Why I Will Never Be LAUSD Superintendent

EDUCATION POLITICS-I'm probably the last person in the world the Los Angeles Unified School District's (LAUSD) entrenched dysfunctional leadership would want to take up its offer to help find a new superintendent  to replace the habitually retiring and morally challenged Ramon Cortines. But I will push on anyway and let you determine if what I propose makes more sense than what they’ve been doing wrong for generations. 

For a long time, the purpose of the LAUSD has not been to educate students. Rather, its main role has been to serve the financial and political interests of its corporate vendor population – a group that would be threatened if graduating students actually mastered K-12 math and English standards well enough to question why the District pays significantly over-fair-market value for most of the goods and services it receives. (See the Belmont and Ambassador Hotel school construction contracts just for starters.) 

Take note of the inherent conflicts of interest that permeate all LAUSD contract negotiations -- even the process of superintendent selection – that are never questioned by any local, state, or federal regulatory agency. Why is that? 

This is all the more offensive to the fundamental public interest of seeing children educated since the exclusive rationale for the existence of a dysfunctional behemoth like LAUSD -- the second largest public school district in the country -- is what is called “economics of scale.” An enormous entity with the buying power of LAUSD should pay far less than anybody else. But the dystopic reality is the District pays more for virtually everything it uses, with the notable except of teachers, which it continues to drive from the profession. Those with the most seniority are first to go, or course, discouraging idealistic young people from ever considering teaching in the first place. 

One key to changing LAUSD for the better is by challenging the incestuous process in which the primary requirement for being considered for the post of superintendent is ensuring that the entrenched bureaucracy -- and the greedy corporate interests that keep them in power -- will never challenge the LAUSD’s illegal feeding frenzy that continues at taxpayer expense. 

Looking at just one qualification necessary for being considered superintendent, it is clear that those who presently pick the superintendent have no intention of hiring someone with the skill set to challenge the corporate interests that are setting critical education priorities. Why are they seeking someone who has been a teacher but has no business or legal background? How is that a prerequisite for running a multi-billion dollar public education business entity like LAUSD? 

This clearly makes no sense, and only assures that the superintendent will not have the ability to address the rampant fraud that continues unabated and unaddressed at LAUSD. 

Let’s put aside the legally questionable actions of Superintendents Cortines and Deasy – Cortines taking $150,000 a year from Scholastics when he was superintendent (while Scholastics had a $14 million testing contract with LAUSD) and Deasy giving an inside track to Apple and others for the iPad contract, ignoring the open bidding process. Note that after an initial muted outrage about these abuses, no investigation of these actions ever seemed to go anywhere. 

But keeping track of the multitude of potentially illegal or just plain ill-advised actions of LAUSD administration and their corporate masters, does little to address the profound need for excellent public education in Los Angeles.  Ninety percent of the LAUSD student population are poor and of color – students who continue to be pushed through school without the basic educational skills necessary to become productive, employable members of society who hopefully do not end up as part of the largest prison population in the world. 

Over ninety percent of predominantly white middleclass students no longer attend public school, but go to de facto segregated and expensive mostly white private schools. For a long time, the unspoken agenda of public schools has been to keep the rapidly growing majority of poor colored populations in their place by depriving them of the quality education that public school districts like LAUSD once gave to all students in the 1950s and 1960s. 

What now remains is a de facto segregated public school system where the vast majority of students are socially promoted without mastering grade-level standards, either until they drop out or are graduated. Sadly they do not come close to fulfilling the objective requirements for graduation or becoming educated members of society. 

Even if one were not concerned with the lack of basic equity in such a system of public education, I would argue that to allow it to continue inflicts a death blow to American society. We are rapidly developing an uneducated majority population who will be unable to maintain the social and legal institutions that have made this country the dominant world culture for over a hundred years. 

Factors that must be addressed, considered, and resolved in the choosing a new LAUSD superintendent might start with: 

1. Candidates for LAUSD superintendent should be chosen by parents and teachers of LAUSD schools and have no tenure of office, but be subject to removal by a recall election at any time if unable to achieve the goals established by parents, teachers, and administrators in a citywide election held yearly. 

