CALIFORNIA BOARD OF ED SEEKS PROBE OF COMPTON CHARTER CAMPAIGN

• The board will ask the state attorney general to examine charges of misconduct in a petition drive to convert McKinley Elementary into a charter school

• Starts a 15-day period for public comment on regulations to implement the parent-trigger law

By Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times | http://lat.ms/f7VT5t

December 16, 2010 - The state Board of Education will ask the attorney general to investigate complaints of misconduct surrounding a parent petition drive to turn over a struggling Compton elementary school to a charter school operation, the board president said Wednesday.

The petition drive at McKinley Elementary School, the state's first test of a new law that empowers parents to make sweeping changes at low-performing schools, has been mired in charges and countercharges of deceit and intimidation since signatures, said to represent 62% of the school's parents, were submitted to the Compton Unified School District last week.

Those charges resurfaced this week. At a Compton school board meeting Tuesday evening, which drew a crowd of nearly 200 people, several McKinley parents drew cheers as they praised their school's progress and alleged that petition organizers used misleading claims and stealth tactics to gather signatures.

Parent Revolution, the Los Angeles nonprofit that targeted McKinley for its first petition drive, chose a charter conversion as one of four options for change and selected Celerity Educational Group as the charter operator. The group chose not to speak Tuesday evening. Nor did parents supportive of the petition.

 

But many opponents lined up to voice complaints about the petition process. One parent said she thought she was signing a petition to beautify the school while PTA President Cynthia Martinez complained she was not allowed access to all Parent Revolution gatherings. Last week, for instance, Parent Revolution moved a news conference featuring Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa from public space outside McKinley to a private residence. Some anti-petition parents said they were denied entry.

Karen Frison, Compton's acting superintendent, said Wednesday that the district would launch a new "parent empowerment initiative" of its own that will include a "robust community conversation" about the new law and the petition process in Compton. Test scores at McKinley have increased by 77 points in the last two years but the school remains in the lowest 10% of all California elementary schools.

"The parent-trigger law presents more than one option.... Our parents and guardians deserve to discuss these options in an open and transparent manner," Frison wrote in a letter to The Times.

Paulette Gipson, of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People's Compton office, also said the organization would seek to host a town hall to fully discuss the issue. The group supports the parent-trigger law but not the process used to gather signatures in Compton, she said.

Pastor Lee Finnie, whose three children attend McKinley, said the school's PTA planned to create a website to publicize concerns about the petition-gathering process.

"We're going to let the state of California know that when you hear Parent Revolution, you'll smell a rat a mile away and lock the doors and run," he said.

For their part, pro-petition parents and organizers spoke at the state education board meeting Wednesday with passionate pleas for better schools. McKinley parents Shemika Murphy and Ismenia Guzman, for instance, said they were grateful to Parent Revolution for informing them about their rights to demand a better education for their children under the new parent-trigger law.

Gabe Rose of Parent Revolution told board members that his group has documented threats against pro-petition parents and would welcome a state investigation into them. The group, for instance, produced written remarks by a McKinley teacher falsely claiming that Celerity would not accept special-needs children; state law requires that any charter operator taking over a district school must accept all students in the attendance boundaries.

Charter schools are independently run and publicly financed.

Board President Ted Mitchell said he would ask the state attorney general to investigate the numerous allegations on both sides, acting on a request by board member Alan Arkatov.

In other developments, the Compton school district clarified Tuesday that no action or recommendation has ever been made to shut down McKinley, a claim some parents said persuaded them to sign the petition.

A scenario to shut down McKinley and consolidate it with another school is one of six options the board is considering to save money. But no decision will be made until the district holds several public hearings on all options next month.

In Sacramento, the state education board voted to start a 15-day period for public comment on regulations to implement the parent-trigger law.

L.A. TEACHERS UNION WON’T ACCEPT PAY CUTS, ‘VALUE-ADDLED’ EVALUATIONS + TEACHERS UNION OFFICIALS SAY THEY ARE NOT ‘VILLAINS OF EDUCATION’

L.A. teachers union won't accept pay cuts, 'value-added' evaluations

UTLA leaders dispute criticisms from the mayor and others, but reiterate their firm opposition to furloughs, larger classes and use of students' test scores to evaluate teachers' performance.

Teachers and parents applaud UTLA Vice President Julie Washington, right, at a news conference. She said the union was "setting the record straight" after Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa accused teachers of obstructing school reform. (Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times / December 15, 2010)

By Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times | http://lat.ms/hYGfGb

December 16, 2010 - The state's largest teachers union Wednesday fired an early salvo in contract negotiations, serving notice that it wouldn't accept pay cuts easily and that it won't consider linking teacher evaluations to student test scores in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The afternoon news conference, at union headquarters in Koreatown, was a familiar exercise in rallying the rank and file. But it also marked a renewed effort to lead the public debate over school reform, coming shortly after L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa labeled United Teachers Los Angeles the primary obstacle to improving schools.

The union "today is setting the record straight," said vice president Julie Washington, who heads the union's negotiating team and is running for president. "We are not the villains of education. We are the solution. We are dedicated and care about the children and the community. … We are going on the record pushing back."

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The union contract expires at the end of June, but both the district and the union can reopen the current contract on a few selected issues.

Top union priorities include resisting class-size increases and restoring the five days cut from the current school year through employee furloughs, Washington said. The former would spare teachers from layoffs; the latter would return teacher pay to prior levels. Washington insisted that the underlying goal is to promote the best interests of students as well as employees.

Washington didn't completely rule out furlough days but she echoed the union call of past years as she challenged the district to "open its books" and cut out waste and high-priced consultants.

District officials countered that they face a projected $142-million deficit for next year — and that seven furlough days would only make up $97 million.

The nation's second-largest school system already has laid off about 5,000 employees since July 1, 2009, and reduced pay for thousands of others.

The union remained firm on another point: No part of teachers' evaluations should be based on their students' standardized test scores, said treasurer David Goldberg. The union supports using data to improve instruction, he added, and wants to fix a broken teacher evaluation system.

The district wants test scores to count for at least 30% of evaluations through a "value-added" system that measures student improvement, taking into account past performance. Some unions elsewhere have accepted value-added formulas as one measure of teacher effectiveness.

The union also took a swipe at a proposed lawsuit settlement that aims to prevent a school's staff from being decimated by layoffs based on seniority. The union has defended traditional seniority rules.

The best solution would be to avoid having schools staffed with mostly new teachers — who are the first to be laid off, said Kirti Baranwal, a teacher at Samuel Gompers Middle School in South Los Angeles. Gompers was among three middle schools especially hard-hit by layoffs.

Baranwal credited the mayor's education team for giving teachers at some schools under its control the freedom to make strides. But she said the mayor himself is "speaking from a lack of knowledge of what's going on at his own schools."

---

Teachers union officials say they are not 'villains of education'

By Connie Llanos, Staff Writer, LA Daily News | http://bit.ly/icrUvd

12/15/2010 07:06:48 PM PST - After receiving several public bashings amid unprecedented political and community pressure for school reform, leaders of the Los Angeles teacher's union said Wednesday that they are not "the villains of education."

Union leaders also laid out their plan to push for teacher-led reforms, as they prepare for a new round of salary negotiations with school district officials.

The teachers union has faced growing criticism in recent months from Los Angeles Unified officials, community groups and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa for opposing key proposals for school improvement, including key changes to teacher evaluations and the hiring and firing process of educators.

At a news conference Wednesday, labor leaders denounced the idea that they are "defenders of the status quo."

"Too often we are painted as greedy and uncaring, well today, we are setting the record straight.. that is not true and we are pushing back," said Julie Washington, a vice-president for United Teachers Los Angeles.

Facing one of the toughest rounds of contract negotiations to date, UTLA leaders said they want LAUSD to stabilize schools by reducing staff layoffs. Union leaders also said they wanted to push for more freedom for educators to decide how they teach state required subjects and how they measure student success.

