California's Children

Truancy at the top: it's a "right"

April 15, 2013: Esther Zuckerman, a graduate of  LA's Harvard-Westlake school, writes in today's Atlantic Wire about her alma mater and other private and charter high schools in the Los Angeles area from which a migration of "hundreds, perhaps thousands" of students just took place over the weekend in what Zuckerman terms a "massive cut day." 

There are two days, actually, and possibly four, if the student are still recovering from the weekend and can't make it to class on Monday. The reason: the two-weekend Coachella Valley Music & Art Festival held on the Empire Polo Fields in Indo, 100 miles east of LA in the desert ($349 general pass).

...And back in L.A., administrators and teachers at some of the top schools that have struggled to contend with the empty classrooms of Coachella Fridays are finally learning how to deal with absence in the age of the music festival. The rite of Southern California spring, these educators say, is now something of an acknowledged right...

"Radical" Michelle Rhee confesses support for school vouchers

February 5, 2013: Michelle Rhee, (at left in a photo by Max Whittaker for Reuters) for chancellor of the Washington, D.C. public schools, who, as a result, carries the media-tag ID "controversial education reformer" (and who is the wife of Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson), has changed her mind about school vouchers. In Radical: Fighting to Put Students First (Harper, 2012), which has an official publication date of today, Rhee confesses (and the Daily Beast reprints):

...I drew a very deep line in the sand when it came to vouchers. As a lifelong Democrat I was adamantly against vouchers. Vouchers provide public funds to parents who need help in paying tuition for private or parochial schools. Proponents, mostly Republicans, see vouchers as leveling the field and broadening choice for families. Detractors, usually Democrats, decry the use of public funds to pay for private education. I had bought into the arguments that Democrats and others use in opposition to vouchers: vouchers are a way of taking money away from public school systems and putting them into private schools; vouchers help only a handful of the kids; and vouchers take children and resources away from the schools and districts that need those resources the most...for all of those reasons, my view on vouchers was set.  But soon after I arrived in Washington, D.C., I was in a pickle. The District of Columbia had Opportunity Scholarships, a federally funded voucher program [School Choice Incentive Act, 2003] that helped poor families attend private schools. The program was up for reauthorization, and there was a heated debate going on in the city....

After [a] listening tour of families, and hearing so many parents plead for an immediate solution to their desire for a quality education, I came out in favor of the voucher program. People went nuts...the most vocal detractors were my biggest supporters. 

“Michelle, what are you doing?” one education reformer asked. “You are the first opportunity this city has had to fix the system. We believe in you and what you’re trying to do. But you have to give yourself a fighting chance! You need time and money to make your plan work. If during that time children continue fleeing the system on these vouchers, you’ll have less money to implement your reforms. You can’t do this to yourself!” 

“Here’s the problem with your thinking,” I’d answer. “My job is not to preserve and defend a system that has been doing wrong by children and families. My job is to make sure that every child in this city attends an excellent school. I don’t care if it’s a charter school, a private school, or a traditional district school...."

Here’s the question we Democrats need to ask ourselves: Are we beholden to the public school system at any cost, or are we beholden to the public school child at any cost?...

 

LAPD & LAUSD team up to protect children

December 19, 2012: Starting in January, when students return from winter break, the Los Angeles Police Department will begin daily visits to the city's 540 public elementary and middle schools. In the aftermath of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, the LAPD's goal is to ease safety concerns and give officers a better chance of intercepting any possible acts of violence. 

In a story by Joel Rubin, Howard Blume and Andrew Blankstein in the Los Angeles Times, LAPD's Chief Charlie Beck said private or charter schools will be included in this plan if they request to be.

Planning to divert an estimated 1,200 police officers a day to the schools, LAPD intends to send, whenever possible, the same officers to check on the same schools, both so the officers can become familiar with the staff and students, and to establish a sense of security in the school.   

 The [Sandy Hook]shooting, the chief said, has forced him to "recalibrate his department to this new reality."

"A barrier has been broken in our culture," Beck added at the news conference. "It's our job… all of our jobs, to make sure that we resurrect that barrier and make our children safe."

