Sasha Bronner sasha.bronner@huffingtonpost.com
“All the little birds on J-Bird St.
Love to hear the robin goin' tweet tweet tweet…”Tweet o’ th’ week:
DrDeasyLAUSD John Deasy
Sharing daily&weekly routine, discussing importance of school food & wondering y there is controversy re: teacher eval. http://t.co/69p14uLY
part one | http://huff.to/phQGT7
9/21/11 08:57 PM ET - LAUSD superintendent Dr. John Deasy does not believe in wasting time. He talks fast, sleeps little–-four hours a night-–and is in the news often for rolling out a series of ambitious new initiatives for LAUSD. Deasy was promoted to superintendent in February, after previously working for The Gates Foundation (as in Bill and Melinda) as well as overseeing the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District and Prince George's County Schools in Maryland. Last week he sat down with The Huffington Post to talk about the district's year-round calendar, the new (and controversial) teacher evaluation system and lunch in the school cafeteria.
Huffington Post: It’s two weeks into the school year and you seem to be hard at work. I’m curious what your day-to-day is like. Do you visit a school every day? Every week?
John Deasy: Every day. I have a pretty set schedule. Every morning I get up at 2:45am and I have a series of things I do; work out a little bit, do some correspondence. I’m at the office between 4:30am and 5:00am and then I start appointments at 6:00am and then the week is fairly ritualized. So Tuesdays are completely in the office—they’re board days. Thursdays are in office—they’re committee work and meetings. Wednesdays are entirely out of the office; Mondays and Fridays are half day at sites. The whole team does that as well. We are at sites as often as we are in the office.
HP: What do you do when you go to a site?
JD: I have the same routine. Never announce when I’m going. And I am taking a look at the quality of teaching and leadership. And I do that by doing classroom visitations, talking with youth, talking with adults, and then unless there’s a very specific issue I’m going to look at – maybe a school that’s been under reconstruction, then I’m looking at how those things are going. I’m always writing a note back, we come back here to the office, we trade notes. Our goal is to be at every school in this district.
HP: How many are there?
JD: There are over 1,014. But I’m struck by how many times parents and adults and especially students say they have never seen a superintendent. That’s important. Then you come back at the end of the day and you have your evening meetings. I do three evening meetings a night. Meanwhile I manage the district and manage everything electronically. Saturdays and Sundays.
HP: When you were back east in Prince George’s County, how different was it? How different was that job for you?
JD: Both of them are in pretty impacted places, I mean really impacted places. The scope is much larger here. And I did have some weekends to myself there. But the hours are pretty much the same. You have to do it to do this job. I love it though. But it’s exhausting. But when you have a good team you’re lucky.
HP: And when was the last time you ate in a school cafeteria?
JD: Tuesday or Wednesday. Always check the food out, always.
HP: No more celebrity chefs?
JD: We changed our whole menu and launched it this year. It’s incredible. Every time we do an administrative function we serve the cafeteria food. I mean I like food, it’s one of my passions. And I like eating this food. It’s that good. The kids helped design the menu. For all of last year thousands of kids worked on the menu and tasted it. There’s a vegan menu, there are fresh salads, fresh vegetables. Some of my favorites are the vegan ravioli, the quinoa salad, and the farmer’s market salad. I’m really proud of it. [Jamie] Oliver was helpful in agitating on some of the issues. Alice Waters has been very helpful to us.
HP: That’s great. Now most kids have been back in school for about two weeks – but many LAUSD schools are still on a year-round system, is that correct?
JD: Yes, we are year-round still.
HP: What’s the plan there?
JD: Next year there will only be two schools in LAUSD that are year-round and the year after that, there will be none. For 30 years we’ve had schools on year-round.
HP: How could you make that change so fast? What were other people not doing?
JD: We built 111 schools—that was it. This has been a ten-year project. Three generations have never gone to school on a regular calendar. All of LAUSD was year-round.