"District mandated programs have killed ingenuity," said teacher Queena Kim, who works at the UCLA Community School in Koreatown. However, union leaders maintained their opposition to using test scores and to the elimination of the seniority system, which forces the district to keep teachers who have worked with LAUSD the longest, regardless of performance, during layoffs.

In an interview this week, LAUSD Superintendent Ramon Cortines said he saw the union as a critical and integral part of the district, however he said recently his own negotiation invitations to labor leaders have gone ignored.

"I've always felt the union has to be a part of the reform agenda," Cortines said. "But they cannot continue to stonewall."

Union leaders said they have not turned down any district negotiation meetings.

Some in the community though have grown increasingly impatient with the union, including Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who last week blasted the teacher's union as "one unwavering roadblock to reform."

"We all welcome a more progressive teachers union in Los Angeles .... but up until now they have been the party of no," said LAUSD school board member Yolie Flores.

FORMER NEW ACADEMY CHARTER SCHOOL PRINCIPAL PLEADS GUILTY TO EMBEZZLING $1.3 MILLION+

Ruben Vives - LA Times/LA Now | http://lat.ms/ewzC2V

December 15, 2010 |  9:27 pm - The former principal of NEW Academy Canoga Park charter school has pleaded guilty to embezzlement, the Los Angeles County district attorney's office said in a statement Wednesday.

Edward Peter Fiszer, 40, pleaded guilty to one count of embezzlement by a public officer and admitted that the dollar-value exceeded $1.3 million, the statement said. Fiszer was immediately sentenced to five years in state prison by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Judith Champagne and  ordered to pay $1,428,485.15 in restitution to the school.

Prosecutors said Fiszer embezzled more than $1.4 million between 2008 and 2009 by obtaining nearly two dozen cashier's checks from school accounts and depositing them in an Ameritrade account to trade stocks. He was removed as principal in November 2009 after the theft was discovered.

Fiszer was arrested Oct. 4 in West Windsor, N.J., and brought back to Los Angeles by officers investigating the case, the statement said.

Pick ‘n choose: TODAY’S NEWS LINKS

16 Dec: from Google news:

California budget crisis poses new attacks on teachers

World Socialist Web Site - Oliver Richards 

When the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) voted last March in favor of more than 5000 furlough notices, the union's role was clearly to contain ...

 

Villaraigosa re-engages in school reform debate

Daily Breeze

One of Villaraigosa's main campaign platforms in 2005 was to take over the failing Los Angeles Unified School District. That didn't pan out in the ...

 

Vladovic is lone dissenter in LAUSD vote to start school year in August

Daily Breeze - Connie Llanos, Melissa Pamer - ‎

By then, there will no longer be any year-round campuses in the Los Angeles Unified School District. "I have talked to parents up and down my district," ...

QUINCY JONES CUTS RIBBON AT NAMESAKE SCHOOL

Leo Stallworth - ABC7.COM | http://bit.ly/eQ5x8l

Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - SOUTH LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- Music legend Quincy Jones has worked with the top stars, from Frank Sinatra to Michael Jackson, and in more than six decades has picked up dozens of Grammy awards, more than any other living musician. Wednesday another special honor for Jones: the dedication of the new Quincy Jones Elementary School.

It was a special day for faculty students and parents at the Quincy Jones Elementary School in South L.A. None other than musical legend Quincy Jones took part in a special ribbon-cutting to officially open the campus.

"Nothing touches this," said Jones. "I had one when they built a performing arts building at Garfield High School that made me cry. My father would cry. And this one, this is really, really special, in my home town too."

"This is beautiful," said parent Oscar Guzman. "It's a wonderful experience, especially having someone as important as Mr. Jones. And very, very proud, very proud, very emotional."

"It's awesome, just seeing Quincy Jones in the school and the way the Quincy Jones kids are always learning, and we are always trying to learn in this school," said student Rigoberto Mani.

Quincy Jones Elementary School opened nearly two months ago to ease overcrowding at neighborhood schools.

This is the only campus named after Quincy Jones, a 27-time Grammy award winner -- the most of any living musician -- so it was a special day for the folks at the campus.

"So proud to have my kids at this school," said parent Guadalupe Rodriguez. "It's the most beautiful thing that could happen to a parent to have teachers and people dedicated like this."

L.A. Unified School District officials say that with schools learning through jazz music and art education, naming the campus after Quincy Jones is a perfect fit.

"Our children need role models and Quincy Jones represents energy, goodness, excellence," said LAUSD School Board President Monica Garcia.

The Quincy Jones Elementary School campus is part of the LAUSD's current nearly $20-billion new school construction and modernization program.

Compton Trigger/Takeover: McKINLEY PARENTS ALLEGE INTIMIDATION, MICHELLE RHEE COMES TO TOWN

Sandra Poindexter, Ben Welsh Los Angeles Times | http://lat.ms/i8COb7

December 14, 2010 |  7:39 pm | Several parents who are working to have a charter company take over a low-performing Compton elementary school alleged Tuesday that they and their children are being threatened and intimidated by  teachers and other school personnel.

McKinley Elementary 14431 Stanford Ave., Compton, 90220 Public school in the Compton Unified district. Grades K-3 517 students 26 faculty members Source: California Department of Education

The allegations come in the wake of an effort organized by the nonprofit reform group Parent Revolution to force the Compton Unified School District to bring in a charter operator to run McKinley Elementary School, which has struggled for years to raise student test scores. Charters are independently run, publicly financed schools that are mostly non-unionized. Last week, supporters presented the district with a petition signed by 62% of McKinley parents in the first use of California’s new “parent trigger” law, under which a majority of parents can force sweeping changes at a school. But at a news conference held at a local church, several parents who signed the petition said that they have been harassed, threatened with deportation and told that the charter would not accept children with low potential or special needs.

Marlene Romero said that her son’s third-grade teacher asked to speak to her about his education and then spent an hour telling her why she shouldn’t support the petition drive.

“I want the principal and all the teachers to stop intimidating parents and especially our kids,” Romero said. “It’s really sad. My son told me he hated me for what I’m doing. I told him that I’m doing this for his future.”

The parents were joined by Michelle Rhee, the former Washington, D.C., public schools chancellor who heads the recently-formed reform group Students First. She urged district administrators to create ground rules for acceptable and unacceptable behavior by employees.

“If [educators] are saying that parents need to get more involved ... we cannot create a hostile environment” when parents speak up, Rhee said.  

Neither district officials nor McKinley Principal Fleming Robinson returned calls seeking comment. In a statement issued last week, Robinson said some parents who signed the petition reported that they were harassed and misinformed by organizers.

“Some have said they signed the petition but were harassed or signed under false pretenses, which included beautifying the school,” Robinson said. “A lot of parents weren’t given clear information on what the petition was for.”

He said the school is working closely with parents and the community to increase student achievement.

LOOKING FOR ONLINE LEARNING EXEMPLARS

Posted by Eduflack  (Patrick Riccards) |  http://bit.ly/h87A4q

12/15/2010 10:09 AM | Without question, K-12 virtual education opportunities are gaining more and more attention as late.  Earlier this month, the Digital Learning Council — under the leadership of former governors Jeb Bush and Bob Wise — released its Digital Learning Now! report.   In it, the new group offered up its 10 elements of high-quality digital education.

The 10 elements are core to learning success, whether it be digital or otherwise.  By focusing on issues such as student eligibility, student access, personalized learning, advancement, content, instruction, providers, assessment and accountability, funding, and delivery, the DLC makes clear that digital learning is central to the 21st century learning environment.  Online learning is no longer a topic left to the periphery.  It is core to modern-day instruction.

