LAUSD’s Big School ‘Reform’ Is Already DOA
Under the recently released first draft of the rules in L.A., bidding would be open to any public non-profit organization with the financial resources and educational skills to run a school. In practice, that mainly leaves two main potential sets of candidates: charter school operators and the city’s teacher union.
It would be amusing to see the unions and the charter school operators go head to head and see who can run a better school. Similar experiments have produced enlightening results in the past. Boston, for example, has both charter schools and another kind of school called a “pilot school,” which is similar in most respects. The main difference is that pilot school teachers are unionized and charter school teachers aren’t. The result? Charter schools beat pilot schools hands down.
But the biggest thing to notice in the draft rules is that the schools under contracted management will be required to enroll any students from their traditional attendance boundaries who want to attend. In plain English, that means the schools whose management is being bid out will not be schools of choice.
Why? Because parents won’t have a right to choose a school, and schools won’t have a right to offer parents much choice even if they want to. Schools will have to reserve almost all of their seats to satisfy the guaranteed-enrollment requirement for students in their attendance zones.
The same nasty little trick is used in many states to create a bogus policy of “public school choice” so that unions can respond to voucher and charter school proposals by saying “hey, we already have school choice.” But just try to actually exercise the ability to choose a school and you’ll find out there are no open slots anywhere.
Here in Wisconsin, where I live, we theoretically have statewide open enrollment. I can enroll my daughter in any school in the whole state — in theory. In practice, the system has an effective veto over parent choices. The result is that fewer than 1% of all students in the state attend school outside their home districts.
And as long as parents don’t have the right to choose their schools, nothing important changes. The government monopoly keeps its ultimate control over everything that happens. No doubt the charter school companies in L.A. mean well. No doubt they will do their best to manage the schools better than they were managed before, and in most cases they will probably make marginal improvements over the status quo. But that’s not saying much.
The only real hope for real change is real choice. School vouchers have consistently improved public school performance. That’s because they change the underlying power structure and put parents in charge.
More lunacy from CA. The teachers unions killed REAL reform in the form of vouchers. This is destined for failure as well, just as when the government there tried to “deregulate” energy by placing all sorts of crazy rules on trading power… leading to a disaster in energy costs. Funny…. states like TX (not run by crazy lefties) managed to make it work without any problems.
this is just plain crazy. wasn’t bill “the terrorist” ayers and obama “the narcissit” doing just this to schools in chicago. forming non-profits to subvert education ??
somethings never change.
The thesis here is the unexamined premise that school vouchers will result in better education. That seems to be a rather dubious proposition, since incompetent teachers, school metrics related to social engineering, cowardly and inept school administrators, parents who play the blame game instead of taking responsibility for their children at home, and indolent, undisciplined, culturally degraded children will still be omnipresent realities across America.
What you might see is a bigger gulf between the good students and the bad students. But you can achieve that just as quickly by empowering good teachers to teach, abandoning social programs that interfere with a genuine educational experience, reinstating an authentic, achievement-based grading system, foregoing social promotion, and re-establishing the right to discipline students in schools.
What “unexamined premise”. This has been tried in many states and in Canada and it works unbelieveably well. Schools have to compete for that money and hire great teachers. There is nothing unexamined about it. Washington had fabulous results in their test and of course had to cancel it because it threathened the unions.
Vouchers work because parents are going to take their children to the schools which are successful. PERIOD. I really couldn’t care less if the teacher is a member of the teachers union or even if they have an advanced degree… what counts is the results in the classroom. This is why the teachers unions are so afraid of vouchers, it ends their power hold on government funds and education. I am forced to pay property taxes for schools which fail and use alternate funds to get my kids out of those failing schools and into private schools.
As a parent of two high achieving high school students I have some skin in this game, and some opinions based on current experience.
Privatize it all. No taxes, no public schools, no laws requiring school attendance or curriculum. Sell the land we have, and repeal every paragraph of the education code. No vouchers, no subsidies from those without children to those with kids. No government jobs and only those unions that can compete in a free market. Then things would get better. What we’d find is that large fractions of what we call education today are a complete waste of time – standing in line waiting, moving from place to place, etc. We’d find that a huge amount of the content delivered by teachers to groups can be delivered over the web just as effectively, and much less expensively. Kids would play with their neighbors to get exercise. Networks of moms would take turns hosting small groups. Specialists like music and arts teachers would make the rounds, getting paid market wages. Mandates requiring services for non-English speakers and mainstreaming of students whose intellectual development will never pay for the cost of the services delivered to them would go away. Some families would be much worse of than today, but 85-90% of all other families would be significantly better off.
I probably would not go as far as no.6 (rkv) but there is little sense in education policy/existence at the federal level. We could close the federal side down and let the states/local gov.s have it, save alot of money. Then the money could be used to help with something really important like health insurance for everyone that does not have it.
