize support in negotiating the “Schools LA Students Deserve” platform, which includes demands for lower class sizes, full staffing and teacher raises.

For years, he said, “UTLA has been a sleeping giant because we didn’t organize our members.” But that is changing, he added, as the union moves into the sixth month of a “blitz” campaign, aimed at establishing a chapter chair at every school.

And to further their respective visions for the future of education, both Caputo-Pearl and Weingarten vowed to do “everything we can” to get Kayser re-elected to the board, keeping the tenuous pro-union balance of power in place within the nation’s second largest school district.

“Now that he’s asked for our help, for us to step in, we will be providing financial support in whatever form we can,” Weingarten said.

Steve Zimmer

UTLA, the LA Unified teachers union, is offering tonight an unvarnished public view of its bargaining position in negotiations with LA Unified for a new teachers contract.

Board member Steve Zimmer is scheduled to moderate a panel discussion at Occidental College that includes UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten and Martha Sanchez of Alliance of Californians for Community Development.

The event begins at 7 p.m.

Weingarten is participating to demonstrate support for UTLA, which has been demanding lower class sizes, full staffing, restored funding of adult and early childhood education and higher salaries as part of its negotiations with the district. She ias also expected to discuss how the issues in Los Angeles are playing out across the country

The UTLA-district talks have produced little progress so far after months of negotiating although sources on both sides say parallel talks are underway to help close the gap.

Weingarten is also planning to appear with Caputo-Pearl and others at a news conference tomorrow morning at Slawson Southeast Occupational Center, a career and technical education facility that primarily serves adult students.

“Our class sizes are too large and our schools are not staffed fully to support the needs of our students,” Caputo-Pearl said in a news release from the union. “LAUSD educators are not being compensated fairly and we are in real danger of losing them to other, higher paying districts, and recruiting educators to LAUSD is getting increasingly more difficult.”

]]> https://www.laschoolreport.com/zimmer-moderating-utla-panel-discussion-on-union-issues-lausd/feed/ 2 https://www.laschoolreport.com/weingarten-pleads-for-collaboration-in-deasy-aftermath/ https://www.laschoolreport.com/weingarten-pleads-for-collaboration-in-deasy-aftermath/#comments Wed, 22 Oct 2014 22:51:53 +0000 http://laschoolreport.com/?p=30692

AFT President Randi Weingarten Weingarten speaking at an AFT convention

In a speech today  in Buena Park, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, cited former LA Unified superintendent John Deasy as a failed example of school district management and argued for collaboration over fiat as the pathway to success in public education.

“Collaboration is the vehicle that creates trust. It’s the vehicle that enables risk. It’s the vehicle that enables shared responsibility; it’s the vehicle that has all our backs as opposed to throwing us under the bus, or under the bicycle,” she told an audience of union leaders and school and district administrators from across the country at the West Coast Labor Management Institute. “And it’s the vehicle that gives parents confidence in our public schools and our public institutions.”

While she insisted that collaboration “is not a silver bullet,” she described it as “a way to engender collective responsibility.”

Her plea was to both sides the labor-management relationship, insisting that the “top-down” ways of leaders like Deasy, Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee have failed to achieve their promised revolution in public education.

To her labor colleagues, she asked, “Is a manager or a principal really going to be willing to help us solve a problem after we’ve punched the living daylights out of them? Really? Who would ever want to solve a problem if that happens?”

A full transcript of her speech is available here.

Striking a more combative tone than she used earlier this month when she shared a stage with LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy, Weingarten sounded more like an opponent to Democratic leaders than an ally. She rebuked Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Mayor Eric Garcetti, for ‘praising’ the verdict of the landmark Vergara case which ruled California teacher tenure laws can be detrimental to students, saying the union would push back against any public figures that supports the Vergara decision.

The verdict, she said, “pre-supposes that for kids to win, teachers must lose and nothing can be further from the truth… we will fight it – in the courtroom and in the court of public opinion.”

But she stopped short of calling for Duncan’s resignation. In contrast to her counterpart at the National Education Association convention last week. which passed a resolution for Duncan to resign, Weingarten navigated more carefully. “We need a Secretary of Education who walks our walk, and who fights our fight… we are deeply disappointed that this Department of Education has not lived up to that standard.”

When asked by reporters after the event if she supported the NEA action, she would only say that, “I would hope he listens to what people are saying.” She said that although the leadership would not present a resolution, it could still come from the floor. “I am 1000% percent behind any action that the members at the convention [take] on this issue.”