The Los Angeles Unified School District already spends $52 million annually on its own police force. The Los Angeles School Police Department (LASPD) is the largest independent school police department in the U.S. And, with over 350 sworn officers, 126 non-sworn safety school officers and 34 civilian support staff, it is the 14th largest police department in California. Even with a task force as large as this, Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent John Deasy made it clear that the police force is incapable of touching base with every school daily. 

Until Friday, Beck said, he... didn't much worry about elementary schools. The school walls, he trusted, effectively sealed off the youngest of the city's students from whatever violence or other crimes may be unfolding outside them. The relatively few LAPD officers assigned to school issues focused almost entirely on the high schools.

Speaking of the new plan Beck added, "Logistically, it's a big deal, But it's us recognizing a new priority and that there is a new reality." Beck acknowledged that having a police presence at these schools doesn't guarantee the children's and staff's safety -- but it will help.

(Above: Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, left, Supt. John Deasy and LAPD Chief Charlie Beck discuss the new plan for LAPD to visit elementary and middle schools daily.)

Written by: Taylor McCulloch

"Too many [public school] teachers" -- WSJ post drums for private ed

July 11, 2012: Writing an opinion piece in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Andrew J. Coulson, director of the conservative Cato Institute's Center for Education Freedom, states:

...Since 1970, the public school workforce has roughly doubled—to 6.4 million from 3.3 million—and two-thirds of those new hires are teachers or teachers' aides. Over the same period, enrollment rose by a tepid 8.5%. Employment has thus grown 11 times faster than enrollment. If we returned to the student-to-staff ratio of 1970, American taxpayers would save about $210 billion annually in personnel costs.

Or would they? Stanford economist Eric Hanushek, at left, has shown that better-educated students contribute substantially to economic growth. If U.S. students could catch up to the mathematics performance of their Canadian counterparts, he has found, it would add roughly $70 trillion to the U.S. economy over the next 80 years. So if the additional three million public-school employees we've hired have helped students learn, the nation may be better off economically.

To find out if that's true, we can look at the "long-term trends" of 17-year-olds on the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress. These tests, first administered four decades ago, show stagnation in reading and math and a decline in science. Scores for black and Hispanic students have improved somewhat, but the scores of white students (still the majority) are flat overall, and large demographic gaps persist. Graduation rates have also stagnated or fallen. So a doubling in staff size and more than a doubling in cost have done little to improve academic outcomes.

Nor can the explosive growth in public-school hiring be attributed to federal spending on special education. According to the latest Census Bureau data, special ed teachers make up barely 5% of the K-12 work force.

The implication of these facts is clear: America's public schools have warehoused three million people in jobs that do little to improve student achievement—people who would be working productively in the private sector if that extra $210 billion were not taxed out of the economy each year... Even as a tiny, mostly nonprofit niche, American private education is substantially more efficient than its public sector, producing higher graduation rates and similar or better student achievement at roughly a third lower cost than public schools (even after controlling for differences in student and family characteristics).

While America may have too many teachers, the greater problem is that our state schools have squandered their talents on a mass scale... 

Miramonte parents sue LAUSD under new court decision

UPDATE, May 10, 2012: Following the California Supreme Court decision in March by Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar, at left, (see background stories below), who ruled school districts could be held vicariously liable for the actions of their employees, 20 former Miramonte Elementary students have filed a  lawsuit against the Los Angeles Unfied School District, the principal and several school board members.

From the LA Times:

The lawsuit said that the district essentially ignored student allegations. It names several complaints filed against the teacher, including one in 1993 in which a student claimed to have been fondled by [Berndt]. The lawsuit states that no changes were made to the district's “policies, training or supervision, or other actions to protect students," after the complaints.

March 11, 2012: A California Supreme Court decision last Thursday ruled that school districts are legally liable for injuries (e.g., emotional distress, anxiety, nervousness, fear) suffered by a student from sexual abuse if district officials are shown to be negligent in the hiring or supervising of the employee who commits the abuse, reports Maura Dolan for the Los Angeles Times.

The ruling, written by Justice Kathryn Mickle Werdegar, at left, concurred unanimously in the case of C.A.v. William S. Hart Union High School District et al., (WHUHSD) involving a Golden Valley High School (Santa Clarita Valley in LA County) school counselor, Roselyn Hubbell, and a 14-year-old male student. Writing that the molestations often took place off campus while driving him home, it proved a lack of adequate supervision on the part of the WHUHSD, therefore making the district liable: