Guest Post: LAUSD Should Fund Schools in Need, Not District Offices

By David Lyell

First published in the Huffington Post

Dear LAUSD School Board Members, Superintendent Deasy, Secretary Duncan, and President Obama,

We all want to provide the educational opportunities for children and our communities. Please help me receive clarity on the following:

Instead of sending Title I, II, and III money to school sites, as is intended under these programs, LAUSD senior management has chosen to keep this money at central district offices in order to fund unproven, costly initiatives such as the Teaching and Learning Initiative, commonly known as the Value-Added Teacher Evaluation model.

Due to a lack of transparency (the dust hasn't yet settled), it's not even clear yet how much will be spent centrally on these unproven programs, but it appears to be well over $175 million.

Is this legal?

I am in no way questioning the integrity of LAUSD senior district management. Perhaps cutting these programs so we can hire more consultants was a mere oversight.

Isn't this decision a clear violation of the 2011 Voluntary Resolution Agreement between LAUSD and the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights? If not a clear violation, and I think it very well may be, at the very least, does it not violate the spirit of the agreement?

LAUSD's English learners and African-American students disproportionally suffer when money is spent at LAUSD's central administrative offices rather than at schools in our most under-served communities. Schools with well-funded PTAs that have deep pockets will be okay, but schools that can not provide these essential supports will continue to go without libraries, nurses, and counselors, among other services.

Is this really what we want for our communities? When children in affluent communities have all the best supports as they grow and learn, and children in our most economically depressed neighborhoods aren't afforded the same opportunities -- we can not even begin to approach using words to describe such an injustice.

I've taught in schools in our most under-served communities, and I've taught in schools where children have every kind of support service at their disposal, and the difference in opportunities provided is unconscionable.

It is simply disingenuous at best to suggest that we can bridge the achievement gap by simply raising expectations. Yes, expectations should be high, for students, teachers, administrators, and parents, but such an argument diverts attention away from the vast inequality in services afforded students.

A school is not a spreadsheet. A school is not data we can examine on a page so that a six-figure consultant who doesn't even live or work in the neighborhood can make snap judgments about what the community most needs.

A school is a community where relationships form, and through these bonds, children, teachers, counselors, nurses, librarians, parents and administrators establish trust, and nurture, foster, and create an ever-changing, constantly growing, always tenuous environment where mistakes become opportunities, and the insurmountable becomes possible.

These relationships only form and grow when schools foster an environment where children who otherwise would drop-out have a reason to stay in school.

Children need libraries, nurses, counselors, arts programs, access to adult education opportunities, vocational classes, early childhood education, music, dance, band, and sports programs. For 20 years, leaders across the country have been saying that the first five years of life are vital to child development, yet right now, today, the LAUSD school board is poised to decimate early childhood education.

Instead of fostering and growing the above programs, LAUSD is proposing to cut all of the above programs, either entirely eliminating them or decimating their funding to roughly 10% of their previous levels.

They say they don't have the money, but they recently found private foundation money to hire a social media director at a cost of $93,000 per year.

The argument that they don't have money would make a little more sense if the district wasn't proposing to spend $175 million at central district offices rather than providing this money as intended under Title I, II, and III to students in our most underserved communities.

Please tell me this was simply an administrative error. I'll repeat the question once more:

Isn't the decision to spend Title I, II, and III money at LAUSD central district offices rather than at school sites in our most under-served communities a clear violation of the 2011 Voluntary Resolution Agreement between LAUSD and the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights?

David Lyell is a 13-year veteran LAUSD teacher, now serving as Secretary of United Teachers Los Angeles, after being elected March 29, 2011. He blogs at Intersections South LA, LA Progressive, and huffingtonpost.com.

Why Does KIPP Not Look Like Sidwell?

Below is an open online letter from Ira Socol to the President.  I have ventured to add a few comments and a couple of video clips.  

Dear President Obama,

I wanted to discuss the things you believe are "innovative in education," just so I might assure you that in this field - in the field of America's future - your administration is doing irreparable harm.

 "Students at both KIPP and Achievement First schools follow a system for classroom behavior invented by Levin and Feinberg called Slant, which instructs them to sit up, listen, ask questions, nod and track the speaker with their eyes." Yes, the first thing KIPP teaches is Calvinist church behaviour. "They all called out at once, “Nodding!"' Yes. Stare at your master. Sit still. Nod to demonstrate your compliance. Speak in unison according to the script.

