We are sending you this E-mail as you have requested to be notified concerning LAUSD Breakup
Now on our LAUSD page is the complete Mullinax report in ease to read HTML
By KRISTINA SAUERWEIN, Times Staff Writer
DOWNEY
--
A county education committee formally received petitions Wednesday from a group
intent on breaking up the 710,000-student Los Angeles Unified School District
and forming two independent systems in the San Fernando Valley.
During its regular monthly meeting at the Los
Angeles County Office of Education headquarters in Downey, the 11 elected
members of the Committee on School District Reorganization also decided to hold
at least two public hearings on the issue in February. Dates have not been set.
"They are now in the information-gathering
phase," which will culminate with the committee making a recommendation to
the State Board of Education, said Margo Minecki, a spokeswoman with the County
Office of Education. The state board would decide whether to call an election.
Finally Restoring Excellence in Education, or
FREE, collected 20,962 validated petition signatures calling for two
100,000-student school districts, with a boundary roughly along Roscoe Boulevard
that would divide the Valley into northern and southern halves. A minimum of
20,808 valid signatures were needed to keep the school secession movement alive.
To begin the breakup process, FREE had to collect
signatures from 8% of the residents who voted in the last gubernatorial
election, according to state law. The county verified the petitions to ensure
those who signed are registered voters.
The public hearings will help committee members
reach a decision. Under state law, they are required to make sure that the
proposed districts will not cause any substantial increase in costs to the state
or any significant increase in school housing costs nor promote racial or ethnic
discrimination or segregation.
FREE members said they are confident the two
proposals will meet the requirements.
"We looked at those things beforehand,"
said Stephanie Carter, a FREE co-chairwoman.
But FREE members acknowledged that they may need
to revise the size of the proposed districts since the East Valley is one of the
fastest-growing sections of the city.
Already, the proposed districts would be among the
five largest in the state, according to the state Department of Education. FREE
members say the new systems would be large enough to wield clout in Sacramento
but small enough to respond to the community.
FREE is among about half a dozen organizations
from the South Bay to the Eastside working to carve up the district.
No community has left Los Angeles Unified since
Torrance in 1948. Lomita has tried to form its own 2,000-student district but
failed twice, in part because the state education board believed the new
district would be too small to operate effectively.
By Greg Gittrich, Staff Writer
Los Angeles Unified has launched an 11th hour campaign with help from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to win hundreds of millions of federal dollars to wire every classroom for the Internet and two-way video conferencing, officials said Thursday. The ambitious telecommunications endeavor comes only six weeks after district administrators admitted they were perilously close to missing the federal funding deadline -- for the second year in a row.
LAUSD Chief Operating Officer Howard Miller said the district will meet this year's deadline and also submit applications for far more schools than originally planned. The cut-off date for the Federal Communication Commission's E-Rate funding is less than two weeks away. "We will be the most technologically advanced school district in the U.S., regardless of size, in terms of its electronic video, data, and voice interconnections," Miller predicted.
The initiative represents a drastic change in the scope of Los Angeles Unified's efforts to link its classrooms via fiber optic cable and broadband wires. The proposed technological improvements would give the nation's second-largest school district the capacity to put a computer with high-capacity, high-speed telecommunications connections on every child's desk. Miller could not immediately provide an exact figure on the amount of E-Rate money the district will seek, but said it would be "hundreds of millions of dollars."
In November, the district planned to apply for $180 million to wire 170 schools. Miller said that was a "piecemeal" effort that will be dwarfed by the new initiative, which would bring technology improvements to all of the district 790 campuses. Los Angeles Unified's applications will compete with public school and libraries across the country for a portion of $2.3 billion set aside by Congress to fund E-Rate.
Looking to guarantee that the district's applications are submitted on time, Miller signed an agreement with the Army on Monday to manage LAUSD's funding request and oversee the installation of the technology. The deal calls for the Army to receive $687,120. If the federal funding is received, the technology improvements would to start this July and run through June 2001. The Army, however, will be paid in advance, receiving all its fees by March 21.
