School Notebook

Los Angeles Unified Superintendent John Deasy issued a statement this afternoon on Occupy LAUSD, the movement of teachers that's getting started now -- in solidarity with Occupy L.A. -- on a march from City Hall to school district headquarters.

Deasy said LAUSD is a "victim" of policies that hurt the poor, the types of government and corporate actions that the Occupy movement is protesting across the country and around the world.

Deasy said Occupy LAUSD is "both misinformed and contrary to the spirit and intent of Occupy Wall Street, Occupy LA, and the other laudable movements for economic justice that have sprung up around the country and the world over the last month."

The full statement is after the jump. It's followed by Deasy's statement earlier today condemning anti-semitic comments made at Occupy LA over the weekend by an LAUSD substitute teacher, who has since been fired. A district spokeswoman said the teacher had been subbing since 2005 but, because she was not a permanent employee, there's not a record available of where she worked.

As I reported in a story that ran yesterday, a group of educators led in part by former South Bay congressional candidate Marcy Winograd has teamed up to march today. With partial backing from the teachers union (a vote for UTLA endorsement is set for tomorrow), Occupy LAUSD is focused on "privatization" of public schools and the growth of charters.

Wilmington Middle School was featured as a model of teacher collaboration and accountability in a lengthy story in Santa Barbara-based Miller-McCune magazine.

Writer Melinda Burns paints a picture of admirable teamwork at Wilmington Middle, which was the one of the subjects last year of a study on professional learning communities done by the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future.

The school divides instructors into teaching teams that meet after school three times per month.

... Sandra Martinez, a seventh-grade math teacher, said teamwork made all the difference in what can be a very stressful job. It is draining, she said, to teach 130 students every day, including "the ones who can make you miserable." The support from colleagues, the chance to learn on the job and the satisfaction of "seeing the bar going up" -- all this makes her work easier and more fun, Martinez said.

"I'm so comfortable here," she said. "My group is really good. We follow the same strategies and pretty much are on the same lesson at the same time. We even do a script and quote what we're going to say. If it works for our audience, we keep it.

"I don't believe anything will change in our profession until we get teachers who want to be teachers. If you are truly committed to this profession, if you want to be stimulated and move forward, then collaboration is what you do."

I've contacted Principal Myrna Brutti to see if the same practices will be taking place this year, considering budget cuts LAUSD campuses have been dealing with.

David Kooper, LAUSD board member Richard Vladovic's chief of staff, has been hired as principal of Gulf Avenue Elementary School in Wilmington.

A San Pedro native who was an LAUSD teacher and magnet coordinator at South Shores Magnet School, Kooper has worked with Vladovic since his election in 2007. Vladovic, himself a former LAUSD administrator, was re-elected this year and will be sworn in Friday, the same day that Kooper takes on his new job.

Local District 8 Superintendent Mike Romero called Kooper an innovator and an instructional leader, saying he's a good fit for Gulf Avenue, which is one of the local district's three remaining year-round schools. Classes at the campus start July 5.

"The wealth of experiences serving as Vladovic's chief of staff over the past few years will pay great dividends at Gulf Avenue," Romero said.

Kooper said he was excited for the opportunity. Asked if spoke Spanish, Kooper replied: "Claro que sí." The school is overwhelmingly Latino.

The news of his new position was made public in Vladovic's blog. Vladovic announced Kooper's departure with "sadness." *

Nora Armenta, who's been principal at Gulf Avenue since 2007, earlier this month became director of early education programs across the district, Romero said. She's now based at the district's downtown Beaudry Avenue offices.

* Vladovic may have been especially emotional, because he apparently vented at today's school board meeting on the new Cameron Diaz film "Bad Teacher," according to the LA Times. Vladovic took issue with the movie's depiction of a potty-mouthed teacher who cares little about her students' academic success.

In his blog, John Fensterwald breaks down what the new budget deal would mean to K-12 schools: a lot of continued uncertainty.

The deal between Gov. Brown and Democrats in the Legislature is dependent on an upswing in revenues to the state. If that money doesn't materialize, there will be mid-year cuts to schools. That could mean seven to 10 additional furlough days for educators.

