Change The LAUSD

As wonderful and beloved as Common Core is, LAUSD has made it even better by providing schools with Common Core Coaches.

Truthfully, Common Core is loathed by educators who know better.

The Literacy Coaches (Open Court Police) and Math coaches were in most cases a waste of time and money.

Now here comes Common Core Coaches.

You wonder where your money went, when LAUSD decides how it's spent.

• They paid LAUSD teachers to go to training for five days during their vacation.
• Teachers could also go during the school year for three days and receive their regular pay while the district paid substitutes.
• They paid Open Court instructors to fly into Los Angeles and stay at nice hotels.
• They rented large halls in the hotels for instruction rooms and halls where they provided lunch for all of the teachers.
• Each elementary school had a Literacy Coach who really was the Open Court Police.
• They ran around the school visiting classrooms, finding fault, and reporting the teachers to the principal.
• Initially 60% on an Open Court test was considered passing.
• Open Court measured reading speed, even though there are students that read excellently but slowly.
• Any elementary teacher can tell you that it is comprehension, not speed that is important in Reading.

I always wanted to teach forever. (I still do as a volunteer only.)

Then, LAUSD implemented Open Court in elementary schools, forced the teachers to follow terrible pacing plans, selected textbooks with horrible explanations and limited practice exercises, and the tests became the dark cloud over each school, each classroom, and the entire district.

Open Court was the worst piece of crap this elementary teacher ever saw. Scripted, and among it many flaws, it covered adjectives and adverbs on the same page. There were a million other flaws with Open Court.

The pacing plans for elementary classes were designed by non classroom people who knew nothing. So now each grade in every school does the same skill at the same time and the students must all learn at the same speed, in the same learning modality, like a pair of one size fits all socks trying to fit every foot at the same time.