L.A. UNIFIED SUPT. DEASY UNVEILS NEW BUDGET PROPOSAL

By Howard Blume, L.A. Times | http://lat.ms/1lL7xPQ

8:04 PM PDT, April 4, 2014  ::  Buoyed by rising state funding, the Los Angeles Unified School District's draft budget proposal for the new fiscal year is the healthiest spending plan in years.

The general fund would increase from $6.2 billion to $6.8 bill under the proposal for the 2014-15 fiscal year, which begins July 1, officials said. The state’s improving economy and higher taxes are major factors for the increase.

But L.A. Unified also will receive additional dollars through the state’s new funding formula for every student who falls into one or more of three categories: foster youth, students learning English and students from low-income families.

The funds generated by these students are supposed to go to services that benefit them under the new system developed by Gov. Jerry Brown and the state Legislature.

One example in L.A. is a foster youth support system that would grow from three to 75 full-time positions.

“I am proud and pleased to propose new investments that bring justice to our youth,” Supt. John Deasy wrote in a memo Thursday to the Board of Education. “However, it does not resolve all problems or desires for all new programs, restorations or opportunities.”

During the recent recession, the nation's second-largest school system laid off thousands of employees.

As part of the new budget process, L.A. Unified must show in writing how its spending plan would especially help the three special categories of students. The district also must report how the effectiveness of these efforts will be measured.

Deasy’s proposal also calls for a modest reduction in class size. For example, math and English classes would be reduced by two students in 8th grade and 9th grade. For 8th grade math, that could mean classes shrinking from about 34 to about 32 students. Over three years, a two-student reduction also will occur for other middle and high school grades.

Among other particulars, Deasy would like to return part-time library aides to elementary schools and gradually restore middle school librarians.

“Mr. Deasy takes a huge step forward, aiming fresh funding to schools that serve the most disadvantaged families in order to close  achievement gaps,” said UC Berkeley professor Bruce Fuller, after reviewing the proposal.

Statewide, there’s been some concern about whether the new, designated dollars truly would go to benefit the students with the greatest needs. Some advocates said they would oppose using these funds, for example, to pay down debt or for an across-the-board salary hike.

Fuller noted one area of possible concern with Deasy’s budget. He said his preliminary review suggested that Deasy’s proposal uses the new funds, in part, to pay for already existing district programs that had been paid for through other sources.

"It's unclear whether this meets the letter or spirit of Gov. Brown's finance reform," Fuller said.

L.A. Unified’s budget proposal incorporates an anticipated raise for employees, but Deasy declined to say Friday how much salaries would rise. The teachers union has asked for a 17% raise, but hasn’t specified the period of time over which that raise should occur.

The school board will take up the budget proposal Tuesday. A final version is not likely to be approved before June.

AB 215: DEAL ANNOUNCED ON ‘SEVERE MISCONDUCT’ TEACHER DISMISSAL BILL THAT GOVERNOR WOULD SUPPORT + smf’s 2¢

By John Fensterwald |  EdSource Today http://bit.ly/1jPIbxK

April 4th, 2014 | Signaling the resolution of an acrimonious issue, Assembly Education Committee Chairwoman Joan Buchanan, D-Alamo, introduced a bill Friday to make dismissing teachers charged with severe misconduct quicker, easier and cheaper.

Buchanan praised the compromise that was reached, and said that Gov. Jerry Brown, who vetoed her version of the bill last year, would sign it. Brown spokesman Jim Evans confirmed in an email, “As introduced, the Administration supports Assemblymember Buchanan’s approach.”

“I want to thank the education community for its willingness to continue to work on this critical issue,” Buchanan said in a statement. “We share a common goal of keeping our children safe and providing a fair and efficient process.”

Assemblywoman Joan Buchanan. Source: EdSource>>

In a further sign of movement, Bill Lucia, CEO of EdVoice, an advocacy organization, said he would withdraw a proposed ballot measure dealing with teacher dismissals if the bill, as proposed, becomes law by mid-June. In an unusual alliance, Lucia and the California Teachers Association, who have clashed over teacher evaluations, charter schools and, until now, teacher discipline and dismissals, issued a joint statement praising the compromise and each other’s efforts.

“AB 215 is the culmination of several years of effort by diverse stakeholders to address the need to reduce the complexity and cost of suspension and dismissal appeals,” Lucia said. “EdVoice is pleased to support and join the hard work of the CTA in arriving at these needed and significant improvements to current law.”

The teachers association had supported Buchanan’s bill last year. “AB 215 meets our goal of keeping our students safe by streamlining the dismissal process while maintaining due process for teachers,” said Dean Vogel, president of the teachers association.

The California School Boards Association, which led the opposition to Buchanan’s AB 375 last year and submitted its own bill this year with some similar elements to AB 215, was not included in the negotiations with EdVoice and the Brown administration. A spokeswoman said Friday that the association was still reviewing Buchanan’s bill.

Most of the big changes in Assembly Bill 215 would apply only to charges of egregious misconduct – acts that would include sexual abuse, child abuse and some drug crimes. While these make up a small percentage of firings – most dismissal cases are for unsatisfactory performance – they also are the most horrific, threatening children’s health and safety.

Superintendents already can immediately suspend teachers suspected of immoral conduct. Usually this has been done with pay, and districts have complained that the firing process can take toolong and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Lucia cited cases in which districts, to avoid costly hearings, reached resignation or transfer agreements in which they agreed to remove charges from a teacher’s record and not report them to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. The commission has the authority to revoke teacher licenses.

AB 215 would address these complaints by:

• Creating a separate, expedited hearing process after a school board has voted to fire a teacher for egregious misconduct. The case would go before only an administrative law judge, whose decision would be binding. (Either side could still appeal the decision to Superior Court.) Cases not involving egregious misconduct would continue as before, with hearings by a three-person panel consisting of an administrative law judge and two educators, one chosen by the district and one by the teacher.

• Imposing a seven-month deadline for the administrative law judge to issue a decision in all dismissal cases, unless the judge agrees to a delay for good cause. This is the same deadline that Buchanan had proposed last year in AB 375, and both Lucia and the California School Boards Association opposed it as implausible and counterproductive. They said wrangling over evidence would cause delays, forcing judges to reset the clock or dismiss the case. But Lucia said Friday that he now believes the deadline would work. The bill specifies that egregious misconduct cases must become a court priority, going to the head of the docket. It would require the hearing to begin within 60 days. And it would streamline the process by eliminating the ability of either side to appeal evidentiary rulings to the Superior Court. This was another reason that cases were drawn out, Lucia said.

• Clarifying the law to allow districts to suspend without pay teachers charged with egregious and immoral conduct.

• Prohibiting districts from cutting deals with teachers to have charges of misconduct expunged from their record – potentially enabling them to relocate to an unsuspecting district. It also requires a district to disclose charges of misconduct that it has reported to the credentialing commission when another district asks about an employment application.

• Permitting evidence of allegations of child abuse or sexual abuse more than four years old to be introduced.

• Permitting dismissal charges for egregious misconduct to be filed at any time, not just during the school year.

Buchanan said that Brown had opposed limits on evidence and refiling of charges that were in AB 375, saying he wanted to give districts more flexibility. AB 215 removes them for cases involving egregious misconduct but applies them to other dismissal charges.