Optimists - if any are left - can take comfort in knowing that K-12 schools will be spared from any additional cuts if at least $2 billion of the $4 billion comes through. But if there is less than $2 billion, K-12 schools will bear the brunt of the cuts. And they could be as much as $1.9 billion, mostly in end-of-the-year furlough days, if the shortfall reaches as much as $4 billion.

Community colleges, along with Cal State and UC campuses, are going to be smarting regardless of the revenue scenario. But it could get worse for them too, with midyear cuts meaning a loss of 35,000 students for community colleges, Fensterwald reports. Some 130,000 won't be able to take classes thanks to cuts already agreed upon.

Future Peninsula High school freshman David Steinberg became the New York Times' third-youngest crossword constructor with the paper's publication last week of his puzzle.

Deb Amlen, writer of the Times' blog Wordplay, joked in an entry that 14 1/2-year-old Steinberg was failing to measure up, seeing that the youngest-ever puzzle-maker was just 14 when his construction was published back in 1976.

It makes me wonder what Mr. Steinberg has been doing with his time that has been causing him to slack off so much.

All kidding aside, Steinberg's Thursday puzzle impressed Amlen, who said most first-timers go easier on the Times' audience of crossword fans.

Mr. Steinberg dives right into the deep end with a Thursday theme that sets us a very clever task: Find the four-letter words (no, not that kind) that surreptitiously clue us in to a code that needs to be broken. Once you get that, there's one more job. You will need to understand what Mr. Steinberg is saying to you in order to understand the gibberish in the center of the grid at 39 Across. I love code-breaking games, so this was fun, fun, fun for me.

Steinberg will start in fall at top-achieving Palos Verdes Peninsula High in Rolling Hills Estates. He's currently living in Seattle and is moving down to the South Bay this summer after a five-week session at Google. His mom, Karen Steinberg, let the Breeze know about his unusual accomplishment this month.

The teenager says he spends most of his time constructing and solving crosswords -- a passion he developed when he was 12. He has submitted 35 puzzles to the Times, but finds time for interest in Latin, robotics, computer programming and ping pong.

Newsweek has released its annual list of top 500 public high schools in the United States, and a handful of South Bay schools made the cut.

Highest on the list is Palos Verdes Peninsula High, which ranked 60th. Highlights for that school include a graduation rate of 100 percent and an average SAT score of 1817. Clocking in at 236th is the California Academy of Mathematics and Science in Carson (known as "CAMS"), where 93 percent of the grads are college-bound.

Not far behind was Harbor Teacher Preparation Academy in Wilmington, which ranked 272. The average SAT for that school is 1363. South High School in Torrance came in at No. 320; and Redondo Union, 405.

It should be noted that only 1,100 high schools applied for the distinction -- a relatively small fraction of the roughly 24,000 public high schools in the United States.

The magazine this year revamped its criteria in an attempt to honor schools with a well rounded set of characteristics. Whereas in prior years the benchmark was based entirely on AP tests taken per graduate, this year the criteria was expanded to include other metrics. They are: graduation rate (25 percent), college matriculation rate (25 percent), AP tests taken per graduate (25 percent), average ACT/SAT scores (10 percent), average International Baccalaureate scores (10 percent), and AP courses offered per graduate (5 percent).

Noticeably absent from the criteria is the success of the schools in preparing disadvantaged students for college. That metric is included in the list compiled by the U.S. News & World Report. That magazine claims to review more than 21,000 schools nationwide.

On that list, local high schools serving low-income students do indeed fare better. CAMS ranks No. 22; Animo Leadership Charter High in Inglewood, No. 23; Lennox Math, Science & Technology Academy, No. 25; and Hawthorne Math and Science Academy, No. 54.

*Jay Mathews, the creator of Newsweek's original ranking before the magazine was bought from the Washinton Post Co. (which now publishes Mathews' new ranking), responds to the Newsweek list. He's critical that the magazine's methodology ends up privileging schools with higher-income students.

The average portion of low-income students for the 45 schools on the Newsweek list for which that data is available is 19.6 percent. The comparable portion on my list for the 48 schools that gave me poverty data is 31.8 percent.

