http://video.tvguide.com/An+Education/120+school+districts+in+US+adopt+4-day+school+week/7492670

The administration should have stuck with the mass firings. Why? Because just because people say they will do something doesn’t mean they actually will. The same resistance, laziness, and resentment toward the administration is still there tainting yet another class of high school students.

An Associated Press article reports: “Many teachers aren’t showing up for work, often calling out sick. Several abruptly quit within the first few weeks of the school year. Administrators have had to scramble to find qualified substitutes and have withheld hundreds of student grades because of the teacher absences.

“The progress that the city’s school board — and the Obama administration — had hoped for seems increasingly, and alarmingly, elusive.”

I’m sure the administration is to blame as well, but a school can only be as good as its teachers and when they maximize their sick days and quit weeks into the school year they are putting their own self interests above the interests of their students.

Sounds like it’s time to wipe the slate clean. There was a good lesson to be learned here for reformers in my opinion, which is to follow through with the severe actions that are sometimes called for in order to give children, not adults, a second chance.

I was struck by the statistics he cites below:

• America is now 16th in the world academically 

• One third of high school students drop out 

• One half of high school graduates are not college-ready 

• By 12th grade, the average black and Hispanic student is four years behind 

• Children are now exposed to one stimulus every seven seconds 

• Every parent works in 75–90 percent of households 

• Children average six hours of electronics (TV, video games, internet) per day 

• 25 percent of children are inactive and obese 

• 80 percent of jobs in growing fields require a college-ready skill set 

• College graduates earn $1 million more in their lifetime 

These stats point to the impossible-to-ignore reality that our education system needs to be fixed and fast and that it pays literally and figuratively to get a good education. 

Lastly, I liked this quote David Cary included in his vision document: 

“If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.” Bruce Lee

It’s time for American K-12 education to get beyond its plateau and make upward progress. 

AIPCS is a non-unionized charter school that did not participate in the strike and decided to educate its students instead. As a result, AIPCS staff and students started their school day with spray-painted graffiti that said “strike”, gates that had been glued shut, and littered leaflets that said “Chinese Students + High Stakes Tests = High API.” Regarding the leaflets, all students of all ethnic groups perform well at AIPCS. Note that last year, the science scores for black students were higher than those of Asian students.

A man wearing a bright green shirt (the color worn by the striking OEA teachers) was spotted by the school in the early morning by a nearby resident who scared him off.

Here’s a description of the incident from Oakbook:

“Teachers at American Indian Public Charter School in the Laurel District arrived to work Thursday morning to find that someone had spray painted the word ‘strike’ on the school’s sign and on the pavement in front of the school. Someone had also filled the school’s padlocks with glue, and littered the campus with leaflets bearing the equation: ‘Chinese Students + High Stakes Tests = High API.’

“Sopath Mey, the middle school’s principal, said that the disruption to the school’s morning routine was particularly inconvenient Thursday because the school was taking care of 40 extra students, the younger siblings of American Indian students whose parents couldn’t afford to take a day off work during the Oakland teacher’s strike. A neighbor chased away someone suspected of vandalizing the school at around 6 Thursday morning.

“The teachers at AIPCS are not unionized and weren’t striking Thursday. The middle school posts some of the highest test scores in the state. Last year, AIPCS boasted an Academic Performance Index (API) of 977. AIPCS has long drawn the ire of charter school opponents who claim that charter schools sap students and money from the traditional public school system.” http://www.theoakbook.com/MoreDetail.aspx?Aid=3902&CatId=8

There’s more info at Oakland Tribune reporter Katy Murphy’s blog, including kooky comments from OEA members who need to log more staff development hours in rational thought (i.e. “It is possible that the glue and graffiti was put there by somebody hoping to discredit the union.” And the reasonable probability of that scenario is?) http://www.ibabuzz.com/education/2010/04/29/strike-day-vandalism-at-american-indian-school/

And more in the San Francisco Chronicle about the “successful” strike. Here are some excerpts with the link below:

“District officials, faced with an $85 million budget shortfall over the next two years, reiterated once again Thursday that they can’t afford to give the teachers pay raises.

