Change The LAUSD

On Tuesday the members of the LAUSD school board will meet behind closed doors to “discuss what criteria they would like to include in the superintendent’s upcoming annual performance review.” To be clear, this is not the actual evaluation and “under no circumstances…[will] a vote be held to determine Deasy’s employment.” Instead, “board members will have the opportunity to discuss what they consider fair game for Deasy’s annual performance evaluation.”

If children have a constitutional guarantee of high-quality teachers, why does the LAUSD allow institutionalized bullying to keep great teachers from the classroom?

“The Vergara ruling has presented California schools with an opportunity to rectify a catastrophe. Now it will be my responsibility and privilege to ensure that L. A. Unified students have highly competent and effective teachers in their classrooms. This guarantee must be not to some students, or most students. It must be to every single student every single day.”

- John Deasy

The LAUSD’s Policy Bulletin on Workplace Violence, Bullying and Threats (Adult-to-Adult) includes in its definition of bullying “severe...verbal act or conduct...committed by an individual...directed toward one or more adults that has or can be reasonably predicted to [have a] substantial interference with work performance.” Superintendent John Deasy was surely in violation of this policy on the morning of September 8, 2011, when he walked unannounced into a classroom at the Washington Prep High School, quickly decided that the work that had been assigned to the students was an “insult to their potential” and proceeded to engage in “a tirade of statements including that the assignment was ‘a total waste of instructional time.’” He then told the teacher, in front of her students, that she should have been “ashamed to have given them such an assignment.”

“I would like to move that we move the remainding [sic] of board meetings that are tentatively scheduled for 4:00 PM to 1:00 PM...Makes it easier for parents, certainly in my district, who might want to come speak to not be here at 11:00 at night when they have kids to put to bed and homework to supervise and it is impossible to get here during rush hour from most parts of the city to pull comment cards...A lot of us have other responsibilities that we need to take care of and I would really like to move the meetings back, like they are today with a 10:00 AM closed, 1:00 PM open so if we need to stay late we can but, otherwise, I think it works best, not perfect, there really is no time when it is convenient to everyone. But the 4:00 PM I thought would keep us here sometimes to 2:00 AM in the morning with nobody here to participate and that is not something that I support. So I would like to move all of them to 10:00 AM and 1:00 PM.”

- Tamar Galatzan

According the the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 88.2% of married-couple families with children had at least one parent employed. Both parents are employed in 59.1% of these households. In single-parent households, 68.2% of women and 81.2% of men are employed. While not all of these parents are working nine to five jobs, the vast majority are not available to wait in line to get a chance to participate in a school board meeting at 1:00 in the afternoon. While a 4:00 PM start time does not move meetings away from the work day, it at least gives working parents a chance to join a meeting in progress.

Find the petition HERE.

The students of the LAUSD have started this new school year amid chaos. First, the district ignored warning signs that it was not ready and pushed through the implementation of the MiSiS student management system. This resulted in the disruption of education for thousands of students. The district then showed an ignorance of the seriousness of the situation by continuously publicising the talking point that “only” 1% of the students were affected by this error. Even if this statistic had been accurate, and the facts show that it was not, this talking point created the impression that the education of 6,400 students was insignificant.

“It was controversial?”

- John Deasy

At the beginning of August, Superintendent Deasy was mocking opponents of his plan “to provide an iPad to every Los Angeles student, teacher and school administrator.” Yesterday he cancelled the project as the controversy grew over mounting evidence of improprieties in the bidding process. This step should serve as the beginning of a process to make sure that the mistakes that haunted this project from the beginning are never repeated.

A Letter to Tamar Galatzan:

It is readily apparent to anyone who has attended a LAUSD board meeting over the last few months that you have lost your passion for the job. You fulfill the requirements for receiving your second government paycheck by physically showing up for these meetings, but show little interest in the proceedings. Instead, you pass the time on your iPad oblivious to the stakeholders who are trying to plead their cases to the board.

“I can’t remember the last time we got an update on the program...and we don’t supervise anyone who works for the superintendent, which is who was running it”

- Tamar Galatzan

The LAUSD tells parents that they have the responsibility to ensure that “their child attends school every day, on time, and is ready to learn.” Unfortunately, the district does not seem to place a priority on ensuring that the schools are ready to receive them. Our students returned to school this week to find a “slew of problems with the district’s new student management computer system.” With the district relying on the untested My Integrated Student Information System (MiSiS), it’s failure resulted in a wasted instructional time for thousands of students.