new labor agreement<\/a> that embraces local school autonomy, Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent John Deasy has jumped from one school reform horse to another.<\/p>\nHe dismounted from the Public School Choice horse, thus ending the era when the school district sought to improve schools through robust competition between district-run school management teams, charters, and other complex operating arrangements.\u00a0 Under what has been called \u201cportfolio\u201d logic, the school district would assemble the best collection of schools it could, putting underperforming ones up for competitive bids while encouraging the ones that were doing well.<\/p>\n
The labor agreement now being voted on virtually ends Public School Choice.\u00a0 For the next three years, no charters or external school management organizations can apply, and the district is forbidden to reconstitute a school making what the agreement calls but does not define as \u201creasonable progress.\u201d<\/p>\n
Deasy and United Teachers Los Angeles president Warren Fletcher saddled up a new filly\u2014the daughter of school reforms past\u2014called decentralization.\u00a0 The underlying logic is that diversity in approach to schooling is good, that many different models of instruction are needed, and that teachers and administrators know best how to design schooling and to self-regulate their jobs.<\/p>\n
They were right to get off the old horse.\u00a0 It was dead or at least hobbled.\u00a0 The 2009 Public School Choice resolution offered by former board member Yolie Flores was an audacious idea, but political push back tied its legs from the beginning.\u00a0 Its racing life was short.\u00a0 In the first round of applications, the school board rejected Superintendent Ray Cortines\u2019 recommendations and awarded none of the newly constructed schools to charters.\u00a0 The persistently underperforming schools, which had been ordered to write competitive proposals, largely competed against themselves.\u00a0 Few charter or external organizations sought to run them.\u00a0 Conventional wisdom in the charter world is that taking over existing public schools is too fraught with pain and difficulty to be worth the effort; better to start new.<\/p>\n
However, the new decentralization horse does not have a good track record.\u00a0 LAUSD rode this horse hard during the 1990s, and both Deasy and Fletcher could learn from that trial.<\/p>\n
The 1990s decentralization horse didn\u2019t get fed enough.\u00a0 Schools that joined the LEARN project were promised budgetary flexibility, which largely never appeared, and added funding, which dried up after a few years.<\/p>\n
There may be no food at all for the new decentralization mount.\u00a0 While the labor agreement promises formative assistance for struggling schools and help for planning newly decentralized ones, the state budget shortfall, with more in store next week, may truly empty the food bag.<\/p>\n
The 1990s decentralization horse often didn\u2019t know where the finish line was.\u00a0 LEARN training focused more on adult process skills than hard-core analytics about student achievement.\u00a0 There was no agreement about how to measure the outcomes the schools wanted, and for most of the period California lacked statewide measurements.<\/p>\n
The same ambiguity applies now.\u00a0 Will the decentralized schools be judged only by the state\u2019s Academic Performance Index?\u00a0 Will teachers be evaluated by how much they contributed to test score increases?\u00a0 Teachers in general and UTLA in particular loathe so-called \u201cvalue added\u201d measurements, but they have not proposed an alternative.\u00a0 The expectations for decentralized schools, the means of evaluating them, and the consequences are all up for grabs.\u00a0 Without a finish line, the new school reform horse is likely to spend its time chewing the infield grass as galloping on the track.<\/p>\n
The 1990s school reform horse had inconsistent trainers.\u00a0 Teachers and principals attended sometimes extensive workshops and residencies.\u00a0 (Palm Springs in July.\u00a0 Bring gloves; your steering wheel will be too hot to touch.)\u00a0 They learned the process rudiments of what was called a professional learning community.\u00a0 But these schools were isolated within the larger LAUSD and UTLA organizations.\u00a0 The idea of teacher leadership was rejected by the administrative establishment as improper and by union activists as not being tough minded enough.<\/p>\n
The 1990s school reform horse had a short season at the track.\u00a0 LEARN was approved by the school board in 1993 and got underway the following year.\u00a0 By 1999, the race was over.\u00a0 External supporters grew frustrated with LAUSD, and they moved on to foster charter school development, particularly those now called the Alliance Schools.\u00a0 Opposition in the district, school board, and union increased.\u00a0 Victory was declared, but the season ended.<\/p>\n
Fletcher and Deasy may have saddled up a better horse.\u00a0 Using the union contract as a reform document gives reform a stable home.\u00a0 Contracts last longer than superintendencies or a union president\u2019s term, and they are good at patterning behavior.\u00a0 Still, neither union nor district could resist the temptation to mire their new ideas on a slow muddy track of committee approvals, school votes, plan documents, and more approvals.\u00a0 It may never get to the starting gate.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know whether this horse will run, but I\u2019m putting down my bet.\u00a0 See you at the $2 window.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I penned this last week in advance of the trigger budget cuts that are likely to hit the Los Angeles Unified School District later this week. \u00a0Some Christmas present, kids. In a new labor agreement that embraces local school autonomy, Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent John Deasy has jumped from one school reform horse […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524"}],"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=524"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":527,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524\/revisions\/527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}