” ‘I think we all agree our teachers need a pay increase,’ said Brad Stam, chief academic officer for the district. ‘But right now, we can’t afford one. We don’t want to bankrupt the district to do it and go back under state control…’”

“At Edna Brewer Middle School on 13th Avenue in the Glenview neighborhood, all 40 teachers were on the picket line, chanting, ‘Scabs go home,’ and pounding drums and cowbells…”

“One emergency substitute was surrounded by strikers and was forced to push through the line of striking teachers to get inside. Of the school’s 700 students, about 40 came to class, said special education teacher Mark Airgood.”

Don’t forget that most public school funding comes from Average Daily Attendance money, so having students stay home from school decreases revenues for Oakland Unified School District, which in turn makes it all the more difficult to issue pay raises to teachers.

“Another 600 Oakland schoolchildren lined up for a $5 double feature of ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ and ‘Oceans’ with free popcorn offered at the Grand Lake Theater. Owner Allen Michaan held a special screening in support of the teachers’ strike.

“He normally doesn’t offer the deal until summer.

” ‘We’re shocked by how many people showed up,’ Michaan said. ‘We weren’t ready for it.’”

At least someone expressed some common sense:

” ‘To ask for money when California is on the brink of collapse is crazy,’ said the middle school worker, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid animosity at his school. ‘We could all use a pay raise, but if you give the teachers a raise, then the district will have to cut jobs.’”

(http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/04/30/MNV61D726D.DTL)

Coplon writes about charter schools: “Can privately run schools justly take public money while excluding the most vulnerable students? And should children be pushed to their limits—and beyond—to prove they can best their suburban counterparts on some flawed and arbitrary exam?”

Again, charter schools are not privately run! They are public schools. I don’t know enough about the school leader described in Coplon’s article, Eva Moskowitz, or her schools, Success Charter Network, to comment on the exclusion of students, but I definitely take issue with calling standardized tests “flawed and arbitrary.”

This article is another example of taking a charter school’s enormous success (the students’ test scores were incredible) and completely undercutting that success by saying the tests don’t mean a thing.

Coplon also writes about standardized tests: “Despite their well-documented defects, these assessments are the make-or-break barometer of a school’s ‘accountability’ and a vital marketing tool for high-performing charter networks. Lofty numbers bedazzle authorizers and lure fat checks from foundations and trustees.”

If the “defects” are so “well-documented”, then why doesn’t Coplon back up his assertions with some evidence? If people truly believe, like Coplon does, that test scores do not demonstrate a school’s “accountability”, then they assume that parents would be just as comfortable enrolling their child in a school where 0% of students tested proficient in English as one in which 100% of students tested proficient in English.

And what’s so wrong about foundations and trustees signing “fat checks” to support schools? They are trying to help children who come from poor, uneducated families succeed in life. Oh, the horror.

Did Coplon notice how every family member quoted in his article was absolutely thrilled that his/her child was enrolled in a Success Charter Network school?

For example: “Some might deem this excessive, but Ashley’s grandmother, Yvette Rolack, was delighted with the extra attention—and with Ashley’s pair of 3’s. ‘They really stayed with the kids to help them get where they needed to go,’ she says. ‘I am a security guard, and I like my job, but I want my granddaughter to excel and not just stand at the door and nod her head and give directions. I want more for her.’

Unfortunately, opponents of charter schools want less for her because they fight to protect, uphold, and make excuses for a failing inner-city public school system rather than offering children and their families choices and opportunities.

I, quite frankly, like Eva Moskowitz’s quote that some people “believe in choice for themselves, but they don’t believe in choice for other people. To me, that is really fundamental to social justice: to have choices in life.”

Let the people, not the politics, choose.