But the DLC's outline of how begs a very important question — who?  This week, Eduflack was talking with a school district that is quite interested in expanding its digital learning offerings and take a major step forward in offering e-instruction and online offerings to its students.  Anticipating the time and expense involved in such forward progress, school officials were looking to do some site visits with other school districts in state.  The list of "success stories" was relatively short, but a few districts kept popping up.

After some exploration, though, a big problem arose.  The districts that were identified as best practice for online learning in the state were districts that failed to meet AYP this year.  Knowing that, can one look to model instructional practice from a district that can't make adequate yearly progress?  It might not be fair, but AYP is the most important measure a school district faces today.  Any step one takes to improve or enhance instruction should result in improved student achievement.

It would be terrific if every state were a state like Florida, with a strong and successful online learning network that can be modeled and borrowed and stolen from.  But in this day and age, we first look to our own backyards to see what is done, particularly as we emphasize the need to demonstrate proficiency on state assessment exams.  So while we'd all love to replicate what the Florida Virtual School may be doing, we're first going to look at what the neighboring county or the district with similar demographics on the other side of the state is up to.

It is no secret that K-12 education believes in modeling.  Few want to be first to market; everyone wants to do what a fellow successful state, district, school, or teacher is doing.  This is particularly true for digital learning, where so few truly understand it and so few are actually doing it well.  So how do we know who is an appropriate model?  Where is it happening in a district, a school, and with kids like mine?  And how do we determine if a district is indeed worth modeling?

Eduflack is all ears for those who want to identify examples of school districts who have been particularly successful in developing online learning programs, particularly those LEAs who can demonstrate return on their investment, both in usage and in student achievement.  Who wants in?  Where are our exemplars for district-based online learning programs?

SCHOOL BOARD APPROVES NEW PARENT POLICY: MEDIA REPORTS ON CALENDAR CHANGE + SPONSORSHIP PROGRAMS INSTEAD

Could that be because parents feel they were not engaged or listened-to on any of it, just informed?

today’s LAUSD headlines from google news: 15 Dec 2010

LAUSD votes to start school year 2 weeks early

Daily Breeze

The Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education tonight approved a proposal to start the school year about two weeks earlier than usual in hopes ...

LAUSD Approves Corporate Sponsorship for Programs

LAist - Lisa Brenner, Lindsay William-Ross 

Calling it a "new and creative approach in raising revenue for the general fund," Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Ramon Cortines is ...

LAUSD approves earlier start date for students

Los Angeles Daily News - Connie Llanos 

Los Angeles Unified officials approved an earlier start to the year for all schools Tuesday, while also changing district ...

LAUSD to vote on earlier academic calendar

abc7.com

As part of a test run for the proposal, 18 LAUSD schools began operating under the advanced schedule this year. School district officials said the earlier ...

LAUSD considers corporate sponsors on campus

abc7.com

(KABC) -- The Los Angeles Unified School District is set to consider a plan to allow companies to pay to put their logos on school campuses. ...

LA Unified, by Nike?

Los Angeles Times

But today, LA's schools have their backs to the wall financially, so we are reluctantly supporting a proposal by the Los Angeles Unified School District to ...

LAUSD Proposes Earlier Start to School Year

Patch - Vicki Gonzalez 

"You don't just open schools with a key," says Beaty of Eagle Rock High School. "You open them with a lot of people." Changing the school district's ...

Does visual skills training improve reading outcomes? KCBS IN LOS ANGELES TO AIR REPORT ON PILOT PROJECT OUTCOMES TONIGHT

from an e-mail from Gemstone Foundation

Today, December 15, 2010, KCBS Channel 2 in Los Angeles plans to air a report on our results at Ann Street Elementary School.  We have been informed that the segment will show during the 11 o'clock news tonight.  Please tune in if you can, and send us feedback-- We'll also post a link once the piece is posted to the CBS website, so those of you not in the viewing area can see it.

smf: This is the third warning on this imminent broadcast in 4LAKidsNews - hopefully three’s the charm! This project is near and dear to me – I suffer from Convergence Insufficiency and have since I was very young.  As an aged poster child I feel this work – and the new internet-driven treatment – is great news. I am a happy and not exactly uncritical supporter of Gemstone’s Foundations’ efforts!

Pilot Subjects at Ann Street

And the Research Continues...
You will recall that we found improvements in oral reading fluency following visual skills training at Ann Street Elementary School, via an internet orthoptics program.  The comparison group to show progress in that study - as in all of our previous work - was students with visual skill problems who did not receive the intervention. 

At Ann Street we found, as elsewhere, that the difference in fluency gains was significantly larger for trained vs untrained students.

During the current school year, 2010-2011, we are conducting a more rigorous study at 3 additional elementary schools in Los Angeles:  Gardner Street, Tom Bradley, and Plummer.  This study, which is supported by NIH grant EY017414, has random assignment of students to a comparison treatment group (the students will get math training at the same time and in the same classroom as the vision training group), and also includes a no-treatment control group.  Although the design is much more rigorous scientifically than the pilot project was, the experimental question remains the same:  Does visual skills training improve reading outcomes?

If all goes well, we should have the results of that study next summer.  We'll keep you posted!

New Clips to Explain "Eyes in Conflict"
In our continuing effort to inform the public that visual skill level can affect various aspects of behavior, we've collaborated with others to create 2 new pieces for you.
This one is very short, and simply calls parents' attention to what we are now calling "Eyes in Conflict," and how it can interfere with reading..
And this one is quite entertaining -- It's a video of our frog mascot, Ribbert Popeyes, trying to coordinate his eyes so he can catch flies better.  Enjoy!
And Finally...

Here is a video we produced last year describing our work.  It's nearly 10 minutes long, so you might want to try the 3-minute version first.

Rise of the iKids: SCHOOLS TEST iPADS IN CLASSROOMS

By Bruce Newman | San Jose Mercury News | http://bit.ly/hOjts1

12/15/2010 - Before, during and even between classes at Hillbrook School this fall, seventh-graders have been spotted on the Los Gatos campus, sometimes burbling Spanish or Mandarin phrases into the glowing screen in their hands, other times staring into it like a looking glass. <Teacher, Christina Pak, helps Chase Kerley use his iPad during history class at Hillbrook School in Los Gatos on Nov. 22, 2010. The school is one of a handful that has issued iPads to students to use in the classroom as well as home. (all photos @ Hillbrook HS/all photos Gary Reyes /Mercury News) iPads -- the Apple of almost every adolescent's eye -- are being provided to students at several Bay Area public and private schools this year, including Hillbrook, which claims to be the only K-8 school in America using tablet computers in class and sending them home. This has led to a lot of 12-year-olds swanning around the wooded hillside campus, talking to their iPads. Summoning up a virtual keyboard recently, Sophie Greene quickly typed a note to herself in iCal, a calendar program, then played back an audio file in which she was speaking Spanish. "We record a conversation, e-mail it to our teacher, Señorita Kelly," she explained, "then she critiques the lesson in Spanish and sends that back to us." For the 28 seventh-graders entrusted with iPads at Hillbrook, the pictures that flash across the device's screen open a window to a wider world. The iPad allows them to take daily excursions across time and space to such exotic ports as ancient Mesopotamia and modern China. The only drawback is that with their assignments all composed on iPads, the one excuse that no longer works for Hillbrook's seventh-graders is, "The dog ate my homework."

'A game-changer'

At Archbishop Mitty High School in San Jose -- which introduced 32 iPads into the classroom this fall -- the devices are used only in class. And Stanford's School of Medicine gave 92 iPads outright to its first-year students this September. At Hillbrook, which received its iPads last summer as a gift from the parents of two students, seventh-graders such as Sophie slip the handheld devices into backpacks at the end of the school day. Hillbrook's program has been such a hit that it will be expanded next year to include eighth-graders.

As the high-tech tablets complete the first phase of these academic tests, the future of the iPad as an educational tool is raising questions about whether the most plugged-in technology will remain the exclusive digital domain of the wealthiest schools.