Steve Soboroff, chairman of the Proposition BB bond oversight committee, praised the district Thursday for finding a way to meet this year's E-Rate deadline, but criticized Miller's decision to bring in the Army and pay the federal agency before all of the work is completed.
Soboroff's dissatisfaction with the agreement could prove to be a stumbling block for the district, if it decides to ask the Propostion BB oversight commission to release local bond money for a required monetary match of the federal E-Rate funds. "Having one huge bureaucracy sign a contract with another huge bureaucracy and agreeing to pay them in advance without any competition for the work is the LAUSD's old way of doing business. And it's wrong," said Soboroff, a candidate for mayor.
"There are enough big players in this highly competitive technology business where you can get this work done very cheaply," he added.M "This contract is open-ended, it doesn't look to be competitive... and it doesn't meet the oversight criteria for using BB money." At November's Proposition BB oversight committee meeting, Soboroff doggedly questioned several LAUSD technology personnel, who eventually admitted the district would likely miss this year's for E-Rate deadline unless more staff were assigned to compile applications.
Exacerbating the problem, the technology staff told Soboroff that last year's school board and outgoing Superintendent Ruben Zacarias failed to insert money in the district's $7.4 billion budget to meet the required match for the federal money. The revelations were especially shocking since the district lost $60 million in 1998 after missing that year's deadline because of a lack of planning and coordination.
In December, the school board, led by a new reform majority, passed an emergency measure to set aside the money needed to match the E-Rate funds, and IBM agreed to help the district complete its applications for no fee.Soboroff said he wants the district to convince the Proposition BB bond oversight committee that the Army has the experience to manage the telecommunications program and that its fees are competitive.
At a December bond oversight committee meeting, Soboroff and Miller got into a nasty exchange over the school board's decision to hire the Army to manage the E-Rate work and the district's billion-dollar school construction program. The board approved the agreement with the Army, negotiated by Miller, without seeing the contract or consulting with the bond oversight committee. Miller is scheduled to appear before the Proposition BB committee Jan. 19 -- the same day the E-Rate applications are due -- to field questions from Soboroff and other committee members. He has shown no sign of backing down from his decision to use the Army.
"If LAUSD winds up with outstanding state-of-the-art technology," Miller said Thursday, "the corps of engineers will deserve full credit."
Education: Despite its clout, debate over school reforms and clashes with Davis leave CTA on uncertain ground.
By AMY PYLE, Times Staff Writer
SACRAMENTO--In the shouting match over education reform, no voice booms louder than the California Teachers Assn., the union representing 300,000 public school teachers.
The union possesses an unparalleled network of activists--able and willing to serve as campaign workers for politicians the teachers favor. As one of the largest sources of campaign contributions in the state, the union has virtually guaranteed access to the highest levels of government. And, above all, the union benefits from the goodwill the public offers to its members--the state's teachers.
Yet, despite all those advantages, magnified by a longtime ally in the governor's office and a public apparently willing to spend more on the state's schools, CTA officials head into 2000 after a year filled with surprising obstacles. Even within the union's own ranks, calls for change are mounting. Concern about its image played a role in the CTA's decision to launch a million-dollar statewide radio campaign in the fall highlighting ways in which teachers are helping to improve schools.
The first half of this two-year legislative session found the union compromising hard and fast rules to dodge a public spat with Gov. Gray Davis. But 2000 may be less kind and gentle. Davis plans to keep education as his dominant theme. Union-backed teacher training programs and incentives for people to become teachers were core components of his State of the State address this week. At the same time, Davis has already shunned a major part of the union's agenda for 2000, opposing a CTA-backed initiative planned for the November ballot to boost state education spending to the national average.
The experience of Dave Patterson, a neophyte Sacramento lobbyist, illustrates why the CTA may continue to experience difficulty at precisely the moment when union officials had expected their ability to dominate state education debates would be at its peak. Patterson discovered the power of the teachers union in his first weeks on the job. He also found that it could be beaten. "There was many a night that sleep didn't quite come," said Patterson, the lobbyist for the state's 160 charter schools.