A series of high-profile sex abuse cases (among them, here, here and here) had turned the heat on the Legislature to strengthen the state’s dismissal laws. But lawmakers failed to do so during the past two years after contentious debates. In 2012, the state’s teachers unions pressured Assembly Democrats to bottle up a bill sponsored by Sen. Alex Padilla, D-San Fernando Valley, that they said would erode due process rights and could expose them to dismissals based on false charges. Last year, Buchanan worked with the California Teachers Association on AB 375, which she said represented a good-faith effort at compromise, only to have Brown veto it while encouraging her to try again.

At first she was reluctant, she said in an interview, but did in the end. “All parties put in hundreds of hours working through this,” Buchanan said. “AB 215 is fair and holds to our core belief that people who abuse children should not be in the classroom.”

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smf: AB215 (Buchanan) is what is known in legislative parlance as a “gut-and-amend bill”, a variety of legislation never discussed on Schoolhouse Rock.   AB 215 went to the legislature as a nice little bill about Solid Waste Recycling – and then, one day this week everything about it was changed, lined through and tossed out  …except its number. Now it’s about School employees: dismissal or suspension: hearings.

"Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made." - Otto von Bismarck>

I’m sure somewhere someone mourns that Solid Waste Recycling has been tossed aside like – uh – un-recycled solid waste. 

And to be honest, the recycling of solid waste is probably a greater societal challenge and a better thing for our legislators to be occupied with  than egregiously misbehaving teachers.  The three cases cited above all resulted in prosecution and none of those teachers are still teaching …but at least some kind of effluvia has been kind-of recycled.

The full text of AB 215, as amended, Chesboro Solid waste recycling Buchanan School employees: dismissal or suspension: hearings.is here.

STAKES RUN HIGH IN TRIAL RUN FOR EXAMS: Field-Testing Set to Begin on Common-Core Exams

By Catherine Gewertz | Education Week |  http://bit.ly/1dZKiiT

Sydney Matai and other 7th graders at Marshall Simonds Middle School in Burlington, Mass., look at a PARCC practice test to give them some familiarity with the format before next week's field-testing of the computer-based assessments aligned with the common core. —Gretchen Ertl for Education Week

Published in Print: March 26, 2014  [Includes correction(s): March 27, 2014]::  This week marks a major milestone in an assessment project of unprecedented scope: the start of field-testing season for new, shared tests of a common set of academic standards.

Between March 24 and June 6, more than 4 million students in 36 states and the District of Columbia will take near-final versions of the tests in mathematics and English/language arts. Those exams—tied to the Common Core State Standards that all but a handful of states have adopted—were created by a bevy of vendors hired at the request of two groups of states: the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, or PARCC.

“I don’t think a trial of this magnitude has been done anytime in the history of student testing in the U.S.,” said Keith Rust, a vice president at the Rockville, Md.-based Westat, where he oversees the sampling of schools and students for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP.

The exercise won’t produce detailed, scaled scores of student performance; that part is still a year away. Instead, this spring’s field-testing is a crucial part of the assessments’ design stage, undertaken to see what works and what doesn’t. Questions like these are on test-makers’ minds: Will schools’ hardware and bandwidth be able to handle large-scale, computer-based testing? Do the tests work equally well on desktops, laptops, and tablets? Which items might confuse or overwhelm students?

Immense stakes are riding on the field tests. The federal government is watching closely to see how well its $360 million investment—awarded in grants to the state consortia developing the exams—is paying off so far, especially since it has let more than a dozen states drop all or part of their current testing regimens in order to participate fully in the field tests.

States that pledged loyalty to the project need to see that they can rely on the tests, since those states plan to base crucial decisions on them—such as how to evaluate schools, teachers, and students—within a year or two after the final tests are available in spring 2015.

School districts have made massive investments in technology to manage the consortium tests, and have spent countless hours preparing teachers, students, and parents for the new system—all on the faith that enduring the inevitable problems during the transition will pay off in a much better assessment than what they’ve been using. Amid a wave of anti-testing sentiment, many parents and activists are poised to seize on problems in field-testing as one more sign that large-scale testing is misguided.

A Combustible Moment

Those elements create a combustible moment: An experiment deliberately designed to uncover weaknesses in a high-profile test takes place under intense public scrutiny.

“The consortia are going to have to be pretty confident they’ll see minor glitches, but not major problems,” Mr. Rust said. “You wouldn’t want to go into this on a wing and a prayer. If it goes badly wrong, it shakes people’s confidence that it will be right the next time.”

In fact, just days before the planned March 18 start date for field-testing by Smarter Balanced, the organization took the major step of postponing the launch by one week to allow time for what Jacqueline King, a spokeswoman for the consortium, called some final “quality checking.” She said the delay was not about the test’s content, but rather ensuring that all the important elements, including the software and accessibility features—such as read-aloud assistance for certain students with disabilities—were working together seamlessly.

Making Assessments More Accessible

The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium say their computer-based tests will offer an array of accessibility features. Many of these features can be used by any student, but some are geared specifically to students with disabilities, or to English-language learners. The field tests will offer the first opportunity for students to try the accommodations in a test situation.

There are some key differences between the field tests and the fully operational assessments that will be used in the spring of 2015. Length, for instance: Students will typically be involved in three to four hours of field-testing, less than half as long as what they’ll face next spring.

In the real PARCC test, students will take both a multiple-choice, end-of-year component and a more extended and complex performance-based section. On the field test, only 25 percent to 30 percent of students will take both pieces, and only in one subject, said Jeffrey Nellhaus, the director of assessment for PARCC. The rest will take either the end-of-year or performance segment.

The Smarter Balanced operational test in 2015 will be computer-adaptive—adjusting the difficulty of questions to the student’s skill level—but the field test, for the most part, will not be. A small number of students will get the adaptive version at the end of the field-testing window, said Ms. King. That’s because test-makers will use the questions students answer earlier in the field test to calibrate the adaptivity of the test engine later in the field-testing window.

Representative Samples

While some schools volunteered to participate in the field tests, most were chosen by their state or their state’s consortium as the multistate groups sought to build demographically representative samples of students. The result is a distribution of students taking the field tests that is wide nationally but not, in general, deep in individual schools.

The PARCC field tests will involve about 10 percent of the students in the participating states and districts, but they are scattered across half the schools. That pattern is deliberate and beneficial, Mr. Nellhaus said.

“A more spread-out testing pattern,” he said, “means that you won’t get a clustering effect in the sampling” that could magnify the impact of anomalous conditions in any one place. “It also avoids a heavy impact on school life.”

Most students are taking the field tests in only math or English/language arts; a subset will be tested in both subjects. Some states, however, such as California, Connecticut, Idaho, Montana, and South Dakota, have chosen to wade much deeper into the field-test exercise. They’re involving all—or nearly all—of their students. While that takes a greater toll on schools’ time and focus, leaders in those states decided that the payoff would justify the effort.

Those states were among the ones that obtained waivers from the U.S. Department of Education to cut back or eliminate their existing state tests to free up time to try the field tests. Since the new tests aren’t final, the data they produce can’t be used for accountability purposes, so the federal government has agreed to let the waiver states hold their accountability ratings steady for another year.

“We decided that it was a great opportunity for students to experience the test when it doesn’t count,” said Deborah V.H. Sigman, the deputy state superintendent of education in California, where 95 percent of the students will answer Smarter Balanced field test items in both subjects, and the rest will take the test only in one content area.

“It’s also a way for adults in the [school] building to think about what they need to do to optimize the experience for next year.”