With studies about the value of computers in the classroom indicating that results are "all over the map," according to one local educator, low-income schools aren't even sure what they might be missing.

"The achievement gap is alive and well," said Judith McGarry, Rocketship Education's director of development. "Private schools and very wealthy public school districts are absolutely going to have all sorts of resources to throw at their kids. We believe that in our society, all children need to be technologically literate."

Rocketship, the award-winning nonprofit charter school network with three San Jose schools, recently declined a donation of iPads from two large Silicon Valley companies, preferring to wait until more textbooks are published digitally.

Woodside High School recently acquired about 25 iPads for Mandarin language classes, but quickly reassigned a handful for Aaron Blanding's special ed classes for students with orthopedic impairments. "It's maybe not as important academically," Blanding said, "but our kids like that when they take them into general education classes, they hear the other kids talking about how cool they are."

Hillbrook English teacher Tom Bonoma hopes he never has to go back to teaching the old way.

"The iPad has really been a game-changer," he said. "It allows us to do a lot of things in real time that weren't possible before." During a class discussion of "A Raisin in the Sun," a play about a struggling black family set in postwar Chicago, students used Animation Creator HD to record their interpretations of a scene. "It puts the sugar in the medicine of taking notes," Bonoma said. "They suddenly look forward to doing that because they get to interact with this gadget."

No-brainer trainer

Apple essentially had cornered the consumer tablet market when administrators at Hillbrook, Mitty, University High School in San Francisco and San Domenico in Marin were considering the iPad last summer as an educational implement.

"It seemed clear to us that it's a revolutionary kind of tool," said Brent Hinrichs, Hillbrook's head of middle school. "It gets everyone involved all the time. That interaction is critical in having them think and experience every moment that they're in the classroom."

Revolutionary or not, using it as an educational tool was so untested that "tech mentor" Elise Marinkovich had to configure the iPads herself. Trying to figure out how to block Facebook, and to install the kid-friendly browser from Mobicip, she made countless visits to the Genius Bar at the Los Gatos Apple Store. All the effort paid off.

During a recent Hillbrook history class, students fetched files on the achievements of ancient Mesopotamians, wrote several paragraphs about them on the Pages app, inserted photographs from Geo Photo Explorer, then e-mailed their work to teacher Christina Pak. She projected results onto an interactive "smart board" for discussion. You can almost imagine Elroy Jetson asking her a question by instant message.

So far, only one of the $500 tablets has been damaged badly enough to require repair. "It's an educational tool," said Marinkovich, who was thrilled when head of school Mark Silver decided the kids should be trusted to take their iPads home. "If we just stop it at school, how is that helping them?"

Mixed results

Mitty administrators weren't ready to make that leap, although the school may loosen its policy next year. "The interface is very open and collaborative, and I think it fosters a lot of independent inquiry and research," said Lisa Brunolli, an assistant principal in charge of the school's test program. "But it quickly became frustrating that students couldn't take them home and use them for homework."

Rocketship's schools don't use computers of any kind in the classroom, believing them to be a distraction from "the social learning experience," according to McGarry. But they do promote online literacy with computer labs, and are conducting research of their own on whether computers are a help or a hindrance to learning. "We think they're helping," McGarry says.

Books for the current school year had already been purchased when iPads were added to backpacks at schools where tablets are being tried out. Educators cling to the hope that they will be able to buy selected chapters of textbooks for use on the tablets, the way music fans pick individual songs on iTunes.

That would suit Sophie just fine. "In sixth grade my backpack was 27 pounds," she said. "Ohhhh, my back! It was so sore. This would definitely lighten it. And it would be way more eco-friendly."

Spoken like a true iKid.

who's got tablets

• Archbishop Mitty High School in San Jose distributed 32 iPads to students to use only in class.
  
• Hillbrook School in Los Gatos received iPads as a gift from parents of two students. Hillbrook seventh-graders get to take them home at the end of the day.
  
• Woodside High School recently got iPads for Mandarin language classes, but reassigned some for special ed students.
  
• Rocketship, a charter school network in San Jose, recently declined a donation of iPads from two large Silicon Valley companies, preferring to wait until more textbooks are published digitally.

UCLA Ed Budget Forum: ANOTHER DOSE OF BROWN GLOOM AND DOOM

The latest on California politics and government

Posted by Kevin Yamamura, SacBee CapitolAlert | http://bit.ly/fWAEyL

December 14, 2010 - In Round 2 of his budget roadshow, Gov.-elect Jerry Brown is trying his hardest to shellshock a California electorate that has grown weary of bad fiscal news over the last decade.

Brown called the situation "an unprecedented moment of reckoning," "a perfect storm," and suggested the budget crisis might have worse impacts than during the Great Depression because government played a smaller role in people's lives at that time.

He appeared with fiscal officials Tuesday at UCLA to focus on education finance, and he acknowledged that more cuts are on the way. The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office already assumes a $2 billion reduction in K-12 and community college funding for 2011-12 before lawmakers and Brown begin tackling the $25 billion to $28 billion deficit.

The Democrat made it clear he's not interested in one-time budget solutions -- more commonly dubbed gimmicks in Capitol parlance -- though he acknowledged that such provisions have allowed state leaders to "get out of town" and avoid tougher choices on cuts and taxes. Brown called those "non-solution solutions" since they push the problems to the next year.

Brown tried to convey the enormity of the deficit by pointing out how much the state would spend on major programs without any cuts. He noted that spending on Medi-Cal is $17.6 billion, prisons is $9 billion and welfare-to-work is $3 billion.

While Brown hasn't yet called for more tax revenues, he referred to the deficit as only a fraction of the state's overall wealth. He also included charts showing that California ranks poorly on expenditures per student and staff per student -- data sets often used in arguing for more money for schools. And he called the U.S. income inequality gap a "societal crisis."

DEFICIT DIALOGUE

By Jeff Simering, Director of Legislation, Council of Great City Schools|from Nov/Dec Urban Educator | http://www.cgcs.org/UE/Nov_Dec10.pdf

The recent elections, the Tea Party movement, and the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility all converge on controlling the federal deficit. Yet, much of the action so far during the lame-duck session of the 111th Congress would add to the national debt. The high level negotiations between Congressional leaders and the White House over the Bush-era tax rates and the estate tax, the Obama tax cuts of 2009, the extended unemployment insurance benefits, and the FY11 appropriations all boost the national debt.

The irony of having a political debate about lowering the deficit while having members vote to do the opposite is more than even the most cynical Washington-watchers can bear. The proposal to reduce the deficit by $700 billion over 10 years by not renewing the current top-tier tax rates and other big-ticket tax breaks is not likely to survive the political need to not raise taxes on anyone -- even the most affluent. Reports of a tentative agreement between the White House and selected members of Congress would cost nearly $900 billion primarily over the next two years, including nearly $130 billion for the expiring top tax breaks and the estate tax; $112 billion for a 2 percent payroll tax cut for everyone, $56 billion for extended unemployment insurance; $44 billion in tax credits for the poor, children, and higher education coursework; $112 billion for business investments; and $380 billion to extend the middle class and lower income tax breaks and adjust the alternative mimimum tax. Believe it or not, the pending agreement exceeds the cost of the 2009 Stimulus legislation or the 2008 bank bailout--and none of it is paid for. If one thought that the public’s concern about the deficit was Congress’s paramount focus, then the public should think again, for there are higher political priorities now at play.

Outside the Capitol beltway, such stark differences between rhetoric and reality appear simply nonsensical. But,

many examples of such behavior can be found even in the education arena. There is widespread concern that the most critical education programs are inadequately funded, but new programs are being created in a way that will compete with the limited resources that do exist. In addition, there has been an emphasis on research-based or evidence-based programs over the last 10 years, yet marginally-effective approaches and unproven strategies continue to find their way into the national education agenda. And, with the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) being roundly criticized as punitive, even harsher actions have been imposed under the Stimulus “reform” programs. Expecting Washington to be consistent is often a fool’s errand.