HP: And you think that’s just because of the nature of this city and how many people and the lack of schools?
JD: There was a huge lack of schools. And we just didn’t do anything about it. And then we did. It’s huge.
HP: So a lot has been said about the new teacher evaluation system – clearly many feel what’s been happening isn’t effective, and yet you are under a lot of heat for your new plan. It’s a complicated issue. Tell me about your new system.
JD: [Laughs] It took you this long to get into the most controversial subject! It’s fabulous, it’s great. For a year and half, teams of teachers and administrators have worked on developing it and we are rolling it out. And it’s started.
HP: What is it, how does it work?
JD: Oh it’s a long story – that is something to cover over a long period of time. We have court cases against us; the union has taken out complaints against us…
HP: What is the main controversy in your eyes?
JD: I don’t seem to know. They want to stop it from moving forward. Why you would want to stop anybody from getting better…? You’ve got me. But so far we’ve won each of the cases and we keep moving on.
It’s a massive endeavor that’s taking place right now and it’s a multiple-measure approach. The current one is just awful. It’s useless, it’s offensive, it’s ridiculous. It does nothing. So here what we’ve developed is a good strong rubric that says this is what the behaviors of great teaching are: we describe what masterful teaching is, what acceptable teaching is, what beginning teaching is, what unacceptable teaching is - on all these different pieces - and then we go in and we observe you several times and we evaluate. It’s similar to what has happened before, only the instrument that we use now is far more helpful. You can get better if you know exactly what it is you’re struggling with. So let’s say we can help identify that you have a problem helping students decode, or you have a problem helping students understand number sense. That’s better than saying ‘students in math are struggling.’ I don’t know what that means about my teaching. Traditionally that’s all we’ve done, poorly. Now we are doing that well.
And then there are three other multiple measures we use too. Student achievement over time, or value-added. Obviously the most controversial. Not for me. What we’ve done is we’ve created a value-added model, an academic growth over time model, and the fact is that in an organization where we want to evaluate the effectiveness of how schools and people are doing their jobs, I wouldn’t consider not taking a look at how students are actually doing. Contributions to the school and the community are another piece we have evidence on. The fourth piece is parent-and-student teacher surveys. So those are the four buckets of multiple measures. We have 109 schools piloting it this year across the system.
HP: And the others are sticking with the old plan. So this is a test?
JD: Yes, exactly. The training is going extremely well. Teachers and principals have been amazing. We want to learn how to do this well. We have gotten remarkably positive feedback from the field.
HP: Okay we are running out of time, you have people waiting for you out there I see. Let me ask you one last question.
JD: I’ll just talk faster!
HP: You already talk fast; you don’t have to talk faster. What excites you most about this city? What do you love about LA?
JD: The youth of this city. They’re amazing. They have so much in front of them that could be theirs and we intend to make sure they get it. And they’re not getting it all right now. This entire administration should be about their rights. And we will not brook anything that’s going to violate a kid’s right to graduate college. And there will be pushback for that. So buckle up. I love this city, I’m not obviously from here, it’s just missing cold weather and snow and then it’d be perfect.
Part Two of The Huffington Post's interview with Dr. John Deasy |
Dr. John Deasy Talks Launching The Private LA Fund
9/23/11 11:14 AM ET - Last week, news broke that a privately-run Los Angeles Fund For Public Education was launching when solicitation emails hit the inboxes of most major Hollywood players. The LA Fund is the brainchild of LAUSD superintendent John Deasy, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and longtime advocate for the welfare and education of children, Megan Chernin. Chernin, who is chair of the Board of Directors for MLA Partner Schools and a Huffington Post blogger will function as the Fund’s CEO. Friday’s solicitation email did not mince words:
Los Angeles public high schools have a graduation rate that barely surpasses 50%; and of the kindergarteners that make it to graduation, only 6% will be college-ready.
The email goes on to explain that the LA Fund will operate independently from the district and that the money raised will be used to "create system-wide change."