Since California's first charter school opened in 1993, supporters have hailed them as a symbol of liberation from public education's status quo. For the teachers union, charters were more palatable than using tax funds to help pay private school tuitions, but not much more; for charters, freedom includes the right to ignore union contracts.
Last spring, enthusiasm about the first Democratic governor in 16 years led the CTA to renew its quest to unionize charter schools. Assemblywoman Carole Migden (D-San Francisco) agreed to shepherd a bill. Patterson's directive was clear: Stop the Migden bill. Now.
So began a crash course in Sacramento politics. Patterson visited key legislators to tell his story; some of the CTA's seven lobbyists had always been there first. A key test came when Assemblywoman Dion Aroner (D-Berkeley) cast a deciding vote for the bill, setting it free from the Assembly Education Committee.
Aroner doesn't even sit on the Education Committee. At least she didn't until Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles) made her a member for a day to get the bill passed. Villaraigosa, a former Los Angeles teachers union organizer, has received nearly $270,000 in campaign cash from the CTA over the past four years. That maneuver was a prime example of the CTA's clout. But this time it wasn't enough.
Busloads of charter school parents, teachers and students converged on the sun-baked Capitol steps from as far away as Truckee and Pasadena. Former Gov. Jerry Brown, who in 1975 signed the collective bargaining law that made the CTA a true union, publicly scolded the union for being "an educational Goliath." Davis sent word of a certain veto.
Suddenly Patterson found himself at the table with enough chits to make union representation merely an option for charters--a bill Davis would sign into law.
The CTA does not easily admit defeat. It always intended to compromise, said Governmental Affairs Director John Hein: "If you start off in Sacramento with your bottom line, you get less than that." But Patterson suspects that he benefited from a backlash.
The CTA has traditionally balked at changes in teacher tenure, killed efforts to tie teacher pay to student test scores or other standards designed to measure teaching effectiveness, and defended bilingual education even when union members appeared to have mixed feelings about the issue. "The CTA spends most of its time making sure as little as possible puts teachers at risk," said Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles). "That's their function."
That function leads critics to accuse the union of defending the status quo even when it hurts the education of children. "Everyone up there is really tired of CTA and the me-too and it's-all-mine type of game," Patterson said. "I don't have money . . . I don't have a lot of the things that make Sacramento work, but I also don't have the baggage."
Troubled Relationship With Governor
By all outward signs, 1999 was to be a year when criticism over those sorts of issues would not matter. With the first Democratic governor in 16 years, elected with the help of $1.2 million in union money and muscle, an improving economy and a Legislature controlled by Democrats, union officials expected to rule.
But instead, the union found its relationship with the new governor troubled from the start. Davis' initial list of education advisors included union opponents. His education secretary, former state Sen. Gary Hart, counts among his legislative successes an end run around the CTA to establish union-free charter schools. And the union had a mixed view of Davis' first education reform proposals, feeling they reduced the ability of teachers to control how they taught in favor of more top-down control by the state.
The union had to swallow compromises it disliked. The hardest-fought measure was teacher peer review, in which teachers evaluate and assist struggling colleagues. The CTA fears that teachers judging colleagues puts members in an untenable position.
CTA lobbyists won a major concession: Programs would be negotiated locally instead of mandated one-size-fits-all by the state. But lobbyists were unable to remove the governor's hammer: More than $400 million in district funds is tied to successfully launching a peer review program. On other measures, the governor vetoed two bills the union backed, but also killed two others the union opposed.
By summer, during the union's annual conference, the mere mention of Davis or his reforms drew boos. Union President Wayne Johnson summed up the disappointment: Davis is "100% better than [Republican opponent Dan] Lungren, but 50% less than we hoped for." Davis carefully avoids specific mention of differences with the CTA. But a source close to the governor says he was irritated that the union expected to haggle over his reforms and "incredulous" that it took on charter schools again.