Some districts are doing more comprehensive field-testing than their states. The suburban system in Burlington, Mass., 15 miles west of Boston, chose to give the PARCC field test to every student in grades 3-11 in both subjects. Eric Conti, the superintendent of the 3,600-student district, said he thinks it’s good for adults and students to experience something “as close to the real thing” as possible.

A federal waiver allows Massachusetts students participating in the PARCC field test to skip the state’s regular testing under the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, although 10th graders still must take the MCAS to graduate.

Burlington was originally chosen by PARCC to do only the paper-and-pencil version of the field test, and only in some classrooms, in grades 3, 4, 8 and 10, Mr. Conti said. But he wanted to put his district’s technological readiness to the test—it has a computer for every student—so he appealed to the state for permission to use the computer-based version with all children in tested grades, he said.

The district has made a deliberate research subject of itself, not only with PARCC, but with the Cambridge, Mass.-based Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy. Working with the state teachers’ union, the superintendents’ association, and the state education department, the Rennie Center will examine what happens in different field-testing scenarios in Burlington and in Revere, a small urban district near Boston.

Burlington, for instance, will “livestream” the field test, so any loss of its network connections will interrupt the exam availability, Mr. Conti said. Revere, on the other hand, will “cache” the field test, downloading it and pumping it out locally. Burlington is trying the field test on varying devices, including iPads, Chromebooks, Mac desktops, and PCs, in a bid to see what works well and what doesn’t.

“It makes no sense to show off technologically,” Mr. Conti said. “We could probably test all our kids in three days. Our network could handle it. Instead, it will be a three-week disruption.

“But the point is to see what happens,” he said. “As a superintendent, I plan 18 months in advance. When we do it live a year from now, it will impact my budget if we have to make changes. I’d rather know that sooner than later.”

Balancing Opposition, Potential

The Nashville, Tenn., school system illustrates both the promise and the risks districts face when taking part in what the consortium test designers call “testing the test.” About 10 percent of the district’s 83,000 students will take the PARCC field test, either in math or in English/language arts.

Jesse Register, the district’s director of schools, said he thinks the experience will “take away the fear of the unknown” for teachers, students, and parents. It also complements the work the district has been doing to invest heavily in technological infrastructure and in training teachers to use technology to differentiate instruction, he said.

Since Nashville’s schools enroll one-third of Tennessee’s English-language learners, Mr. Register considers his district’s participation pivotal to ensuring the PARCC test works well for students whose native language isn’t English. “For our data to be included in how PARCC is going is important to influencing the design of the test,” he said.

Even as the Nashville schools inform a potentially better test, the district is treading on bumpy turf. Without a federal waiver for Tennessee, Nashville’s students will have to take both the PARCC field tests and the state’s regular assessments. And that likely will draw some criticism, Mr. Register said.

“We’re getting some pushback now about too much assessment,” he said. “We have to communicate very effectively with our parents and with our teachers to make sure this doesn’t become a negative.”

Looking for Weak Spots

More than a few worries are shadowing the landscape as field-testing gets underway. Technological capacity is high on the list.

“We have 60 computers in one computer lab in our school. Our tech people are worried about our servers,” said Kristin Winder, a 6th grade teacher in Great Falls, Mont.

One district experienced such problems in the run-up to the PARCC field tests that it decided against participating. District sources said their faith was undermined by last-minute changes in test dates, student files uploaded but then lost, and other logistical and communications slip-ups.

“We simply couldn’t allow our system’s first experience with PARCC to be a negative one,” a district official said in a confidential email obtained by Education Week. “We believe it would have undermined our work and our staff. Students and parents deserve better.”

The complexity of mounting field tests on such a large scale is daunting. PARCC’s field-test-administration manual weighs in at 180 pages. The readiness exercise has spawned countless memos and staff meetings across states and districts as systems gear up for the field test. Educators have spent time trying practice tests with students, and administrators overseeing the coming exams have experimented with “training tests.”

“You can imagine the planning it takes to put something like this in place,” Ms. Sigman said of preparing for the Smarter Balanced field tests.

Some see big benefits in all that planning, as it provides a glimpse into how the common standards should inform instruction and a preview of the forthcoming tests. Others see those hours as a tragic mischanneling of education energy and resources.

“Schools are spending all this money trying to get wired and ready for PARCC and Smarter Balanced. And who’s getting that money? Corporations,” said Peggy Robertson, an Aurora, Colo., literacy coach who co-founded United Opt Out National, which seeks to eliminate high-stakes standardized tests. “The less money schools have, the more likely it is that they’ll fail. All of it is a setup for charter schools and the privatization of public education.”

Teams from each consortium will be watching many aspects of field-testing closely to figure out what works well and what doesn’t.

Questions of technology loom large: How many children can a given school test at one time? If a teacher is streaming video in her classroom while other children take the test down the hall, will it overload the system?

The teams are looking for many other outcomes as well. What kinds of answers does a given question elicit from a range of students? Test designers will have detailed student-level information—pegged to unique new identifiers to protect students’ identities—to enable them to see if some questions stump subgroups of students, such as those in a given area of the country or those from certain racial or socioeconomic backgrounds. Do students who perform well on most parts of the field test consistently trip on some items?

Those kinds of observations will lead to a weeding-out or revision of questions, typically as many as 10 to 20 percent of the total, Ms. King of Smarter Balanced said.

Other questions involve how to scale and score the tests. PARCC officials, for instance, will be considering whether to treat the end-of-year portion and the performance-task portion as separate exams, with separate scales and scores, or to combine them into “one big test,” Mr. Nellhaus said. And if they are combined, should the two pieces be weighted differently?

In the end, the two consortia are keenly aware that they’re asking a lot of participating schools and districts: major time investments and schedule disruptions for what amounts to a research project to refine the test.

“This is why we do this,” Ms. King said. “To see what works and what doesn’t.”

Even some of those most committed to the project are feeling trepidation. One district official who described himself as “knee deep” in preparations said he is bracing for blowback from his staff and his parent community if even moderate problems arise with the test.

“I just hope it’s worth it in the end,” he said.

OKLAHOMA MOVES TO DUMP COMMON CORE: A landslide vote in the Sooner State follows Indiana withdrawal.

By Alec Torres,  NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE  | http://bit.ly/1h1miLw

Bucking the Trend: Range Riders statue at the Oklahoma state capitol

APRIL 2, 2014 5:31 PM  ::  The Oklahoma state senate passed a bill Tuesday to withdraw the state from the Common Core standards. If the bill is signed by Governor Mary Fallin, Oklahoma will become the second state to withdraw from the Common Core.

Indiana withdrew last week, with Governor Mike Pence’s signature.

The bill to get the Sooner State was hugely popular in both houses. House Bill 3399 was approved by the state house in a 78 to 12 vote before being sent to the state senate for amendments. On Tuesday, the state senate voted 37 to 10 in favor of the bill. The bill will now go to the House for another vote before being sent to the governor’s desk.

Oklahoma was one of the first states to adopt the Common Core standards in June of 2010, after a vote by the state board of education. However, the Sooner State later dropped out of the Common Core’s standardized testing consortium in the summer of 2013. Fallin then issued an executive order in December directing the Secretary of Education to make sure the federal government “does not intrude in Oklahoma’s development of academic curricula and teaching strategies.”

State representative Jason Nelson, an author and co-sponsor of HB 3399, is confident that the bill will pass its last vote and that Fallin will sign it.