In any case, there appear to be higher priorities for both the political right and left than deficit reduction, despite all the noise about the nation’s debt. The Council of the Great City Schools does not usually take positions on such mega-tax policies now under congressional consideration. But, the spasm of new tax and other expenditures that the proposed tax deal represents will do nothing but create an atmosphere where members of Congress will later claim that they can’t increase education investments because all the money is gone. And one need look no further than the proposed education freezes in the Continuing Resolution (H.R. 3082) now pending in Congress for evidence to support that claim.

It is notable that the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility has emphasized the need for America to invest in economic growth and competitiveness, including education, infrastructure, and research. Yet, the Commission’s main charge to the White House and Congress is to “put up or shut up” on the national deficit and debt. In the short run, it doesn’t look like we will see either one.

REPORT OF THE RABEN GROUP: Federal Education Policy and Funding in the 111th Congress …looking forward to the 112th Congress - Report to the LAUSD Board of Education

made by Joel Packer to the LAUSD Board - Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Federal Education Policy and Funding 2010 & 2011: Report to the LAUSD Board of Education

EDUCATION FILLS BIG SPACE ON BROWN’S CHALKBOARD

As the governor-elect prepares to take office, California's schools are confronted by a lack of funding that threatens to further harm pupils and a controversial reform movement that could dramatically reshape how classrooms are run.

 

Gov.-elect Jerry Brown won't necessarily be in lockstep with teachers unions, which supported him in his successful campaign against Republican Meg Whitman. (Justin Sullivan, Getty Images / December 13, 2010)

By Seema Mehta, Los Angeles Times | http://lat.ms/hC4Svj

December 14, 2010 - As Gov.-elect Jerry Brown prepares to take office, major headwinds are buffeting the biggest component of his upcoming budget: California's schools. They are being confronted by a lack of funding that threatens to further harm pupils and a controversial reform movement that could dramatically reshape how classrooms are run.

Most immediate and pressing is the state's fiscal crisis — a $28-billion gap is forecast for the next 18 months. How that will affect school districts already reeling from years of multibillion-dollar cuts will be the subject of Brown's second budget forum, which is scheduled for Tuesday in Los Angeles.

"Jerry Brown is entering office at a moment when the capacity of the system is weaker than any time in recent memory," said John Rogers, director of the Institute for Democracy, Education and Access at UCLA. "I worry we may be reaching a breaking point."

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Schools' financial health is intricately tied to the state budget because roughly 40% of it is earmarked for K-12 education. In recent years, as legislators struggled to close large deficits, schools have seen round after round of funding cuts — $21 billion in the last two years alone. California's per-pupil spending is now lower than that in nearly every other state, resulting in widespread teacher layoffs, the cancellation of summer school, the shortening of the school year and the overcrowding of classrooms.

Educators say the state is seeing the result of these actions — the dropout rate rose three points, to 22%, in the 2008-09 school year — and fear that more cuts could push some districts into insolvency.

"I attribute the increase in the dropout rate to some extent on the budget cuts — fewer counselors, fewer classes in music and the arts, less career-technical education," said Jack O'Connell, the outgoing state superintendent of public instruction.

Brown, who has called finding more funding for schools a "very top priority," acknowledges the difficulty of doing so in tough economic times.

"I'd like to get as much money for the schools as I can, but there's only as much money as the economy and the taxpayers make available," he said in October.

His focus on education has evolved during his four decades in public life. Even among his supporters, Brown is viewed as having had little interest in the topic during his previous stint as governor (1975-1983).

"I don't think he had a huge mark on education in his first two terms," said Michael Kirst, a Stanford University professor and Brown advisor who served on the state Board of Education when Brown was last governor. "What changed is that he got to be mayor of Oakland, and he took over at a time the school district was imploding."

Brown sought mayoral control of Oakland's failing schools but never achieved it. He did gain the power to appoint three members to the school board, but failed to have a real effect on the district.

Brown's advisors say his experiences tangling with the district's bureaucracy, as well as his founding of two charter schools in the city, gave him both an interest in improving education in California and concrete ideas on how to do it.

"That really transformed him," Kirst said. "When I began discussing education with him again for this race, it was like talking with a school administrator.… He could talk about teachers and how to evaluate them. He hired and fired several principals. He has an on-the-ground operational grasp of education."

The charter experience also led to his skepticism of the national education reform movement.

Among other things, reform advocates have focused on dramatically altering the way teachers are hired, evaluated and fired, which has caused major clashes with teachers unions. Some proposals include instituting merit pay, tying teachers' evaluations to their students' performance and altering a tenure system that makes it difficult to fire ineffective teachers and a seniority system that leads to layoffs of effective but young instructors.

These issues gained prominence when the Obama administration began pushing them last year, using the federal Race to the Top competition as leverage. That competition for billions of federal dollars, at a time when many states were facing budget deficits, prodded California and other states to implement legislative changes aligned with the reforms. California failed to qualify for the federal money in two Race to the Top rounds because it did not win significant backing from unions and districts and because other states enacted more reforms.

Parents in Compton this week became the first in the state to tap a school-turnaround law prompted by the Race to the Top competition when they petitioned to turn an elementary school into a charter. And Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a former organizer for the United Teachers Los Angeles, savaged the group's leadership, describing it as the "one unwavering roadblock to reform."

Brown has expressed serious reservations about some of those proposals.

"Look, we're facing big changes, and people who haven't been around always want to reinvent the wheel with yesterday's tried-and-failed programs," Brown told representatives of the California Teachers Assn. in June.

He was even more blunt last year, when as the state's attorney general he weighed in on Race to the Top. He castigated the draft regulations as simplistic, unproven and overly "top-down, Washington-driven" and called for a "little humility."

"What we have at stake are the impressionable minds of the children of America. You are not collecting data or devising standards for operating machines or establishing a credit score," he wrote in the August 2009 letter. "In the draft you have circulated, I sense a pervasive technocratic bias and an uncritical faith in the power [of] social science."

During his gubernatorial campaign, Brown released an education plan that many experts criticized as lacking specifics. Kirst suggested he would occupy a middle ground.

"Declaring war from Day One on your employees is not the strategy here," he said. "He's going to see if there are any agreements that can be reached, rather than declaring teachers organizations and employee organizations the enemies."

Teachers unions spent millions of dollars supporting Brown against Republican Meg Whitman. But as mayor, Brown repeatedly clashed with teachers unions, and they don't expect him to walk in lockstep now.

Educators, academics, labor leaders and others will parse the governor-elect's words and actions to try to get an idea of his focus.

"A huge question for Brown is will he pull together his mental energy and innovative instincts to really focus on education over time," said Bruce Fuller, a UC Berkeley professor who worked for Brown on education issues in the early 1980s. "I don't think he's yet shown that he has that kind of passion about uplifting the schools. That remains a big question as he starts to appoint key advisors and figure out the priorities of his first term."

WHAT INTERNATIONAL TEST SCORES REALLY TELL US: Lessons buried in PISA report

By William J. Mathis | Washington Post/The Answer Sheet | http://wapo.st/eh4IMX

Guest blog by William J. Mathis of Goshen, Vermont - managing director of the National Education Policy Center and a former Vermont superintendent. The views expressed are his own.

9:30 AM ET, 12/12/2010 - For the 27th, government officials have yet again been surprised, shocked and dismayed over the latest international test score rankings. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said, “We have to see this as a very serious wake-up call.” Former Reagan education official Chester E. Finn Jr. reported that he was “kind of stunned” by the results of the Program for International Student Achievement (PISA) results. In hyperbolic overdrive, he compared the results to Pearl Harbor and Sputnik.