Such differences produce interesting and useful conversations about what makes a great school. We school rating scoundrels have a good time when we get together to talk about this. I think the new Newsweek listmakers, almost none of whom I know, will enjoy reviewing their data and seeing if there are other measures they want to include.

Mathews also notes that a short deadline for schools to apply likely affected the outcome.

The Washington Post erred in its exclusion of Palos Verdes Peninsula High School from the newspaper's list of the nation's top 1,900 public secondary campuses, according to an email from a Post columnist to Pen High. I described Pen's surprising exclusion last week.

The index should be updated later this week, and Pen High will be somewhere around 192nd rank, making it the top school from the South Bay and Harbor Area, and placing it within the top 1 percent nationwide.

Here's part of an emailed apology from Post columnist Jay Mathews to Peninsula High:

The Post erred in failing to place Palos Verdes Peninsula High School on our 2011 High School Challenge rankings of the nation's high schools. It is entirely my fault. I expect that great school--one of the first I visited when I conceived this project 15 years ago--will be added to the list this week, along with other schools we missed in the first version of the list. Every year since this list began in 1998, we have had a second updated version to make sure we include every school, including those who failed to notify us of their numbers and those, like PVPHS, whose paperwork I lost somewhere on my desk.

PVPHS will be ranked in the top 200, somewhere around 192, which puts it in the top one percent of US public schools measured this way. Its line on the list will read as follows:

Palos Verdes Peninsula Rolling Hills Estates CA 73.00 2.10 3.489

Those three numbers are, in order, the percentage of seniors who had at least one passing grade on an AP exam while in high school, the percentage of students qualified for federal lunch subsidies, and the school's Challenge Index rating (the number of AP test in 2010 divided by the number of graduating seniors.)

In a blog post I stumbled upon this afternoon, journalist Erin Aubry Kaplan muses briefly on the meaning of a neighbor's interdistrict transfer from Inglewood to El Segundo Unified.

Kaplan says, in her post on KCET's SoCal Connected blog, that she felt a bit confused by her friend's triumphant announcement of having finally received a transfer permit.

We're in Inglewood. For months, Christina and her husband had been trying to enroll their teenage kids in El Segundo High School; El Segundo is not far west of us, but it's essentially another universe. A very pleasant town that, ethnically speaking, is about as hermetically sealed as they come in Southern California. I've been there countless times (just to visit, of course) and can count the number of black faces I've seen on two hands (and they were probably visiting too). I could count the number Asians and Latinos on maybe three. It was kind of astounding.

According to state figures, the 3,200-student district this year had just 109 black students, or about 3.4 percent. Still, it's not as monochromatic as Kaplan suggests. The district is only about 55 percent white and more than 22 percent Latino.

But that's the school district, which welcomes students from outside its boundaries. The city population itself is whiter, with about 78 percent of residents identified as white, according to U.S. Census data.

Anyway, Kaplan's friend Christina struggled with a bureacratic transfer process but ultimately got spots in El Segundo High for her children, whom Kaplan describes as "exactly the kind of students the community at large needs to thrive as a community."

What does this loss mean for Inglewood schools?

I applauded her triumph, gave her a fist pump. But after I got home and thought about it, the triumph felt hollow. My garden looked less lovely. It was the old paradox of integration that was best expressed by a black oldtimer from the Eastside who put it this way after racial housing covenants were struck down in 1948: we got what we wanted, but lost what we had. We're still losing.

Read it.

The United Way of Los Angeles has a report out this week with some provocative recommendations to improve teacher quality in Los Angeles Unified. (Full report / exec summary)

It's the result of a study of about 1,500 teachers done by the D.C.-based National Council on Teacher Quality. The LAUSD Board of Education is receiving a presentation on the report this afternoon.

Daily News writer Connie Llanos reports on some of the recommendations, including changes to teacher evaluations, and that tenure not be granted until a teacher has worked with the district for four years, instead of two. Those issues are of course bound to draw union fire.

Education blogger John Fensterwald has a detailed breakdown of the report's recommendations, along with the required legislative action that would be needed to implement changes to the Education Code.

*After the jump is a statement from LAUSD on the report, and from board member Yolie Flores Aguilar.

