Tuesday the Los Angeles Unified District School Board voted to ban suspensions for “willful defiance”. Starting next year alternative disciplinary measures will be taken for infractions such as dress code violations, eating in the classroom and mouthing off to teachers instead of the traditional suspension, reports Vanessa Romo on Takepart.com.

This change is being instituted with the knowledge that taking kids out of the classroom does not prove to be an effective method when disciplining students with behavioral issues. LAUSD officials also hope that it will help eliminate racial profiling in the classroom.

The U.S. Department of Education conducted a study that showed African-American students are suspended over three times as often as white students.

 “In LAUSD, African-American children make up nine percent of the student body, but they account for 26 percent of all suspensions, nearly half of which are for willful defiance offenses.”

The district has yet to outline a budget, causing administrators to worry about the reality of the plan. In order to have effective support for students, the schools would likely need to hire addition personnel.

Lack of staff in schools is already a problem:

 “Currently in LAUSD, the school personnel-to-students ratio is at an all-time high. Public elementary schools must have more than 1,150 students before an assistant principal is assigned. Ideally, said Perez, there should be one for every 700 students. She calls the counselor ratio “horrendous.” The average high school counselor is responsible for 500 students.”

Despite the fact that it will require a lot of work from the schools, the benefits are well worth it, as demonstrated in East Los Angeles at Garfield High School. The students, faculty and community groups all signed “promise letters” to do whatever it takes to turn the school around and avoid a district take over. After three years with long hours put in by teachers developing behavioral plans for individual students, as well as alternative disciplinary methods in the classroom, the school was able to raise its API score by 114 points and keep control.

Takepart.com’s Kristen Kloberdanz reports another successful switch from traditional suspensions to a restorative justice system in the Oakland Unified School District.

The system includes a three tier model including prevention, repairing harm and alternatives to suspension with support for re-entry. The first tier ensures that the students are made to feel they are important and that they are learning in a caring environment. The second replaces suspension with counseling, peer circle groups, and peer mediation. The third welcomes students back to school with open arms who have been expelled from other schools or previously incarcerated.

“In 2007, restorative justice was tested at an Oakland middle school that had a high expulsion and suspension rates. Within three years, suspensions were reduced by 87 percent and there were no more expulsions. This year a three-tiered model of whole school restorative justice, which includes professional development and coaching, is being provided to 13 OESD pilot sites.”

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Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent John Deasy came under heavy fire in the wake of a sex abuse scandal that revealed elementary teacher Mark Berndt’s years of sexual misconduct in an LAUSD school. After February, 2012′s revelation that the district had a serious problem with identifying and dealing with potential abuse, LAUSD increased its efforts to remove offending teachers from their classrooms.

And now approximately 600 Los Angeles teachers are seeing those efforts bear fruit. Barbara Jones of The Mendocino Beacon reports that LAUSD has fired 100 teachers, forced 200 to resign and removed 300 more from the classroom as allegations of abuse are investigated.

The mass effort appears to be the result of a culture change in LAUSD. In the past, as in nearly all major school systems nationwide, dealing with allegations of misconduct in Los Angeles were difficult and expensive. It could take several years of hearings and appeals — all of which cost the district — to fire a teacher. Principals who took the necessary steps to remove teachers from classrooms rarely had their requests honored by boards, which meant that teachers would be returned to the school and often instigated a negative professional climate.

But now that administrators have the support of LAUSD, they’re coming forth in droves to deal with complaints about teacher misconduct that include sexual contact, emotional/mental abuse and corporal abuse — and some of the allegations are nothing short of outrageous:

“God, how do I even explain this?” Deasy asked, before recounting that a Westside elementary teacher in his early 60s “trained” his students to give him a full-body massage for 20 minutes every day while he “rested.” Youngsters, including some special-education students, later told officials that he shouted profanities, spanked them and hit them with rolled-up papers when they misbehaved.

Not everyone is pleased with the crackdown, though. United Teachers Los Angeles, the city’s teachers union, has called it a “witch hunt” and charged the district with hasty, poorly-conducted investigations and a mood of guilty until proven innocent. A lawyer for UTLA summed up the union’s position:

“Every case must be judged on its own merits,” Schwab said. “But in a number of cases, the nature of the charges haven’t been appropriately investigated or have been too vigorously pursued and the evidence never supported such allegations.”

44 teachers have been investigated and cleared of allegations.