The PISA tests were given to 15-year-old students by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 65 nations and educational systems. Nine had higher average scores in reading, 17 in math, and 12 in science.

While ranking nations on test scores is a pretty sorry way to evaluate education systems, there is simply no reason to expect the results to have been any better than they were the last time we heard from this same chorus of surprised, shocked and dismayed pundits and politicians.

The reason is simple. Federal and state policymakers continue to embrace reforms that have little positive effect (if not downright negative effects) while ignoring reforms that make a difference. Buried within the PISA report is an analysis of educational systems that registered high test scores. Here are some of the less-reported findings:·

• The best performing school systems manage to provide high-quality education to all children.
• Students from low socio-economic backgrounds score a year behind their more affluent classmates. However, poorer students who are integrated with their more affluent classmates score strikingly higher. The difference is worth more than a year’s education.
• In schools where students are required to repeat grades (such as with promotion requirements), the test scores are lower and the achievement gap is larger.
• Tracking students (“ability grouping”) results in the gap becoming wider. The earlier the practice begins, the greater the gap. Poor children are more frequently shunted into the lower tracks.
• Systems that transfer weak or disruptive students score lower on tests and on equity. One-third of the differences in national performance can be ascribed to this one factor.
• Schools that have autonomy over curriculum, finances and assessment score higher.
• Schools that compete for students (vouchers, charters, etc.) show no achievement score advantage.
• Private schools do no better once family wealth factors are considered.
• Students that attended pre-school score higher, even after more than 10 years.

As OECD Paris-based official Michael Davidson said in National Public Radio comments, “One of the striking things is the impact of social background on (U.S.) success.”

Twenty percent of U.S. performance was attributed to social background, which is far higher than in other nations. Davidson went on to point out that the United States just does not distribute financial resources or quality teachers equally. In a related finding, students from single-parent homes score much lower in the United States than they do in other countries. The 23-point difference is almost a year’s lack of growth.

Our Educational Policies

Unfortunately, federal and state policies do little to adopt these factors that other nations have found so successful. Countless finance studies show that funding across our schools is inequitable and inadequate. Federal and state governments vaguely note this concern but actions do not match the rhetoric. Our treatment of economically deprived students is to house them in segregated schools and shunt them into tracked programs.

A number of “get tough” social promotion policies have been adopted in states even though we know they are harmful. Despite a clear research consensus, early education is still politically disputed. Tracking students still remains the national norm even as we know it increases the achievement gap.

As the federal government (under both Republican and Democratic administrations) has become even more top-down and prescriptive, local schools become less autonomous and less like our successful international counterparts. Finally, the push for privatizing public education through charters, tuition tax credits, vouchers and the like does not result in better test scores and has the effect of increasing segregation, and the inequalities that lead to low test scores.

The American Dream

The American dream is that all children have an opportunity to be successful no matter how humble their roots. Thus, the most troubling finding in the PISA results is the lack of “resilience” among our children.

OECD measured resilience by looking at the scores of the least wealthy 25% of students and seeing what proportion of these students have academic scores in the top 25% of countries with similar socio-economic levels. In the highest scoring nations, 70 percent of the students are rated resilient.

The U. S. figure is less than 30%. In a nation which sees the top 1% controlling more than 50% of the nation’s wealth and the collapse of middle class jobs, we face the specter of building a country of social, economic and educational apartheid.

Secretary Duncan calls the PISA scores a serious wake-up call for our economy and “international competitiveness.” But that is merely to misunderstand economics and global competitiveness. Due to our pursuit of ineffective and ill-focused educational and economic reforms , the rude disturbance of our slumbers is the slamming of the door on the American dream.

WHAT WORKS IN THE CLASSROOM? ASK THE STUDENTS: Students Know Good Teaching When They Get It, Survey Finds

By SAM DILLON | NEW YORK TIMES | http://nyti.ms/eDn16m

December 11, 2010 | How useful are the views of public school students about their teachers?

Quite useful, according to preliminary results released on Friday from a $45 million research project that is intended to find new ways of distinguishing good teachers from bad.

Teachers whose students described them as skillful at maintaining classroom order, at focusing their instruction and at helping their charges learn from their mistakes are often the same teachers whose students learn the most in the course of a year, as measured by gains on standardized test scores, according to a progress report on the research.

< Document:  Learning about Teaching | http://bit.ly/fSmf6A

Financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the two-year project involves scores of social scientists and some 3,000 teachers and their students in Charlotte, N.C.; Dallas; Denver; Hillsborough County, Fla., which includes Tampa; Memphis; New York; and Pittsburgh.

The research is part of the $335 million Gates Foundation effort to overhaul the personnel systems in those districts.

Statisticians began the effort last year by ranking all the teachers using a statistical method known as value-added modeling, which calculates how much each teacher has helped students learn based on changes in test scores from year to year.

Now researchers are looking for correlations between the value-added rankings and other measures of teacher effectiveness.

Research centering on surveys of students’ perceptions has produced some clear early results.

Thousands of students have filled out confidential questionnaires about the learning environment that their teachers create. After comparing the students’ ratings with teachers’ value-added scores, researchers have concluded that there is quite a bit of agreement.

Classrooms where a majority of students said they agreed with the statement, “Our class stays busy and doesn’t waste time,” tended to be led by teachers with high value-added scores, the report said.

The same was true for teachers whose students agreed with the statements, “In this class, we learn to correct our mistakes,” and, “My teacher has several good ways to explain each topic that we cover in this class.”

The questionnaires were developed by Ronald Ferguson, a Harvard researcher who has been refining student surveys for more than a decade.

Few of the nation’s 15,000 public school districts systematically question students about their classroom experiences, in contrast to American colleges, many of which collect annual student evaluations to improve instruction, Dr. Ferguson said.

“Kids know effective teaching when they experience it,” he said.

“As a nation, we’ve wasted what students know about their own classroom experiences instead of using that knowledge to inform school reform efforts.”

Until recently, teacher evaluations were little more than a formality in most school systems, with the vast majority of instructors getting top ratings, often based on a principal’s superficial impressions.

But now some 20 states are overhauling their evaluation systems, and many policymakers involved in those efforts have been asking the Gates Foundation for suggestions on what measures of teacher effectiveness to use, said Vicki L. Phillips, a director of education at the foundation.

One notable early finding, Ms. Phillips said, is that teachers who incessantly drill their students to prepare for standardized tests tend to have lower value-added learning gains than those who simply work their way methodically through the key concepts of literacy and mathematics.

Teachers whose students agreed with the statement, “We spend a lot of time in this class practicing for the state test,” tended to make smaller gains on those exams than other teachers.

“Teaching to the test makes your students do worse on the tests,” Ms. Phillips said. “It turns out all that ‘drill and kill’ isn’t helpful.”

“A HISTORY OF MISTAKES” & DEAD KIDS: LA's Dept. of Children & Family Services Ploehn out; Jimenez in

california’s children blog | http://bit.ly/hpWVIz

UPDATE December 13: 12/13/2010 - The Los Angeles Times reported today that LA County CEO William Fujioka has "removed Trish Ploehn" (at left) as the $260K/year director of the Dept. of Children and Family Services. According to the article, Ploehn will handle "administrative work" in Fujioka's office, "unrelated to child welfare."

Fujioka plans to request approval by the Board of Supervisors to appoint one of his deputies as interim director. That deputy is likely to be Antonia Jimenez, Alsop said.

Jimenez, left, who has little child welfare experience, arrived at the county earlier this year. She has previous experience as an senior manager at Deloitte, the management consulting firm, and in Massachusetts state government, including the governor’s office.

Since arriving in Los Angeles, she quickly gained the confidence of her superiors for her management expertise and has been admired for her reputation as a turnaround expert.