The Washington Post has released a ranking of 1,900 public high schools across the nation, and once again the list of South Bay schools that made the cut raises some questions about the criteria.

Now called the High School Challenge, the ranking was started by WaPo education columnist Jay Mathews in 1998 and long published in Newsweek. This year it includes 11 secondary campuses from the South Bay and Harbor Area. They're not the ones you might think.

That's because Mathews' formula is this "simple" one: the number of AP, IB or other college level tests given by the school in 2010 divided by the number of graduating seniors. That is, the average number of AP tests (in our schools' case) per grad.

Mathews acknowledges this might give some unexpected results, and in various blog posts he calls his method "contrarian," and writes that he welcomes the competition from Newsweek in a forthcoming best-schools list.

While not a measure of the overall quality of the school, the rating can reveal the level of a high school's commitment to preparing average students for college.

An FAQ goes into more detail on why Mathews believes the number of college-level tests given -- and not how well students do on those tests -- is a good measure of a school's quality. He writes:

The Challenge Index is designed to identify schools that have done the best job in persuading average students to take college level courses and tests. It does not work with schools that have no, or almost no, average students. The idea is to create a list that measures how good schools are in challenging all students, and not just how high their students' test scores are. 

Here are the rankings for local schools on the list of 1,900:

• 197. Harbor Teacher Preparation Academy
• 305. Palos Verdes High
• 611. Redondo Union High
• 456. Hawthorne Math & Science Academy
• 1047. California Academy of Math & Science 
• 1168. Animo Inglewood Charter High
• 1262. Carson High
• 1457. Animo Leadership Charter High
• 1525. Narbonne High
• 1534. El Segundo High
• 1721. Banning High

Obviously, it's most notable that a number of troubled LAUSD schools are on the list, including Carson High, which the district has put up for bid by outside operators under the unusual Public School Choice initiative.

At the same time, top-achieving schools like Peninsula* and Mira Costa High didn't make the cut.

Here's a 2009 blog post I wrote on Mathews' rankings. There are a few differences: Peninsula and Mira Costa were on that list, as was Westchester High. The other schools that remain in the 2011 list are in different order, generally speaking.

*Update: The omission of Peninsula High was an error that will be fixed, Mathews said in an email to administrators. The school will be ranked somewhere around 192nd, making it the top campus locally.

California Watch is out today with another great project, this time looking at school districts' spending per student.

It's a topic that creates controversy in education circles because there are such great disparities -- and because it's all based on a locked-in, byzantine funding system created by in the wake of a 1971 court ruling on state education spending, Serrano v. Priest.

Here's the crux of the issue:

The Supreme Court ruled that differences in the basic amount spent per student - so-called "revenue limit" funding - had to be within $100 across all districts. Taking inflation into account, the permissible difference is now $350 per student. Although larger differences remain among some districts, disparities in the basic amount districts receive from the state have been substantially reduced.

But that reduction has been wiped out by local, state and federal funds for close to a hundred different programs. A large part of the money is based on formulas established in the 1970s for meals, transportation and other services that often have little connection to current student needs.

The inequities the court sought to alleviate with its Serrano ruling persist. About two-thirds of districts now spend at least $500 above or below the state average, according to California Watch's analysis.

Here's a surprising result of the research:

The analysis found there was virtually no correlation between funding and (API) scores that could explain the wide variation across the state in per-pupil spending in districts.

California Watch also looked at correlations between expenditures and student backgrounds, including their race and ethnicity and whether they are poor enough to receive a free or reduced lunch. The analysis also did not find any significant correlations among these variables.

Their database shows some surprising results locally. I know officials in some of the districts in affluent areas -- including Manhattan Beach and the Palos Verdes Peninsula -- are prone to emphasizing their comparative lack of per-pupil funding. But this is pretty stark in terms of more cash going to districts that educate lower-income student bodies.

In descending order, here are Cal Watch's figures for per-pupil spending in local districts:

• LAUSD $10,015
• Lennox $9,759
• Centinela Valley $9,366
• Inglewood $8,931
• California average $8,452
• Lawndale $8,390
• Redondo Beach $7,991
• Palos Verdes $7,812
• Hawthorne $7,806
• El Segundo $7,733
• Hermosa Beach $7,527
• Torrance $7,505
• Manhattan Beach $7,467
• Wiseburn $6,884

Wiseburn, the high-achieving K-8 district in Hawthorne, is clearly the curveball here.

