Part One: THE SINGLE BEST IDEA FOR REFORMING PUBLIC EDUCATION + Part Two: HIGHLIGHTS OF THE DISCUSSION

 

By Steve Denning Contributor, Forbes | http://onforb.es/oBBl7w

The Single Best Idea for Reforming K-12 Education

9/01/2011 @ 5:25PM | I have been asked for my “single best idea for reforming K-12 education”. When you only have one shot, you want to make it count. So I thought I would share my idea here, in case anyone has a brighter insight.

Root cause: factory model of management

To decide what is the single best idea for reforming K-12 education, one needs to figure out what is the biggest problem that the system currently faces. To my mind, the biggest problem is a preoccupation with, and the application of, the factory model of management to education, where everything is arranged for the scalability and efficiency of “the system”, to which the students, the teachers, the parents and the administrators have to adjust. “The system” grinds forward, at ever increasing cost and declining efficiency, dispiriting students, teachers and parents alike.

Given that the factory model of management doesn’t work very well, even in the few factories that still remain in this country, or anywhere else in the workplace for that matter, we should hardly be surprised that it doesn’t work well in education either.

But given that the education system is seen to be in trouble, there is a tendency to think we need “better management” or “stronger management” or “tougher management”, where “management” is assumed to be the factory model of management. It is assumed to mean more top-down management and tighter controls, and more carrots and sticks. It is assumed to mean hammering the teachers who don’t perform and ruthlessly weeding out “the dead wood”. The thinking is embedded in Race to the Top and No Child Left Behind.

These methods are known to be failing in the private sector, because they dispirit the employees and limit their ability to contribute their imagination and creativity; they frustrate customers, and they are killing the very organizations that rely on them. So why should we expect anything different in the education sector?

When the problems have been caused in the first place by introducing the practices of “management”, then a more rigorous pursuit of this type of “management” only makes things worse. It is like medieval doctors trying to cure patients by bloodletting, using leeches, which only made the patients worse.

The inapplicablity of these methods is aggravated by the changes in the economy. Not so long ago, we could predict what jobs and careers might be available for children in their adult life. The education system could tell little Freddie or Janet what to study and if he or she mastered that, he or she was set for life. Not any more. We simply don’t know what jobs will be there in twenty years time. Today, apart from a few core skills like reading, writing, math, thinking, imagining and creating, we cannot know what knowledge or skills will be needed when Freddie or Janet grows up.

The best single idea for reforming education

Given this context, I believe that the single most important idea for reform in K-12 education concerns a change in goal. The goal needs to shift from one of making a system that teaches children a curriculum more efficiently to one of making the system more effective by inspiring lifelong learning in students, so that they are able to have full and productive lives in a rapidly shifting economy.

Implications of accepting the shift in goal

This is a shift from running the system for the sake of the system (“You study what we tell you to study, when we tell you, and how we tell you, and at a pace that we determine”) to a focus on the ultimate goal of learning (“Our goal is to inspire our students to become life-long learners with a love of education, so that they will be able to learn whatever they have to.”) All parties—teachers, administrators, unions, parents and students—need to embrace the new goal.

Once we embrace this goal, we can see that that many things will have to change to accomplish it. We can also grasp that most of the thinking underlying current “reforms” of the system can be seen in their true light as schemes and devices that are actually making things worse.

Some of the implications include:

1. The role of the teachers and parents: Education has to shift from imparting a static package of knowledge to a dynamic goal of enabling students to create knowledge and deploy skills to new situations, whatever they turn out to be. In this world, teaching by transfer of information doesn’t work well. Instead the role of teachers (and parents) becomes one of enabling and inspiring the students to learn, so as to spark their energies and talents.
2. The role of administrators: Administrators have to realize that managing the teachers through the control of a traditional hierarchy using carrots and sticks isn’t going to work any better than it does in industry. Unless teachers are themselves inspired, they are unlikely to inspire their students. The role of the administrator has to shift from being a controller to an enabler, so as to liberate the energies and talents of the teachers and remove impediments that are getting in the way of their work.
3. The role of tests: Instead of the teacher or the administrator being the judge of progress, there are explicit criteria where both the students and the teachers can understand themselves how they are doing (in real time) and thus learn how to improve.
4. Respecting Goodhart’s law: The current focus on testing has tended to make test results the goal of the system, rather than a measure. The change in goal means recognizing that a test is only measure. Using tests as the goal infringes Goodhart’s Law: when measure becomes the goal, it ceases to be an effective measure.
5. The mode of accountability: Instead of measuring progress through top-down tests and bureaucracy, the education system must be linked dynamically to self-driven learning of the students themselves. Education must abandon accountability through the use of detailed plans, rules, processes and reports, which specify both the goal and the means of achieving that goal. Instead, what is needed is “dynamic linking”, which means that (a) the work is done in short cycles; (b) the teacher sets the goals of learning for the cycle. (c) decisions about how the learning is to take place is the responsibility of the students; (d) progress is measured in terms of the questions the students are able to generate, not merely answers that they are able to regurgitate; (e) students must be able to measure their own progress—they aren’t dependent on the teacher’s tests. (The ELLI assessment tool is a promising approach to achieving these measurement goals.)
6. Communications shift from command to conversation: i.e. a shift from top-down communications (“the sage on the stage”) comprising predominantly hierarchical directives to horizontal conversations (“the guide on the side”) that helps the student discover new resources, solve problems and generate new insights.
7. An implementable agenda: Unlike many other ideas now being pursued in education, the shift in goal doesn’t require years of research or armies of consultants or vast funding. It doesn’t involve reinventing the wheel. Thousands of Montessori schools have been on this track for many years, with extraordinary results.
8. From outputs to outcomes: Implicit in the shift in goal is of course also an implicit shift from delivering outputs (numbers of students who pass a standardized test) to outcomes in terms of what students are able to do as a result of their education. At its heart, it’s a shift from a focus on things to a focus on people, and the true goal of education.

Read also:

Got a better idea? I would love to hear from you!

I am the author of six business books and consultant to organizations around the world on leadership, innovation, management and business narrative.

My most recent book is the Leader's Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century (Jossey-Bass, 2010). Other books include The Leader's Guide to Storytelling (2nd ed, 2011) and The Secret Language of Leadership (2007) . I worked for many years at the World Bank: as the director of knowledge management (1996-2000) I spearheaded the introduction of knowledge management as an organizational strategy. You can follow me on Twitter at @stevedenning. My website is at www.stevedenning.com. 

The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

The Single Best idea For Reforming K-12 Education: Part 2 HIGHLIGHTS OF THE DISCUSSION

By Steve Denning Contributor, Forbes | http://http://onforb.es/oq4PUo

Sep. 5, 2011 - 8:23 am  - Thanks to all those who have read, tweeted or responded to my article, The Single Best Idea for Reforming K-12 Education. With over 10,000 pageviews and a vast response on Twitter and many long passionate comments on the Forbes site, the article evidently resonated with many. I am particularly grateful to Randal Hendee and Diane Ravitch for having flagged the article to the education community. Here are just a few of the highlights from the discussion that has ensued.

Today’s key problem nailed

There was wide agreement from those who responded that the article accurately described the central problem now faced by K-12 education. Among the most moving responses was the following:

As an elementary school teacher, one of the most frustrating aspects of the last ten years of educational policy for me has been riding through the negative consequences of the factory model of education: the switch of focus from people to scores (with accompanying specious rhetoric that ‘it’s all about the children’), the narrowed and over-standardized curriculum which claims to make instructional decisions for me but does it badly, and extensive, time-consuming documentation of my implementation of others’ ideas of what’s best for my students. (Not to mention time-consuming, mandatory “data analysis” of standardized test scores and standardized practice-test scores, district-mandated spreadsheets which tell me more or less the same thing that seeing and listening to the students’ daily work tells me!)

But the most frustrating aspect of the last ten years of education policy has been reading and listening to business leaders and economists who have succeeded in leading the American public to redefine “achievement” as “test scores” and who have convinced our superintendents and administrators that the way to said “achievement” is through scripted, test-targeted curriculum and learning materials. They say this bald-faced, ignoring or not hearing the many teachers who protest that chasing test scores is not the same as building and nurturing a culture of learning, and that generating test scores is only one kind of achievement. The desire to quantify our work has led our leaders straight to the effect you mention in your article, where the quantifier becomes all and distortion of the actual work is the result. [spschoolmarm]

Where do these ideas come from?

The idea of education as learning is as old as the word itself. Among the ancient Greeks, Plato wrote movingly along these lines. So the core idea is very, very old. So in one sense, I agree with some who said, “Nothing new here!” Or “ Been there! Done that!”

Yet the discovery of how to manage knowledge work on a large scale is quite recent. I summarized where these new ideas come from here:

Education is a kind of knowledge work. The battle over how to manage knowledge work has been fought out most notably in the field of software development over the last couple of decades. The issue had to be resolved there, because if a software program doesn’t work, you are looking at a blue screen. When a firm has spent a hundred million dollars developing the project, this is more than mildly upsetting. In other fields, like sales, finance, health or even education, you can argue about what is success or failure. In software, there is no argument. The difference is brutally obvious. It either works or it doesn’t.

At first, when managers encountered these problems in software development, they did what is now happening in education. They disciplined people. They tried tighter management. They asked for more detailed reports. They sent the developers on death marches. They fired them. But the replacements did no better. So much money was involved that a solution had to be found.