Previously published on this story:

Trish Ploehn, 56, chief of the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, is expected to be "reassigned" to a position somewhere else within the county system, according to an article in Saturday's Los Angeles Times written by Garrett Therolf. Reporter Therolf, who, for the past few years has been tracking the underreported deaths of children under the supervision of DCFS, writes:

... the Board of Supervisors increasingly criticized Ploehn's performance... In recent months, she hired an attorney to write a letter alleging that they had created a hostile work environment for her, according to a source familiar with the matter. ...top county leaders have acknowledged that the department is in crisis, with a massive backlog of open investigations into child-abuse allegations and a history of mistakes in the oversight of abused and neglected children that sometimes contributed to their injuries or deaths. ...[Ploehn] has worked ... as a youth counselor, adoption specialist and emancipation services worker. In 2003, she became deputy director, and in 2006, she became the first director to be selected from inside the department. She earned about $260,000 last year, making her among the top 200 highest paid county officials.

With 170,000 child abuse hotline calls a year, and 7,300 employees, running the department is one of the most difficult management tasks in local government.

During her tenure, Ploehn has been credited with improving the stability of placements for the 30,000 children living, under the department's active supervision, with family members or in foster care. She also improved education opportunities for some of the foster children.

HOW WILL THE NUTRITION BILL CHANGE SCHOOL LUNCHES?

By: Veronica Devore | PBS NewsHour RunDown Blog | http://to.pbs.org/g4QrcF

December 13, 2010 at 10:44 AM EDT - President Obama has signed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 into law, a major victory in First Lady Michelle Obama's crusade against child obesity and hunger. The bill increases federal funding for school lunches - by about six cents per meal - for the first time in more than three decades.

The child nutrition legislation, which was approved unanimously in the Senate in August and recently passed the House by a vote of 264 to 157, gives the Secretary of Agriculture the power to set standards for foods sold in schools, including items in "a la carte" lines and vending machines. The legislation also combats child hunger by making more than 100,000 children on Medicaid eligible for free lunches.

A controversial provision in the law regulates the price of lunches served to children from families that earn more than 185 percent of the poverty level. The Congressional Budget Office has said this provision will require some schools to raise their meal prices.

Margo Wootan, Director of Nutrition Policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, says that while definitive nutrition standards are yet to be determined by the Department of Agriculture, the bill represents a major change for the quality of food in the nation's schools.

"This child nutrition bill gets a lot of junk food out of schools and a lot of healthier food into schools," said Wootan. "It is a historic step toward reducing childhood obesity and helping parents feed their children better."

Students from schools across the country, including some participants in the NewsHour's Student Reporting Labs program, submitted photos of their school lunches. Wootan analyzed many of them based on what she believes the new nutrition standards will mandate; her thoughts appear in the photo captions accessible at the NewsHour Website [http://to.pbs.org/g4QrcF] by mouse-overing the photos.

Green Dot’s Animo Justice Charter High School: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A CHARTER SCHOOL FAILS?

“The school was the only one in the Green Dot network that offered classes in English as a Second Language”

Bertha Rodríguez Santos, New America Media, News Report, Translated by Elena Shore | http://bit.ly/ePMLCZ

Dec 13, 2010  - LOS ANGELES—California leads the nation in charter school growth this year, according to a report released last month by The Center for Education Reform.

With 912 charter schools in the state, up 114 from the 2009-2010 academic year, charter administrators are being praised for developing what many believe is one of the most effective models for educating low-income students.

But far less attention has been paid to the closure rate of charter schools. According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, over the past two academic years, 281 charter schools, or about 6 percent of the total open in 2008-09, closed nationwide. In California, there have been 150 closures since in 1992, when the state’s charter school law was enacted, and 72 in just the past three years.

What happens to kids when a charter school fails?

Thalía Saavedra, 17, has a sweet and mild demeanor, but she grows angry when discussing the unexpected closure of her school, Animo Justice Charter High School, earlier this year.

“They didn’t even give up the opportunity to share our opinions,” said Thalia.“They never gave us a voice, they never notified us in advance. They just told us, ‘It’s closing,’ and that’s it.”

The news came one Friday morning in late March, when Saavedra and her classmates were asked to gather in the school gym. The students assumed they were to attend an ordinary assembly, though none was scheduled.

Instead, representatives from Green Dot, the L.A-based charter school network that opened Animo Justice in 2006, informed the students that the school was being shut down in June.

In an interview, Marco Petruzzi, president of Green Dot, blamed the decision on financial problems, low enrollment, and poor academic performance, in addition the failure of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) to provide the school with promised facilities.

Teachers learned the news just 20 minutes before the announcement to students. Green Dot’s chief academic officer, Cristina de Jesús, and vice president of education, Megan Quaile, gave a Power Point presentation on the school’s attendance and test scores, then informed teachers of the closure.

Science teacher Judy Riemenschneider called the process of evaluating and shutting down the school unfair and “truly insulting.”

Another teacher, who asked not to be identified, said she was told not to say anything to students and warned that if she “opened her mouth,” she would be in trouble

The school’s 500 students, meanwhile, were shocked—and devastated. More than 90 percent of them were Latinos, nearly half were English Language Learners, and the school was the only one in the Green Dot network that offered classes in English as a Second Language. Where were students supposed to go? What would happen to the community they had worked so hard to create?

Fast Growth, Big Plans

Founded in 1999, Green Dot is a fast-growing charter-school network that operates 18 schools in Los Angeles and one in New York with public and private funds. Supporters include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Oscar de la Hoya Foundation, the Wachovia Foundation and Wells Fargo bank, among others

On its website, it says it is “leading the charge to transform public education in Los Angeles and beyond so that all children receive the education they need to be successful in college, leadership, and life.” Yet Animo Justice’s problems began even before it was launched.

Originally, Green Dot had sought to take over troubled Jefferson High School, in South Central Los Angeles. But when LAUSD did not allow the charter school network to use the Jefferson facilities as originally planned, Green Dot decided to compete with Jefferson students by opening five charter schools in surrounding neighborhoods, according to Marco Petruzzi.

Animo Justice’s first location was a building between Broadway and 26th Street in South Central L.A. But the next year, the school moved to Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles, where students took classes in 10 portable classrooms installed in the parking lot.

In 2008, the school changed locations again, to a small building, near Long Beach Boulevard in South Central, where it remained until its closure.

The industrial environment wasn’t optimal for academic achievement. Less than a block away, a train passed by every 15 minutes, and the noise made it difficult for students to concentrate, Thalia said.

Ismael “Mike” Sebastián, who followed the school from one campus another and graduated in June, recalled one day when a strong odor from the bathroom’s flooded drainage system gave students bad headaches, and they had to call the paramedics. A sociology teacher said the poor air quality near the school “affects the brain cells.”

Petruzzi acknowledged that the frequent moves and lack of a permanent building contributed to low student enrollment, which in turn added to the school’s financial problems. The school was under-resourced in other ways that hurt achievement.

For example, Thalia said her regular math and English teachers were absent for an entire year. Instead, the classes were taught by substitutes with little experience

Meanwhile, with three principals in four years, the school lacked strong leadership, Riemenschneider said

According to Ed-Data, during the 2008-2009 school year, only 13.9 percent of Animo Justice students were proficient in English Language Arts, a significant drop from 26.9 percent proficiency the previous year. The percentage of students proficient in math dropped from 23.1 percent in 2007-08 to 14 percent in 2008-09

A Strong Community

For all its problems, however, students deeply cared about the school. It was they and parents who chose to combine the word “Justice” with the word “Animo,” a name now borne by all of Green Dot’s L.A. schools. They also chose the school’s colors and the phoenix as the school’s mascot.

The small class size allowed students to form close relationships. Everyone knew each other. Thalia said she considered the school to be her second home: the academic part of her family. Mike Sebastián said the teachers always knew what was going on with the kids.