Legislators have also worked to streamline the process of investigating allegations, filing charges and dismissing teachers. AB 375, a bill introduced to the California Assembly, could fare better than previous attempts:

Assembly Bill 375 would set a deadline of seven months for the administrative appeal, start to finish. It has the support of UTLA and the California Teachers Association, which last year lobbied strongly against a bill that would have given a school board the final say in firing a teacher. Under heavy lobbying by the unions, that measure died in committee.

Despite the uncertain future of LAUSD’s aggressive project to end teacher misconduct, Deasy has expressed a solid commitment to deal with the issue. Of the prior practice of paying accused teachers to drop their appeals, Deasy said, “Not on my watch.”

The post Housecleaning in Los Angeles: Hundreds of Teachers Shuffled Out appeared first on Education News.

A trial appears to be imminent in the lawsuit brought by parents of Morgan Hill special education students that could see services for disabled students in California substantially expand in both scope and cost. Parents are claiming that the state is not doing enough to live up to the guarantees made by the government that special needs students receive a free and appropriate education, according to the Mercury News report.

Plaintiffs – now including parents of special education students throughout the whole of California – are alleging that the quality of education provided to the disabled in the state is abysmal and that the systems in place to identify students with special needs and provide them with additional help is inadequate.

Parents also claim that they’re being consistently left out of the process to determine what are the best educational options for their children. Even when individual districts blatantly fail in their obligations, according to the parents bringing the lawsuit, asking the state to intervene has been pointless.

A victory could possibly force districts to offer more programs to more children with physical, mental and social-emotional disabilities. As it is now, parents claim, districts put up unreasonable challenges to those seeking special services for their children.

“I fought the district for 10 years,” trying to overcome denial of requests for services, McNulty said. “I believe it’s systemic in Morgan Hill. There are a lot of great teachers there. But they don’t realize that what they’re doing is noncompliant” with the law.

Providing additional services for special needs students has been required since four decades ago when Congress made those services mandatory. Schools were ordered to begin testing students to identify those who need special services and then make arrangements to offer them.

It was not a mandate districts around California enthusiastically embraced, mainly due to the fact that accommodations for special education students are typically expensive and require hiring of trained personnel.

he federal government requires the program but pays only a fraction of its share; the state also pays only a portion, leaving districts to pick up the rest while expressing resentment about the “encroachment” on their tight budgets. And the expense can be considerable. San Jose Unified spokesman Paul Higgins says the district budgeted $42 million this school year for special education, or 14 percent of the operating budget.

Plaintiffs believe that the state refusing to enforce the disability education mandate is the chief issue in the lawsuit. Although parents can complain to the state when they feel their district is not meeting the special education requirements, in the past, the California Department of Education has sided with districts the majority of the time.

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Those familiar with the Supreme Court are saying that it’s looking increasingly likely that affirmative action in college admissions is on its way out. The New York Times explores the ways in which states that are now looking for a different way to maintain diversity on their college campuses can emulate one of the first states not to use affirmative action at all – California.

In 1996, after the passage of Proposition 209, California became one the first states to do away with affirmative action in college admissions entirely. In the first few years after Prop 209 was adopted, the impact on minority enrollment in the University of California system was undeniable. The number of Latino students fell by 3% from 15% to 12%. The percentage of the student body that was African-American also declined by a single percentage point from 4% to 3%. At some of the most prestigious campuses in the system like Berkeley and UCLA, the declines were even steeper.

But after a few years the numbers rebounded — and then some.

Until last fall, 25 percent of new students were Latino, reflecting the booming Hispanic population, and 4 percent were black. A similar pattern of decline and recovery followed at other state universities that eliminated race as a factor in admissions.

Since considering race in admissions was no longer an option,the public university system in California – and other states where affirmative action is no longer on the books like Florida, Michigan and Washington – instead look for traits that are frequently its proxy. For example, admissions procedures on UC campuses give students points for “overcoming disadvantages” such as being from low-income families or from families where English isn’t the first language. Applicants from underperforming schools also get a leg up, as well as those from crime-ridden neighborhoods.

The approach has helped maintain the level of diversity on UC campuses, but is that necessarily a good thing?

Not according to Heather Mac Donald, writing for the City Journal. Mac Donald asks if at a time when the public university system in California is claiming poverty, can it justify spending millions of its budgets to fix a problem that doesn’t really exist?