Here’s the article in its entirety–worth reading despite the bias, in my opinion:

http://nymag.com/news/features/65614/

Gov. Charlie Crist has been jawboned and buttonholed as he has traveled around the state in recent days, and his office was deluged with 120,000 messages. Passions have not run so high in Florida, the governor said, since the controversy over ending the life of Terri Schiavo in 2005.

This time, the point of contention was eliminating tenure for Florida public school teachers and tying their pay and job security to how well their students were learning.

On Thursday, Mr. Crist picked a side, vetoing a bill passed last week by the Florida Legislature that would have introduced the most sweeping teacher pay changes in the nation.

The veto puts Mr. Crist, a moderate Republican, at odds with his party base in the Republican-controlled Legislature. His decision has also renewed speculation that he might drop out of the Republican primary for a United States Senate seat and run in the general election as an independent. For months, he has been trailing the more conservative Republican candidate, Marco Rubio, a Tea Party favorite, in polls.

Mr. Crist said Thursday that his decision was not political. He cited “the incredible outpouring of opposition by teachers, parents, students, superintendents, school boards and legislators.”

The bill was supported by the Florida Department of Education and statewide business groups, which expressed disappointment in the governor’s decision, saying that teachers should be held more accountable.

But the governor, announcing his veto in the Capitol in Tallahassee, said the changes envisioned would put “teachers in jeopardy of losing their jobs and teaching certificates, without a clear understanding of how gains will be measured.”

Linking teacher pay to student achievement has long been a goal of some education reformers. They are mostly conservatives, but their ranks also include people in the Obama administration.

They argue that teachers should be treated like people in most professions, and paid based on how effective they are.

The issue has made for a season of strange bedfellows, with the Obama administration’s chief education initiative, Race to the Top, seemingly encouraging just the kind of overhaul that Florida Republicans endorsed and that teachers and their allies furiously opposed…

www.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/us/16teachers.html

…Yet in recent years researchers have discovered something that may seem obvious, but for many reasons was overlooked or denied. What really makes a difference, what matters more than the class size or the textbook, the teaching method or the technology, or even the curriculum, is the quality of the teacher.

…There once was a time when teaching (along with nursing) was one of the few jobs not denied to women and minorities. But with social progress, many talented women and minorities chose other and more highly compensated fields. One recent review of the evidence by McKinsey & Co., the management consulting firm, showed that most schoolteachers are recruited from the bottom third of college-bound high-school students. (Finland takes the top 10 percent.)

At the same time, the teachers’ unions have become more and more powerful. In most states, after two or three years, teachers are given lifetime tenure…The percentage of teachers dismissed for poor performance in Chicago between 2005 and 2008 (the most recent figures available) was 0.1 percent. In Akron, Ohio, zero percent. In Toledo, 0.01 percent. In Denver, zero percent. In no other socially significant profession are the workers so insulated from accountability. The responsibility does not just fall on the unions. Many principals don’t even try to weed out the poor performers (or they transfer them to other schools in what’s been dubbed the “dance of the lemons”)…

Over time, inner-city schools, in particular, succumbed to a defeatist mindset. The problem is not the teachers, went the thinking—it’s the parents (or absence of parents); it’s society with all its distractions and pathologies; it’s the kids themselves. Not much can be done, really, except to keep the assembly line moving through “social promotion,” regardless of academic performance, and hope the students graduate (only about 60 percent of blacks and Hispanics finish high school). Or so went the conventional wisdom in school superintendents’ offices from Newark to L.A. By 1992, “there was such a dramatic achievement gap in the United States, far larger than in other countries, between socioeconomic classes and races,” says Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality. “It was a scandal of monumental proportions, that there were two distinct school systems in the U.S., one for the middle class and one for the poor.”