And the solution was found, largely by doing the work in self-organizing teams in short cycles, drawing on the talents of the team, and getting direct feedback from users at the end of each cycle. This way of working (dynamic linking) turned out to be hugely productive for the organization, much more satisfying for competent people doing the work and much better for the people for whom the work was being done. So there is now a huge global movement to manage software in this way, under names like Agile or Scrum. And it is spreading into all forms of knowledge work, under the name, Radical Management. When the whole organization adopts this as a way of working, the organization tends to become astonishingly profitable.

So we shouldn’t have to go through another multi-decade battle in education to discover what we already know: that bureaucratic management doesn’t work in knowledge work. We can all learn from what’s happened in other fields, and stop wasting people’s time, money and lives.

Does this stuff work?

Frankly, writing on Forbes, I expected more pushback than I received. Here is how one of the very few skeptics responded to the article:

I don’t think so.

You make the presumption that children, currently tied to their x-boxes, game-boys, and smart-phones are going to abandon these distractions in-order to “learn” how to read, write and count.

If we look at what we call the successful education systems in this world we won’t find much of this kind of education.

I believe we need to engage all adults involved in a child’s education to ensure that there is a focus on learning.

When adults, parents in particular, are held responsible for their children we can see an improvement in education.

“Education is hard work!” (Robertson Davies)

My response to this “learning is all hard grind” school of education is as follows:

1. “Kids won’t abandon their xboxes, gameboys and smartphones to learn how to read, write and count.” I don’t think that we should start with a presumption against modern technology. For instance, the conversation prompted by my article, in which over ten thousand people have participated so far, and from which I have learned a lot, could not be happening without this technology. The new generation is growing up with this amazing technology. The question is not how to protect them from it but rather how to harness its power for the cause of learning. I have discussed how to do this with Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown in my article here.

2. “Successful education systems don’t follow this kind of education.” I believe that Montessori schools have broadly followed this approach for many years and I believe they are very successful, particularly in a real-world sense. You might even see them as the origin of modern successes like Google and Amazon. Other comments on this article also point to various successful exemplars.

3. “Parents should be held responsible for kids learning.” Agreed, but that is a whole societal change, including remedying poverty and income inequality, that goes way beyond reforming the education system.

4. “Education is hard work.” Agreed. There is however a difference between hard work that is a grind and dispiriting and hard work that is exhilarating and uplifting. The current system specializes in the former. I believe that it will do better if it shifts to the latter.

Remove all constraints?

At the other extreme of the political spectrum, one reader suggested I was being too restrictive:

My only push back is in where you have teacher setting the goal. I think any prescription will compromise the brilliance we would see if the learner is truly set free. even that of a raised eyebrow. Krishnamurti states: partial freedom is no freedom. I think that is why most of our project based learning is compromised. Problem-based learning is way better than we’re used to. So we’re loving it. But we’re not getting at that true trust base, that true power of pull, the authentic curiosity/curriculum within each learner. [monikahardy]

And another reader wrote:

Have you ever looked into democratic free education (see: http://www.sudval.org/)? By removing coercion and allowing the natural desire to learn to flourish in the students, children become the sort of independent, life-long learners that you envision. [heliumiami]

Being a rebellious person by nature, I sympathize with the ideas like “Partial freedom is no freedom,” and democratic free education.

And yet as the author of a Sonnets 2000, I can also see that a world without constraints may not necessarily be very creative.

Even my article itself was generated in part by a structured challenge from the editors of Forbes: “Give me your single best idea for reforming K-12 education!” My first reaction was, “That’s absurd!” But then on reflection, I realized that having the discipline to set priorities among all the challenges facing education was actually helpful in bringing the whole scene into focus.

Structure enables creativity. We see examples of this everywhere. In nature, we see the fantastic diversity generated by a few basic structural elements: no more than a hundred varieties of atoms and a couple of primary colors lead to a universe of infinite beauty and diversity. In the great human creations, in the twelve notes of the musical scale, in the twenty six letters of the alphabet, these fantastic structural inventions have unlocked the enormous creativity of literature and music. Without structure, there is nothing for creativity to get leverage upon.

So I am uneasy about the idea that the teacher should just let the kids do whatever they want and sit back passively. I see a key role for the teacher in terms of posing challenges and asking questions that lead to more questions. In between “the sage on the stage” and “total anarchy”, there is a role for “the guide on the side”.

Monikahardy subsequently clarified:

I’m not suggesting a passive mentor, but a mentor alongside, which is quite the opposite of passive. I’m suggesting the mentor be modeling learning, be readily available, and most of all be able to listen with no agenda. we’ve been experimenting with this the last two years. There’s a huge difference when kids finally believe that you have no agenda other than permission for them to be, and then you go about facilitating that.

I agree with this formulation. Manipulation is not a good thing. Pseudo-freedom may be worse than no freedom at all.

Global competitive standards in education

One reader asked what I thought about the drive under way to make our schools more competitive globally through raising standards and rewarding success. I replied:

I am all for making schools competitive globally, steadily raising standards and rewarding success. Those are all good things in principle.

But everything depends on how they are implemented. If by “making schools competitive globally, steadily raising standards and rewarding success”, one means making the system teach children a curriculum more efficiently in a top-down bureaucratic manner, adopting scores on standardized tests as the goal of education, and hammering teachers for poor scores, then obviously this is a travesty of true education and utterly counterproductive for the reasons I have described above.

What’s more, it focuses the education system on the needs of the 20^th Century economy, namely, docile workers who did what they were told, had specific knowledge and could answer questions based on that knowledge.  The needs of the 21^st Century economy are very different. As the economy goes through increasingly rapid change, the workers who are needed are people who can learn new skills quickly and who are as good at deciding what are the right questions as they are at finding the right answers. By and large, today’s curriculum tends to discourage learning and creativity and today’s standardized tests don’t do a good job of measuring those dimensions. As a result, the preoccupation with international test scores is leading to students who are good for the 20^th Century, but not the 21^st Century.

If on the other hand, by “making schools competitive globally, steadily raising standards and rewarding success”, we mean inspiring lifelong learning in students, so that they are able to have full and productive lives in a rapidly shifting economy, with the standards and measurements that truly reflect that goal, then I am all for those things.

What about poverty?

Diane Ravitch has argued powerfully that the principal problem of many struggling schools is poverty. Anthony Cody asked: How would your approach change the way students there experience education?  My reply:

Income inequality is obviously a major determinant of educational performance. I will not pretend that the changes in educational approach that I suggest can overcome the handicap of poverty.

Nevertheless an education system that focuses on learning, and encourages students to learn by exploring issues that are of interest to them, has greater chances of overcoming some of the constraints of poverty a top-down system that proceeds from thee approach of “You study what we tell you to study, when we tell you, and how we tell you, and at a pace that we determine”

How can educators be more persuasive?

I was also asked what educators could do to make their voices heard. Some feel that the Department of Education and White House listen more to business leaders than to teachers. My reply:

It’s important how the issue is framed. If the issue is framed as an education issue, “how do we improve education?” there is a risk that anachronistic management ideas will be implicitly assumed as self-evident and imposed on the sector. If on the other hand the issue is framed as a management issue, “what does the world know about running knowledge organizations?” then the whole array of evidence can be brought to bear on the discussion.

This in turn implies that if leaders in the education sector are to win these arguments, they need to be aware of what is happening beyond education and become versed in what is known about running knowledge organizations, from Agile, Scrum and Radical Management.

CHARTER SCHOOL SHUTDOWN LEAVES STUDENTS, TEACHERS SCRAMBLING + smf’s 2¢

West Sacramento charter school students show up for first day; find school closed + UPDATE: West Sac charter school formally closed

Written by Karen Massie, News 10 / KXTV (Sacramento)  | http://bit.ly/oPCfdP

Video: Watch the story

7:36 PM, Sep 2, 2011  |  WEST SACRAMENTO, CA - The California College, Career and Technical Education Center has shutdown in West Sacramento leaving teachers and students and staff scrambling to find somewhere else to go.

Some parents apparently found out about the charter school's unexpected closure when they arrived for an orientation meeting Thursday and found the school's doors locked.

Kirsten Malork showed up Friday to find out what was going on.

"I've heard the news, I just want to see for myself," Malork said. "My son Brandon Perry was going to be enrolled in the school. I was thinking okay, great. He's going to have a sense of direction. This school looked really good. It looked promising."

When CCCTec opened last fall, every student was provided with an IPad. 

<< PAUL PRESTON - Dennis McCoy/Sacramento Business Journal

Owner and school superintendent Paul Preston said the school was designed for students who had struggled at other schools.  They would be able to get enough credits to graduate, as well as, learn vocational skills, such as, auto repair, woodworking and graphic design.

Preston said the school had space for 200 students. But teacher Kathryn Schroeder-Kelly said when school ended last spring only about 66 students were enrolled. 

Fewer students severely reduced the amount of per pupil funding the school received from the state.

Schroeder-Kelly said the school's money problems became apparent to teachers in February.

"My paycheck bounced," Schroeder-Kelly said. "That's when I thought, well, this is weird. But I got a cashier's check and everything was fine."

Then two months later Schroeder-Kelly said Preston informed teachers their checks would be late.

"Eventually our checks were issued," Schroeder-Kelly said. "Some went through but some of them bounced."

A letter sent from the State Board of Education to the school last June said, "CCCTec appears to have failed to meet generally accepted accounting principles, or engaged in fiscal mismanagement."