UC Two captured the admissions process long ago. Ever since the passage of Proposition 209 banned racial discrimination at public institutions, UC’s faculty and administrators have worked overtime to find supposedly race-neutral alternatives to outright quotas. Admissions officials now use “holistic” review to pick students, an opaque procedure designed to import proxies for race into the selection process, among other stratagems.

Nor, according to Mac Donald, is this diversity push really serving those it was designed to help the most – the students. Mac Donald cites Richard Sander’s “mismatch theory,” which demonstrates how admitting students who are academically unprepared to tackle the work to a school where an average student has the skills to meet the challenge merely sets them on a road to failure.

The post Diversity Without Affirmative Action: Still a Worthy Goal? appeared first on Education News.

According to Victor Skinner of EAGNews.org, Ben Chavis is known by a lot of names among members of education establishment — and few of them are flattering. Skinner lists “egomaniac” and “money-grubbing monster” among the more fragrant of epithets. However, being liked is not Chavis’ job. Being an educator is. And at that, he is undeniably successful. Not that it matters to those in charge.

According to Skinner, charter schools founded and run by Chavis are performing impressively especially among the demographic most likely to be failed by traditional public schools: low-income students. Yet, now a number of those charters face closure and no one can quite explain why.

Chavis, a Lumbee Indian and former school superintendent, took over Oakland Unified School District’s chronically failing American Indian Public Charter School (AIPCS) in 2000, and quickly transformed the institution into one of the premier schools in the nation. He also helped established two other schools that joined AIPCS in forming the American Indian Model Schools charter network.

But he became a target for criticism by public school proponents who believe the union model is the only model for education. AIPCS, like most charter schools, employs a non-union teaching staff.

Oakland district officials decided to pull the network’s charter after an investigation into Chavis uncovered that he had improperly benefited from the network to the tune of about $4 million. It isn’t clear why the findings warrant the closure of the three schools rather than the removal of, and possibly a criminal investigation directly into, Chavis.

According to Chavis, the issue isn’t money – at least not the money he has made. Instead, district officials are looking to claw back the funding they annually lose to the American Indian schools.

In an interview with EAGNews, Chavis blamed politics for the predicament the network and its students find themselves in.

It appears that in the attempt to punish Chavis, the district is being extremely unfair to AIPCS students. After all, their list of accomplishments is impressive.

Nearly every AIMS student comes from a low-income family, yet by 2007 AIPCS became the first school in Oakland ever honored with the prestigious National Blue Ribbon Award for academic excellence.

Chavis helped to establish American Indian Public High School the same year, and in 2009 the first class of students graduated. One-hundred percent of graduates went on to four-year colleges, some attending prestigious schools like Cornell, UC Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The fact that all this came a mere ten years after the first school in the network was nearly closed because of chronic under-achievement makes the eventual success of the three schools even more astounding.

However, when it comes to clash between a maverick and Oakland’s education establishment, American Indian students appear to be the ones losing out.

The post Politics Threaten Successful Charter Chain in Oakland appeared first on Education News.

A number of California teachers have filed a lawsuit against the biggest teachers union in the state – the California Teachers Association – to be allowed to stop paying union dues because the forced payment is a violation of their free speech rights, The Associated Press reports.

The ten teachers are being represented by the conservative Center for Individual Rights and are hoping to bring down laws that allow unions to collect dues even from people who don’t wish to join and who don’t share the union’s ultimate mission.

Specifically, the plaintiffs are opposing the fact that at least part of their dues goes towards union-sponsored political activities rather than contract negotiations and efforts to act an an ombudsman to the employees.

CTA spokesman Frank Wells said in an email that the suit is a “baseless challenge” intended to dilute worker rights.
The lawsuit comes about five months after California voters defeated Proposition 32, which was an attempt to starve unions of the tens of millions of dollars they collect from employees or members to use to finance campaigns and political organizing.

Overall, there are about 2.4 million union members in California, and that money has helped make teachers, prison guards and other public workers some of the most feared institutions in Sacramento, where labor has longstanding ties with Democrats who now control both chambers of the Legislature and every statewide office.

The lawsuit, which has been filed in the U.S. District Court, names not only the National Education Association but also the local teachers unions. The plaintiffs argue that the opt-out process which the unions have in place in order to allow members who don’t support the union’s political agenda to withdraw is insufficient, difficult and frequently makes people trying to take advantage of it feel intimidated.

Although the union spokesman reiterated that joining the union is not mandatory, and he further disputed the assertion that the “opt-out” process can in any way be considered cumbersome.