In Part 2 of our interview with Dr. John Deasy, The Huffington Post asks point blank what the fund is, why it's separate from LAUSD and how it just might save Los Angeles.
For Part 1 of the Dr. John Deasy interview, click here.
Huffington Post: So the biggest news right now for you is the rolling out of the Los Angeles Fund For Public Education. Tell us a bit about it.
John Deasy: The LA Fund is something we have been planning since last April and we are very thankful that Megan Chernin is the CEO. What we have been doing is laying out the fact that this is an opportunity for people to support important issues within LAUSD. We have a very aggressive plan for improvement – I think that’s pretty well known at this point.
HP: And the goal is to raise $200 million over five years?
JD: $200 million in the first three to five years, that is correct. And then I want $500 million overall. The fund allows people to donate at any kind of level, which I think is important and it allows them to donate in forms of choice. So we have four ‘buckets.’ The first includes all issues around Human Capital Development. How are we developing great teachers? How are we evaluating great teachers? How are we supporting great teaching? How are we dealing with improving teaching that is not great? How are we separating low performance?
The second bucket is the Arts – all of the access to the arts for youth who just fundamentally do not have any access to the arts. How do we get every youth to have at least two mediums in the classroom?
The third is System-Wide Transformation. Choice. People feel that they want to be supportive in terms of the reforms that we’re doing around public school choice, performance management. People can support those.
And the last one is Youth Health. And that ranges from all of the issues where people just outright struggle having glasses, having dental care, to sports, et cetera.
HP: People can choose out of those four where they want to put their money?
JD: Exactly. And then Megan at this point is putting together what we’ll call the foundation gifts and then we launch next month.
HP: Who will oversee where the money goes and how it’s used? Because it’s separate from LAUSD.
JD: The Fund is not part of LAUSD. It’s to support LAUSD. It’s an independent board and organization. They’re 501(c), they’re established, and already up and running.
HP: Have you done anything like this before?
JD: No. Nothing on this scale, and it’s modeled after the successful Chicago and New York City funds.
HP: It seems like people in the past, for various reasons, have been skeptical about giving money directly to LAUSD because of a fear of where the money will go.
JD: It’s a black hole. I can’t get anything to happen.
HP: So this seems like a potential solution – to work around the sytem in order to change it?
JD: Partly. Here’s what we’re gonna do, here’s how we’re gonna be measured, and here’s how we’re gonna deliver the money. If we don’t do it, take your money back. We want to be really clear that this is a social return investment for the investors that actually want to contribute to advancing the ball down the field—in a space that they’re interested in.
HP: What do you feel is a realistic goal for the first year? Versus five years down the line?
JD: I am very ambitious. I am seriously hoping that we are able to get half of it in the first year and begin implementing the programs next year. The number of people who simply sent me an email today and wrote a check shocked me. We want people to feel like they can give at any level. There’s no tiering. So it’s not like a million dollars or above. If someone wants to give $500, fabulous.
There’s kind of this sense of belief and possibility right now. But those are perishable moments—I’m very clear about that.
HP: But appreciate them while you have them. Who thought of this idea? How did it come about?
JD: I did, when I came here. It’s one of the two things I want to do.
HP: What’s the other one?
JD: I want to launch an equivalent of Robin Hood. Are you familiar with Robin Hood in New York City? It’s a giant organization that was launched by all hedge fund managers and it’s a huge pool of money that fundamentally deals with poverty in New York City. And I want to do the equivalent here. Robin Hood is a trademark name…it could be Zorro fund here.
HP: When do you think you might start that?
JD: A year after I get the LA Fund in order. LA Fund is just for public education. This is really about poverty in our city.
HP: That’s great. And something I’m assuming the Mayor would be happy about as well.
JD: I think he would be happy with it…on the days that he’s happy. [Laughs]
 | smf: Zorro? Really.
“& wondering y there is controversy re: teacher eval.’ - sometimes the strength of one’s own arguments convinces one. |
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