“The strong votes [for the bill] are not an illusion,” Nelson tells National Review Online. “There’s really strong support in both the house and the senate.”

Fallin did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication. She has expressed reservations about a prior version of the bill.

On March 24 — on the same day Governor Pence signed legislation withdrawing Indiana from the Common Core standards — Fallin released a statement praising state authority and criticizing the Common Core.

“As we work to raise the bar in our schools, it is essential that higher academic standards are developed and implemented by and for Oklahomans,” Fallin wrote. “We have no interest in relinquishing control over education to the federal government or outside groups.”

Fallin wrote that she would support legislation repealing the Common Core, if the legislation “increases classroom rigor and accountability while guaranteeing that Oklahoma public education is protected from federal interference.” She did not consider the earlier version of HB 3399 before amendments satisfactory, but but said she hopes it will “ultimately be signed into law.”

Nelson believes the legislature has fulfilled the governor’s request. “I think she would probably sign it because we’ve addressed the concerns that the standards are not watered down,” Nelson says.

HB 3399 still allows the Oklahoma state board of education — in consultation with the state’s higher education and vocational training systems– to preserve aspects of the Common Core standards, if it so chooses.

“Specifically, the bill says that the state cannot cede its control over our standards or our student assessments,” Nelson says, “or relinquish our authority over those standards and assessments.” The bill, he says, would still leave the state free to use selected Common Core standards.

If the bill is signed into law, Oklahoma will transition away from the Common Core standards over the next few years as it develops its own standards.

DEASY RELEASES DRAFT OF LAUSD’S NEXT BUDGET, WITH NEW MONEY

by Vanessa Romo, LA School Report | http://bit.ly/1skr4bw

[THE SUPERINTENDENT’S PROPOSED BUDGET RECOMMENDATIONS 2014-2015 – are posted here: http://t.co/4WX9QQxA0D]

April 4, 2014 6:50 pm  ::  LA Unified Superintendent John Deasy made public today the first draft of a $6.8 billion budget for the 2014-15 school year, a presentation that offered the first glimpse of how the new Local Control Funding Formula is going to work.

Superintendent John Deasy>>

The budget will be formally presented to the school board on Tuesday, after which the six current members are expected to engage in a lively debate over how to tweak, change or blow-up Deasy’s initial foray into this year’s budget negotiations. At the same time, interest groups around the city who have already been lobbying the members, are expected to intensify their efforts.

The district is required to have its final version in shape — the Local Control Accountability Plan — for the board’s final approval on June 17.

The budget proposal includes spending plans for an extra $332 million in state funds, which has been the object of intense lobbying from interest groups because much of that money is earmarked to serve students in high needs categories: those from low-income families, English learners and foster youth.

That additional money includes $137 million above the state’s standard per pupil spending.

The district current serves 11,604 children in foster case and 154,110 who are English learners. Overall, 80 percent of all LA Unified students are from low-income families.

While Deasy’s proposal reflects more money for lots of programs and people, including more teachers, nurses, librarians and counselors — it’s probably not enough to satisfy most.

For example, the budget includes money for 1,210 new jobs, many of them teaching positions. Next year, the budget provides for another 1,672 new positions and 534 in the year after that, for a three-year total of 3,417.

It remains to be seen whether those totals will satisfy the various unions whose members are LA Unified employees. UTLA, for example, has made rehiring all teachers laid off prior to the 2008 recession a major objective with a new collective bargaining agreement about to be negotiated.

In a letter to the school board members that accompanied a package of documents that provides details of the budget proposal, Deasy said, “While we are all happy with the new funds, I remind all that even with these new funds we do not have nearly enough to accomplish what we desire or to fully provide youth with a justice-based education in California. Not by a long shot! But it is a start.”

Under his plan, one of the largest allocations of the new money — $85 million — will go directly to schools, distributed in proportion to the target student population. Schools can autonomously decide how to spend that money within the spirit of the funding formula, and they have no impact on additional services provided by the district.

A group of 71 pilot and network partner schools already use the per pupil funding formula so they will continue to operate their budgets independent of the district’s guidelines. And, with the exception of their share of the $85 million, they are opted out of other districtwide initiatives.

Here are a few line item examples from the budget:

• $9.9 million for foster youth. Next year, the district plans to open a series of Family Source Centers and to increase the student counselor/psychiatric worker to student ratio to 1 per 100, which mean 75 new full time employee. Currently the district employes three full time foster care case workers, for more than 8,000 foster youth.
• 15 new librarians and 192 library aides who would work a 3 hour/day
• 60 new middle school teachers, a result of reducing math and English Language Arts class sizes by two students
• 70 new high school teachers using the same formula
• 15 new nurses
• 25 new custodial staff member

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KCRW’s The Mixer with Host: Steve Chiotakis had and excellent interview with Vanessa Romo fresh out of Deasy’s News Conference on the Budget Friday night – with background on the process and on the realities of this draft of the plan. (“Nothing is going to happen until after the May Revise!) Unfortunately I cannot find that piece posted online.

 

Sheriff's Union Battle, and LAUSD Spending

FRI APR 4, 2014

Host:

• Steve Chiotakis

Produced by:

• Avishay Artsy

There's a strange battle going on within the Association for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs, and now a judge has gotten involved. Cindy Chang from the LA Times explains. Also, KCRW's Steve Chiotakis looks at the spending priorities of LA Unified superintendent John Deasy. He's joined by Vanessa Romo of LA School Report.

First Look: SUPERINTENDENT’S DRAFT PROPOSED BUDGET RECOMMENDATIONS & FORMAL PRELIMINARY DRAFT OF THE LOCAL CONTROL ACCOUNTABILITY PLAN (LCAP)

from LAUSD | http://bit.ly/1gwNw7T

Board Presentation/Public Information Deck

Board Presentation LCAP Draft 4-4-14 FINAL

from: http://lausd.schoolwires.net/Page/5124

Proposed Budget/LCAP Recommendations 2014-15

The budget recommendation by LAUSD Superintendent John E. Deasy and his administration represents the fiscal prudence and beliefs in the just investments necessary to support the youth of LAUSD, which includes aligning with the new Local Control Accountability Plan (LCAP) and the funding provided by the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF).

With a set of new investments and the maintenance of many current investments, this proposed budget serves as a series of investments in justice. The justice we are committed to providing the amazing and needy youth of the Los Angeles Unified District. A justice-based budget is in complete alignment with the new Local Control Accountability Plan (LCAP) and the funding provided by the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF). The historic opportunity before us now in California is to propose, adopt, and implement a set of equity-based investments and hold ourselves accountable for the outcomes we set and promise to our youth and families. In doing so, we honor the employees who work daily, all year, to make the promises possible.

This proposed budget is being presented in three documents:

* Set of Proposed Investments

* Formal preliminary draft of the LCAP

* Public Information Deck - We will use this at our public meetings to capture and summarize the new laws, processes, and budget form(s) as we move towards adoption in June.

Want to provide comments on the proposed budget and the draft of the LCAP? CLICK HERE!

 

1. Set of Proposed Investments

2. Formal preliminary draft of the LCAP

LAUSD DRAFT LCAP 4414[1]

3. Public Information Deck

this is the same as the Board Presentation LCAP Draft 4-4-14 FINAL (previous)

BATTLE LINES FORMING IN LA UNIFIED FOR ‘LOCAL CONTROL’ SPENDING

by Vanessa Romo, L.A. School Report | http://bit.ly/PxO8UT

April 3, 2014 4:55 pm  ::  The battle over the new money coming into LA Unified from the state’s new Local Control Funding Formula starts in earnest tomorrow when Superintendent John Deasy lays out his plan for the 2014-15 budget.