In the past two decades, some schools have sprung up that defy and refute what former president George W. Bush memorably called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” Generally operating outside of school bureaucracies as charter schools, programs like KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) have produced inner-city schools with high graduation rates (85 percent)…

It is difficult to dislodge the educational establishment. In New Orleans, a hurricane was required: since Katrina, New Orleans has made more educational progress than any other city, largely because the public-school system was wiped out. Using nonunion charter schools, New Orleans has been able to measure teacher performance in ways that the teachers’ unions have long and bitterly resisted. Under a new Louisiana law, New Orleans can track which ed schools produce the best teachers, forcing long-needed changes in ed-school curricula. (The school system of Detroit is just as broken as New Orleans’s was before the storm—but stuck with largely the same administrators, the same unions, and the same number of kids, and it has been unable to make any progress.)

Do you agree with the statement made in the following article that American culture undervalues education? I believe it does in many ways but would really like to hear other opinions.

Many Nations Passing U.S. in Education, Expert Says
By SAM DILLON

www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/education/10educ.html

One of the world’s foremost experts on comparing national school systems told lawmakers on Tuesday that many other countries were surpassing the United States in educational attainment, including Canada, where he said 15-year-old students were, on average, more than one school year ahead of American 15-year-olds.

America’s education advantage, unrivaled in the years after World War II, is eroding quickly as a greater proportion of students in more and more countries graduate from high school and college and score higher on achievement tests than students in the United States, said Andreas Schleicher, a senior education official at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, which helps coordinate policies for 30 of the world’s richest countries.

“Among O.E.C.D. countries, only New Zealand, Spain, Turkey and Mexico now have lower high school completion rates than the U.S.,” Mr. Schleicher said. About 7 in 10 American students get a high school diploma.

Mr. Schleicher’s comments came in testimony before the Senate education committee and in a statement he delivered. The panel plans to rewrite the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the main law governing federal policy on public schools.

The committee also heard from Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, the largest teachers’ union; John Castellani, president of the Business Roundtable, a group that represents corporate executives; and Charles Butt, chief executive of a supermarket chain in Texas, who said employers there faced increasing difficulties in hiring qualified young workers.

The blame for America’s sagging academic achievement does not lie solely with public schools, Mr. Butt said, but also with dysfunctional families and a culture that undervalues education. “Schools are inheriting an overentertained, distracted student,” he said.

Senator Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat who leads the Senate Committee, picked up on that comment. “Overentertained and distracted — that’s right,” Mr. Harkin said. “The problem lies with many kids before they get to school, and if we don’t crack that nut, we’re going to continue to patch and fill.”

Mr. Schleicher based many of his international comparisons on data from the O.E.C.D. Program for International Student Assessment, which tests students in scores of countries every three years in math, reading or science.

He said Finland had the world’s “best performing education system,” partly because of its highly effective way of recruiting, training and supporting teachers.

South Korea, he said, which was in economic ruin after World War II, today is an economic dynamo partly because of its educational attainment, which, among other measures, has achieved a 96 percent high school graduation rate, the world’s highest.

Poland, Mr. Schleicher said, is improving its education system most rapidly. In less than a decade, it raised the literacy skills of its 15-year-olds by the equivalent of almost a school year. “If the U.S. would raise the performance of schools by a similar amount,” he said, “that could translate into a long-term economic value of over 40 trillion dollars.”

America’s system of standards, curriculums and testing controlled by states and local districts with a heavy overlay of federal rules is a “quite unique” mix of decentralization and central control, Mr. Schleicher said. More successful nations, he said, maintain central control over standards and curriculum, but give local schools more freedom from regulation, he said.

“The question for the U.S. is not just how many charter schools it establishes,” he said, “but how to build the capacity for all schools to assume charter-like autonomy, as happens in some of the best-performing education systems.”

“In one way, international education benchmarks make disappointing reading for the U.S.,” he said.

Within the same school sit teachers—many making over $72,000 a year—who do not want to take on reform responsibilities without significant pay increases. They have the union’s backing.

Enter School Superintendent Frances Gallo, who is under pressure from Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist to reform Central Falls High School, which is one of the worst performing schools in the state.

About a month ago, Education Commissioner Gist tells Superintendent Gallo that she has to use one of four models to reform Central Falls High School. Gallo chooses the “transformation” model, which allows her to work with existing staff members to improve the school’s abominable performance.