Mr. President, this is not innovation. We know this formula. It drove the colonialist education systems of Wales and Ireland in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was the hallmark of British Colonial Schools from Lagos to Cape Town to Delhi. It was the path followed by the U.S. government's Indian Schools.

It is the well-worn path of imperial cultures. Force those not born "like" the elite to first convert, and then run in a futile attempt to "catch up."

Mr. President, is that what you would want for your daughters?

The KIPP "SLANT" idea, shown below being introduced by a smug rich guy I cannot identify, is reductionist education which assumes that children of color are incapable of the kind of rich learning available to their wealthy, white counterparts.

[Ira, that old white guy's name is Tom Snyder, who used to develop and market some excellent collaborative learning software before such notions were made irrelevant by the present era of Test and Punish that the Oligarchs call accountability.  No, no, not for the banksters and casino capitalists, but for the fat cat teachers.  But I digress.  Now, however, instead of developing software, Snyder is developing tools for the K-12 corporate classroom like contracts that students and teachers sign based on the KIPP chain gang work model.  Listen again carefully to his intro: "It's not a metaphor, it's an acronym for the KIPP schools, it's the word SLANT, and a lot of you might have read about this.  These are school, the KIPP schools, are working very well in Brooklyn and the Bronx, where, I don't know the kind of districts you guys are from, but these are challenging [knowing nod to communicate black and scary], these are highly volatile, highly poor, highly damaged, and they've been working in Chicago, Louisiana, uh, I don't, off the top of my head I don't know the other cities . . . .]

But let us notice, white kids don't learn that way...

President Obama, I believe that every child in this nation deserves the kind of creative, exciting, and culturally open education your children are getting at Sidwell Friends. And I believe that forcing a traditional concept of attention on children in order to make them "white enough" to be unthreatening second-class citizens is wrong on every level.

Let me quote this from the Middle School at Sidwell: "We seek academically talented students of diverse cultural, racial, religious and economic backgrounds. We offer these students a rich and rigorous interdisciplinary curriculum designed to stimulate creative inquiry, intellectual achievement and independent thinking in a world increasingly without borders.  We encourage these students to test themselves in athletic competition and to give expression to their artistic abilities.  We draw strength from silence—and from the power of individual and collective reflection."

Now let us see how much less KIPP kids get: "KIPP Academy Lynn Charter School will create an environment where the students of Lynn will develop the academic skills, intellectual habits and character traits necessary to maximize their potential in high school, college and the world beyond." "Academic Skills - Calculate accurately - Read fluently - Write effectively - Comprehend fundamental knowledge." "KIPP Academy Lynn will relentlessly focus on high student performance on standardized tests and other objective measures."

What research is it, Mr. President, that Secretary Duncan cites to indicate that the students of KIPP Academy Lynn Charter School deserve so much less - of life, of creativity, of respect, of freedom, than your daughter's classmates at Sidwell?

No Mr. President, KIPP Academies are not innovation. They are the oldest colonialist form of oppression in the school manual. They are institutions of the elite's cultural power, and their purpose is to protect the elites by ensuring that underclass children will never catch up.

But, if you really want to prove me wrong, send your daughters to a KIPP Academy. Your i3 grants mean there should be one coming to the White House neighbourhood soon.

- Ira Socol

Thanks, Ira.  Here are some more of the dangerous black children that Tom Snyder has contracts for, this time learning how to walk the line in the parrot learning chain gangs that became so popular during the Reading First heyday of corruption that was led by the direct instruction gurus at the University of Oregon, the same ones who manipulated Reading First so that 46 states ended up adopting these methods for Title I schools, i. e. poor children:

Notice the invisible straightjackets that the children are wearing later in the clip:

GAO Study Shows ED Lax in Monitoring and Assisting School Improvement

Today's Baltimore Sun carries a story on ED's Raymond Simon's visit to take questions from concerned school administrators, who see their schools, teachers, and students being run into the ground by NCLB. Pretending that he will have his job more than a few more months, and that the Administration's school privatization testing policy will continue unabated, he had this:

Anne Arundel's Superintendent Dr. Kevin Maxwell asked if there would be any flexibility in requiring all students to reach the target goals of No Child Left Behind in 2014.