Here's an important component of Cal Watch's story on these figures:

The disconnect between money and academic performance is at the heart of an ongoing debate among educators and researchers.

"Money may be necessary for school improvement, but it doesn't guarantee that improvement takes place," concluded UC Berkeley education professor W. Norton Grubb in his recent book "The Money Myth," after conducting an intensive review on the subject.

In particular, he found that urban schools tended to spend inefficiently for a variety of reasons, including high staff and student turnover and conflicts over how to teach struggling students. At the same time, he said, urban districts often have extra expenses for needs such as security, dropout prevention, or for teaching students who are not proficient in English.

Here's a Q&A with some more info.

Los Angeles Unified School District has just announced an agreement with United Teachers Los Angeles. Details from the district's press release are below. UTLA statement after the jump.

From "A Portrait of California," released today by the American Human Development Project:

Only one hundred of California's nearly 2,500 high schools account for nearly half of the state's dropouts.

Wow. Based on a speed-read, I'm not sure where this statistic comes from, but just: wow.

The report uses census data to look at health, education, and living standards, not surprisingly revealing wide disparities in the Golden State.

LA Times columnist Hector Tobar gives some nice press today to a group of young-ish folks who grew up in Wilmington and are trying to make the port community a better place.

The feel-good column is about twentysomethings giving back to the neighborhood that raised them. Tobar dubs it "renaissance by the refineries."

He writes about 24-year-old Kat Madrigal, who started a blog called the Wilmington Wire, and Robert Jones, a 21-year-old CSU Dominguez Hills student who teaches at the Wilmington Empowerment Project. Jones wants to return to Banning High to teach. Also mentioned is artist Oscar Duarte, who helped start the Wilmington Enrichment Community Artist Network, or WECAN.

The column points out the disparity made evident by Wilmington's proximity to the affluent Palos Verdes Peninsula:

From just about anywhere in Wilmington and the communities that surround it, you can look up and see the hills of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, an island of prosperity floating in the distance and a constant reminder to locals of where they stand in the world.

Sumiko Braun, a Carson native and actress, recently took a group of Wilmington and Long Beach teenagers up to Palos Verdes as part of a "reality tour" organized by members of the One Imagination collective. It was her way of sharing with neighborhood young people some of the lessons she'd learned in college.

"We started off in Wilmington, by the refineries, and went up to PV ... and then back down to South L.A. and Watts," Braun told me. They compared the schools, medical facilities and grocery stores and looked at other measures of social health. "The differences were drastic and extreme," she said. "When we were done, a lot of the students got emotional about it, because they didn't realize until that moment how this city works."

As the LA Times notes today, there's a handy new online tool to map out potential cuts to school districts across the state.

The map shows the estimated losses per student -- in each school district or state Assembly or Senate district -- under dramatic education spending reductions that would be part of an all-cuts state budget. The tool uses projected cuts of $764 per pupil. In some districts, it shows the number of pink slips that have gone out.

Torrance Unified, our biggest local district after LAUSD, is facing the largest loss: $18.4 million in cuts, according to the tool. Inglewood follows with a possible $11.7 million loss. Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified comes next with nearly $9 million in cuts.

Los Angeles Unified faces cuts of $498 million, according to the site.

The site, on the K-12 News Network, was developed as a volunteer project by two California parents. It's a collaboration with the with Parents for Great Education, a Silicon Valley-based nonprofit.

As Howard Blume writes in the LA Times, there's a reason for putting this data together.

The effort behind it is ostensibly nonpartisan, but one reason for the new reference tool is to increase pressure on a handful of Republican legislators to allow a statewide vote on tax extensions that, if approved, would ease budget shortfalls on school districts.

In an open letter to teachers nationwide sent in honor of Teacher Appreciation Week (May 2-6), U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan acknowledged that teachers are frustrated and have come under attack in recent months.

