{"id":1322,"date":"2017-12-28T14:02:53","date_gmt":"2017-12-28T21:02:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/?p=1322"},"modified":"2017-12-29T13:17:46","modified_gmt":"2017-12-29T20:17:46","slug":"heres-the-peace-dividend-in-los-angeles-charter-school-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/?p=1322","title":{"rendered":"Here’s The Peace Dividend In Los Angeles Charter School Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"

Learning from L.A., <\/em>our book about institutional change in public education, was published a decade ago.\u00a0 Then, we saw charter schools as a logical force in the transition of an institution built for the industrial age to one designed for the 21st<\/sup> Century.<\/p>\n

Instead, in the space of a decade, charter schools in Los Angeles morphed from a highly popular innovation to a political wedge issue.\u00a0 One\u2019s favorability toward charters has become a political litmus test for school board elections, and efforts to regulate them have become front-page news. Plans to replace traditional, district-run schools with charters have been characterized as bringing the district to a tipping point.\u00a0 The question is \u201ctipping to where\u201d?<\/p>\n

In the case of the Los Angeles Unified School District, \u201cwhere\u201d depends on how the ongoing battles over charter schools intersect with two realities.<\/p>\n

First, the nation\u2019s second largest school system is in the midst of profound institutional change.\u00a0 LAUSD is not a failed school district.\u00a0 It is not an unchanging monolith.\u00a0 It is an institution that is struggling to reshape itself, moving from early 20th\u00a0Century assumptions about how to organize teaching and learning to a form better suited to our times.\u00a0 Often it does this unknowingly, because for the most part people within LAUSD have a strong institutional culture but a very weak institutional memory.\u00a0 They don\u2019t spend a lot of time trying to understand how they got to where they are.<\/p>\n

Second, the politics surrounding the school district are dysfunctional.\u00a0 Simply put: the politics we\u2019ve got won\u2019t get us the schools we need. Instead of crisis resolution we have gridlock, obscenely expensive trench warfare, and politics that turn our attention away from solutions that are staring us in the face.<\/p>\n

Because charter schools have become the wedge issue in politics, it is through the politics surrounding them that a new district will emerge.<\/p>\n

The linked paper<\/strong><\/a> develops this theme of working through the charter school politics as a way of finding a way forward for the Los Angeles Unified School District, and perhaps by extension for American public education. \u00a0Also, see this ‘On California’<\/strong> <\/a>column and others linked to it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Learning from L.A., our book about institutional change in public education, was published a decade ago.\u00a0 Then, we saw charter schools as a logical force in the transition of an institution built for the industrial age to one designed for the 21st Century. Instead, in the space of a decade, charter schools in Los Angeles […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,143],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1322"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1322"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1329,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1322\/revisions\/1329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}