Deasy is meeting with reporters to unveil his spending priorities plan for an estimated $390 million the district will receive in extra resources, before he presents it to the school board on Tuesday.

It’ll be the first glimpse of how well (or how poorly) competing interests have lobbied for a piece of the pie, and it’s likely to kick off of an intense debate over dollars as the district — like all school districts in California — formulates its Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP) over the next couple of months.

There  is no advance material in the publicly posted Board Agenda/Revised Order of Business or the Public & Press Meeting Materials for the Superintendent’s Recommended Draft Budget/Draft Local Control Accountability Plan

A preview of the pressures came into view today when Communities for Los Angeles Student Success (CLASS) and various constituencies outlined their wish-list for some of the districts’ neediest schools.

Under the new plan, districts will receive a base grant per student. Beyond that, students who are either low-income, foster youth or English learners earn supplemental money. Additionally, schools with more than 55 percent of low-income students get concentration grants.

Elmer Roldan, education program officer at United Way of Greater Los Angeles, said the group is calling on Deasy to allocate 80 percent of the supplemental and concentration funds for use in educating students with the highest needs.

“Because these students are the reason that LAUSD is receiving this extra funding, then we want that to be the priority for the district,” he said.

United Way is also urging the district to allow spending decisions to be made locally — by principals, teachers and community members  – and not centrally by district officials. Furthermore, they are asking the district to reserve an additional $50 million for foster care services and $25 million for English learners.

Roldan called unfair an argument made by school board members whose districts cover more affluent areas, that the district should invest the extra revenues in districtwide initiatives since more than 80 percent of LAUSD students are high need.

“This would make sense of all kids came into the classroom living in the same conditions with the exact same opportunities, but we know that that’s not the case,” he said.

Angela Vazquez, a policy analyst with the Advancement Project, wants a plan that puts foster youth students front and center. Her group is staging a rally on Monday

As an example of the need, she says there are only three staff people dedicated to serving more than 8,000 foster care students in the district.

“We know that foster youth are the least likely to graduate, the most likely to drop out and the most likely to change schools during the year,” she said. “They face an achievement gap on statewide tests, even compared to other LCFF target populations.”

Once Deasy shares his proposal with the board, the lobbying for priorities is expected to intensify and probably continue until the LCAP plan is complete.

Report: FOUNDATION FUNDING WIDENS THE GAP BETWEEN CALIFORNIA’S ‘RICH’ AND ‘POOR’ SCHOOLS + smf’s 2¢

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez | Pass / Fail | 89.3 KPCC http://bit.ly/QIkpd5

Adolfo Guzman-Lopez/KPCC

April 3rd, 2014, 5:30am  ::  The Irvine Public Schools Foundation raises money to pay for all K-3 music classes, and covers some of the costs of music classes for 4tn, 5th, and 6th graders in Irvine Unified schools.

Southern California researchers are finding that foundations, set up to raise money for public schools, are reintroducing funding inequality that was supposed to be eliminated back in the 1970's, when the California Supreme Court ruled on the Serrano vs. Priest case.

“The court said spending needs to be equitable between school districts, you can’t have Beverly Hills spending twice as much as the other guys, per pupil, because a child’s education should not be dependent on the wealth of the area in which they happen to live,” said Cal State Fullerton professor Sarah Hill.

She and two colleagues have compiled  information from about 1500 education foundations and other fundraising groups such as booster clubs and PTAs, along with Internal Revenue Service data, to create a database Hill said is the first of its kind.

“We’re doing more of a sophisticated analysis looking at how wealth matters for which school districts are able to raise money. How demographics matter,” she said.

Some Northern California public school foundations are raising additional funds of about $2,000 per student. Researchers say that figure is a significant addition to the roughly $8000 per student the state gives public schools each year. California's current level of per pupil spending is the second lowest in the country.

Seven of the 15 foundations that raised the most money in California are in Los Angeles and Orange counties. Manhattan Beach’s foundation, according to Hill’s data, raised $7.5 million in 2011 to boost instructional programs for roughly 6800 students in the district. Irvine Unified’s foundation is number three on Hill’s list, with $5.1 million raised in 2011.

“This community in particular always wants more and wants better,” said Neda Eaton, CEO of the Irvine Public Schools Foundation.

Eaton said her group gives the 29,000 student Irvine Unified School District money to reduce class sizes and pay for the district’s kindergarten through 3rd grade music program. The foundation also helps to pay for music classes for all 4th, 5th, and 6th graders and pitches in for after-school and summer programs, open to kids from area districts. Irvine is a generally wealthy community, with a median household income of $92,000; but Eaton said there are pockets of the city with kids who qualify for free or reduced-price meals.

School officials said the music classes and lower student-to-teacher ratio improves learning, graduation rates, and college attendance.

About 45 minutes north, Montebello is also turning to private fundraising efforts to help its area schools.  It has a one-year-old organization called the Friends of the Montebello Unified School District Foundation.

“They do fundraisers. I think they’ve raised about $30,000 in the past year,” said Montebello Unified Deputy Superintendent Art Revueltas.

Parents in his district, he said, want to do more and make things better for their kids, too.  But at $50,000, Montebello’s median household income falls far below that of Irvine. The school district’s Academic Performance Index, the 1000-point measure of achievement based on tests, is 200 points lower than Irvine Unified’s.

Researchers recognize there are many factors at play, but generally, the wealthier a community, the better its public schools.  Foundations based in wealthy communities are able to raise more in donations.

Hill and her fellow researchers studying the funding inequity titled their preliminary report “California Local Education Foundations: And the Rich Get Richer.”

“I wouldn’t say it’s the rich are getting richer, I think we’re providing equity for our student body and our student base,” Ralph Opasic said.

He's president of the Orange County High School of the Arts and heads its foundation. The non-profit is number four on Hill's list of total revenue raised by foundations set up to benefit one public school campus. The $19,000,000 it raised in 2011, according to Hill's analysis, added $3522 per pupil to the money it's getting from the state.

“Our demographic is across the board. It’s anything but just rich students. We have probably 15 to 20 percent of our students that qualify for federal free and reduced lunch, they’re benefitting from this education in Santa Ana,” he said.

Steffanie Early, head of community relations for the Irvine Public Schools Foundation said the report's title upsets her.

“I can understand the concern that they have about inequities in school districts, but again I feel that if our community wants to, and is able to support it and to prevent some children from losing things that are absolutely critical to their development, we should be able to do that and frankly, to be able to do that without being judged for it,” she said.

Professor Hill said she’s seen public school funding inequality grow in recent years, fueled by independent fundraising, and she wants more Californians to know about it.

“You don’t want to fault parents for being involved in their children’s schools. We know that’s important and nobody wants to say that parents shouldn’t be involved; but the question is still -what about the kids who are being left behind, the kids who aren’t getting the same resources - and they’re generally from lower income areas and are we OK with that.”

Some school administrators said the Local Control Funding Formula -  Governor Brown’s forthcoming funding increase for all public schools which grants additional funding for low-income and English Learner students – will do a lot to ease funding inequality.