The letter said the school had not paid teachers, several vendors and had missed payments to the California State Teachers Retirement System.

Attempts to contact Preston fell short because the school's phone number rang to a busy. 

Preston posted an apology notice on the school's door blaming "budgetary confines and a lack of funding" for CCCTec's financial woes.

The school's Facebook page talked about a $750,000 grant it had received. The California Department of Education is demanding that $57,000 be returned.

Malork said she knows the school received even more money from the state. 

"What happened to the money?" Malork said. "It should have benefited the kids around here that now have no where to go."

Another notice on the school's door referred students to other schools in West Sacramento.

Schroeder-Kelly is looking for another job and said she hopes her students land in someone else's class. 

"Believe in yourselves," Schroeder-Kelly said. "Continue working and make sure you get in school and keep your eye on the prize."

 

West Sacramento charter school students show up for first day; find school closed

Written by Paul Janes & George Warren, News 10 / KXTV (Sacramento)  |

1:07 PM, Sep 2, 2011   - WEST SACRAMENTO, CA - Arriving students and parents were stunned to find their charter high school closed on what was supposed to be the first day of school.

A terse announcement on the Calilfornia College, Career and Technical Education Center (CCCTEC) website reported the school had been shut down because of "budgetary confines and a lack of funding."

The shutdown follows a scathing letter in June from the California State Board of Education suggesting CCCTEC had failed to meet generally accepted accounting principles or had engaged in fiscal mismanagement.

The letter said teaching staff reported the school was as much as four months behind in issuing paychecks.  Vendors also reported unpaid bills, according to the Board of Education letter.

The mother of one CCCTEC student said she showed up for orientation on Thursday to find the school locked.  She said about 40 parents waited outside for hours for an explanation that never came.

CCCTEC's website referred freshmen, sophomores and juniors to West Sac Prep Charter High School.  Seniors were referred to River City High School or Yolo High School.

We apologize for any inconvenience that this has caused your household," CCCTEC superintendent Paul Preston wrote.

UPDATE: West Sac charter school formally closed

  Written by C. Johnson, News 10 / KXTV (Sacramento)

6:05 PM, Sep 2, 2011  |WEST SACRAMENTO - Parents and students were left bewildered Thursday to find California College Career and Technical Charter High School not open and ready for the new school year.

PREVIOUS STORY: West Sacramento students find school closed on first day

Friday, the high school reactivated its website to state "due to budgetary confines and lack of funding, California College Career and Technical Charter High School is now closed."

According to a source, the first-year school was supposed to enroll around 300 students, but only 61 registered. The California Department of Education then investigated the school and uncovered irregular bookkeeping, unpaid teachers, potentially falsified attendance records and several other problems.

On the website, the school apologized for any inconvenience and said to call (916) 371-2833 to request transcripts and refunds.

Refunds for school uniforms purchased would be made within 90 days, the school promised.

 

smf’s 2¢: According to CCTEC’s charter petition to the State Board of Education[http://1,usa,gov/osKyOi]

• On Nov 30, 2009 the Washington Unified School District DENIED CCTEC’s petition to start a charter School.
• On Jan 25, 2010 the Yolo County Board of Education also DENIED CCCTEC’s petition. 
• On Feb 5, 2010 CCTEC applied to the State Board of Ed and was AWARDED a charter on May 10, 2010.
• CCCTEC opened in Sept 2010.
• Preston was also attempting to open a second charter school, Woodland Polytechnic Academy, on the CCCTEC model.
• And there’s that letter from the State Board alleging fiscal impropriety, the bounced checks, the missed payments to CALSTRS and the $750,000 grant.

TEACHER CHEATING ON STATE TESTS FOUND AT TWO LOS ANGELES SCHOOLS + smf’s 2¢

Three teachers at LAUSD’s Short Avenue Elementary in Del Rey and one teacher at Green Dot’s Animo Leadership in Inglewood are implicated.

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

Los Angeles schools Supt. John Deasy characterized the Short Avenue teachers’ actions as gross misconduct. (Al Seib, Los Angeles Times / September 5, 2011)

September 5, 2011  - The state has thrown out the test scores of a top-performing Los Angeles school and of the highest-scoring campus in the nationally known Green Dot charter group after cheating was uncovered involving several teachers.

Short Avenue Elementary in Del Rey and Animo Leadership Charter High School in Inglewood were barred from receiving academic rankings released last week by the California Department of Education. That action deprived the schools of the state rating that has become the key figure used by parents and officials to judge campuses in California.

At Short, three teachers are accused of changing answers or coaching students to the correct answers or both. At Animo Leadership, a science teacher is accused of fixing wrong answers.

L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy characterized the Short Avenue teachers' actions as gross misconduct.

"Students take tests independent and alone," Deasy said. "We don't coach them and give them answers." He added, "It's obviously wrong behavior, but it's more than that.... It's not the behavior we want to model — ever."

When the improprieties came to light, the Los Angeles Unified School District and Green Dot conducted internal investigations and notified the state Education Department. As a result, each school was struck from this year's Academic Performance Index, the rating used to measure the progress of schools in California.

Cheating scandals have received increasing attention nationwide. In the Atlanta school system, 82 educators have admitted cheating, with misconduct documented at 44 of 100 schools. In Washington, D.C., concerns have risen about cheating in response to the high-stakes improvement mandates of former Chancellor Michelle Rhee.

Locally, at six charter schools operated by Crescendo, principals were ordered last year to require teachers to review the state tests in advance and then use that material to prepare students. L.A. Unified recently closed those schools in the aftermath of the scandal.

Such episodes underscore the pressures and pitfalls of testing systems that, nationwide, increasingly affect teacher and principal evaluations and whether schools achieve acclaim or censure and penalties.

At Short Avenue, a third-grade teacher identified as Teacher C had "average erasures per student of 10 to 21," and most were changed from wrong to right, according to a summary of a district internal investigation. One student acknowledged she'd left math questions unanswered because they were "too hard," the report stated. But correct answers appeared in the booklet.

"In the principal's office, she was unable to perform a basic addition/subtraction problem," the report said. "Most students were advised by the teacher as to which questions were incorrect, and then the teacher instructed students to return to their seat to correct their answers."

The probe began when a parent raised concerns about a second-grade teacher accused of reviewing questions on the standardized tests after students had finished with them for the day. Students use different portions of the same multiple-choice booklets for the tests.

Students "admitted that they went back the next day and changed their incorrect answer to the correct one as a result of the previous day's review," L.A. Unified stated in its report to the state.

Another third-grade teacher, identified as Teacher B, "had numerous erasures (207) as well, with the majority of all erasures changed to the correct answer."

This teacher also "walked around the classroom and pointed to incorrect answer[s] in test booklet and told students to go back and check that particular problem." The teacher helped students decide which mathematical operation to use and wrote helpful notes on their scratch paper.

The students of that teacher said they didn't consider the assistance cheating because the instructor didn't directly indicate the right answer.

L.A. Unified did not provide requested information about Short Avenue. Details were instead obtained through a public records request from the state.

Deasy said he planned to launch a deeper investigation, including into whether scores from past years are legitimate. Short Avenue had until now been a success story, with a mix of students that substantially reflects the district at large. About two-thirds are low-income and about two-thirds are Latino. Other ethnicities include white (11%), black (9.4%) and Asian (8%.) Last year, the school's performance index ranking was 848, well above the state target of 800.

At Animo Leadership, students alerted adults of possible cheating.

When students received their booklets to resume testing, at least two 11th-graders noticed that their answers to the physics test appeared to have been changed since the previous day, said Marco Petruzzi, Green Dot's chief executive.

The teacher proctoring the tests immediately alerted administrators. Green Dot notified its board, the state and school district officials.

State records indicate that a staff member is suspected of "accessing 11th-grade answer documents and altering answers" on the physics exam, said John Boivin, administrator for the testing office at the California Department of Education. As many as 148 students out of 604 could have been affected.

Petruzzi said a thorough investigation found no widespread evidence of wrongdoing. He said pending disciplinary action prevented him from providing more details.

Educators guilty of cheating face dismissal and possibly the loss of credentials that allow them to work in public education. L.A. Unified and Green Dot have not released the names of the implicated teachers.

Green Dot Public Schools runs 18 charter campuses, including at Locke High in South L.A. and a campus in New York City. Charters are publicly funded, independently run schools.

With a valid score, Animo Leadership would have approached an 800 API, which high schools serving large numbers of low-income minority students struggle to attain. The school, which was the founding Green Dot campus, has been named among the top 100 public high schools by U.S. News & World Report.

"It would have been our highest-scoring school," Petruzzi said. "That's why I'm so disappointed."

Neither Deasy nor Petruzzi made excuses regarding the increasing pressure that teachers face to deliver ever-better test scores.

"You cannot always avoid students or adults cheating," Petruzzi said. "What is important is how the institutions or corporations or organizations react. It is not tolerated here."

●●smf’s 2¢: a couple of points, from the top o’ my head:

• This isn’t about charter schools or traditional schools. Both schools are unionized schools.
• The stakes in “high-stakes-testing” have become a little too high. The people who allegedly cheated were led into temptation – even if  the tests (and certainly the system) aren’t designed to catch ethical or moral failure. If the stories as reported are as reported the folks responsible should be swiftly outta there …in accordance with due process.
• It is interesting that it was parents who blew the whistle at Short Avenue and students at Amino Leadership. As indeed it was teachers who did the same at Crescendo.
• I have not yet found a report from CDE about other schools in CA that are being investigated or sanctioned similarly.  I think it’s safe to assume that Short Ave and Amino Leadership are not unique.
• See this Mid-testing classes aided Sweetwater Gain | http://bit.ly/pAfjua from San Diego about some institutionalized fudging on tests at Sweetwater High in National City.
• And California Teachers Helped Students Cheat on Achievement Test | http://bit.ly/nXo3Ay  (from 2007) – which describes that the institution is not new.