Gallo lays out six conditions. She tells union leaders and staff that if she can’t adopt the “transformation” model by getting their cooperation, she will resort to the “turnaround” model, which means that everyone will be fired and the district will be able to hire 50% or less of the staff back for the next school year.

The six new staff responsibilities Gallo presents are:

25 more minutes added to the school day, some tutoring shifts before and after school, once a week eating lunch with students, undergoing more extensive evaluations, attending teacher planning sessions once a week, and 2 weeks of training during the summer.

Gallo can only offer $30 an hour and only for some of the additional duties, but the union leaders say the teachers should earn $90 an hour and for all of the additional duties.

As a result, the union leaders say no, we do not agree to your six conditions. They, I conjecture, effectively try to strong-arm Gallo and call her bluff.

They find out that Gallo wasn’t bluffing because she fired them all. Every teacher and administrator.

And from this situation a major media story erupts that asks a lot of fundamental education reform questions.

Here’s a transcript on the subject from Anderson Cooper 360, which shows a classic battling of heads between an education reformer and a teacher’s union president:

Anderson Cooper 360, 2/22/10

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1002/22/acd.02.html

COOPER: Really interesting story out of Rhode Island. There are 74 full-time teachers at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island. But by June all of them could be out of work; fired for failing to turn around one of the lowest performing schools in the state. Less than half the kids graduate. Only 7 percent are proficient in math. Almost all of the kids live in poverty.

Last week the dozens of teachers who earn at least $72,000 a year received letters recommending their termination. They were sent by the school’s superintendent. The board of trustees votes on the measure tomorrow. It’s not against the law. The fact is it’s one of six options mandated by the federal government to fix struggling schools.

The superintendent says the decision came after the Teachers Union balked at other options that would have required faculty to spend more time with students. The move sparked both outrage and support.

Joining us, two sides: Randi Weingarten, is the president of American Federation of Teachers which represents the teachers at Central Falls High School; and Steve Perry, our education contributor. Appreciate both of you being with us.

Steve, many teachers already put in a lot of time helping students both in and out of the classroom. What’s wrong with asking for a little more money by the teachers for all that extra time?

STEVE PERRY, CNN EDUCATION CONTRIBUTOR: Nothing if the community had it. The community doesn’t have any money. They’re paying $72,000 a year for these individuals to be in a school in which they’re graduating just 50 percent of the students.

And as you said, 93 percent of the children are not performing at proficient at math. They’re asking for more money? They can’t stay after for 25 minutes? It takes you ten minutes to get your coat on.

COOPER: Randi, the teachers rejected the school’s original plan which would have saved all their jobs because they wanted more money for this extra time that they would have had to spend with students. You know, critics like Steve are saying they’re basically putting their salaries ahead of the needs of kids.

RANDI WEINGARTEN, PRESIDENT, AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS: Well actually, Steve, from what my understanding is the story is a bit different than that. And I know the teachers would very much like to negotiate this and I know that some of the officials in Rhode Island have called for mediation. We want to keep that school open. We want to keep that school open for kids.

We agree with you and we agree with Steve. Seven percent math proficiency is totally unacceptable but so is the amount of poverty in that school. What we need to do is we need to make sure we create a place where all kids can achieve in some ways like the place that Mr. Perry has created in Capital Prep.

COOPER: What does that mean?

PERRY: Right. Thank you. One of the things that…

COOPER: Steve, go ahead.

WEINGARTEN: Can I finish? Sorry.

COOPER: Steve, go ahead.

PERRY: One of the — one of the things that’s important, if poverty is this immovable object for that faculty we understand that maybe it’s not their group of students that they can educate. Let’s free the students.

Why would we keep a school open that has already proven that it simply cannot educate the children in the circumstances within which they’re in? We operate a school in a poor community. There are thousands of educators all over the country who have the capacity to educate children where they are. We don’t need to change poverty. We need to change who’s teaching children in poverty.