"He's taken aback by their unwillingness to see how dangerous it is to continue to look like business as usual," the source said.
Seeing the CTA as Teachers, Not a Union
Despite the setbacks CTA has experienced, it is still a mighty force. Behind its might is a carefully concocted mixture of discipline, size, political savvy, and, most of all, public trust. A 1998 Harris Poll asked people whom they trusted to tell the truth. Teachers were at the top at 86%, followed by priests. Trade unions landed at the bottom at 37%, just below journalists and politicians.
Infuriating union foes, the public perceives the CTA more as a group of teachers--and therefore trustworthy--than as a union.
Opponents insist that if California teaching salaries rank 10th in the nation and overall education funding ranks 40th, someone's been raiding the cookie jar. Yet instead of "political hardballers," the union is "seen as a group of professionals that bond together, more like doctors," said Ken Khachigian, a past White House advisor who fought the CTA and lost in 1993 when he headed a campaign to provide tax-funded vouchers for private school tuition.
Union President Johnson maintains that no one understands the problems of schools better, or more closely represents the desires of the public, than 300,000 college-educated teachers--mostly women, average age 43 and almost half Republicans, half Democrats.
The union is not shy about using its influence. Legislators who take on the CTA find that their own education proposals go nowhere. Republican Sen. Ray Haynes of Riverside is a frequent CTA critic. He has seen bill after bill get bottled up in committee. Haynes has "never been my friend on anything else," said former CTA lobbyist Owen Waters. "I never thought it was important enough to go meet with him."
The other education groups in Sacramento--associations of school boards, administrators and the like--meet weekly with the CTA to settle on joint positions and usually present a united front--further enhancing the CTA's power.
None of the groups share the CTA's wealth. In the last decade, the CTA dipped into its $400-per-teacher annual dues to give candidates roughly $10 million in cash and millions more in campaign volunteers and literature. The other groups together distributed less than half that amount.
Nor can the other groups beat the union's tightly disciplined organization. About 150 full-time field staff representatives oversee 1,500 teachers each, bringing teachers' concerns up to the union's headquarters in Burlingame and the union's campaigns down to teachers. The staff network oversees a political army unmatched by any other, with lead teachers trained at annual institutes where topics range from how to influence a local school board election to how best to approach an Assembly member.
More than any other lobby, the CTA can offer candidates political cradle-to-grave service, helping them define their education platforms and win campaigns, then providing them well-documented legislation to carry.
In her last election, when Sacramento Democrat Deborah Ortiz found herself in a hotly contested battle for a state Senate seat, the CTA lent her one of its top lobbyists, who helped organize local teachers to work phone banks and walk precincts. When education emerged as a key campaign issue, Ortiz relied on the CTA to bring her up to speed. The union also added $36,000 to her campaign, two-thirds of it in the final crucial weeks before the election. After Ortiz won, she carried one of the CTA's priority bills. Ortiz argues that she took on the bill because she is a pro-labor Democrat, not as repayment.
Speaker Villaraigosa defended his assistance to the CTA on the charter school bill in similar fashion. Anyone who thinks such actions are a quid pro quo for campaign contributions misses an important piece of the puzzle, he said: He supported the union long before it supported him. "My wife's a teacher, I worked for the teachers union, and I believe that teachers are the most essential element in a quality education," he said. "Philosophically, we agree."
Buying Access to the Highest Levels
What political contributions buy, lobbyists and politicians agree, is access. In the case of the CTA, which over the past seven years consistently ranked among the top five contributors to legislators, that access is to the highest levels. Every year the CTA reviews up to 4,000 pieces of legislation to decide which to work for, which to ignore, which to oppose.
Even Republicans--who get only 8% of the campaign contributions the union distributes, and rarely carry union-sponsored bills--find they cannot match the CTA's knowledge, particularly in an era of term limits. "As much as I want to blame CTA for being slow to look at reforms, the rest of the education interest groups are empty, powerless, incompetent, politically inept or all of the above," said former Assembly Minority Leader Bill Leonard (R-San Bernardino).