2. Social promotion must be immediately ended. While it is humiliating for students who don't pass school during any given year to not move on with their age group, it is far more humiliating and expensive to the student and society to push them through school without basic skills and enough mastery of basic grade-level standards. Maintaining social promotion is ultimately degrading to a mostly poor minority population, while making them an expensive burden on society for the rest of their lives. 

3. In a state that is now majority Latino, LAUSD should, at a minimum, be bilingual Spanish. There is recent scientific evidence showing that the bilingual brain processes all language - including science and math - in a faster and more efficient manner than a monolingual brain.  

The notion that this makes it harder for bilingual students to be assimilated into society has been shown to be completely wrong. Bilingualism has no downside. But most importantly, it not only tells students who speak Spanish that they are valued, it also substantively makes their culture a vital component of Los Angeles, California, and American culture. 

I would offer one exemption from the bilingual Spanish requirement. That would be allowing any school community that prefers substituting any other language than English to use in the bilingual model. Some whose ancestors have already given up their native language might disagree, but I urge them to reflect on their loss and not require that Spanish, Korean, Chinese, or other immigrants make the same mistake by giving up their languages. That would be to the detriment of this country that has prospered because of its diversity. 

4. All local K-12 schools would be run by a School Congress made up of parents, teachers, and possibly students. This entity would supply delegates to the annual LAUSD convention to vote on district priorities. It would also choose all administrators at the school who would have no tenure of office. They would be subject to removal at any time if the School Congress finds that an administrator is not fulfilling his or her mandate to the school. 

This would get rid of the top-down model that has been used at LAUSD, replacing it with a two-way accountability model similar to what exists in a parliamentary system of government where the executive branch can be challenged and removed at any time. 

While such a decentralized system of power would be less likely to be perverted for improper reasons, (unlike the present corporate dominated LAUSD leadership,) I would still empower LAUSD, the County Board of Education, the State Department of Education, and the federal education authorities to function as independent overseers to hold local School Congresses accountable. Nobody should be immune from independent oversight by an objective authority. 

5. The Common Core testing tyranny should end. It is a mistranslation of what Common Core has meant in Europe and elsewhere – something that has functioned well in successful public education systems. In these countries, Common Core is a core of knowledge at any grade level that is seen as a point of departure from which students and teachers expand their knowledge into other deeper areas of intellectual endeavor. 

In the United States, entities like Pearson, which have been given virtual monopolies on what is and is not allowed to be taught, have set up a rote system of education that puts barbed wire around what a teacher can teach. Noticeably missing from this system of non-education are critical thinking skills that have been replaced by testing regiments designed to create human parrots -- not free-thinkers capable of taking an active part in a vibrant democracy. This form of non-education creates a passive population incapable of challenging the corporate plutocracy that has seized control of this country and virtually all of its institutions. 

6. The total capacity of all colleges and universities in this country is 30 percent of high school graduates. But what about the other 70 percent? As soon as possible we need to reinvigorate what once was an exceptionally good industrial arts program that can offer education and career training for those not going to college. I can train a student in six months to become a state certified welder with a starting salary of $40,000 a year. This same student could also choose to go to college, while working at a high paying trade, and will not come out of college profoundly in debt as most college graduates do today. 

The aforementioned is anything but a complete list of public education reform measures that could be adopted by a new and honest superintendent to turn around LAUSD -- as well as be a template for the rest of the country where school boards are presently under the thumb of corporate interests. 

Anything even remotely resembling what I have mentioned here will be scrupulously avoided in the present superintendent search process. 

However, if anyone would like me to take on this challenge with my 40 years of educational, business, and legal experience, I would be happy to do so. And of course, you would only have to pay me what a teacher makes. Maybe, you could throw in one paid auxiliary, given the endless hours I would have to spend picking up after the mess left by Deasy and Cortines. 

And maybe to sweeten my offer, I would say that you wouldn't have to pay me anything unless the parents, students, and teachers -- and even the administrators of this district -- didn't agree at the end of my first year that things are a whole lot better at LAUSD.

 

(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]) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.

-cw

  

CityWatch

Vol 13 Issue 87

Pub: Oct 27, 2015