WEINGARTEN: Well what we actually need to do is we need to do both.

But look, we have thousands of schools, as Mr. Perry said, that work. Let’s look at what it is that makes them work. We have…

COOPER: But doesn’t accountability work? Holding teachers accountable?

WEINGARTEN: Accountability is one aspect of it, but what I’m talking about, Anderson, is think about the schools that work across the country. Think about the schools that parents sometimes spend thousands of dollars to put their kids in.

They have well-prepared teachers. They have smaller classes. They have rich curriculum. What we’re saying about here Central Falls where there’s been five principals in the last six years, where there is one high school in the whole — in the whole little city which has become the focus point of the community, where hundreds of people last week were there supporting the kids and the teachers.

Let’s turn that school around like we have in so many other places.

PERRY: Right. And so here’s what’s important to note. She’s right. Attorney Weingarten is right. That we do need better teachers and the only thing standing in way of that are the teachers unions and seniority rules that won’t allow us to bring people in who are the most qualified and willing to teach in those schools.

If those folks in that one school cannot do it, then let’s free the children. Let’s let charter schools come in. Let’s let individuals who want to participate in the process come in. If the interest is the needs of the children, let’s do it.

She’s also right, let’s give the children what the children would receive in these private schools, the same things that the superintendent was asking for. Stay after school a little while longer. Come to school a little while earlier. Eat with the children once a week.

Are we really giving up our jobs because they’re asking us to eat with children once a week? And finally, over $30 — $30 additional dollars. The community has double-digit poverty. There’s no more money.

It’s unreasonable and irresponsible to ask a community that’s already given to the teeth for more money, especially when the product that they’re receiving is below standard. At some point we have to acknowledge that the children are more important than the adults who have degrees, certification, and 401(k)s. We have to focus on the children.

COOPER: Randi, I want you to be able to respond.

WEINGARTEN: Look, the children are more important, and as I said to you I talked to the superintendent of schools last Thursday and I said, let’s restart these negotiations, let’s not close the only high school in Central Falls.

I have worked across the country and have seen high-poverty schools including, Mr. Perry, the two charter schools that I started in New York City, turned things around for kids. What we need to do is have strategic common sense reforms that I know my members can do for kids in Central Falls. We need a chance to do that.

COOPER: Randi, your critics will say — what is essential is the ability for a superintendent or principal to fire teachers. You seem — teachers’ unions obviously are opposed to that notion of being able to fire teachers.

WEINGARTEN: Look, Anderson, we’re not opposed to the notion of if somebody is not performing to do what management has to do.

COOPER: But it’s incredibly hard to fire a teacher.

PERRY: They only make it harder. I mean it takes at least a year to fire a teacher, at least a year. That’s 120 students in a class, under a teacher’s responsibility. It takes them at least a year. If Ms. Weingarten is saying that she’s in favor –

WEINGARTEN: Mr. Perry, can I — get a word in..

COOPER: Let him finish, then I’ll let you finish.

WEINGARTEN: Ok.

PERRY: If what she’s saying is she’s in favor of children, if you’re in favor of children then your members have to move out of the way. I’d be willing to bet that some 40 percent of the teachers in that school don’t agree with the union leadership. In fact, I bet if they were given the opportunity they would return without any cause. They wouldn’t even require anymore –

COOPER: Randi, I want you respond then we have to go.

WEINGARTEN: As I said, the teachers want to negotiate. We have been shut out of that by the superintendent. We’re willing 24/7 to do it.

The bottom line is this. It’s not union contracts. Look at the best state achievement in the United States. Maryland — wall to wall union contracts. The issue is, how do we make sure we get the well- prepared teachers to have the smaller class sizes, the safe environment that kids need so we help every single child in Central Falls?

COOPER: Ok. Randi Weingarten, appreciate your time; Steve Perry as well.