Speaking with passion to a packed room of union delegates from all over the country, Weingarten commended teachers on their deep commitment to education and to the children they serve. “We are the front lines for children, the first responders to poverty,” she said. “We must create new coalitions and through them the groundswell needed to reclaim the promise of America.”

But she spent the bulk of her hour-long speech railing on those she said were bent on the union’s destruction, and she urging the rank and file to not sit back. “While we will never out-spend our opponents, we can out-work them and out-organize them — but we have to vote.”

Randi Weingarten, AFT President

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) kicks off its annual convention in downtown Los Angeles tomorrow bringing more 3,500 national union delegates to the home of LA Unified, the second largest school district in the country.

On the agenda: fending off what the union sees as its biggest threats, including billionaire money, an assault on tenure, and the “pervasive fixation on testing over teaching and learning,” according to a union press release.  A proposed hike in union dues is also on the table.

It is less clear whether the delegates will seek a resolution asking for the resignation of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, as its counterpart, the National Education Association, did at its convention last week.

The gathering is attracting political and union heavy weights: AFT President, Randi Weingarten will deliver the keynote address Friday morning, following a speech by Governor Jerry Brown. Other speakers include Mayor Eric Garcetti, and California State School Superintendent Tom Torlakson, a teachers union ally who is facing a November re-election fight against education reformer Marshal Tuck.

AFT is the second largest teachers union in the country, representing 1.5 million teachers, health workers and school-related personnel nationwide.

Alex Caputo-Pearl, the newly installed president of the Los Angeles teachers union (UTLA) will lead a panel on social movement unionism that will include teachers union leaders from Chicago, St. Paul, and Philadelphia.

“It will be about how to take on some of the challenges that unions are facing by building a broader alliance with parents and community all around the quality schools agenda,” Caputo-Pearl told LA School Report.

“Obviously we’ll get to talk about some of the dilemmas we face in Los Angeles, like the billionaire funded Vergara lawsuit, as well as some of the problems with Superintendent John Deasy putting forward an unacceptable offer around pay,” he said.

The union is currently in contract negotiations with the district but appears to be at an impasse. UTLA leaders flatly rejected the district’s recent proposal of a 2 percent raise for 2014-15 plus a retroactive 2 percent bonus for 2013-14, calling it “insulting.”

Meanwhile in a letter to members posted on the convention website, AFT President Weingarten explained why she is recommending a dues hike, taking members’ annual contribution from the current $213 to $225 a year by 2015.

“We face continued assaults through privatization, profiteering and deprofessionalization in the schools, universities, hospitals and institutions that serve the American public,” Weingarten wrote. “The dues increase is intended to support organizing efforts, mobilize political power and enable us to incubate new approaches and solutions to helping those we serve, their families and our communities.”

On Saturday union members will rally at Staples Center Plaza to join with California postal workers protesting Staples’ plan to use store employees to staff U.S. Postal Service counters at Staples stores.

The conference will end Monday with a press conference on due process with teachers and community leaders.

All speeches, general sessions, and business discussions, will be live streamed here.

Previous posts: Top 6 shockers: how Weingarten and Deasy agree on tenure, Strike talk emerges on Caputo-Pearl’s first day as union chief, Weingarten: Bad Teachers Need Another Profession

Courtesy: Aspen Ideas Festival

The stage was set with the two public education luminaries, ready to square off on such lightning rod issues as tenure and teacher dismissal laws in the wake of last month’s Vergara trial: Randi Weingarten, leader of the nation’s second largest teachers organization, AFT, and Superintendent John Deasy, leader of the second largest school district in the country, Los Angeles Unified.

The Vergara decision, striking down tenure and dismissal laws in California as depriving the state’s most vulnerable students equal access to a quality education, was widely seen as a blow to the teachers union and has moved public opinion toward agreeing with change.

But when Weingarten and Deasy engaged in debate earlier this week at the Aspen Ideas Festival, instead of fireworks, they seemed to find surprising common ground.

Could this be an opportunity for consensus building? Here are some highlights:

Steve Zimmer, left, John Deasy, right

Superintendent John Deasy and School Board members Steve Zimmer and Monica Ratliff flew to Washington D.C. last week, not for a relaxing getaway but to meet with lawmakers to discuss the impact of federal budget cuts is having on the district. Known as “sequestration,” the cuts are costing the district hundreds of millions of dollars in Title I money for school districts with high percentages of low-income students.

The trip was “marked mostly with less than positive news on the fiscal front, for sure,” Deasy told LA School Report today. “There was no evidence whatsoever that the sequester is going to go away.”