What’s the point of being able to choose your own school if you have to stay within the LA public school system? They all follow the same politically correct, dumbed down curriculum. I know because I live in LA and we tried a public school this year for the first time.
Its not the allotment to neighborhood schools. Its the unionization of schools from the bottom up that accounts for the functional failure of schools in NY, LA and other big cities. (You anti-LA snobs better look beyond your stupid regional prejudices–this is a problem in any large city).
The New Yorker (no I don’t normally read it but I did for this article) published an essay last month called the “Rubber Room” about NY’s schools. Excellent and damning essay on the inability of NY’s teacher’s unions to cooperate in ousting the bad and incompetent teachers. The average hearing to fire a NY school teacher takes 5 years! And even then an arbitrator that wnats to continue working on school cases is reluctant to really fure anyone.
LA’s union rules are just as bad: LAUSD –just like NY–pays millions to teachers each year for doing nothing–just to keep the worst ones out of the classroom.
The same union problems ruined MArtin Luther King hospital here in LA County. Horribel workers that no one could fire. The feds finally pulled its license.
Neighborhood schools worked fine when they existed for kids, not unionos. That’s what must be returned.
This is just more of the same. The Teacher’s Unions have been running this bait-and-switch bob-and-weave duck-and-cover runaround for years, trying to avoid any meaningful reform that might mean some of their membership would either lose their jobs, or alternatively have to work harder to keep them. Nothing new, and as the author says, the Union won’t be budged and the system won’t get any better.
The real story here, as far as I’m concerned, is Villaraigosa’s defection from staunch city employee Union supporter to firm opponent of those organizations. When he first unsuccessfully ran against fellow Democrat James Hahn, the knock on Villaraigosa was that he was too pro-Union, and insufficiently pro-Black. Hahn was seen as more level-headed in dealing with the unions, and (through his father, a member of the county Board of Supervisors representing South Los Angeles in the sixties) seen as the champion of the Black community, though he’s white himself. Hahn self-destructed once in office, firing the city’s Black police chief (not without reason, but that’s beside the point) and allowing his administration to become embroiled in a series of financial scandals. Enter Villaraigosa, and the unions thought they were in the catbird seat, essentially running the show. They’d get to set their own salaries, retirement benefits, health care, working conditions, everything. Everyone would get big raises, not have to work so hard, and of course the benefits would be endless.
Then the economy went into the toilet, and the unions acted (or tried to) like nothing happened. They should still get their whopping raises and gold-plated benefits (after all, times are tough, aren’t they?). Pay cuts were out of the question, furloughs for workers inconceivable, and essentially anything that saved the city money was a horrible idea, almost akin to the Holocaust. Instead, the savior of the whole mess was going to be a massive tax increase passed by referendum back in the spring. The voters, unfortunately, voted it down, for the strange reason that they don’t seem to have any money in the midst of an economic downturn. The Dems in the legislature tried to convince Arnold raising taxes was a good idea, but he balked after seeing the results of the referenda (which he had supported). So now we’re stuck at every level in California. The state is broke, counties are broke, cities from Compton to Beverly Hills are broke, and since we’re governed pretty much wall to wall by Democrats, the only solution is a tax increase that will hasten the departure from the state of those few who live here and actually produce something, which is therefor taxable.
So Villaraigosa’s defected and doesn’t support his old friends in the Unions any more, because apparently he’s figured out that they’re going to bankrupt the whole thing before they’re through. He’s been weakened by a personal scandal which tarnished his image and rendered even his name a bit strange (his last name is a combination of his own growing up, and that of his now ex-wife, who divorced him after it was revealed he’d had an affair with a Spanish-language news correspondent) so you have to wonder where he sees his political career going from here. There’s been talk of him running for governor, but a Democrat who blows off the unions like this would have a hard time running for state-wide office, and he would have a pretty tough competitor in Jerry Brown, who’s been talking pretty seriously of running again. My sense is that he’s just frustrated, and might wind up back in the private sector when his term’s over.
Let me get out of this forum. I am a public school teacher in L.A. who believes charters are a panacea for education’s ills. What people here call anti-choice I see as pro-student. Attendance guarantees means charters can’t cherry pick top students and bump out lower achieving students, which does happen. This is a good thing. To #6, I don’t really believe you have children in school because what parent would want to eliminate human teachers and relegate their physical education course to playing with neighbors?
I think free market fans become so enamored with Friedman that they fail to see that the theory can’t always be applied to all professions. Do you really want cheap labor teachers for children? I can tell you my charter colleagues always stay young because they burn out before they reach 30. I want a veteran teacher for my own children, who teaches for good old fashioned passion and to educate youth. Were any of you in this forum educated by cheap labor? Was Friedman?
School vouchers is, I believe, the most important issue of our time. If we can get the next generation out of failing schools, cut the legs out from under the corrupt teacher’s union, and create a new American industry that competes for parents tuition dollars, then there just might be hope for this country.