 

Top Southern California public school districts - Fundraising revenues

Foundation Name	School District	Enrollment	Total Revenue	Per Pupil Revenue
Manhattan Beach Education Foundation	Manhattan Beach	6,716	$7,499,090	$1,117
Irvine Public Schools Foundation	Irvine	27,258	$5,134,930	$188
Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District Combined	Palos Verdes Peninsula	11,928	$4,006,507	$336
Pasadena Educational Foundation	Pasadena	19,803	$3,612,896	$182
San Marino Schools Foundation	San Marino	3,198	$3,174,157	$993
La Canada Flintridge Educational Foundation	La Canada	4,062	$2,590,994	$638
Newport-Mesa Schools Foundation	Newport-Mesa	21,811	$2,211,169	$101

Source: Data provided by California State University, Fullerton - compiled from Internal Revenue Service filings

Where does Dr. Deasy and Megan Chernin’s Los Angeles Fund for Public Education – with its Century City office and $200 million fundraising goal -  come into this? 

 

-  from A Failure of Philanthropy: American charity shortchanges the poor, and public policy is partly to blame By Rob Reich Stanford Social Innovation Review Winter 2005

‘High Quality Teachers Act of 2014’: VERGARA-LIKE BALLOT INITIATIVE PULLED UNTIL 2016, REPORT SAYS

Projected annual cost of teacher assessments exceeds $1 billion.

by Yana Gracile | LA School Report | http://bit.ly/1ec1igc

April 1, 2014 2:39 pm  ::  A state ballot initiative aimed at regulations governing teachers that was headed for the November ballot has been pushed to 2016, according to a report by ABC affiliate KXTV in Sacramento.

The measure was seeking to change the way California school districts lay off teachers by using a teacher’s classroom performance rating, rather than seniority. Matt David, a Republican strategist and the measure’s sponsor, decided to wait until 2016 to bring the measure to the voters because of the high start-up costs associated with new annual teacher evaluations, the KXTV report said.

The fiscal analysis of the initiative, conducted by the independent Legislative Analysts office, showed that the cost of the new annual teacher evaluations could hit $1 billion.

Though the decision may seem like a victory for teacher groups statewide, David isn’t backing down.

“We feel it’s necessary to commission a study that examines the true cost based on other states rather than speculate on hypotheticals like the LAO fiscal analysis,” he told the station.

David’s initiative seeks many of the same objectives as Vergara v. California, the state’s most significant teacher rights case in two decades, which recently concluded the testimony phase in California State Superior Court. The case was brought by nine student plaintiffs who say the current state laws protect ineffective teachers and deny their constitutional right to receive a quality education.

The defendants in the suit —the state and its two biggest teacher unions argued that the regulations are fine as they are and blamed problems with ineffective teachers on poorly-run schools and districts.

Messages seeking comment from David were not immediately returned.

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Matt David from Twitter via the SF Chronicle>>

David was national campaign manager for GOP presidential hopeful John Huntsman and before that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s  communications director. Before that, he was deputy communications director for GOP presidential candidate John McCain in 2008, and also worked the communications front for President George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection.

 

 

 

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Proposed Ballot Initiative Filing

Deasy at USC: VERGARA IS THE NEXT BIG CIVIL RIGHTS CASE

Posted on  by Vanessa Romo | LA School Report | http://bit.ly/1hA9BHh

April 1, 2014 10:03 am  ::  More than two months ago LA Unified Superintendent John Deasy took the stand as the first witness for the plaintiffs in Vergara v California, a lawsuit challenging teacher protections. He testified for three days, laying the foundation of their overall case.

Now that the trial has ended, the head of the largest school district in the state continues to make his case to the public, positioning Vergara as a civil rights issue.

<< John Deasy, a night school law student at Loyola Marymount, with fellow panelist, Susan Estrich

Speaking yesterday on a panel called “Rights, Writs and Rulings: Where does a student go for redress?” sponsored by the USC Rossier School of Education, Deasy characterized the Vergara trial as the next point on the civil rights continuum seeking to strike down segregation in public schools: A major focus of the plaintiffs’ case is that low-income and minority students are more likely to be taught by ineffective teachers than children from more affluent families.

He spoke at length about Plessy v Ferguson and Brown v Board of Education, both historic cases that challenged the Fourteenth Amendment. And Deasy drew parallels between more the recent public education battles of Williams v California,Serrano v Priest, and Butt v California, as well as the peaceful protests lead by African-American students in the 1960s.

Deasy said a group of well-dressed black students sitting at a segregated Woolworth’s counter in Greenboro, North Carolina decades ago, politely asking to be served is not unlike a group of nine California students asking for a better education today.

“I would like a cup of coffee. I want to go to a good school,” he said. “We are still struggling some 60 years later to enact the promise of Brown v Board of Education. I am troubled how today we can witness such unequal, non-protected classes of youth at a single institution called public education. Our work is not done.”

It is not the first time Deasy has elevated disparities in public education to status of a civil rights issue. It was part of his rationale for LA Unified’s push to get iPads in the hands of every district student.

But the arguments in Vergara, which equate a case seeking to strike down five laws that govern teacher seniority, dismissal and tenure to a battle with institutional racism, is upsetting to people on the other side of the issues, as if opponents of Vergara are implicitly racists or bigots for supporting the existing laws or advocating a different path toward improving educational outcomes.

That includes those who support the two-year probationary period for tenure, the state’s last in, first out layoff policies, and the state’s dismissal process.

“I know about the inequities,” said Lisa Alva, a teacher at Roosevelt High School in east LA, which she describes as “notably needy.”

Throughout Deasy’s speech she said, she was trying “really hard” to reconcile his lofty ideas with the reality of what is happening in schools everyday.

“Deasy says this case is not about striking down teacher rights, that it’s about student rights, but the two are not mutually exclusive.” she said. “Help us do a better job. Give us the resources and the support we need.”

Pencils down, iPads up! - LA SCHOOLS’ NEW EXAM STRATEGY PUT TO THE TEST + smf’s 2¢

Annie Gilbertson | Pass / Fail | 89.3 KPCC http://bit.ly/1opXim0

by Lexie Flickinger via Flickr

March 31st, 2014, 4:56pm  ::  L.A. Unified students will be taking the new test on iPads.

Gone are the No. 2 pencils and eye-crossing bubble sheets — Los Angeles Unified schools will begin piloting a new state exam on Tuesday, [April 1st] administered entirely by computer.

Students in grades 3-8 and grade 11 will be the only ones  trying out the new test, designed by the Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium to measure mastery of the new Common Core standards.

The district has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in computer and Wi-Fi infrastructure this year, and since students' scores won't be issued during the pilot, all eyes will be on how the technology and test administration perform.

Superintendent John Deasy  tapped about $23 million in bond money to rush order 45,000 iPads for testing - that was 6,500 more than than the  bond oversight committee calculated would be needed. (The district  did not take into account existing computer inventory.)

Earbuds and keyboards were purchased separately.

Accessories and iPads are being delivered to schools along with charging carts, costing $2200 each, according to one recent Apple purchase order.  The carts fit 35 iPads a piece, putting the total cart cost at  about $2.83 million.

There are locks on each cart, and school principals were also called upon to identify a secure room to store the equipment after each day of testing.

The district administered a readiness survey in January and found 11 percent of school administrators have infrastructure concerns, including issues with providing the reliable internet connection needed for exams.

The district scheduled $800 million worth of  school site network and data center upgrades as part of its effort to equip every student with a tablet. Over 500 campuses are scheduled for the work, but only 59 sites will be complete by the start of testing.