As Deasy begins to prepare next year’s budget, he’s faced with a school board that favors hiring more teachers and support staff at a time the electorate has voted to raise taxes to fund public education. In other words, expectations are high. But federal cuts threaten to plunge the district further into debt, even as new money begins to flow from the state.

“Do we take new money and [fill] the hole? It’s going to be a very big dilemma,” said Deasy.

The term sequestration refers to $85 billion in reduced spending per year, scheduled to continue through 2021. The cuts were initially meant as a threat, set to start automatically should Congress not find a way to increase revenue or make targeted cuts. After lawmakers failed to reach a compromise, the sequestration went into effect in March.

Deasy has warned that if sequestration is not ended, LAUSD would face a $350 million budget hole in the current school year.

“I’m very worried about the general direction of support for public education,” he said. “It seems like there isn’t any.”

Deasy said he, Zimmer and Ratliff met with a number of House members, including George Miller a northern California Democrat, and Lucile Roybal Allard, a Democrat who represents parts of east Los Angeles. They also met with the heads of two national teachers unions: National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.

According to the LA Daily News, which spoke with Ratliff, Weingarten was “so impressed with local efforts to implement new English and math standards that she asked the superintendent to share the educators’ lesson plans.”

The group also met with senior staff of the Department of Education but not with Secretary Arne Duncan.

The LAUSD trio discussed a number of other subjects while in D.C., including the implications of AB 484, which eliminates the California Standardized Tests and designates the current school year as a sort of dry run for the new Common Core tests. Both Deasy and the Obama administration were upset with state lawmakers for only funding either math or english tests.

Deasy now says LAUSD students will take both tests; the district will most likely cover the costs of the second test. He also said he would try to find some way of using the testing data to gauge student performance – something state lawmakers said was not feasible this year.

“We will attempt to find out if we can provide some level of student performance,” said Deasy.

Ratliff attended a meeting of the Council of the Great City Schools – she was appointed to succeed Zimmer as the district’s liaison to that council by Board President Richard Vladovic. Deasy said it was “very helpful” to have Ratliff in that role. He said that Zimmer was included on the trip because he has “repeatedly built connections on special education funding.”

Zimmer told LA School Report that they also met with LA Unified’s Washington-based lobbyist, the Raben Group.

Previous posts: In DC, Deasy, Ratliff and Zimmer Talk Budget Cut Impact; Coalition Calls on Gov. Brown to Veto Testing Bill, AB 484; Superintendent Deasy Not Happy With Latest Testing Bill; Vladovic Adds Committees, Doles Out Assignments

Deasy and members Monica Ratliff and Steve Zimmer met with Rep. George Miller, a Democrat from Concord, Assistant Education Secretary Deb Delisle and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, according to the LA Daily News.

The News quoted Ratliff as saying, “What I just realized is how Dr. Deasy has worked to cultivate relationships here in Washington that allows us to talk about what needs to be done for our district.”

Rather different from the usual instruction: “Pick the best answer, A, B, C, or D.” Right?

That’s because California is getting “Smarter.”

Beginning in the 2014–2015 school year, 25 states are replacing their standardized tests with “Smarter Balanced” assessments, a product of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, one of two groups developing tests aligned to the new Common Core State Standards now being taught in 45 states.

In California, the new tests will replace the traditional Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) assessments, which were established by the legislature in 1997. The STAR tests passed into history on July 1 although the state has not yet decided what tests, if any, will be used for the current academic year.

“If you take a look at the Smarter Balanced prototype, you will see that almost all the items have a connection to the real world,” says Jaime Aquino, deputy superintendent of instruction for Los Angeles Unified. “It’s about application. It’s about measuring higher-order thinking. It’s not about multiple choice.”

Aquino says the new test is infinitely superior to the previous California standardized tests, which were entirely multiple choice, except for writing assessments in grades 4 and 7.  The Smarter Balanced tests are designed to probe critical thinking and analysis through a mix of multiple-choice, short answer and extended response questions.

Not all education experts are pleased with the change.

Robert Schaeffer of FairTest, a nonprofit that works to promote quality education and testing, says the new Common Core-aligned tests are longer and “substantially more difficult” than previous tests, calling the questions “esoteric, highly technical and unnecessary for someone to succeed in college or life” with a format he says is no different from the tests many states give now.

“Because of the political pressure to develop these tests quickly and cheaply, they largely failed to revise them,” says Schaeffer. “It’s more important to get it right than to get it fast. It’s easy to develop the perfect assessment system in theory, but you need to try it out in practice.”