If you’re as fascinated by the news story as I am, here’s another article link (with an excerpt) to satisfy your curiosity:

http://www.projo.com/news/content/central_falls_trustees_vote_02-24-10_EOHI83C_v59.3c21342.html

Every Central Falls teacher fired, labor outraged
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
By Jennifer D. Jordan

CENTRAL FALLS, R.I.

The state’s tiniest, poorest city has become the center of a national battle over dramatic school reform. On the one side, federal and state education officials say they must take painful and dramatic steps to transform the nation’s lowest-performing schools. On the other side, teachers unions say such efforts undermine hard-won protections in their contracts.

“This is hard work and these are tough decisions, but students only have one chance for an education,” Education Secretary Duncan said, “and when schools continue to struggle we have a collective obligation to take action.”

Duncan is requiring states, for the first time, to identify their lowest 5 percent of schools — those that have chronically poor performance and low graduation rates — and fix them using one of four methods: school closure; takeover by a charter or school-management organization; transformation which requires a longer school day, among other changes; and “turnaround” which requires the entire teaching staff be fired and no more than 50 percent rehired in the fall.

State Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist moved swiftly on this new requirement, identifying on Jan. 11 six of the “persistently lowest-performing” schools: Central Falls High School, which has very low test scores and a graduation rate of 48 percent, and five schools in Providence. Gist also started the clock on the changes, telling the districts they had until March 17 to decide which of the models they wanted to use. Her actions make Rhode Island one of the first states to publicly release a list of affected schools and put into motion the new federal mandate.

Gallo and the teachers initially agreed they wanted the transformation model, which would protect the teachers’ jobs.

But talks broke down when the two sides could not agree on what transformation entailed…

L.A. Weekly took the bull by the horns with the fiery expose, “LAUSD’s Dance of the Lemons: Why firing the desk-sleepers, burnouts, hotheads and other failed teachers is all but impossible”. Kudos to Beth Barrett for researching and writing this excellent and shocking piece. http://www.laweekly.com/content/printVersion/854792

LAUSD is so large that it “educates” one-tenth of all the students in California. In light of the information revealed by L.A. Weekly, it’s frightening to think that 10% of California’s children are shuffling through such a low-performing, inefficient school district.

LAUSD is known for its “dance of the lemons”, which refers to the practice of transferring bad teachers secretively to other schools in the district, paying incompetent teachers to leave the system, and repeatedly placing teachers in retraining programs despite evidence that they do not show signs of improvement.

The dance of the lemons stems from the school district’s inability to fire lousy, tenured teachers due to union rules and bureaucratic red tape. Because of the incredible cost and time involved in trying to get rid of incompetent teachers, administrators have resorted to shuffling the lemons around or paying them to rot somewhere else.

Here are some excerpts from the article:

“…The Weekly has found, in a five-month investigation, that principals and school district leaders have all but given up dismissing such teachers. In the past decade, LAUSD officials spent $3.5 million trying to fire just seven of the district’s 33,000 teachers for poor classroom performance — and only four were fired, during legal struggles that wore on, on average, for five years each. Two of the three others were paid large settlements, and one was reinstated. The average cost of each battle is $500,000.

“During our investigation, in which we obtained hundreds of documents using the California Public Records Act, we also discovered that 32 underperforming teachers were initially recommended for firing, but then secretly paid $50,000 by the district, on average, to leave without a fight. Moreover, 66 unnamed teachers are being continually recycled through a costly mentoring and retraining program but failing to improve, and another 400 anonymous teachers have been ordered to attend the retraining.

“…Documents show only one instance in the past 10 years in which an LAUSD teacher accepted his firing and left without a fight or big payment.

“…According to confidential settlement agreements obtained by the Weekly under the California Public Records Act, the school district goes to great lengths to avoid the formal steps for firing teachers. Not only has LAUSD paid 32 tenured teachers more than $1.5 million to leave, but the LAUSD school board, which says it is reform-minded, allows these teachers to leave with clean records, and with no hint that they took a payout under pressure. The deals are so hush-hush, in fact, that the Weekly has discovered that one teacher, Que Mars, who taught math at Chester W. Nimitz Middle School, is still listed in LAUSD’s substitute-teacher pool after taking a $40,000 check — to stop teaching in L.A.