In the interim, hot spots will be attached to the iPad carts, but the district has not responded to requests for the unit and service costs of this stopgap measure.

Teachers were issued a tech troubleshooting packet, a strategy that Board Member Monic Ratliff has found worrisome. There will also be IT workers on call, but several schools will share their services and delays may eat into instructional time.

The California Department of Education gave L.A. Unified a wider time frame to finish testing than other districts. L.A. Unified schools will be allowed to test up until May 16.

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smf:  Setting the unsettling iPad controversy aside for a moment: I find it kosmic-with-a-‘K’ that students in the 9th grade – the most challenging+critical  year in the K-12 span - are not tested. And for good measure they are not tested in the 10th grade either. I suppose this may accommodate the California High School Exit Exam – given in the 10th – but the CAHSEE measures what you’ve learned up-to-and-including  the 8th grade – essentially making it the  Middle School Exit Exam!

By the time the 11th grade assessment is given (at the end of the 11th grade) many of the critical students we are trying to reach have dropped and are out.

Nutritious but uneaten: SOLUTIONS SOUGHT TO REDUCE FOOD WASTE IN SCHOOLS

Federal rules require students to take at least three items each day, but an L.A. Unified manager wants to change the policy to reduce the $100,000 in food thrown away daily.

By Teresa Watanabe | LA Times | http://lat.ms/PirlMW

●●smf: 1. With the line that long, why is the service window to the left closed?  2.And why are Cheetos, juice and Pop-tarts available in the student store?*  ::  Mele Vehikite, 16, left, Ellie Gutierrez, 17, and Antonio Ramos, 18, eat lunch at Washington Preparatory High School in L.A. The school is required to serve three items, including a fruit and a vegetable, even if students do not want them. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times /April 1, 2014)
* UPDATE ON Q #2: Starting July 1, 2014, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Smart Snacks in Schools will change which foods and beverages can be sold outside of the cafeteria in California’s schools.

• So student stores are selling unhealthy snacks to students as long as they can….?
• What happened to the No Junk Food Resolution of 2003?

April 1, 2014, 9:43 p.m.  ::  It's lunchtime at Washington Preparatory High School in Los Angeles, but 16-year-old Parrish Jackson has barely touched her turkey burger and apricots.

She's dumping them into the trash can.

The apricots are "sour," the junior says. The meat is "nasty." If it were up to her, she would just have taken the potato wedges — they're close enough to fries — then headed to the student store to fuel up on hot Cheetos and juice.

And so it goes on hundreds of campuses in Los Angeles Unified, the nation's second-largest school system, which serves 650,000 meals a day. Students throw out at least $100,000 worth of food a day — and probably far more, according to estimates by David Binkle, the district's food services director. That amounts to $18 million a year — based on a conservative estimate of 10% food waste — which Binkle says would be far better spent on higher-quality items, such as strawberries or watermelon.

But under federal school meal rules finalized in 2012, Parrish and other students must take at least three items — including one fruit or vegetable — even if they don't want them. Otherwise, the federal government won't reimburse school districts for the meals.

"What can we do about this?" Binkle says. "We can stop forcing children to take food they don't like and throw in the garbage."

Many nutrition and health experts disagree, citing studies that show repeated exposure to fruits and vegetables eventually leads children to eat more of them. That, in turn, will help prevent obesity and related maladies, says William J. McCarthy, a UCLA professor of health policy and management.

The cost of wasted food "is a small investment for permanently enlarging our children's receptivity to the foods most likely to prolong their lives and minimize their risk of the major chronic diseases that kill Americans," McCarthy said in an email.

The differing views reflect the escalating national debate over how to improve child nutrition without the massive food waste and climbing costs in the $11.6-billion federal school lunch program, which feeds 31 million students daily. The rules, part of the 2010 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act championed by First Lady Michelle Obama, imposed a dizzying array of requirements on calories, portion sizes, even the color of fruits and vegetables to be served. The rules also increased the amount of fruits, vegetables and whole grains that must be offered, imposing higher costs on school districts.

For Binkle and many other school food managers, the most challenging change has been the requirement to offer both a fruit and vegetable — previously it was one or the other — and make students take at least one of them in order to receive federal reimbursement for the meal.

The extra produce costs school districts $5.4 million a day, with $3.8 million of that being tossed in the trash, according to national estimates based on a 2013 study of 15 Utah schools by researchers with Cornell University and Brigham Young University.

Other studies also have found significant waste, including 40% of all the lunches served in four Boston schools. In L.A. Unified, a forthcoming study of four middle schools has confirmed substantial waste and "significant student aversion to even selecting a fruit or vegetable serving," according to McCarthy, who co-wrote it. He declined to provide further details until the study is published.

Yet federal rules bar schools from allowing people to take the uneaten food off campus. The school board voted to allow nonprofits to pick up extra food under the federal Good Samaritan food law that allows such actions to aid people in need. But Binkle said that not enough schools participate to solve the massive waste problem.

Teachers and parents have also complained about widespread waste in the Breakfast in the Classroom program, which requires L.A. Unified students to take all three items offered.

Nationally, the cost of wasted food overall — including milk, meats and grains — is estimated at more than $1 billion annually. A U.S. General Accountability Office survey released in January found that 48 of 50 states reported that food waste and higher costs have been their top challenges in rolling out the 2012 rules.

The widespread concerns have prompted the School Nutrition Assn., representing 55,000 school food providers, to launch lobbying efforts to revise the child nutrition law, which is up for reauthorization next year.

Among other things, the group wants to remove the requirement forcing students to take a fruit or vegetable, suspend rules requiring lower sodium and drop a planned shift from half to full whole grain in food products beginning in July.

"We're not opposed to healthy changes," said Julia Bauscher, the group's president-elect. "We just want changes that don't unnecessarily increase cost and force students to take foods they have no intention of eating."

Other nutrition experts are pushing back. Juliana Cohen, a Harvard University nutrition research fellow, said the rules have helped children eat more nutritious food — particularly important, she said, for urban, low-income students who get up to half their daily calories from school meals. She co-wrote a study, published this month, that found that students observed over two days in four Boston schools ate more fruits and vegetables after the new rules took effect — although they still threw away much of them.

The solution to waste, Cohen and others say, isn't to roll back the rules but to find other ways to prod children to eat their vegetables. Working with professional chefs to make meals tastier, planting school gardens and scheduling recess before lunch are all proven ways to do so, Cohen and McCarthy say.

The Utah study found that rewards such as raffle tickets and small amounts of money got students to eat more produce with far less waste than mandatory servings. Joseph Price, a Brigham Young assistant economics professor and study co-writer, said smoothies and redesigned cafeterias have also been effective.

L.A. Unified, regarded as a national leader in making school food more healthful, has taken many of these steps. Celebrity chefs, such as Jamie Oliver, have helped develop menus. More than 270 schools offer "harvest of the month" lessons about produce, and 450 schools have started campus gardens.

Still the food piles up in school trash cans.

Back at Washington Prep, a few students said they ate their entire lunches. Daniel Ofa, a hulking sophomore, said he doesn't really enjoy the spaghetti or enchiladas but downs them anyway.

"Since we're football players, we eat all of it, bad or good," he said.

Several students poked at their food. The potato wedges seemed the biggest hit, while the apricots were a bust. At one table, A'lea Rendev, a senior, pulled a hair from her turkey burger, eliciting loud "ewwwwws" from her friends.