 

A.J. DUFFY, EDUCATION REFORMER? Could Duffy have been a closeted reformer all those years? Or do his views simply reflect those of whoever signs his paycheck?

LA Times Editorial | http://lat.ms/nJD7OA

Was A.J. Duffy, who recently was termed out as president of United Teachers Los Angeles, a closeted reformer all those years? (Los Angeles Times)

smf notes: Fortune China reports that school ‘reform’ propagandist-in-chief Steven Brill in his philippic Class Warfare makes a suggestion: (Brill’s)  "Nixon-to-China" suggestion  is for New York City: Hire Randi Weingarten, the powerful leader of the American Federation of Teachers, to run the schools. Brill says Weingarten actually told him she'd take the chancellor job. She even said Bloomberg offered her the post some years ago, Bloomberg denied this to Brill, adding, "It's a really stupid idea. Never in a million years." 4LAKids assumes that Mayor Tony, Monica García and Eli Broad will welcome Duffy to the reform fold with the same enthusiasm in the same time frame.

September 4, 2011 - On several occasions over the last few years, A.J. Duffy sat in a conference room with the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times and expounded on the evils of charter schools, the value of teachers union contracts that included pages and pages of extensive work rules, the importance of the teacher seniority system and the nefarious intentions of those who sought to streamline the firing of bad teachers.

So it came as a bit of a surprise when Duffy, who recently was termed out as president of United Teachers Los Angeles, announced that he wants to open charter schools that will make it harder for teachers to receive tenure, easier for them to lose it and allow schools to move much faster to fire ineffective instructors.

Was Duffy a closeted reformer all those years? Or do his views simply reflect those of whoever signs his paycheck?

Does it matter? As UTLA president, Duffy represented the interests of teachers. It would be nice if teachers unions were more progressive than UTLA, and many of them are, but it's not their job to put the interests of children first; they exist to bargain for the best working conditions for teachers. That said, though Duffy's belligerent style never softened during his UTLA tenure, his stances did. He came to support pilot schools, which are public schools that operate with a "thin contract" that doesn't micromanage teachers' responsibilities. He voiced a willingness to compromise on once-ironclad protections for teachers. By the end of his term, some hard-core UTLA members actually saw him as a turncoat.

No matter what motivates Duffy these days, his personal shift reflects a sea change in educational policy. Existing tenure and seniority rules have become increasingly unacceptable to administrators, politicians, parents and the public. The stultifying regulations in many teacher contracts are seen as a barrier to academic progress.

Last year, as UTLA president, Duffy wouldn't sit down at the table with Los Angeles Unified School District administrators and representatives of groups that had sued the district. The groups, which included the American Civil Liberties Union, rightly claimed that poorer students from low-performing schools were being deprived of their educational rights when their teachers — generally those with the least seniority in the district — were laid off. Those layoffs led to major disruptions in improvement programs. The two sides went ahead without UTLA, agreeing on new protections for those students in a settlement that the union decried. Reform is moving ahead, albeit unsteadily, with or without the blessing of unions; Duffy clearly learned that it's smarter to stay at the table.

PUSHING PARENTS TO GET INVOLVED IN KIDS‘ EDUCATION: South Gate resident Mary Johnson, who sent her four children to college, has a code of parental responsibility. It works at both under-performing urban schools and high-achieving campuses.

 

By Steve Lopez, LA Times columnist | http://lat.ms/qDCheN

 

Mary Johnson tells parents that while they have a right to demand the best from schools, they have an obligation to hold their children accountable. (Francine Orr, Los Angeles Times)

September 3, 2011 - Scads have been written the last few years about education reform, teacher evaluations and funding shortages. But relatively little has been written about two parties with huge control over the quality of any child's education: The student and the parent.

Anyone up for a national conversation on parent evaluations?

Last week, I went to South Gate for a visit with Mary Johnson, a grandmother who knows a thing or two about how parents can step it up. It was her own grandmother, in fact, who provided the early training.

Johnson and her six siblings lost their mother when Johnson was just 2. So all seven of them went to live with grandma Emma Bessix in Dover, Del. The house had no electricity, but it had an established place where all the kids had to do their homework — or else.

Johnson later moved to California, studied at El Camino College, and, as a single, working parent, sent all four of her children to college. That was the expectation for the kids, and they knew it, just as they knew that until they graduated from high school, their mom would be on campus, volunteering for this or that, investing in her kids because nothing mattered more to her.

That work led to the formation of Parent U-Turn, a nonprofit advocacy and training program, and Johnson has been tapped by both UCLA and Pepperdine University to train parents and teachers. Her focus has always been on under-performing urban schools, but her code of parental responsibility works for schools on both sides of the tracks.

Parents aren't doing their job, says Johnson, if all they do is drop their kids off at school, and principals aren't doing their jobs if they don't encourage constructive involvement by parents. Johnson has been known to lead marches on schools and organize strikes, but she tells parents that while they have a right to demand the best that schools can offer, they also have an obligation to hold their own children accountable.

If school starts this week and you haven't already gotten your child eating healthier food, going to bed earlier and dusting off the backpacks, Johnson would say you're not doing your job. She suggests that when you first meet your child's teacher, you hand him or her a card on which you've written your phone numbers and email address. Then Johnson would have you say something like this to the teacher:

"I know how my kids behave at home, but if there's any kind of behavior problem in your classroom, I want to know about it. If A's and Bs are about to become Cs, I want to hear about it, because colleges are only interested in A's and Bs."

Johnson has a grandchild who's about to start kindergarten at Montara Avenue Elementary in South Gate and another in preschool. On the first day of school Wednesday, Johnson will stand before Montara parents and invite them to get involved in their children's education both at school and at home, no matter how economically stressed they might be.

John Rogers, a UCLA education professor and one of Johnson's mentors, makes a fair point about the limitations faced by parents, many of whom might be less interested in joining the PTA than in figuring out how to get health insurance or dental care for their children. Meanwhile, school funding in California has shrunk, class sizes are growing and there could be more of both before we get halfway through this school year.

Still, roughly nine out of 10 K-12 students in the United States attend public schools. And no matter what the challenges are from one school district to the next, every parent can make a difference, whether it's by marching on the halls of power to demand a reinvestment in children or it's by clearing time each night to check in with your child.

And if you ask your precious little scholar what he or she did in school and the answer is the ever-popular "nothing," you might consider a follow-up question, or a review of the homework assignment, or offering to email the teacher to determine whether, indeed, nothing at all happened in school today.

Johnson recommends talking to kids about college even when they're young, "just to plant that picture in their heads" and reinforce the idea that you've got high expectations. And if you hear about a field trip to a zoo, says Johnson, raise a ruckus.

"All the animals are just lying around, sleeping. Why don't kids take field trips to colleges?"

Johnson and I also talked about a topic that will be a subject for another column. As an African American in a mostly Latino part of Greater Los Angeles, Johnson has been to school meetings that were conducted in Spanish, with an interpreter available to her.

I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous.

Holding on to your native language is terrific. But parents who make no effort to learn English are limiting their own job prospects, hindering their ability to monitor their children's education and giving their kids an extra burden if they enter school with limited English.

On the other hand, said Johnson, who watches telenovelas to brush up on her Spanish, "It's time for African American families to wake up" and realize the social and economic benefits of encouraging their children to learn another language, and I wouldn't limit that advice to African American families.

As I said, more on that later. Until then, as we begin another school year, remember that it isn't just the kids who have to answer the bell.

THE STAKES OF LAUSD’s SCHOOL CHOICE

Editorial in the Daily Breeze  http://www.dailybreeze.com/ci_18827178

9/04/2011 - The leaders of Los Angeles' schools are gambling with the district's future. Hopefully, they are playing the odds, because there's a lot at stake for the future of education reform in Los Angeles.

The district's chips are its new schools. The payoff is a significant rewriting of the district's contract with teachers that includes a number of reforms in the methods used for evaluating, paying and firing teachers. The game ends two months from now.

Last week, the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education agreed to a plan that will give district educators first crack at bidding to operate new schools.

Currently, both new and underperforming schools are part of the district's groundbreaking School Choice. Under this program, a number of schools each year are opened up for bidders to compete to operate those schools. In the first years of bidding, schools have gone to charter operators, to the mayor's partnership schools and to district teachers.

In exchange for priority to bid for new schools, the teachers union, United Teachers Los Angeles, has to agree to contract reforms yet to be determined. If no agreement is reached by Nov. 1, the deal is off and the third round of School Choice will proceed with 15 new schools up for bid.

Taking new schools out of the mix is a blow to charter schools, which are justifiably proud of the recent test scores. The Standardized Testing and Reporting Program data released last month

---

Advertisement

---

was consistently dismal on academic gains at School Choice schools - except for the new schools operated by charters. Three of those four schools outperformed district-run neighborhood schools.

Charter school advocates lamented the board's decision as a step away from reform. From their perspective, they may be right. But the ramifications are significant for education districtwide, particularly for all of the students stuck in mediocre schools that aren't bad enough to qualify for School Choice.

