MY TURN-(Ed Note: The LAUSD, on Tuesday, announced settlement of the Reed vs. California lawsuit. Our long-time education advocate offers some perspective.) Contrary to what is being asserted in the proposed Reed settlement between the plaintiffs, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), and the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, it will not lead to the change in approach that is so desperately needed in the “37 schools that [still] struggle with high teacher turnover and student drop-out rates and low API scores.”
The reason: it completely ignores LAUSD's longstanding policy of social promotion, irrespective of actual student academic level. And, that is really the unaddressed problem at the root of why these 37 schools and others just like them continue to fail at LAUSD and inner city districts like it throughout the United States.
Merely supplying more money without pragmatically addressing the longstanding purposefully failed culture of LAUSD does not “represent a path to stability and long-term success for schools that have too little of both.”
Increasing funding without addressing students subjective levels remains a formula for continued student failure.
Even with less funding these schools would do far better if LAUSD addressed students underlying academic deficits in a timely age-appropriate manner with something more than rhetoric and money that will be consumed by administration expense, while the reality on the ground is these schools will continue to look pretty much the same.
More relevant than this proposed Reed settlement is changing the LAUSD administrative attitude that has no expectation for minority student excellence and continues to accuse teachers that do of “not being culturally sensitive.”
Mark Rosenbaum, chief counsel for the ACLU SoCal is typical of this uniformed mindset in his failure to understand why these schools have continued to fail, since the ACLU in bringing this lawsuit has only been concerned with the effects and not the underlying avoidable causes, most of which come from misguided LAUSD policies.
His supporting of the Reed case … and this supposed solution … make the clearly false assertion that present poorly educated students' denial of “the American Dream [is] solely by fortuity of the zip code in which they were born or raised.” This a complete misunderstanding of why these students continue to fail in a reality that Mr. Rosenbaum and people from his privileged class have never had to confront in their own lives.
In an LAUSD that continues to ignore the now 60 year-old holding in Brown vs. Board of Education, that, “Separate but equal is inherently unequal,” Local Control Funding Formula, “which will bring millions of dollars in new programs to schools in need,” will actually achieve little measurable change until the longstanding failed policies of LAUSD are finally addressed and changed.
The LAUSD Board will consider the agreement at its meeting on Tuesday, April 22. Given its failure to address what is really causing minority students to fail, you might consider going to that meeting to voice your objections … not that the LAUSD Board will listen.
(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He’s a second generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 30
Pub: Apr 11, 2014
