Superintendent Deasy, Let Me Propose a Wager

MY TURN-Here's the deal: I'll bet LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy my whole income against his salary and benefits, approximately 7 to 1 odds -- since I am obviously the long shot here -- that I can balance LAUSD's budget without firing or laying off any employees necessary in the actually rather straight forward process of teaching students. 

In the corporate inspired group think world of public education where Superintendent Deasy has spent his actually rather brief education tenure, he has become so accustomed to accommodating to this long failed system, in order to move up, while serving the corporate agenda that instated him and other superintendents- 43% are graduates of the Broad Academy- that it is unrealistic to think that he could ever implement the difficult changes that must be put into place, if we are to finally create a successful 21st century education model. 

The reasons for Superintendent Deasy and his predecessors are objectively incapable of implementing any change that might lead to quantifiable results are the following: 

1. Counterintuitively, Deasy's first principle in any proposed change or innovation is to protect the existing administrative and business structures that depend on LAUSD, which ironically is in and of itself the root of all the problems at LAUSD. It is a given that there is nobody in the Superintendent's office that does not come from having moved up in this failed bureaucracy without questioning the existing authority. 

From his chief of staff, all the way down the line, these administrators have achieved their leadership positions by blind adherence to policies that have lead LAUSD to consistent failure year after year. 

Why would anybody reasonably think that they would or could presently act in a way diametrically opposed to how they have comported themselves throughout their whole professional careers? 

2. As I mentioned in another recent article, the sole rational justification for the very existence of LAUSD is the economics of scale, which proposes the idea that a large school district like LAUSD would be able to get better prices on the goods and services it buys.  

However, this has never been true, because it has been subverted by LAUSD's only dealing with preferred vendors of goods and services that are often engaged because of their political or business ties to LAUSD leadership and not because they offer the most competitive prices. Therefore, it is not surprising that: 

"Between 1960 and 1984, the total number of school districts nationwide fell by more than 60%, from 40,520 to 15,747. During this time, the cost of school administration grew by 500% while the number of teachers rose by only 57%."

3. Given LAUSD's underlying commitment to the status quo as laid out in #1 and #2, Superintendent Deasy and those under him in administration can only pick reforms that in no way change the clearly failed power structure of how LAUSD is set up. This means that any real reforms are doomed to failure and could never be implemented by LAUSD as presently constituted. 

The real changes that need to be proposed are never even considered and neither Deasy nor his immediate predecessors like Cortines, Brewer, and Romer would ever have been given the position in the first place, if there was even the slightest chance they might in any way challenge the LAUSD's failed but lucrative policies for those in power that never ever address the objective needs of students and teachers.

Charter schools need a Local Education Agency (LEA) oversight under state law. This gives LAUSD, serving as LEA for the vast majority of local charters, the ability to so hobble new charters with LAUSD's unnecessary requirements, that the charter model can never reach its potential, where LAUSD has the LEA oversight. 

There are 5 possible models of school reform that could be implemented, but LAUSD administration only wants models that it can subvert into some approximation of the status quo that keeps them in power. 

This is why pilot schools remain their first choice, because they have veto power over who will be principal. In addition, it also allows LAUSD to degrade the LAUSD/UTLA Collective Bargaining Agreement by being able to get rid of anybody who questions the principal's authority. 

The only reason why charters are even necessary in the first place is that nobody has been able to hold LAUSD or any other public school district in this country accountable for failure of this trillion dollar a year boondoggle. 

If some of the real costs of purposeful public education failure -social promotion and grade inflation- were ended immediately, the cost of true remediation of students would actually be far less than the continued use of these failed policies year after year. 

It is also true that the failure to educate in a timely manner does irreparable harm, so we need to face the varying degrees of damage that have been done to the students already in the system, so that we might salvage whatever we can that is clearly worse as a function of how long the student has been in the public education system- definitely a hard sell to parents who would prefer to believe that their socially promoted child without basic skills is still somehow going to be a doctor or lawyer- just ask them. 

Feel good vacuity like No Child Left Behind and Life Long Learns flies in the face of a clear and uncontroverted reality that the majority of LAUSD students have already been left far behind and, if nothing is done, will be anything but competitive life-long learns. 

Like the poorly educated students that are turned out year after year by LAUSD, the District's administrative bureaucracy- many of whom are LAUSD "graduates"- keep coming up with superficial and ineffective knee-jerk responses to what have become a series of self-perpetuating crises without seeking the expertise to finally and definitively address the underlying problems. 

Several years ago, previous Superintendent Cortines proposed extending the school day to address the academic deficits of far too many students in LAUSD. No thought was given to why these students were significantly behind grade level- social promotion … nor to whether a significantly less expensive after school tutoring program might finally address these students needs. 

So a few years later the budget goes south and the same regime proposes a six day cut to the school year, which they see as an innovative way to address the latest catastrophe in a district that always seems to be in triage mode.  

Since Deasy has come in, he clearly shows by his actions against fairly compensated teachers that he thinks maintaining  bureaucracy that has never educated students is his first job. 

For as long as I can remember, students and their education have taken a back seat to: administrators, construction, computers, books, police, local district offices and personnel, coaches, and just about any and everything else that really has little impact on the crucial teacher to student ratio as a necessary precondition to educating students in a timely and effective manner. 

There is another way of structuring my proposed wager with Superintendent John Deasy: Just give me 1% of the savings I am able to implement at LAUSD without cutting back on any NECESSARY teaching functions, which should have been LAUSD's primary mandate. 

I would take such a deal in lieu of salary, since it would pay me significantly more than Deasy's present inflated compensation package that has been recently augmented by the rubber stamping LAUSD Board.

However, I know it is un-American to say this and I am far from being a rich man, but I don't really need any more money and would probably put such a windfall into building a great school by using the money to fairly compensate the best and most capable teachers. 

You see, I truly believe that the greatest threat to my well being and that of my children is not how much money I have, but the quality of life in Los Angeles and elsewhere in this country, which I believe is most profoundly affected -- for better or worse -- by the quality of public education. 

The question I don't seem to be able to find an answer to is why it seems so many others don't feel the same?

 

(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He’s a second generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at [email protected]) 

-cw

  

 

 

 

 

 

CityWatch

Vol 12 Issue 42

Pub: May 23, 2014