If, that is, the school district holds out for contract reforms that include every teacher. Superintendent John Deasy said he's seeking a number of reforms, such as better teacher evaluation, which would include student achievement, flexibility in teacher pay to reward good teachers, and changes in the tenure process.

While charter schools have probably done more to advance reform in the district, they were never the only solution to the district's problems. If some charters decide not to participate in the School Choice program after this, it would be unfortunate but not insurmountable. The reform movement the charters started has its own momentum now.

Deasy paints this wager as a win-win for education and district reform, but seems willing to consider those reforms just for the teachers at new schools. That's a losing bet for sure. He must hold out for something that pays off for every student in the district.

FORMER CHARTER OPPONENT DUFFY TO LAUNCH HIS OWN ‘REVOLUTIONARY’ SCHOOLS

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

9/2/11 - Once a vocal opponent of the rapid growth of charter schools in Los Angeles, former teachers union leader A.J. Duffy has announced plans to launch his own independently run public campuses.

Duffy, who left his post as president of United Teachers Los Angeles this summer, said the new venture will give him an opportunity to launch "revolutionary" schools that will be teacher-led and free from bureaucratic rules.

If approved by the Los Angeles Unified School District, Apple Charter Academy Public Schools could start opening sites in South Los Angeles as early as next spring.

"This is going to be the school of every teacher's dreams," Duffy said.

Teachers at Apple Academy would get union protections most educators don't get at charters schools, which generally don't hire unionized workers, such as the right to earn tenure and have an arbitrator present at termination proceedings.

But teachers who receive poor evaluations could be fired for performance and the dismissal process would take no more than 20 days - not the years it can take under the current union-protected system.

Working with Duffy as board members of Apple Academy are former LAUSD school board President Caprice Young, who also headed the California Charter School Association; Ref Rodriguez, founder of Partnerships to Uplift Communities Charter Schools; and David Cunningham Jr., a former Los Angeles Councilman representing South Los Angeles.

Duffy's new project is sure to raise eyebrows among teachers who see the growth of charters as a direct threat to the traditional public school system.

And there are many within the reform community who would question how the former labor heavyweight will mesh in the charter community.

Young said she understands how people could question the "charter maven" joining forces with the "union geek."

But she pointed to Duffy's record of approving reforms for local schools as proof of his qualifications to run a charter.

That included pushing UTLA leaders to unionize charters and approving streamlined contracts for pilot schools where teachers have more decision-making power.

"In public life, the quotes you give to the press are not always reflective of your personal feelings but reflective of the position you hold," Young said.

Jed Wallace, current president of the CCSA, questioned whether Duffy's charter petition, put together over a shorter time than most successful charters, would lead to a quality new campus.

"We recommend that the district put this charter petition through the same rigors that its Charter and Innovations Division brings to its review of every charter applicant," Wallace said.

Still, Wallace welcomed Duffy's entrance into the charter world.

"We are pleased to see that Mr. Duffy, who has been a vocal opponent to charter schools in the past, is now demonstrating by his own desire to lead a charter school, that charters are absolutely an effective ingredient for public education reform in LAUSD," Wallace said.

REFLECTIONS ON IMPROVEMENT

Associated Administrators of Los Angeles Update - Week of August 29, 2011 | http://bit.ly/ni94nf

Superintendent John Deasy has rightfully lauded LAUSD students, administrators and teachers for the improvements demonstrated by District schools’ 2011 STAR results and graduation rate. In fact, our schools have exceeded the progress made by the Mayor’s Partnership Schools, L.A.’s Promise (formerly known as Mentor L.A.) and most charter schools. Nevertheless, while acknowledging the fact that resources have been cut to disastrous levels, the Superintendent continues to exhort administrators to do substantially more with significantly less.

Administrators led the effort to improve student achievement despite experiencing three years of considerable personal sacrifice, including furlough days, the loss of summer school opportunities and no salary increases. Many AALA members have had their Basis reduced. While we successfully negotiated additional Z Time for supervisory administrators who had their Basis changed and maintained the current norms for secondary APs, the increase in the number of charter schools and decreased student enrollment caused the loss of some administrators’ jobs. Other employees have suffered, of course, as evidenced by the:

 Elimination of a large number of plant managers, librarians, office staff and playground supervisors

 Reduction in force of over 1,000 classified staff and the transferring of a large number of others to different sites after the beginning of the school year

 Reduction in force of hundreds of teachers.

The impact of these cuts on administrators’ workload is dramatic. Add to that the misery experienced by the parents and guardians of our students whose financial survival has become precarious because of the poor economy, which particularly hurts children. The affect on schools of angry, disaffected students is substantial—and administrators are ultimately accountable for handling every instance of disruptive behavior.

While increasing resources for public education is essential, California’s State legislature gave a higher priority to the funding of prisons than to financial support for schools. LAUSD’s Board of Education, dominated by the Mayor’s majority, failed to promote Governor Brown’s effort to transfer Community Redevelopment Agency resources to schools, police and other public agencies which are all in bare-bones survival mode.

For principals and principal leaders participating in Phase II of the Educator Growth and Development Program, the workload will increase even further. While each formal teacher observation under the Stull evaluation system typically takes two-three hours (with a preobservation conference, observation, preparation of notes and postobservation conference), participants report that each observation under the pilot system will take upwards of five-six hours. This is only a small piece of two larger systems, much of which have yet to be developed. Interestingly, at least 21 central and Local District support personnel are being hired to “assist” with the pilot, while schools are starving for staffing support. School leaders need adequate resources and fewer exhortations to do more with less. Otherwise the system itself cannot be sustained

.

LET’S BELIEVE IN THE MAGIC OF SCHOOL LIKE HARRY POTTER

By David Tokofsky, Editorial  in the Los Feliz Ledger | http://bit.ly/nk09yQ

Sept 2011 - I just received my daughter’s state test scores for the 2010-11 school year in Math and what they call “Language Arts.”  (I guess that is reading and writing.)  My Rachel, who enters 5th grade this year, is doing well.

Then I heard the new Los Angeles Superintendent John Deasy—with a Kennedy-like Boston accent—declare the scores are improved in Los Angeles, but not high enough.

As a former Los Angeles Unified School board member for 12 years, I agree: scores should be higher—after all, these are our kids and we want them to be slightly better than average—but not at the expense of true learning and student enlightenment.

Scores motivate. They do in athletics and in the classroom. Other than my work on the school board, I taught ESL at John Marshall High School as well as Spanish and AP Government. I was also the soccer coach and the coach of Marshall’s first national championship Academic Decathlon team. In these capacities, I chose to emphasize scores in my classroom and on my teams. Doing so created a self-imposed benchmark for progress for my students and created the excitement of trying to “best” yourself competitively.

Thirty years ago when I became a teacher I moaned about California public schools lack of measurement of student progress. Today, however, I feel we have lost touch with what matters in learning in order to “teach to the test” and reduce our kids to just a Math and Language Arts score.

Today, kids and teachers are exhausted from the focus on standardized testing that doesn’t even ask what our kids know about science, social studies, art, music, physiology, history or psychology.

As we start school this year and particularly in the Los Feliz, Silver Lake, East Hollywood and Echo Park areas, lets try to remember how excited we are for our kids every September and how excited they are to see their friends and teachers and principal and to start to read together and to study again.

Let’s try to retain that excitement through the entire school year. Let’s try to remember the crowds at the “back to school” sales fighting to get our kids the supplies they need.

Let’s remember the experiences of summer and how much experiential learning matters:  how excited our kids were to go to the beach or the mountains or to see their relatives or travel across the U.S. or abroad this summer.

Let’s try to help our school educators—who deal with public attacks on their efforts regularly—and instead, offer our skills, time and knowledge to help the classroom and school.

Excitement of course is not enough. The teacher is fundamental and we should fight for the best. The teacher your child gets matters more than anything in their schooling.  And yes, some, sadly, may not measure up.

For these policies and lapses we cannot control, we need to be present to our neighborhood schools, public, charter, private, parochial or French. We need to lend our expertise, our resources—our time.

When my students at Marshall High won soccer seasons, Mock Trial state competitions or the national Academic Decathlon for the first time for a Los Angeles school, I relied on all the faculty at Marshall to lend a hand or a lecture.  I relied on local parents to lecture or coach.  I relied on University professors and other knowledgeable friends to assist. In the end, people cheered the victories.

What else but success can happen when everyone chips in?

If Harry Potter taught us anything about school, it is that school is about magic—not testing.

• David Tokofsky is an educational strategist, father of two school age children, and former teacher at John Marshall High School and Los Angeles Unified School board member.

UPDATE: Weblinks/Download/Podcast to KPCC ’Education Summit’ broadcast yesterday

see:

4LAKids Scott Folsom

Must listen/download: EDUCATION SUMMIT W/DEASY, FLETCHER & GARCÍA - Patt Morrison for Fri. Sept. 2, 2011 @1PM 8... http://t.co/wNADU5u

Monica Garcia, Warren Fletcher, John Deasy and Pilar Buelna share the stage at KPCC's Education Summit, hosted by Patt Morrison.  photo: Kathleen Miles/KPCC -

Download/Listen  First segment
Download/Listen Second Segment
Download/Listen  Third Segment

Note (9/3): The “Web Extra” segment is not yet posted

Logos for Duffy's new charter?

NEWS STORY: A.J. Duffy to start up his own charter school company, Apple Public Schools.

