The senior teachers are being driven out, put into teachers’ jails, retiring early or changing careers because of their dissatisfaction with what public education has become; pretty soon there will only be new, inexperienced (perhaps TFA) teachers on many school sites.
Teachers will tell you that veteran teachers helped them in their early years of teaching and that they in turn helped others along the way.
As an inexperienced teacher you went to the veterans and asked:
“What do I do in this situation?”
“Did this ever happen to you?”
“A parent is……”
“One of the students is….”
And they always knew what to do!
Most school principals and assistant principals are too busy, too far removed from the classroom, and just don’t care.
These are the kind of questions that an experienced, veteran teacher can answer—you won’t find the answers on Google.
LAUSD as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts: The Superintendent, his assistants, the school board members, and the downtown and local bureaucrats don’t care. They, like UTLA, are trying to protect their positions, perks, privileges, and pensions.
They don’t care about the students.
They don’t care about the teachers.
They don’t care about the parents.
They don’t care about the schools.
They make the decisions and set the policies that the Superintendent decrees as he follows the program of his masters: Gates and Broad.
New Orleans eliminated all of its public schools. Every school is a charter.
Way down yonder in New Orleans, they have just drawn the road map for LAUSD schools.
For profit charters here we come.
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Editors note: Change The LAUSD is supporting the effort to place an initiative on next year's ballot to repeal the Charter School Act of 1992. To show your support sign the petition at www.ipetitions.com/petition/repeal-charter-school-act-of-1992-in-ca-ballot