At first, students were paralyzed by the news. Then, putting their academic lessons on social justice into action, they decided to fight. The next day, they staged a sit-in protest in the hallways instead of attending class.

Several days later, some 400 students spontaneously marched the six miles to Green Dot’s offices on Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles.

“You got your education. Now give us ours. We want justice,” the students’ signs read.

But the students’ chanting and discontent had no effect. Marco Petruzzi met them for two hours to explain the reasons for the closure, but did not change his mind.

Education as a Business

"For them, our education is a business,” Thalia said. “They used grades to try to blame us, but in reality, they were the ones who failed.”

One teacher, who spoke on condition of anonymity, believes Green Dot and other charter school operators mislead students and parents about what they can accomplish. They promise families a high-quality education, but unlike parents in affluent areas like Beverly Hills, low-income parents lack the resources to supplement what the schools can provide, the teacher said. In the end, many charter schools are unable to meet the expectations they set.

“It’s exactly like a factory,” she said. If a school does not perform according to the established parameters, the charter school operator can close it, lay off the teachers, and kick out the students—leaving them in the lurch.

In the interview, Petruzzi responded to the criticisms. “It wasn’t a decision we took lightly...The state is in bankruptcy; there’s not enough funding. The district has broken the law and not given us facilities.

“We did not give up on the students,” he said. “No teachers lost their jobs because of this. We offered placement in other schools. We are just trying to face the very difficult financial situation the best way possible.”

But the teacher who declined to give her name, who taught at the high school for two years, said she and her colleagues were put in a difficult position. Those who dared to support the students in their attempt to save the school were not rehired by Green Dot, she said many had to look for work in other schools or find another career.

Of the 25 teachers who taught classes at Animo Justice, only half returned to teach at Green Dot schools.

Students, meanwhile, were given a list of Green Dot schools they could select from. They were placed at schools through a lottery system and consideration of what schools would be the best fit for Animo Justice students.

Thalia Savedra is attending a charter school outside the Green Dot network. She plans to graduate this coming June—“if they don’t close it down in the middle of the school year.”

• Bertha Rodríguez-Santos, a reporter and editor at El Tequio magazine, has been a newspaper, radio, and TV reporter in Mexico and the United States for 18 years. She produced this story as part of the 2010 NAM Education Beat Fellowship for ethnic media journalists, which is supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

So…. where’s this week’s 4LAKids?

The e-mail server and publisher that distributes the 4LAKids e-mail newsletter is down for ‘routine maintenance’ – whatever that means. The articles are all written+edited and what-not – and are waiting in their little files to go out to your emailbox – waiting only for the programmers with their code and/or the engineers with their little green screwdrivers to work their magic. Which may not be until monday morning

Onwardly – smf

following is the lead article for those who can’t wait:

Creating the swamp.

"When there is evidence of bad public policy, you can safely assume that it took two parties working collaboratively to create the swamp."

As a lover+practitioner of hyperbole+metaphor that that's a lead line that's gonna draw me in - especially if the article's about education. This time it's about public education in NYC, that faraway land of myth and Giants (football but no longer baseball ones) populated with characters like Mayor Bloomberg and Joel Klein ...and their impromptu apprentice Cathie Black.

The article "Cathie Black’s Tenure Trap" | http://huff.to/fCGw0K is by a NY City Schools teacher, Marc Epstein. As Epstein is a high school history teacher I'm trusting that his history is well-researched and correct - but that really doesn’t matter. There is irony and pathos and conflict and angst; the storytelling is excellent and it has a beat you can dance to. And it contains - along with a description of the absurdity that is the NYC Schools - the best definition+puncturing-of the popular misconception of what "Teacher Tenure" is:

"Tenure for public school teachers is not a lifetime sinecure. In most respects it is no different from civil service protections for police, fire, and sanitation workers. You have to have due process in order to fire an employee."

Quoth the mad poet to his bust of Pallas: "Only this, and nothing more."

BUT NEW YORK HAS NO EXCLUSIVE CLAIM TO SMALL CHARACTERS WRIT LARGE - surpassed only by their egos - and possessed with all the answers gained without a credential to whatever ails public education.. We in L.A. have our own ...and this week saw the recharging/re-emergence/reset of The Energizer Bunny and the grand reappearance of his alter ego: The Education Mayor!

Mayor Tony was seemingly everywhere this week. see: http://lat.ms/e0eKc4 - even The Times wonders what he's up to!

He made a self-described major policy address to the Public Policy Institute of California in Sacramento about education reform. Seeing as he was in Sacramento, the subject was the Los Angeles teachers union - which Tony is no longer a fan of. Apparently UTLA is "the one, unwavering roadblock to reform ...they have consistently been the most powerful defenders of the status quo. At every step of the way, when Los Angeles was coming together to effect real change in our public schools, UTLA was there to fight against the change and slow the pace of reform."

'Reform' being the direction the mayor wants to go; the 'status quo' being anything/anywhere else.

This is rather sad in a way - at one time Tony was an organizer for UTLA; when he attempted to unconstitutionally take over LAUSD the the current UTLA leadership supported him. Now the romance is over. Like I said: sad.

In a Huffington Post article [http://huff.to/f9P3h6] Tony waxed poetic: "In the 60s, when I was in school, the California public school system was the gold standard--a national model that complemented our State's image as a land of opportunity." That overworked theme of the mythical golden age is pure balderdash. Read George Skelton's column AN A IN OVERCOMING THE ODDS, below.

Tony was also there in Compton this week - speaking out for the Parent Revolutionaries and tearing down the Compton school district. Gentle readers - there is nothing so important+meaningful to local government and school district officials - and the citizens of any of the smaller cities around L.A.- than the musings of the mayor of Los Angeles on how they are running their cities and schools. They truly appreciate it that our mayor - and one of our assistant city attorneys (Parent Revolutionary-in-chief Ben Austin) are badmouthing and attempting to dismember their school system - the mayor in his spare time, Austin as part of one of his other part-time jobs. Every day I dodge the pothole-the-size-of-a-Buick at San Fernando Road and Avenue 26 I'm reminded that Mayor Tony has other things to fill his time besides running the City of LA. Every gang crime I hear of, every municipal injustice unresolved I wonder if that wasn't a case where Ben Austin might have made a difference - if he wasn't otherwise employed.

There are no magic bullets in public education, no quick fixes - no short cuts to excellence. There is no substitute for the hard work that needs to be done over time. But the 'reformers' pulled the 'parent trigger' anyway in Compton; they played the parent card in a piece of theater so elaborately choreographed it would impress Guy Laliberté, the Cirque du Soleil impresario.

Imagine: Compton parents, all by themselves, not only identified their troubled school - but interviewed and selected the right charter operator to turn it around - and obtained the requisite number of signatures on the petition they wrote. They all but wrote the charter. This wasn't parent driven, it was chauffeured by five paid community organizers employed by Parent Revolution - an unholy-owned subsidiary of Green Dot Public Schools. It's a hostile corporate takeover right out of the corporate arbitrageur playbook - Kohlberg Kravis Roberts couldn't have done it better! And when the dust settled and the masks were off they trotted out the big guns to celebrate their victory ...or at least the scary noise they made. Tony. Ben. Arnold. Gloria Romero. Michelle Rhee. Mission accomplished.

Supermen+women?  No, just the cast that proves the opening quote.

And the kids? ...still waiting.

¡Onward/Adelante! - smf

PS: Imagine my horrified delight at this headline on the education homepage at the Huffington Post: SHOCKING: L.A. SUPERINTENDENT ACCUSED OF MISSPENDING $5 MILLION | http://huff.to/h0KTS7. OMG! (Un)fortunately the story refers to the former Beverly Hills superintendent and alleged shenanigans in the BHUSD Facilities Division. Somehow I don't think that Arianna & Co.suffer from mistaking 90210 for LA ...unless that's Mayor Tony's voice in their GPS.