FairTest is calling for a moratorium on the Common Core tests. Schaeffer cites the sharp drop in scores in New York and Kentucky, after those states administered tests aligned to the new standards, and FairTest is not alone in its objection.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said back in April that the tests should not be used to judge student or teacher performance, or used in any other high-stakes decisions, until the standards have been field-tested. Education organizations, including the National Education Association and the National Parent Teacher Association, have made similar requests.

Schaeffer suggests it will take more than three years to try out the assessments and improve them.

“In the perfect world, tests would be treated like prescription drugs,” he says. “Before you can sell a prescription drug in this country, you have to prove to a neutral body that it is both safe and effective. And you do that through experiments and trials and you build to mass administration. You don’t say, ‘Wow! This looks like it’s going to be a cure for a rare cancer’ and start administering it right away.”

In LA Unified schools, the Smarter Balanced tests will be taken on iPads. Elsewhere, students may take them on whichever devices—iPads, laptops, desktops—schools have available, with Smarter Balanced providing pencil-and-paper tests until the 2017–2018 school year to give schools time to acquire the appropriate technology.

The new tests for math and language arts will be given over the last 12 weeks of the school year in grades 3 through 8 and 11. There will be a mix of multiple-choice and short-answer questions. Some parts of the test will require students to have some tech savvy. They may be asked, for example, to drag and drop fractions or decimals onto the correct place of a number line.

Students will also have to tackle a “real-world” writing assignment called a performance task, like the example above or this one. To complete some of them, students may first have to read articles or watch an informational video, like this one.

The new tests are lengthy. The language arts and math tests combined will take seven hours in grades 3 through 5 and 8½ hours in grade 11. Schools decide over how many days to administer the test. Teachers have the option to give assessments throughout the school year to track their students’ progress. Deb Sigman, California’s deputy superintendent of public instruction, says these interim tests would be a helpful way to inform teaching and learning.

“We have included in our assessment bill that we think the [interim tests] are vitally important and we encourage that the state pays for them for all districts,” Sigman told LA School Report.

The biggest difference with the Smarter Balanced assessments, aside from the fact that ultimately they will all be given on computers, is that they will adjust to the student taking them. Questions become more difficult or easy depending on how a student answers previous questions. The benefit, according to the Smarter Balanced website, is that the tests are individualized and can more quickly pinpoint the skills students have mastered.

“Struggling students who can’t answer the more difficult questions can be given a set of questions that can really home in on what it is they know,” says Sigman. “We’re not giving kids questions that we know they can’t answer. So it’s a more precise measure.”

This past spring, 52 LAUSD schools participated in pilot tests for the new assessments. Findings from the pilot tests are not yet available, but they will eventually be used to improve the assessments going forward.

Field tests will be conducted in the spring of 2014. In a letter to district superintendents and charter school administrators, Tom Torlakson, the state superintendent of public instruction, wrote that he is requesting “as many schools as possible” participate in the field test, insisting that “this will be a wonderful opportunity for our students and teachers.”

Previous Posts: Aquino Sees Deeper Thinking but Falling Scores with Common Core, California Could Face Year With No Meaningful Testing Data

Senate GOP Leader Wants to Reduce Pink Slips for Teachers
State Senate GOP leader Robert Huff of Diamond Bar says he has a way to reduce the annual practice of issuing preliminary pink slips to tens of thousands of California teachers who later are told they will not lose their jobs. LA Times

LAUSD Budget Forecast Is Getting Brighter
LA Unified’s Budget, Facilities and Audit Committee is convening Tuesday morning. The proposed agenda shows financial improvement at the district after five years of devastating cuts — due to a boost from Prop. 30 funds. KPCC

Power Shift on L.A. School Board
Election results for seats on the board of the Los Angeles Unified School District – the largest district in California and second-largest in the nation – will have far-reaching implications for the future of education reform in the Golden State. OC Register Column (Gloria Romero)

Divided Over L.A. Unified
One nasty election later, there is no sign that the divisiveness in the Los Angeles Unified School District will abate. If anything, it looks likely to increase, with activists in United Teachers Los Angeles announcing that teachers will vote on a passel of anti-reform positions. LA Times Editorial

Parent Group Receives Proposals to Remake Failing LAUSD Elementary
A group of Los Angeles parents who successfully invoked a state law to take over their failing school have received four proposals on how to remake the school, including one from the Los Angeles Unified School District. San Bernadino Sun