“The lawsuit seems self-contradictory. It acknowledges that those represented by unions can opt-out of paying … and then complains that they are somehow forced to pay for them,” Wells wrote.

In a statement, the center said the fees can be diverted to various programs outside contract talks, including funding what it called a politically biased union magazine.

“Individual teachers have a constitutional right to decide for themselves whether to join a union and financially support its efforts,” said Terry Pell, president of the center. “The government may not compel teachers to provide financial support to policies with which they fundamentally disagree.”

The post California Teachers Union Members Sue Over Forced Union Dues appeared first on Education News.

According to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union in California, more than 20,000 students enrolled in schools around the state are not getting the level of English instruction they require. California schools are required by law to offer English instruction to those who don’t speak the language, but according to the district’s own records, more than 20,000 people don’t get the help to which they’re legally entitled.

The ACLU alleges that this failure to provide language help is instrumental in keeping kids left back and results in low scores on exams that measure student proficiency.

According to attorney Mark Rosenbaum, the state fails to provide English lessons to those who need it at the same time that it continues to accept federal funding for ESOL assistance.

The ACLU brought the issue to the attention of the state with a letter in January, and officials say they’re working to ensure compliance at the local level.

Chief Deputy Superintendent of Public Instruction Richard Zeiger said in a statement that the state is determined to provide English learners appropriate instruction and encouraged parents to bring problems to the state’s attention.
“The Department will continue to work with local agencies to ensure compliance with districts’ obligations to provide services to English learners,” Zeiger said.

Zeiger also noted that a recent appellate court decision found that the department was meeting its legal obligations related to on-site monitoring of English learners.

In its lawsuit, ACLU demonstrates the issue using three families whose children speak Spanish while attending the Compton Unified School District, along with an 18-year-old who is enrolled in Grossmont Union High School District in San Diego.

Although in each case the student was identified as needing additional English language instruction, they were removed from ESOL courses soon after and their grades started to suffer almost immediately.

One mother had both of her children, an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old, held back a year immediately after they stopped being provided language instruction, the suit alleged.

Rosenbaum said parents often didn’t know their children had been taken out of language classes, and in one case, a mother was told to bring her own translator to school meetings to get an explanation.

In response to the January letter, school officials acknowledged the problem while adding more than 98 percent of the state’s 1.4 million English learners are receiving services.

The post ACLU Sues California Over Lack of English Instruction appeared first on Education News.

Members of the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) teachers union have expressed “no confidence” in the performance the district superintendent John Deasy in a formal vote. More than 90% of those casting a ballot said that they did not agree with Deasy’s handling of his professional responsibilities.

More than 17,000 of the union’s 32,000 members voted in the referendum. The vote is non-binding on Deasy, but union leadership says that the outcome means that their members approve of the aggressive stance they have taken against policies promoted by Deasy and other district official.

Even before the outcome of the vote was made public, Deasy called the whole enterprise “nonsense,” including the campaign waged on the union website to sway the member votes via poorly photoshopped pictures of the Superintendent in various unflattering settings.

Still, a no confidence vote was not necessarily a foregone conclusion. The referendum came soon after union members overwhelmingly approved a new teacher evaluation agreement and after L.A. Unified School District restored unpaid furlough days. The confidence vote was placed before teachers by the union’s House of Representatives, which contains many new delegates and younger teachers, who were presumed to be more supportive of Deasy.

Teachers who expressed dissatisfaction with Deasy chiefly complained about the new focus on standardized exams, saying that this has made the classroom a less enjoyable place for both students and instructors.

Yet the opprobrium wasn’t universal. Chris Records, who voted in support of Deasy, said that he was encouraged by the stances he took in support of both school leaders and teachers themselves — especially when he showed the willingness to work with the union on the teacher evaluation issue.

Anticipating the outcome, Deasy’s defenders rallied Thursday with a letter to the L.A. Board of Education.

“Although we have a long journey ahead of us, we believe that LAUSD leadership is taking the appropriate and productive steps to achieve success for all of its students,” the letter states, citing rising test scores and graduation rates and few student suspensions. “During his tenure Dr. Deasy has proven himself a more than capable leader.”

Those signing the letter included James Cuno, head of the J. Paul Getty Trust; Antonia Hernandez, chief executive of the California Community Foundation; Monica Lozano, publisher of La Opinion; and Gary Toebben, president of the L.A. Area Chamber of Commerce.