He writes:

[Y]ou are frustrated when teachers alone are blamed for educational failures that have roots in broken families, unsafe communities, misguided reforms, and underfunded schools systems. You rightfully believe that responsibility for educational quality should be shared by administrators, community, parents, and even students themselves.

He acknowledged that many teachers are fed up with the teach-to-the-test effects of No Child Left Behind, and with being the target of accountability measures that don't factor in other elements of students' lives.

Many of you have told me you are willing to be held accountable for outcomes over which you have some control, but you also want school leaders held accountable for creating a positive and supportive learning environment. You want real feedback in a professional setting rather than drive-by visits from principals or a single score on a bubble test. And you want the time and opportunity to work with your colleagues and strengthen your craft.

The solution? Not surprisingly, Duncan says he wants to work together with teachers to change federal law to create a "a system of evaluation that draws on meaningful observations and input from your peers, as well as a sophisticated assessment that measures individual student growth, creativity, and critical thinking."

We'll see how that goes.

The whole letter is worth a read. It's after the jump.

Both the Los Angeles Times' Howard Blume and Connie Llanos of our sister paper, the Daily News, wrote goodbye stories last week marking the last day of former Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Ramon Cortines.

Here's a laudatory quote in Blume's story from Westside school board member Steve Zimmer, who told the LAT he wished the 78-year-old Cortines had stayed on longer:

"We had simply the most skilled, most accomplished superintendent in the nation at the magical moment of his last job," Zimmer said. "He did this work completely unfettered, unchained. There was no objective other than what was best for children. He absolutely held the district together, understanding exactly where the organization was, where it needed to be and how much change it could absorb."

The Daily News story has this description, which encapsulates the longtime educator:

Diminutive in size, Cortines is known for his larger-than-life personality that is part charm, part wit and part fiery passion.

His short fuse caused him to submit a written resignation to the school board earlier this year, over an argument with a board member. He later withdrew his resignation. He could be grumpy with staff and he was unapologetic about his expectations.

But most district officials also marveled at Cortines' stamina and work ethic - that had him starting work days at 4:30 a.m. until the last few days of his time as chief.

Superintendent John Deasy began his work leading the nation's second-largest school district on Friday.

LAUSD has set a new date for the board hearing on a controversial proposal to covert Westchester High to a district-wide magnet school. It's next Tuesday, April 12.

The item was postponed last week.

The agenda is here. It's Item 31, but there's no board report yet.

John Fensterwald has the details about a proposal discussed Wednesday during an Assembly Education Committee hearing. Worth a read.

The Los Angeles Times is reporting that the Los Angeles Community College District board has voted in closed session to fire Larry Eisenberg, who oversees the $5.7 billion construction program that was the subject of the newspaper's recent investigative series.

The Board of Trustees was meeting today at Harbor College in Wilmington for the first time since the Times six-part series, the product of 18 months of reporting, was published.

A short item on the Times' news blog says the board voted unanimously to terminate Eisenberg's contract, effective Saturday.

Eisenberg, the district's executive director of facilities planning and development, was responsible for a troubled solar program at Harbor that the Breeze covered last year. Called a visionary by some, Eisenberg also brokered than abandoned a deal with a local green building nonprofit that was set to run a showcase out of district offices.

The vote comes a day after two incumbents were re-elected to the board. Steven Veres, another candidate who ran on a slate with the incumbents -- Miguel Santiago and Mona Field -- also was elected. A fourth member of that slate, Scott Svonkin, is headed to a runoff with San Pedro teacher Lydia Gutierrez.

On Monday, LACCD Chancellor Daniel LaVista, who was appointed last year, sent out a letter to district staff saying that "reparation work" was needed. The letter had a different tone than defensive press releases he and the district issued in response to the Times articles.

He said he still felt the paper had taken an "unbalanced approach" to the district's construction program.

That being said, I am in no way denying that there have been major issues within the Program. So this time, I want to emphasize how seriously I take the problems and mistakes of our Program that this series has pointed out in detail. The Times has brought to light much that needed to be exposed, and we'd be more than remiss if we didn't take advantage of the outside perspective the Times has presented.

LaVista's letter -- with promises of a review ethics codes and evaluation processes -- is attached for your perusal.

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