EDUCATION POLITICS-As the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) blindly continues its clearly failed policy of social promotion that continues to move students into higher and higher grades without the indispensible mastery of prior grade level standards necessary to succeed in those grades, literally nothing is being done to address these students deficits in a timely manner.
That can clearly be documented by obscene dropout rates well over 50% through K-12 and a 75% level of the entering junior college population taking remedial courses that they should have been given while still at the K-12 level.
It is an absolute rule in a student's education that the longer we wait to address their deficits, the less likely we are to ever turn things around. While pointing this out is clearly provable by the uncontradicted statistics documenting of unnecessary failure, the reality of pointing this out and not drinking the LAUSD kool aid will more than likely get you labeled a racist.
So although most teachers and administrators are clearly aware of this, they value their careers and prefer to compliment the latest LAUSD emperor's new clothes.
Given this reality of teacher and administrator coercion by political correct newspeak, it is not surprising that the vast majority of these purposefully socially promoted students ultimately wind up dropping out of K-12 or junior college, if they make it that far.
Undaunted by this clearly quantifiable reality of their students unnecessary failure, LAUSD leadership continues unmoved to employ vacuous feel good rhetoric such as "scaffolding" in lieu of any truly coherent program that has carved out the time and assets necessary to accomplish the work necessary to fix the damage done to an innocent student population before its too late.
The metaphor that educational scaffolding is derived from is that of a house that is profoundly damaged by let's say an earthquake. In that case, scaffolding is put in place to support and maintain the building while the necessary retrofitting is accomplished to allow it to ultimately stand alone without the danger of collapse.
This type of scaffolding works, because it gives those making repairs both the time and implements necessary to retrofit the damaged building so it can once again stand alone. In the education version, literally no time is set aside to accomplish the work or support the students in their new single-subject secondary environment that rests on the falsely assumes mastery of prior grade level knowledge that these students clearly don't have.
Something as basic as keeping a school open in the afternoon and early evening to allow students a place with the support necessary to do homework or backfill what they missed in earlier grades is rarely put in place.
Offering industrial arts or other trade courses that might offer a more relevant context for learning without negatively impacting the limited time that single subject academic teachers and their students have in regular academic class might also give positive results.
Leaving a student who is profoundly behind grade level in such an academic class with the clearly bogus assumption that they will somehow get what they need by osmosis from the other students not only dooms these students who are far behind grade level, but also sucks up all time the minority of students, who are at grade level, need to ultimately compete with students coming from private schools, where all time and degree of class difficult can be made with the assumption that all those students are at grade level.
Further collateral damage is caused to LAUSD public schools when students who are profoundly behind predictably disrupt the class and make it impossible for either the teacher to teach or those students capable of learning.
Quantifiable results of this can be seen in a 50% attrition rate among new teachers in just the first 5 years of their teaching careers and in the equally shocking reality that even the students who make it through school in this chaotic environment find themselves nonetheless profoundly behind when they make it to college.
This as NPR recently reported accounts for the abysmal college graduation result of minority LAUSD educated students who continue to suffer the misfortune of remaining under-educated even though they have remained diligent throughout their K-12 education.
These students are unjustly left to carry the weigh on issues of self-estime, because they tend to blame themselves for what is really LAUSD's systemic failure that never really gave them the educational environment in which they could have reached their potential.
Question this policy that clearly and negatively impacts the lives and achievement possibilities of predominantly poor students of color in a de facto segregated district that remains close to 90% Latino and Black and you risk being labeled a racist by a system of anti-intellectual non-education policies that attempts to cover its own racism by empty concepts such as scaffolding that in fact have shown itself to be incapable of addressing profound prior grade-level standards deficits in a secondary public education reality without the time or prior standards mastery necessary to allow the majority of students to succeed.
While there are many good administrators, they are intimidated into silence by the clear knowedge that they too will be targeted- like teachers- if they dare to question LAUSD party line. Since somebody has to be blamed for continuing student failure, teachers have become the convenient scapegoat in a process of teacher evaluation that finds the teacher unjustly held responsible, if their student in let's say a 12th grade Government class cannot pass their course with their 3rd grade reading ability.
In the teacher evaluation process you have administrators, who themselves could not attain any better results with this socially promoted population than the teachers they are negatively evaluating.
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And yet, somebody has got to be blamed, so the teacher is found to be incompetent in their evaluations. It is worth mentioning that many of these administrators escaped the classroom as soon as they could for administration, because they couldn't teach.
And one wonders whether they ever had any desire to teach in the first place or merely got into teaching to become a better paid administrator.
Besides blaming teachers for the longstanding failure of policies they had no part in developing, LAUSD administrators have now been told to target teachers at the top of the salary scale, about to vest in lifetime health benefits, or disabled, since getting rid of them will give more money to LAUSD leadership to squander on its clearly failed policies.
What actually makes LAUSD as presently constituted immune to change ironically is the anti-intellectual environment of this education institution that has become pervasive throughout this LAUSD culture of mediocrity.
What this has created is not only strong resistance to change, but also a proactive search and destroy mentality that targets and goes after anybody who has the nerve to challenge LAUSD's clearly failed policies or dares to try and actually educate students.
They are labeled as "not being culturally sensitive."
(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 13 Issue 24
Pub: Mar 20, 2015