“…Hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of other L.A. teachers hand out busy-work, show movies during most class periods, sleep, don’t show up on Fridays, or consistently churn out kids who score well below the rest of the school in core subjects like math, science, reading and English.

“California Charter Schools Association’s Young and other education analysts say the obstacles to identifying and ousting these teachers stem from the 1970s, when popular but not particularly competent teachers were named as principals while top teachers with deep academic backgrounds got fired for failing to toe the line. In the backlash that followed, critics say, new laws and regulations made it increasingly hard to fire a California teacher.”

It is an offense to common sense and equal rights to allow “the dance of the lemons” to occur. Think of the untold number of students whose education is hijacked by terrible teachers, bureaucratic inefficiency, cowardly district officials, and union control. Could you imagine something like this, on this scale, happening at a private corporation?

Think how different LAUSD would be if it could hire and fire at will. LAUSD would still have its problems, but getting rid of an entrenched corps of incompetent teachers and the network of programs and lawyers surrounding it would be a good first step toward reform.

Here are more excerpts from L.A. Weekly about the “retraining” that goes on in LAUSD:

“…When a teacher gets a below-standard Stull evaluation — named after a lawmaker who in 1971 authored California legislation requiring checks of educators’ work — that teacher participates in a rehab program called Peer Assistance and Review, as did Burio and Loftin. The program, engineered by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa when he was a state assemblyman in 2000, is supposed to improve schools by pairing failing teachers with mentors — often retired teachers with many years of experience.

“By some accounts, PAR is a miserable failure. Under the confidential program — a secrecy feature that teachers unions insisted on — not even school principals can find out if their subpar teachers are improving. District officials admit to the Weekly that only about one-third of teachers pass the training.

“Moreover, as happened with Burio at San Pedro High, principals must keep these substandard teachers in the classroom during the retraining. There are no particular consequences if a teacher does not improve.

“…School principals, Hughes says, know that if they negatively review an L.A. teacher’s abilities, ‘just about everyone who gets a below-standard Stull grieves it’ — and the principal gets caught in a lengthy, often bitter process. Records show that of 16,235 LAUSD teachers evaluated in 2008, 1,321 were considered below standard in classroom ability. Only a small fraction of those 1,321 received a formal, negative Stull rating. In some cases, the principals simply did not want to get in a nasty fight.

“…Superintendent Cortines says he recently banned the repetitive transfer of ‘lemons.’ But there is no way to verify if Cortines’ ban is working, or if it was even implemented, because the practice unfolds entirely in secret. Nobody, including parents, can currently find out if a newly arrived teacher was sent to a school under a forced transfer.

“…LAUSD is not as aggressive as New York City, whose school district employs eight attorneys solely to remove bad teachers, and places underperforming teachers in the district’s infamous ‘rubber rooms’— offices away from children, where they earn full salary to do nothing during their job disputes.

“…President Barack Obama has begun pushing for tougher evaluations of teachers, tied to their classroom test scores, and for direct comparison of teachers with their colleagues along the same hallway. As those and other reforms aimed at teacher quality begin to find acceptance in other parts of the nation, however, it seems a stretch to imagine LAUSD, the district so big it educates one in 10 California children, joining in.

“‘The power of the union [and] the California Teachers Association in this state has definitely tipped the balance in favor of protecting the incompetent teacher,’ says Collins. Somehow, she says, ‘Parents and students need to know they have a voice.’”

Do they really have a voice? And if they do, can they be heard? It reminds me of a chapter name I came across recently in the book The Long Tail called “The ants have megaphones. What are they saying?”

Students and their families in failing school districts might speak out, but they are drowned out by the voices of teachers, teachers unions, school district personnel, politicians, and lawmakers—the people who really have the power when it comes to education reform. And some of those people need to stop supporting the status quo and start thinking about the future, which is looking bleak for the majority of children in California.