Change The LAUSD

“I hated the community vote”

- Tamar Galatzan

It is a stated goal of the Los Angeles Unified School District to have “parent and community engagement.” Unfortunately, putting those words on paper is as far as their commitment to the issue goes. For example, Board meetings start at 1:00 when most working parents, teachers and students can not attend. It is not even a good time for stay-at-home parents because it is too close to the end of the school day when they have to pick up their children. The Board did experiment with a 4:00 start time, but Tamar Galatzan led the effort to return it to the middle of the work day.

The district’s $1.3 billion plan to provide an iPad to every “student, teacher and administrator” has now drawn the attention of the FBI, but moonlighting City Attorney Tamar Galatzan should have been the one to notice the problems. Instead, she was what KPCC’s Annie Gilbertson described as “a fierce supporter of the Superintendent’s iPad program.” Howard Blume of the Los Angeles Times said that she “was one of the staunchest supporters of the original iPad plan.” An opinion piece in the Los Angeles Register referred to “the iPad plan’s chief proponents, Tamar Galatzan and Monica Garcia.”

Ms. Galatzan’s support of the iPad program does not line up with her campaign’s position that “she has also been very judicious in how she spends voter-approved bond money earmarked for her schools.” Bond funds are paid back with interest over 25 years and are a school district’s equivalent of a household mortgage. Just like a mortgage is appropriate for buying a house, the LAUSD is justified in using these funds for construction, capital improvements and long-term maintenance. A consumer would be ill-advised to take on such a long-term obligation to buy a consumer item, like an iPad, that will only last a few years. Similarly, the district should not be using these funds to buy “hoops, ropes and soccer balls” if this is the type of “recreational equipment for school playgrounds” that she brags about on her campaign site.

The LAUSD has set a goal of a 100% graduation rate. The students, parents and community should expect nothing less. Unfortunately, the results fall far short. In the 2013 - 14 school year, only 67% of students in the district graduated in four years and only 41% of students are “graduating and passing all A-G courses.” The fact that a Board Member would ask for re-election based on those “record numbers” is appalling.

This is another issue that calls out for new blood on the LAUSD Board of Education. As a member of the Board I will:

“It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”

- George Orwell, 1984

Elementary schools exist to give students the building blocks that they will need later in their academic careers. Without knowing their times tables, basic history or grammar rules, they have little hope of successfully tackling classes when they enter middle and high schools. With this in mind, it seems rather Orwellian to describe Calahan Elementary School as “A School for Advanced Studies.” Does Big Brother have an office in the district’s headquarters on Beaudry?

The letter that was mailed to our house was very stern. It stated that our daughter’s “immunization series is incomplete” and if she does not receive her second Varicella vaccine she will be “excluded from school attendance beginning: 1-12-15.” There is one small problem - she received her second chickenpox immunization in 2009. Apparently something caused the system to suddenly think that this never occurred.

The My Integrated Student Information System (MiSiS) was supposed eliminate problems like this one by replacing several disparate programs. Had it worked, the $13.5 million spent on its implementation would have made sense. Unfortunately, it was poorly designed because it did not take into account the age of the hardware that would be running it. Even worse, it was not adequately tested before “all legacy systems...were converted to read-only access, effective Monday, June 16th [2014].”  The resulting disruptions caused the district to take emergency actions which will result in an estimated $98 million in additional charges.

Guest post by Ellen Lubic, Executive Director of Joining Forces 4Ed. 

“You know the good ole days weren’t always good

And tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems.”

- Billy Joel

We are in a national funk. A bright “Morning in America” has given way to a stormy afternoon as the headlines scream that America’s best days are behind us. It seems that when we lost our position as the largest manufacturing country in 2010, we also lost our can-do spirit. It has been replaced by a fatalism that proclaims that our greatness can never be reclaimed.

When discussing our alleged demise, China is the country that is mentioned most often. However, this ignores the facts behind their success. For example, it took a Chinese population of 1.34 billion to manufacture $1.92 trillion worth of goods in 2010.  While the United States only manufactured $1.86 trillion during this same period, we did so with a population that is 23% the size of China’s. Furthermore, in 2012 the average hourly wage for a Chinese worker was $1.36 - hardly something Americans should aspire to.

The failure of the MiSiS implementation, which contributed to what Superior Court Judge George Hernandez Jr. ruled were “severe and pervasive educational deprivations,” is an example of how the established roles of the Board and the Superintendent are not being followed. The Board is supposed to set policy and hold the Superintendent accountable. In turn, the Superintendent is in charge of running the daily operations of the district based on the policies implemented by the Board. When a Board member openly admits, as in the case of the MiSiS disaster, that “we don’t supervise anyone who works for the superintendent”, the Superintendent is clearly not being held accountable.

Almost every major problem facing the LAUSD can be traced back to the size of the massive bureaucracy. With more than 640,000 students spread over 720 square miles in over 900 schools, the easiest way for the district to provide oversight of the system is by establishing a one-size-fits-all policy and mandating that everyone blindly follow it. This cookie-cutter technique may work fine in a factory where every widget must come off of the line exactly like the one before it and the economies of scale help drive down costs. However, the product of our public education system should not be identical bricks in the wall but individuals capable of critically thinking.

Every Who Down in Whoville Liked Christmas a lot…

But the Grinch, Who lived just north of Whoville, Did NOT!

The grinch hated Christmas! The whole Christmas season!

Now, please don’t ask why. No one quite knows the reason.

It could be his head wasn’t screwed on just right.

It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight.

But I think that the most likely reason of all,

May have been that his heart was two sizes too small.

- Dr. Seuss

The Grinch in our LAUSD tale does not actually live north of Whoville, but works in the fortress located downtown at 333 So. Beaudry Ave. He is a faceless bureaucrat who does not actually work with children. Instead he sits in his cubicle crunching numbers and reading the latest education theories written by people who he deems qualified on the subject because they have a lot of money. According to his calculations, our students are not failing because of furlough days, poorly maintained buildings or the lack of funds for music, art and vocational training. The problem is Christmas!

“Then he got an idea! An awful idea!” He sent out a memo to schools far and wide: Christmas is cancelled and those found celebrating will be properly admonished. The fearful principal at Nobel Middle School quickly complied, sending word to teachers at the last minute that there was to be no celebrating before winter break. It did not matter if goodies had already been baked, supplies purchased or lesson plans completed. Policies make the oversized-district easier to manage and cannot be ignored.