Change The LAUSD

• 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.

Throughout the United States, veteran teachers are being targeted. Facebook has story after story about veteran teachers, many times an award winning teacher, being targeted by their school administrations.

These school administrators have received the word from on high—the downtown administrators—to get the veteran teachers to leave.

In LAUSD they are put into teacher jails. In other districts the veteran teachers receive poor reviews, the most difficult students, and all kinds of pressure from the administration--all designed to get them to quit before they receive either full or partial lifetime benefits upon retirement.

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!

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: