Change The LAUSD

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!

“You should not speak to any child, especially students not your own.”

-Derek Horowitz, LAUSD Principal

Now that Tamar Galatzan is a former member of the LAUSD School Board, there is not one Board Member who has children enrolled in the district. Granted, this change is only symbolic as Galatzan had a reputation for ignoring the concerns of other parents (there is a reason that three parents ran against her in the March primary) and focusing on the needs of the charter school advocates who financed her campaigns.  However, symbols are important and the new Board needs to take steps to show that it takes its goals of “parent and community engagement” seriously.

I have taught at a have nothing school, at a have some school, and at a have everything school, all in LAUSD!

The one great common factor at all three schools is the quality and dedication of the teachers. I believe that there are teachers like this throughout the world:

Superintendent Cortines has announced that he will leave his position in six months. When it was convenient for him, he would remind people that he had been a teacher. Years ago when he was also the Superintendent, he made a robo call to teachers and retired teachers when the district altered the health benefits and wrote the changes in a manner that confused everyone. His recorded call conveyed nastiness and a disdain for the teachers.

The new Superintendent of LAUSD should:

The LAUSD Board of Education and the Superintendent (whoever he is) have always been the center of the attention in the district—it should be the schools, the students, and the educators.

When notable teachers like Rafe Esquith and Iris Stevenson receive international and national acclaim, it goes against the grain of downtown where the spotlight is supposed to be directed on those at Beaudry. So they attempt to shine a negative flame upon those teachers.

Now that the elections are over:

For over seven years I wrote more than 650 articles for Examiner.com, an online site that is owned by a conservative who supports all that I oppose. For years I’ve wanted to find a non ad driven site to share my writing. Friday, they sent me a kiss off Email ending in “best wishes”. So here I am.

Through my childhood, my Dad and I were not particularly close. In a lot of ways the experience of his childhood haunted him and he did everything possible to make sure that mine would be different. In doing so, he left his own minefields for me to negotiate.

Election season was clearly over on Tuesday afternoon as the LAUSD set about to fulfill the legal requirement of getting public input into the Local Control Funding Formula. Outgoing District 3 representative Tamar Galatzan did not even bother to show up to the meeting. District 2’s Monica Garcia left as public comment began. Even George McKenna’s seat was empty before the last speaker had a turn at the podium.

On Tuesday, the LAUSD Board will vote on reaffirming its commitment to “A-G Life Preparation for All.” Unfortunately, the title of this resolution is disingenuous as somehow, we have come to confuse “life preparation” with “preparation for college.” While I agree that any LAUSD student who wants access to college preparatory classes should be given the opportunity, we should not pretend that college is the only pathway to success. Any college graduate who is underemployed and struggling to pay off student debt will  certainly attest to the fact that college does not guarantee success. What the LAUSD really needs to do is recommit itself to serving all types of students