Academic Decathlon Students Get Ready for State Finals
While students on the region’s top Academic Decathlon teams are cramming, cramming, cramming for this weekend’s state championship, veterans of the brain-draining contest know that what the kids are learning extends far beyond the title match. LA Daily News

Savings From STAR Suspension Would Net About $15 Million
A plan to suspend some statewide testing in advance of transition to new assessments based on the common core standards would save the state about $15 million, according to an estimate released Monday by the California Department of Education. SI&A Cabinet Report

AFT’s Weingarten on Why She Got Arrested, ‘the Gall’ of Reformers
American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten was arrested last week in Philadelphia while protesting a hearing of the School Reform Commission that voted to close 23 public schools. WaPo

Schools Partnership Aimed at Helping Teachers
In another step toward implementing new education standards, California joined a multi-state partnership Monday with resources to help teachers. Monterey County Herald

The Mayoral Endorsement That Isn’t
Los Angeles Unified School District board member Tamar Galatzan has spent the last few weeks taping informal interviews with Eric Garcetti, Wendy Greuel, Kevin James, Jan Perry and Emanuel Pleitez, getting their views on public education and what their role would be as mayor. LA Daily News Column

Teachers Training Teachers: It Works in California School District
Jandella Faulkner is a teaching coach in the Long Beach, Calif., school district. Her job is to train a select group of teachers at Edison Elementary. It’s part of a district-wide training system that relies on teachers working with each other to improve classroom practices. NBC News

Second Effort to Limit ‘Willful Defiance’ as Cause to Expel and Suspend
Assemblymember Roger Dickinson (D-Sacramento) is reintroducing his bill to limit the use of willfully defying authorities or disrupting school activities as a reason to suspend or expel students. EdSource

Southern California Educators, First Responders to Train on “Active Shooter” Scenarios
The L.A. County Office of Education is holding an all-day “active shooter” workshop this Friday. The training, at the agency’s compound in Downey, is designed to educate principals and police who patrol schools on how to react in the worst of all circumstances: an armed intruder  on campus. KPCC

Gym Class Isn’t Just Fun and Games Anymore
On a recent afternoon, the third graders in Sharon Patelsky’s class reviewed words like “acronym,” “clockwise” and “descending,” as well as math concepts like greater than, less than and place values. During gym class. NY Times

Legislation Would Require Carbon Monoxide Alarms in New School Projects
A new law that went into effect at the first of the year requires owners of apartment buildings to install carbon monoxide alarms in each unit. Now, a San Diego County lawmaker wants school districts to make the life-saving monitor a part of any new or modernization project. SI&A Cabinet Report

District, Union Team Up to Solve Budget Crunch
As anyone who has ever sat at either side of a bargaining table can attest, the labor-management relationship is already challenging enough in flush times. But as one Colorado district shows, it is not impossible for district and union leaders to work together to make tough decisions. EdWeek

Senate Plan Would Give Schools More Time to Prepare for Common Core Testing
A leading member of the state Senate has proposed legislation that could give schools significantly more time to prepare students and teachers for assessments based on the new common core curriculum standards. SI&A Cabinet Report

AFT President Randi Weingarten

American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten is scheduled to hold a Friday, February 8 press conference at Woodland Hills Academy to announce a $150,000 grant to the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA).

The grant is aimed at helping teachers create strong school improvement plans and prevent the need for any additional “parent trigger” actions in LAUSD.

Weingarten’s appearance signals the importance of UTLA and the parent trigger issue to the national union.

The event  will also serve as a media opportunity for Westside District 4 School Board incumbent Steve Zimmer, who is scheduled to appear along with UTLA President Warren Fletcher. UTLA has endorsed ZImmer and its independent expenditure committee has requested campaign funding from the AFT.

According to a press advisory issued Wednesday, the AFT grant will provide UTLA with the funding to help LA teachers write school improvement plans that could help avoid potential parent trigger actions like the one that occurred last month at LAUSD’s 24th St. Elementary School. “The funding will be used to create a training program to help teachers write school plans and prepare school improvement teams.”

AFT is holding the press conference at Woodland Hills Academy because back in 2006 it was the first school to operate under the Expanded School-Based Management Model (ESBMM), one of three different school autonomy models that teachers can opt into becoming when writing school improvement plans. “This school stands in stark contrast to the parent-trigger petition effort at 24th Street Elementary School,” notes the AFT advisory.

According to Parent Revolution head Ben Austin, the union would do better to focus more closely on the trigger process already underway at 24th Street Elementary.  “UTLA and AFT need to work with the district to craft a proposal that’s better than a bunch of high quality charter school proposals.”