 

These logos are not suggestions, they are already taken. Three are from probably the most successful, lawyered-up and litigious corporations in the world. One is from an existing charter school - with probably the best legal claim to the name.

WATERING DOWN THE PUBLIC SCHOOL CHOICE INITIATIVE + smf’s 2¢

LA Times Editorial | http://lat.ms/ppE3TN

By keeping charter operators out of the first round of applications to run new schools, the L.A. Unified board has scaled back its goal of making educational excellence the highest priority.

L.A. Unified board member Steve Zimmer, seen here in June giving a speech to teachers and students to help save LAUSD arts programs, justifiably frets about the charter groups' lack of interest in older schools. (Los Angeles Times)

September 2, 2011 - The Public School Choice initiative was a landmark reform for the Los Angeles Unified School District. By allowing alternative operators — whether charter school organizations, the mayor or groups of teachers — to apply to manage scores of new and low-performing schools, it set the standard for putting students first. The theory was that anyone could apply and the very best applications would win, ensuring that students attended the best-run schools the district could offer. Just as important, charter operators in the program would have to accept all students within each school's enrollment area rather than using the usual lottery system under which more-motivated families tend to apply to charter schools.

Of course, this is L.A. Unified, which means things didn't always work out. More than one management contract was awarded on the basis of political alliances. Charter schools were disappointingly unwilling to take on the tougher challenge of turning around failing schools; most of their applications were for the new, pretty campuses.

For all that, Public School Choice still promised to give educational excellence the highest priority. Until this week, that is, when the school board scaled back on that promise in a big way by deciding that charter organizations will be kept out of the first round of applications for new schools. Only if the applications by inside groups — mostly teacher teams — are less than "sufficiently excellent" will charters be allowed to apply.

Board member Steve Zimmer justifiably frets about the charter groups' lack of interest in older schools. Teachers have worked in overcrowded, dilapidated schools for years, only to see the long-promised new schools go to outside operators. But the key point of Public School Choice was to seek out the best education for students — not "sufficiently excellent" but the best. Reform-minded members of the board went along with the new policy when it was made contingent on concessions from unions for those teacher-run schools. Those concessions, including more robust evaluations, are worthwhile, but the district shouldn't have traded quality in return for them.

The board should instead have decreed that when competing applications are of equal quality, the advantage must be given to internal groups. That would have given all applicants an incentive to deliver outstanding proposals without depriving students of what could have been a knockout application from an outside organization.

 

 ‘Scaled back?’  …or ‘zeroed in’?

The Times is right in their concluding paragraph – except, as they point out in in the first sentence in paragraph #2: “Of course, this is LAUSD….”

• Starting before the beginning, - in the photo caption - the LAT concedes that Zimmer “justifiably frets about the charter groups' lack of interest in older schools’.”  “Justifiably” is editorial opinion. What part of “justifiably” is the editorial board’s argument with?   Continuing to quote their own editorial:
• “More than one management contract was awarded on the basis of political alliances.”    Improperly awarding public contracts is either mis-  or malfeasance, depending on how good one’s  attorney is.
• “Charter schools were disappointingly unwilling to take on the tougher challenge of turning around failing schools; most of their applications were for the new, pretty campuses”.
• And then the editorial board goes on to bemoan “the promise” of PSC. 

Enough with The Promise – that outside operators can excel at running neighborhood schools is a premise – and a failed one at that!  

The cold hard facts are that outside operators are doing the lesser job and that kids at outside-operated schools are falling further behind – or maybe not progressing with the ‘same urgency’ of the teacher-and-community-driven programs. The reality and the lesson-learned of PSC is that the teacher+community programs have outperformed the charter operators.

Philly creamed? Cheese! - PHILADELPHIA SCHOOL DISTRICT REVIEWING WHETHER ACKERMAN’S COMMENTS VIOLATE “BYE-BYE-BUYOUT” DEAL

 

District Reviewing Whether Ackerman's Comments Violate Buyout Deal

By Susan Snyder, The Philadelphia Inquirer – from Ed Week District Dossier | http://bit.ly/qHydYn

Published Online: September 2, 2011

The Philadelphia School District's legal office is reviewing critical public comments that former Superintendent Arlene C. Ackerman made last week about a top district administrator to see whether they violate her $905,000 separation agreement.

Just three days after the announcement of the acrimonious end to her superintendency, Ackerman last Thursday ripped chief financial officer Michael Masch on WURD-AM (900) in talking about the district's $600-million-plus budget hole.

"People are blaming it on me," she said. "It's just ridiculous."

Ackerman said she was "pressured" to hire Masch and later sought to have him step down after getting "mumbo-jumbo talk" about district finances. Masch declined to comment.

Her separation agreement says she may not make public comments "or disseminate any private or confidential information" about the School Reform Commission or senior members of the district's administration that are "malicious, wanton, or reckless," or that are "reasonably foreseeable to injure their reputations."

District spokesman Fernando Gallard said Thursday that "the district is reviewing the comments made by Dr. Ackerman on WURD and other media outlets. It is our expectation that Dr. Ackerman will abide by the separation agreement."

Several sources said the comments could serve as ground for the commission to void the agreement, which includes $500,000 in public funds and $405,000 from anonymous donors channeled through the Philadelphia's Children First Fund.

District officials confirmed Thursday that Ackerman had not yet been paid. Under the agreement, she is owed the funds by Wednesday.

"Considering that there's $900,000-plus at stake, $500,000 of which is public funds, I would hope that the SRC would cancel the agreement—which is within their rights—and let's renegotiate the settlement with more public input," said Helen Gym, cofounder of Parents United for Public Education. "If there's a chance for them to fix it, now is the time."

Zack Stalberg, president and CEO of the Committee of Seventy, a nonprofit government watchdog group, said he also viewed the comments as a potential violation.

"It's the SRC's responsibility to pursue this and determine whether she's violated the terms of her separation agreement," he said. "If she has, then I don't think she's entitled to the money."

Ackerman's lawyer, Dean Weitzman, did not return calls or reply to e-mail.

Calls for the commission to reexamine the agreement come as state Auditor General Jack Wagner notified the district by letter Thursday that his office was auditing the buyout agreement. Among the objectives will be to uncover the identities of the donors, Wagner's spokesman said. Wagner's office also is auditing superintendent buyouts in three other districts—Allentown, Gettysburg, and Central Dauphin.

The district looked into other ways to end Ackerman's tenure, including having the SRC abrogate her contract because of the financial crisis or firing her for cause. Both courses could have led to litigation.

District officials and those in Mayor Nutter's administration have remained mum on who pledged the funds to help end Ackerman's three-year tenure, and there has also been speculation that one or more of the donors may have backed out in recent days as public scrutiny of the deal intensified.

District officials confirmed Thursday that the district had not received the $405,000 from the fund.

Calls to fund executive director Jeanne-Marie Hagan and lawyer Sheldon Bonovitz, the fund chairman, were not returned. Both SRC Chairman Robert L. Archie Jr., a law partner of Bonovitz's, and interim Superintendent Leroy Nunery II serve on the board. Until recently, the group's website also listed Ackerman as a board member.

Nutter spokesman Mark McDonald declined to comment on the identities of the donors or about Nutter's position on whether the donors should be made public.

Last week, Nutter defended using private donors: "If a person wishes to make a donation to a legitimate legal entity and asks for anonymity, then I think in that situation the preference of that particular donor has to be respected."

State Rep. Ron Waters, chairman of Pennsylvania's Legislative Black Caucus and a supporter of Ackerman, said the donors' identities should be known.

"We don't know who these donors are, or if they have a special interest," he said. "If there's nothing wrong with what they did, there should be no problem telling who they are."

The identities of the donors is the best-kept secret in town, he said.

"It's a new form of 'no snitching,' " he said.

If the donations do not come through, the district is on the hook for the $405,000, officials say. The severance agreement does not stipulate that payment hinges on the donations' being received.

The district saved $440,000 when it removed three of Ackerman's communications officers in the aftermath of her departure. She complained that they were escorted from school headquarters like "criminals."

Ackerman's media offensive began last week, first in an article in Education Week, then in interviews on Fox 29 and WURD, Philadelphia's black-oriented talk-radio station.

"I never understood the numbers that I was given by my CFO," Ackerman said of Masch. "We would get documents at the end, right before a board meeting or the night before. There was never any time for real dialogue."

She said her decision to ask Masch to step down was "probably the last part of my undoing."

Phil Goldsmith, a former interim CEO of the district, said the blame lay with Ackerman. The SRC, he said, should have terminated her for "financial mismanagement," along with poor leadership and her mishandling of racial attacks at South Philadelphia High School.

"She was the top person there," Goldsmith said. "If she wanted his resignation, why didn't she just terminate him?"

Related Blog

Visit this blog.

On WURD, Ackerman said, "It just couldn't happen."

Goldsmith said he doubted the SRC would do anything about Ackerman's comments concerning Masch.

"Who knows," he said, "maybe they'll increase her severance."

SRC members did not return calls for comment.

Waters defended Ackerman's right to comment on Masch: "She only reiterated something that was already public knowledge."