"If the food was good food, we'd have no problems," A'lea said. She dumped her food, then headed off to the school store for a Pop-Tart.

The “other” CORE: TEACHERS UNION FIGHTS NEW PLAN BY SACRAMENTO, LAUSD AND OTHER SCHOOL DISTRICTS TO ADDRESS LOW-PERFORMING SCHOOLS + smf’s 2¢

By Loretta Kalb The Sacramento Bee | http://bit.ly/1dKwbh5

Sunday, Mar. 30, 2014 - 12:00 am/Modified: Sunday, Mar. 30, 2014 - 10:40 am  ::  In the seven months since Sacramento City Unified School District won unprecedented federal permission to use new methods at low-performing schools, the urban district has begun ranking campuses and sending educators to other schools to coach their colleagues.

These were among the early steps in plans to improve performance among 43,175 students, many of whom live in poverty and are learning English along with their everyday studies.

Even as the district rolls out the plan, the teachers union – which never signed on – is fighting to stop it. The Sacramento City Teachers Association, in particular, objects to a promise that Sacramento City Unified and seven other districts made to link student test scores to teacher evaluations.

“We have been really, really clear in California ever since (federal grant competition) Race to the Top that we did not believe using student test scores to evaluate teachers was a good idea,” said Dean Vogel, president of the California Teachers Association, which has been providing support to the SCTA.

Sacramento City Unified is part of a consortium that represents more than 1 million students in school districts in Fresno, Long Beach, Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco, Sanger and Santa Ana.

The group, California Office to Reform Education, or CORE, made national headlines last year when the U.S. Department of Education granted it district-level waivers from No Child Left Behind, a broad federal law that sets performance requirements for schools. The decision was a departure from the normal practice of only granting states such flexibility.

No Child Left Behind expects all students to test at a “proficient” level on state tests by this school year, a bar so high that 42 states and the District of Columbia, in addition to the CORE districts, have obtained waivers from the law on the promise that they will find alternate ways to improve education.

CORE plans to apply for a second-year waiver by May 1, said Rick Miller, the group’s executive director.

California’s bid for a waiver from No Child Left Behind was rejected in late 2012 after it omitted a promise to evaluate teachers, a priority for the Obama administration.

The Sacramento City Teachers Association met this month with labor and community activists to discuss objections to the CORE approach. Besides its concern about linking teacher evaluations to student test scores, the teachers union criticized spending scarce district funds on travel for teachers to pair with other instructors within their own district or with consortium schools elsewhere in the state.

Opponents also complained that the eight superintendents acted with scant public discussion or formal trustee votes that normally accompany major decisions. Union leaders began circulating a petition calling for trustees to withdraw Sacramento’s waiver from federal rules.

District board President Patrick Kennedy said Sacramento trustees were kept informed and gave their assent for the waiver, though they never voted last year. But he said the district needs to do more to engage the public.

“I think some of that (public involvement) criticism is probably warranted,” Kennedy said, noting that board members plan to convene a community meeting in April on the CORE waiver.

“At that time we will get the facts from all sides,” Kennedy said. “It will give us an opportunity to look at this without all the political noise, and determine whether the programs within (the waiver) are in the best interests of teachers and students.”

So what happened in Sacramento in the first year of the waiver?

The district gained flexibility in spending about $4 million in federal dollars meant to aid low-income students under No Child Left Behind. Because federal rules gave parents control over how they wanted to supplement their children’s education, much of the money previously went to for-profit tutoring companies. Critics said the companies have had too little oversight and taught subjects often not aligned with students’ regular curricula.

Sara Noguchi, interim superintendent at Sacramento City Unified, said the district can now “spend that money the way we see fit, so long as it’s tied to intervention for students” who need help in specific subject areas such as math.

Under No Child Left Behind, schools that failed to show adequate yearly academic progress for five years or more were relegated to Program Improvement status, facing the threat of sanctions such as restructuring, staff changes or closure. Last year, 64 out of 75 campuses in the Sacramento district were in Program Improvement, including 28 that had reached or exceeded the five-year mark.

In one example of restructuring under NCLB, former Sacramento City Unified superintendent Jonathan Raymond unveiled his “priority schools” program in 2010 to drastically overhaul seven struggling campuses. The district inserted new principals, who were given authority to remove teachers.

The CORE waiver does away with Program Improvement but replaces it with another set of sanctions for schools that don’t improve.

The Sacramento district this year started ranking campuses in three categories based on state test scores: reward schools (top performers), focus (midperformers) or priority (lowest performers). It also began pairing teachers with others in the district or in the CORE consortium to share strategies and experiences.

The document outlines steps to prevent lowest-performing schools from languishing, starting in Year 1 by allowing a principal greater flexibility in staff and scheduling. After four years, those campuses can face more intensive intervention, up to and including conversion to a charter school or closure.

The CORE plan views school pairing as key to improve schools, according to the federal waiver application. The aim is to have teachers and principals develop ongoing coaching relationships through monthly meetings and regular contacts.

This year, Oak Ridge Elementary in Oak Park, a formerly overhauled campus, is paired with Edward Kemble Elementary in south Sacramento. At both schools, nearly all students qualify as low-income and more than 40 percent are English learners.

In an example of a cross-district pairing, Sacramento’s top-performing Fern Bacon Middle School is paired with Elmhurst Community Prep in Oakland.

Sacramento City Unified has done virtually no work on the controversial task of linking student test scores to teacher and principal evaluations.

Noguchi said she hopes the district and the union can dispel tension and “get past the mistrust.”

“Nothing can usurp the collective bargaining agreement,” she said. “If we are not in agreement, it’s pointless.”

The teachers union remains frustrated over how the district filed its waiver application last year.

At its community session earlier this month, union leaders lambasted the Sacramento district for depicting in the application “several meetings with teacher representatives,” including a May 1 meeting in which teachers were said to have asked questions about the teacher evaluation process. When pressed, the district in February acknowledged that no May 1 meeting had occurred. Rather, that exchange was part of written correspondence that the district had with the teachers union president.

SCTA complained to the federal Department of Education about the lapse and, earlier this month, Assistant Education Secretary Deborah Delisle said in a letter that her staff would investigate and “take what we learn ... under consideration” should the CORE group apply for a waiver extension.

District officials called the May 1 meeting reference a mistake in a long, 423-page, application. Further, they said, union leaders rejected an opportunity to meet with the CORE group last spring about the waiver.

CTA’s Vogel was unapologetic about bypassing the meeting.

“Word was out that the teachers had never been consulted. They were all invited to a meeting so they could hear the CORE team explain the waiver to them,” he said. “They said, ‘No thank you.’

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smf: Not only was the CORE CA Waiver entered into statewide without teacher consultation - in LA at least it was entered into without the advice and consent of the Board of Education. The CORE Waiver has never appeared on a public agenda of the L.A. school board; it has never been approved and/or ratified by the board. . LAUSD’s participation in the CORE Waiver is based exclusively upon the superintendents’ signature to the waiver application.

Now we learn that a waiver extension is in the works and must be submitted by May 1. Today is (no foolin’) April 1!

I attended a by-invitation dog-and-pony show community informational meeting about the CORE CA Waiver at the California Endowment last January and another at LAUSD on Feb 12,. All information flowed in one way: Out.  The message was “Trust us: Don’t worry/be happy”. No mention was made about a waiver extension, no solicitation was made and/or process described for community input.