The vote of no confidence on Deasy did overshadow the other issue on the ballot, which asked the voters to evaluate the performance of the current union leadership — a measure that gained 77% approval.

The post Los Angeles Teachers Union Votes No Confidence on Deasy appeared first on Education News.

If John Deasy cares about the outcome of the Los Angeles teachers union’s upcoming no-confidence vote, he isn’t showing it by acting less decisively. While appearing with Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Deasy spoke about doing away with the notorious district practice called the ‘Dance of the Lemons’ – where underperforming teachers are transferred from school to unsuspecting school – by announcing that the district has taken steps to get rid of ineffective teachers much more quickly.

Although it’s easy to believe that the vast majority of LAUSD teachers are competent and good at their jobs, there are still reasons to suspect that a bad apple can hide in the district a lot longer than a similarly poorly-performing employee in a private sector might. Across the United States, between 2 and 6% of all employees are fired annually, yet in LA schools, only about .001% lose their jobs in any given year.

United Teachers Los Angeles and the California Teachers Association, with their enormous political influence at the state and district level, had fixed things so that even the worst teacher could tap a multistep appeals process that on average took more than a year and cost schools hundreds of thousands of dollars per case. Terrible teachers often were reinstated, so for decades, principals quietly transferred them to other L.A. schools — the “dance” that, when finally detailed by L.A. Weekly and other media, spawned intense criticism.

The difference is in the numbers. In 2005-06, a total of 6 teachers were fired in the district with an additional 10 persuaded to resign. The following year only three were let go outright, with 15 tendering their resignations under duress. But in the first full academic year after Deasy took over as head of the LAUSD in 2010, 99 tenured teachers were let go and 122 were convinced to resign.

Many were fired for misconduct — say, for sleeping in class, showing movies every day or touching a child inappropriately. Many others were let go for incompetence. Deasy, in his clipped way, calls it “dismissals for unsatisfactory performance.”

Vivian Ekchian, head of LAUSD’s human resources division, has worked under four superintendents — Deasy, Cortines, David Brewer and Roy Romer. She says they all cared about holding teachers to competency standards, but Deasy’s sheer intensity and willingness to put money behind it moved the ball forward for the first time.

The high numbers are thanks to a policy put into effect by Deasy while he was still the district’s #2 in October 2010. The new policy would submit for dismissals any teacher who was deemed unsatisfactory after two years.

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An online petition opposing the measure that would require California Public Universities to grant online credit for courses offered by approved online course providers has drawn over 1,600 signatures already, The Daily Californian reports. The measure, called SB 520 and introduced in California State Senate, would require schools making up the Cal State, UC and Community College systems to accept for credit courses offered by MOOC providers like Udacity and Coursera.

The petition is being sponsored by the UC Berkeley Faculty Association – a group that has come out swinging against the bill almost as soon as it was announced. The petition says that the proposal is a wrongheaded way of addressing accessibility and affordability issues surrounding higher education in the state.

“This bill will lower academic standards (particularly in key skills such as writing, math, and basic analysis), augment the educational divide along socioeconomic lines, and diminish the ability for underrepresented minorities to excel in higher education,” the petition reads.

Steinberg could not be reached for comment on the petition.

The petition has been circulating since late last month and a copy was forwarded to Steinberg who had no comment at the time. But earlier that month he released a statement pointing out that more than 7,000 students in California Public University system were stuck on waiting lists for courses critical to their graduation scheduled.

More than 80% of 112 community college courses had waiting lists as well.

But Philip Stark, a signatory of the petition and a UC Berkeley professor of statistics, disagrees.

“I have taught hybrid courses, large for-credit online courses, and a (massively open online course) with about 52,000 students,” Stark said in a comment on the petition. “It is quite difficult to approach the pedagogical quality of a good face-to-face course with an online course. If there are to be UC-quality online courses, they likely will come from UC and from its peer institutions, not from just any commercial provider.”

Other groups opposed to the bill are UC Academic Senate which published an open letter to its members last week expressing concerns over how the drafting process for the measure was handled. In the letter, it was pointed out that the bill was put together without any input from university faculty or administrators.

According to Steinberg, even if the measure has no chance of passage the discussion it has inspired in the higher education sphere is important enough. He pointed out that with tuition growth outpacing income growth, without some radical intervention it won’t be long before a college education is completely beyond the means of an average middle class American family.

Steinberg wants to find a way to fix the problem that over 7,000 students remain on waiting lists for community college slots in the state, while fewer than 16% graduate from the public university system in four years.

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