U P D A T E D > Must listen/download: EDUCATION SUMMIT W/DEASY, FLETCHER & GARCÍA - Patt Morrison for Fri. Sept. 2, 2011 @1PM 89.3FM

Education Summit: The Way Forward for Your Child’s Education and the LAUSD

KPCC Episode: Patt Morrison for September 2, 2011 |http://bit.ly/rjhrTE

9/3: UPDATE

Download/Listen  First segment Download/Listen Second Segment Download/Listen  Third Segment Note (9/3): The “Web Extra” segment is not yet posted

 

smf: A cosmic meeting o’ th’ minds as Deasy and Fletcher appear together for th’ first time ever on the same same stage?  With Monica Garcia as the extra added distraction?  Not quite! But a good conversation nonetheless when the players stray occasionally (but not too far) from their taking points. Deasy is a New Englander on a data-driven mission – and maybe on a roll - albeit in California. Does that make it a  lobster roll …or a California roll? Fletcher is a classroom teacher and wants what classroom teachers want: Smaller class size, better pay, more support and less meddling from downtown. And Garcia thinks like a social worker with political ambitions – hitched to Mayor Tony’s wagon. In the end it is The Parent and The Student who stir the conversation – probably because they didn't see the talking points.

●● I will update this page and the twitterers amongst us with download/podcast info as it becomes available – Please also download the un-broadcast/web-extra segment – the conversation became more heated and went far beyond the prepared thoughts.

Kathleen Miles/KPCC - Monica Garcia, Estephanie Solano, Warren Fletcher, Pilar Buelna and John Deasy stand with Patt.

Guests: Pilar Buelna, former director, Families in Schools-Parental Information and Resource Center (FIS-PIRC) John Deasy, superintendent, Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) Warren Fletcher, president, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) Monica Garcia, president, LAUSD Board of Education Estephanie Solano, 2011 Graduate, Roosevelt High School Web Resources FIS-PIRC: Pilar Buelna LAUSD: Superintendent John Deasy UTLA: Warren Fletcher LAUSD Board of Education: Monica Garcia Roosevelt High School: Estephanie Solano Inner City Struggle

 

Tough times and tough questions face the Los Angeles Unified School District: slashed budgets have caused teacher and staff layoffs, increased class sizes, and cancellation of arts and career training courses; test scores are low and drop-out rates high; conflict over evaluations threatens the relationship between teachers and the district; and it’s a constant challenge to reach parents who want to be involved but struggle with busy schedules or language barriers. With nearly 700,000 K-12 students in the second largest school district in the nation, all parties involved are feeling the urgent need for reform, though new measures under Superintendent John Deasy’s purview have bolstered confidence in the district’s seriousness about change. In just days, school officials, teachers, parents and students will face these challenges head-on as kids file into the classroom for the new academic year. One issue likely to raises hackles and concerns on all sides will be the state of LAUSD’s delicate negotiations with UTLA over teacher contracts, evaluation, and rehiring. The statewide budget crisis led to sharp cuts in the beleaguered school district’s funding for next year, which in turn led to the layoffs of more than 3,000 teachers, furlough days and scraped summer and extracurricular programs. Deasy has proposed a series of changes to existing employment contracts and is piloting a teacher evaluation program with more than 1,000 educators and 104 schools participating, in the hopes that its new procedures will yield more accurate indications of teaching quality and get the green light for implementation in the 2012-2013 school year. UTLA, which sought an injunction against the pilot program that fell through earlier this year, has yet to agree to the suggestions. Many of the teachers it represents are especially opposed to the “value-added” evaluative approach, which incorporates student test scores into assessments of teacher quality. LAUSD and UTLA are also locked in a dispute over rehiring practices, which have been somewhat complicated by the mandates of a state bill called AB 114 and the expected loss of $100 million revenue that the district will sustain due to declining enrollment. Obstacles to parental involvement in the school system will probably remain a cause for dissension too. The difficulty of communication between teachers and parents for whom English is not a primary language has limited parents’ engagement in their kids’ education and put some minorities at a disadvantage, advocacy groups say. Many parents are also upset over the transient nature of the various reforms that the district has put into effect over the years, wondering whether any of those steps truly improved their children’s education. And LAUSD’s students themselves, who face over-crowded classrooms and limited educational resources on a daily basis, cite bad teaching, ineffective disciplinary procedure, and the infrequency of communication between school staff, parents and teachers as further barriers to effective learning. With all of these conflicting views about what to change and how to change it, agreement seems like a distant possibility.

But despite the bleak situation, a few laudable improvements have brightened prospects for change in other sectors. The district has made some surprising gains in student achievement over the past year, with modest increases in standardized test scores and graduation rates that have left parents pleased and charter school reformists bewildered. Though LAUSD’s test scores still lag behind the statewide averages, a recent analysis conducted by the Los Angeles Times revealed that LAUSD schools’ results significantly superseded those of many underperforming schools that had been recently taken over by charter operations. Eight underperforming schools have been overhauled since Deasy became Superintendent in April, while successful agreements with various employee unions over increased furlough days prevented about half of the layoffs expected for this year. The district has also revamped its school menu by banning sugary milk and introducing more vegetarian options in an effort to combat the nation-wide obesity epidemic, much to the approval of many parents and health organizations. Parents of LAUSD students scored a victory as well in the recent passage of the “parent trigger law,” which gives parents the power to petition for changes in staff and management at schools that consistently underperform. Since all of these changes taking place over the past year, could next year be packed with similar advances, or will district officials become mired in endless disagreement? With so many conflicting efforts for reform steep budget cuts in the mix, what does the future have in store for the nation’s second-largest school district? Which changes will be made first, and how will they satisfy those invested in Los Angeles’ public education system?

Ex-UTLA CHIEF TAKES HARD LINE ON TENURE: Once an anti-charter crusader, A.J. Duffy wants to make it harder for teachers to obtain protections at the campus he hopes to open next year + smf’s 2¢

By Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times

Times’ Print Edition Headline: Duffy, who is starting his own charter, says the process should be longer and stricter.

Times’ Online Edition Headline: At his charter school, ex-UTLA head would target tenure

A.J. Duffy hopes to open one or more schools in the South L.A. area by the fall of 2012 at the latest. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

 

September 1, 2011

A.J. Duffy, who headed a teachers union that has long fought against charter schools, now is starting his own. And some of his ideas are going to trouble some educators and his friends in the labor movement.

The longtime anti-charter crusader wants to make it harder for teachers to earn tenure protections and wants to lengthen that process. He even wants to require teachers to demonstrate that they remain effective in the classroom if they want to keep their tenure protections.

And if a tenured teacher becomes ineffective, he wants to streamline dismissals. The process now in place can stretch out for several years, even with substantial evidence of gross misconduct. Some union leaders, notably Duffy, have defended this "due process" as a necessary protection against administrative abuses.

"I would make it 10 days if I could," Duffy now says of the length of the dismissal process.

These are not viewpoints ever advanced, condoned or accepted by United Teachers Los Angeles, which represents teachers and other professionals in the nation's second-largest school system. Duffy headed that union for six years, until term limits forced him from office in July.

Duffy will have a unionized school, preferably with his former union, but not at the expense of sacrificing his vision for how a school should operate, he said.

Skeptics, who criticized Duffy's management of the union, now question his qualifications to run schools. Charter school advocates responded cautiously, but were generally positive.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa had called the union under Duffy "one unwavering roadblock to reform." The mayor had no comment, but Patrick Sinclair, a spokesman for a group of schools overseen by the mayor, said, "We're glad he's pursuing a lot of the changes and reforms that we and the mayor would like to see."

Charter schools are free public schools that are operated independently from the local school district. They are not subject to some rules that govern traditional schools, and most are non-union.

Duffy, 67, will move this week from a founding board member to executive director of Apple Academy Charter Public Schools. He plans to submit a charter proposal for review and possible approval by the L.A. Unified School District in the next few weeks. He hopes to open one or more schools in the South L.A. area by the fall of 2012 at the latest.

Among those on his board: Former school board President Caprice Young, who went on to head the California Charter Schools Assn., after the teachers union mounted a successful campaign to oust her in 2003. Duffy was a union activist then; he became president in 2005, joining an anti-charter union leadership.

"If you were to put it in evangelical terms, this is about the best conversion I could hope for," said Young, who now heads a nonprofit teacher-recruiting effort. "I hesitate to describe it that way, because this is a collaboration. I've been willing to let go of my preconceived notions about someone with whom I've fought in the past."

The Apple Academy board also includes Ref Rodriguez, co-founder of the Partnerships to Uplift Communities, a large and non-union local charter group.

Even while Duffy battled charter schools, he also wanted to unionize them. Some other UTLA leaders opposed this goal; they didn't want to sanction the existence of charters in any way. L.A. Unified has more charters than any other school system, 197, and two joined UTLA over the last six years. (Some traditional schools converted to charters and remained with the union.)

As union president, Duffy railed against the lower percentage of special education students and students learning English who were served by charters — an issue that still troubles him. And he fought to keep charter schools off L.A. Unified campuses. Every time a charter school opened, it siphoned off union teaching positions.

At the same time, he argued for charter school-like freedoms at traditional schools, running up against the L.A. Unified bureaucracy and, frequently, his own union's reluctance to risk weakening contract protections.

As his term in office ended, Duffy had a right to return to the classroom — he had been a teacher and a dean. But he hoped for a larger role. That chance came through an unexpected vehicle: a charter-school cheating scandal.

In 2010, when teachers at Crescendo charter schools reported that they were ordered to cheat on state standardized tests, they quickly joined UTLA for protection against retaliation. Duffy took up their cause and argued that the schools should remain open.

L.A. Unified ultimately voted to close Crescendo in July. Now, Duffy hopes to hire Crescendo teachers and attract former students.