Simon stressed that there was no flexibility on this issue.

"The 2014 is nonnegotiable to us," Simon said.

However you read this stubborn departure from reality and this pretense that the public does not recognize NCLB as the bare-knuckled failure expansion plan that it is, the dogged monitoring and draconian testing by all children, regardless of whether or not they can read the test, will remain the memorable aspect of this utterly calamitous and immoral education policy. Not so memorable will be ED's strategy to improve those thousands of schools that end up on the failed AYP lists. That is because there is none to speak of.

A new GAO study shows, in fact, ED asleep at the wheel once more when it comes to monitoring the school improvement funding to schools not making AYP or in providing guidance or other assistance to schools. For instance, the What Works Clearinghouse that ED set up as a shell for federal assistance to failing schools is regarded by 19 states as "moderately to very helpful," while 22 states find it "some to no help."

Here is a summary of the GAO finding from Senator Harkin's office:

The report, titled “Education Actions Could Improve the Targeting of School Improvement Funds to Schools Most in Need of Assistance,” is available at this link or at http://www.gao.gov . . .

Among other things, the GAO made the following findings:

• Some states have not allocated or tracked their school improvement funds as required by the NCLBA, and the Department of Education has failed to monitor the lapses. For example, all states are required to keep a complete list of the schools that receive improvement funds; three states (Arkansas, Florida and North Carolina) could not provide any school-level data to the GAO, and California could provide only a partial list. The GAO also found that in a few cases, “non-Title I schools had inappropriately received Title I school improvement funds.” Though the Education Department is responsible for monitoring the allocation of improvement funds, it did not uncover those issues.

• All states are also required to take certain factors into account when allocating school improvement funds, such as focusing on the lowest-achieving schools. However, three states (Delaware, New Hampshire and Virginia) and the District of Columbia reported that they required districts to provide each school an equal amount of funding, and thus, the GAO states, may not have prioritized the allocation of funds as required under NCLBA. Again, the Education Department failed to identify those issues during its State monitoring efforts.

• The GAO also found that many states have not been able to set aside the full 4 percent of Title I funds for school improvement, as intended under NCLBA. Twenty-two states were unable to set aside the full 4 percent for at least one year, and six of these – Florida, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, and Michigan – were unable to do so for three or more years. These states were limited by a hold-harmless provision that prevents a state from reducing the Title I funding for any school district from the previous year.

And here are some quotes from the GAO Report, itself, that show in spades the lax attitudes by ED toward improvement, as opposed to their rigid and hyper-vigilant oversight of testing requirements and failure production. While states are required to set aside 4 percent of Title I money for school improvement, the growing list of failing schools makes this impossible if other Title I schools that are not failing are to to continue to receive their funds that are guaranteed by a "hold-harmless" provision (to make sure these funds aren't siphoned off for other purposes).

Sometimes, after taking into consideration the hold-harmless provision, there are not enough funds available from those districts with increasing Title I allocations to cover the full 4 percent set-aside. Specifically, 22 states have been unable to set aside the full portion of Title I funds for school improvement for 1 or more years since NCLBA was enacted because they did not have enough left over after satisfying the hold-harmless provision.

While most states monitor funds, 4 states were unable to make publicly available the complete list of schools receiving improvement funds, as required under NCLBA, because these states do not collect information on each school receiving improvement funds, and Education has not provided guidance on this requirement.30 Almost all states were able to provide a list of schools receiving funds to us, but 3 states—Arkansas, Florida, and North Carolina—provided information on districts that received funds, but could not provide information on which schools received funds, and California provided a partial list of schools that received funds. In a few cases, we found that non-Title I schools had inappropriately received Title I school improvement funds. State officials said that they would take steps to address this issue, and we referred this matter to Education, which is following up on it. Though Education monitors the allocation of school improvement funds through its 3-year Title I monitoring cycle, Education officials told us they had not uncovered these issues. In addition, Education does not regularly check when and whether states have made the lists of schools receiving improvement funds publicly available, as required, and has not provided guidance on how states make lists of schools receiving improvement funds publicly available.

So far ED's solution to this 4 percent funding problem is to do away with the "hold-harmless" provision, which would, in effect, allow states to take money from Title I schools that have miraculously managed to make AYP to pay the 4 percent to those that have not made AYP. It's the classic rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul solution.