Duffy said his new role gives him another crack at a longtime union goal: freeing teachers from what he regards as an oppressive district bureaucracy.

And he said his teachers would receive a fair, if expedited, dismissal process. Struggling teachers would receive help before they were fired, and experienced teachers would have to support the dismissal.

Former UTLA President John Perez said he wished Duffy well but said he could not endorse Duffy's new direction. Charter school operators, he said, are laying the groundwork for using public-school funds at private schools through so-called vouchers.

They're also opening the door for corporations "who want to destroy public education by getting their hands on the hundreds of billions of dollars we spend on public education in this country," Perez said.

smf: I have been encouraged and I am encouraging everyone to stay away from the metaphors of war+violence – (ie: ‘’pulling-the-trigger’ and ‘death penalty’) in the reform debate – so the following are not ‘bullet points’. They are – if you’ll excuse the Archie Bunker irony and the correct typographic nomenclature: ‘dingbats’. Or ‘meatballs’. (“Cheese Louise, Edith …ain’t we got enough of them already?”) I know better than to blame reporters or their subjects for the output of headline editors, but I think Caprice Young and Ref Rodriguez and the other partners in Apple Charters – including parents, teachers and students -  might take offence to the first person possessive  of “his own charter” and “at his charter school.” I spoke-to or exchanged emails with Duffy, an Apple board member  and UTLA leadership when this came to light as an unbelievable rumor.  Once my “say it ain’t so’ text message was independently confirmed with shy “maybe” and a smiley face emoticon I agonized how I could avoid the ‘strange bedfellows’ metaphor. (I can’’t). Duffy has been in strange beds before. He supported Mayor Tony’s AB 1381 Takeover of LAUSD – a position that was eventually repudiated by the UTLA membership. Current UTLA leadership is carefully distancing itself from Duffy’s current effort – he is a private citizen they say. I saw Citizen Duffy Wednesday night;, he was already complaining about how LAUSD is stonewalling and stalling  on Apple’s charter application. I had thought Jed Wallace (or Steve Barr or Ben Austin) had spoke his lines. Apple essentially is trying to pick up the pieces of Crescendo Charter – which had their charters pulled for involvement in a test cheating scandal and for failing to terminate staff (not teachers)  involved in he scandal.  http://bit.ly/qmh2Ew I have heard no dispute that it was teachers at Crescendo who blew the whistle on the cheating Crescendo was a UTLA signatory school – but The Times article says the Crescendo teachers joined UTLA after the whistle-blowing. The teachers eventually paid the “no-good-deed-goes-unpunished” price by losing their jobs; the parents and students lost their school. Stay tuned. And keep your suspension-of-disbelief firmly fastened at all times!

VENICE NEIGHBORHOOD COUNCIL BACKS MIDDLE SCHOOL OPTION AT WALGROVE, DECLINES TO CONSIDER SUPPORT FOR OCEAN CHARTER CO-LOCATION

BY GARY WALKER – the argonaut - http://bit.ly/pQaeSU

Thursday, September 1, 2011 - The Venice Neighborhood Council entered the much discussed debate surrounding the pending land lease deal at Walgrove Avenue Elementary School in Mar Vista when it acted upon two resolutions that could influence the outcome of which school is selected for the elementary school site.

Los Angeles Unified School District officials are offering an unoccupied parcel of land at Walgrove to a charter operator in an effort to accommodate a dearth of facilities for charter schools as well as to reduce tensions created by colocations, a situation that polarized several Westside campuses this spring.

LAUSD Board Member Steve Zimmer, who represents Venice and Mar Vista in District 4, announced that the tentative date for the school district to release a request for proposal is Sept. 15. The RFP will serve as an official invitation for any charter operator to submit an application to be considered for the land lease.

The neighborhood council voted unanimously Aug. 16 to support a motion brought by Cindy Chambers that LAUSD consider a middle school at the Walgrove site, with a last minute addition by board member Amanda Seward that included “without excluding elementary or high schools.”

The board also declined to vote on a recommendation brought by Birgitte Hellsten, a parent from Ocean Charter School, that asked “while the council may support any charter co-occupying the Walgrove campus,” if a school is chosen, that the council endorse Ocean Charter’s continued colocation at Walgrove.

Colocation occurs when a traditional school and a charter share classrooms and common areas on a campus. It is an outgrowth of Proposition 39, a 2000 voter-approved initiative that mandates school districts to provide equal access to charter schools on community school campuses where there are unused or empty classrooms.

Fourth through eighth grades of the Waldorf-based school share space with the elementary school, and Ocean Charter’s kindergarten through third grades hold their classes at a Del Rey Christian church.

Board member Jake Kaufmann attempted to have the middle school motion postponed, but resident Karen Wolfe, whose daughter attends Ocean Charter, pointed out that delaying the vote would deprive Venice of adding its voice to a debate concerning where many of the neighborhood’s children could attend in the future.

“It’s really important that this get decided tonight because the motion seeks to influence the criteria that will be included in the request for proposal,” Wolfe told the council. “At (the September Venice council meeting) the request for proposal will already be out and you guys won’t have any say.”

The initial vote for Chambers’ resolution had five members - including Kaufman - abstaining, with six members voting in favor and five against the motion. But a second vote brought the total to 12-0, with three abstentions.

Proponents of both motions packed the Oakwood Recreation Center building to lobby the local council, which has recently become more involved in weighing in on education matters.

When she addressed the local council, Ocean Charter Executive Director Kristy Mack-Fett reiterated a reoccurring sentiment among her school’s supporters: their fears of an unfair process that could exclude them from competing for the land lease.

Mack-Fett emphasized her school’s test scores as well as the number of local families from the Venice/Mar Vista area that attend Ocean Charter as a reason why the council should consider backing Hellsten’s recommendation.

“We’ve been (on the Walgrove campus) for five years and we’d very much like to stay there,” she said.

Zimmer also addressed the board and stated again, as he has in prior interviews with The Argonaut, that the process for selecting a school will be open and impartial.

“There seems to be a preconclusion that (the selection process) will not be fair,” Zimmer told the council. “Our legal department is absolutely committed to a fair and transparent process.”

Mack-Fett added that Ocean Charter officials would like to work with the homeowners near Walgrove as well as parents at the elementary schools who have a variety of complaints about how parents at the charter school have conducted themselves since its arrival in 2006.

“We’d like to continue to be a part of this community and would like to work with our Walgrove partners on improving things and ideally developing a site that houses our whole school and also can be developed in collaboration with the shared vision of Walgrove,” she said.

Zimmer also addressed certain language that has been used by supporters of Ocean Charter, who frequently say they feel that they would be “evicted” from the Walgrove campus if they are not chosen for the land lease.

He noted that eviction is a legal term and Ocean Charter signed an agreement to colocate at Walgrove only through 2012.

Approximately 50 parents of Walgrove students signed a letter asking the Venice council to wait until the applications have been submitted before deciding to back a specific charter.

“We are the ones that will be most impacted,” said Claudia Trevisan, who lives near the elementary school and who signed the letter. “We want more middle school choices for our children, and as a Walgrove parent, I would like to see a school that does not compete with elementary school kids.”

In a letter to Ocean Charter parents, Hellsten thanked them for attending the meeting and discussed both resolutions.

“The motion that effectively sought to diminish (Ocean Charter’s) chance for winning the bid on Walgrove, was not passed either, at least not in its original language,” she wrote.

“The motion passed, but with the amendment that no school should be excluded from the (request for proposal) process. The task force views this as an important victory and Ocean Charter parents’ concern for a fairly written proposal was clearly noticed by the (Venice Neighborhood Council).”

Wolfe, a Venice resident whose son attended Ocean Charter but is now at Marina Del Rey Middle School in Del Rey, said she believed Ocean Charter’s recommendation was premature.

“After the request for proposal is released, if the board wants to recommend a school, they can,” she said.

Green Dot Public Schools has also indicated an interest in establishing a middle school at the Walgrove site.

Barbara Einstein, whose four daughters attended Walgrove, circulated a petition three years ago to gather signatures from local parents in an effort to establish a Green Dot middle school in the Venice/Mar Vista neighborhoods. A middle school at the Walgrove site would allow children who would be attending Green Dot’s sixth grade classes a few years from now to be able to return to a school closer to home, she said.

“I would really hope that those children would come back to Venice and be at a school in Venice,” said Einstein, who has three daughters enrolled in the Green Dot colocation at Cowan Avenue Elementary in Westchester.

Parents from Walgrove and Westminster Avenue Elementary School in Venice have signed at least one petition supporting a Green Dot middle school, demonstrating the desire to see a middle school alternative to Mark Twain Middle School.

Green Dot executives Marco Petruzzi and Douglas Weston were also in attendance at the council meeting.

Josh Campbell, whose two daughters attend Ocean Charter, thought the motion by Chambers would hamper his school’s chances to have a fair opportunity to bid on the site.

“We will have the same amount of students from (kindergarten) through middle school as a middle school that would be on that campus,” he said. “We just want to be part of the process, and saying it should be a middle school negates us from being a part of the process.

“I don’t think that you should support a school, but I don’t think that you should exclude a school either,” Campbell added.

Ocean Charter is in its last year of colocation with the elementary school. By state law, the bungalows that the school occupies at Walgrove must be removed, and several parents and members of its administration feel there is a sense of urgency to win the land lease bid or find a location where its elementary and middle schools can be on the same campus.