Even after bills leave the Legislature, the CTA sees to it that teacher representatives sit on the Department of Education committees that determine how they are carried out. Gov. Davis was so concerned about the potential for softening of his proposals in the Department of Education that he withheld $1 million from the department's 1999-2000 budget to be delivered only when he is satisfied.
Once cleared by the department, the new laws drift down to districts where union officials do not have to fight to be heard; contracts give them a legally mandated voice. In fact, a Republican movement toward local district- and school-based control has been readily embraced by the CTA because that is arguably where unions can exert the most influence.
California Union Not Seen as Reform Leader
Across the United States, teachers unions have taken public criticism to heart, adopting new reform methods. The movement, called "new unionism," emphasizes taking greater responsibility for school quality. "Simply put, in the decade ahead, we must revitalize our public schools from within or they will be dismantled from without," said Bob Chase, president of the National Education Assn., the CTA's parent group.
In some areas, new unionism has meant peer review programs, union-sponsored charter schools and even unions helping administrators shut down failing schools. California has rarely been a reform leader, in part hamstrung by the CTA's own elaborate organization, in which positions on issues are prescribed in an inch-thick handbook and changes must be voted on by a 660-member council.
One former lobbyist described the situation as like a huge oil tanker going through environmentally sensitive habitat, moving "really slowly." Within the CTA, United Teachers-Los Angeles has played an eclectic role that mirrors divisions within its own organization, pushing for reforms in some arenas and for retrograde policies in others--with varying degrees of success.
It is UTLA, for example, that continues to hold the hardest line on the right of teachers to choose their school, leaving struggling schools in poorer areas with the most inexperienced staff. On the other hand, it was also UTLA that nudged the CTA toward compromise on Davis' peer review proposal, in part because the Los Angeles union already planned to start such a program.
Young Teachers Push for More Support
Shortly after Johnson took office as CTA president last June, he pledged to make the union more progressive. He wants to open a group of CTA-sponsored charter schools and push for a state law that would allow local unions to play an official role in curriculum reform--a push bound to be controversial with school administrators. In the radio ads that ran throughout the fall, Johnson sought to unite teachers with concerned parents against politicians and bureaucrats who use "our public schools as a testing ground for the fad of the week."
The CTA's own extensive polling shows that teachers and the public want the union to increase its role in issues that affect teaching and learning. Those sentiments are especially pronounced among the quarter of the state's teachers under age 36--who also desperately want their union to provide support and guidance in how to teach.
By the CTA's estimates, 20% of new teachers quit within three years and half within five years. In internal surveys, they were more likely to cite working conditions than low wages. Older teachers' top concern is politicians who tinker with schools, union polls show. Mid-career teachers cite the desire for a bigger role in school governance.
But teachers under age 35 said they needed help figuring out ways to get parents more involved in their children's education. And teachers under 25 are the most likely to say they want the CTA to provide them with avenues for seeking the advice and counsel of their colleagues, a request that has led the union to expand statewide mentor programs.
In a compromise that some see as a watershed, the CTA in 1999 negotiated a state budget deal that raised starting wages but, for the first time, also tied teacher bonuses to school performance. For the March primary election, the CTA has teamed up with business leaders on an initiative that would reduce the vote needed to pass local school construction bonds from a two-thirds majority to the simple 50%-plus-one majority needed for state bonds.
In November, the CTA hopes to ask voters to pass a plan to require the state to raise per-pupil spending to the national average over five years, at a cost of almost $5 billion. Success in the CTA's endeavors will depend on public confidence that communal interest has replaced self-interest. Even union backers fear that may be a hard sell with Johnson at the helm because of his history: As UTLA president in the late 1980s, he led one of the state's most bruising strikes. Asked about this, Johnson shakes his head. Like the CTA as a whole, he feels he has been misunderstood: "I'm a very peaceful kind of person, I really am. But if you want to fight, I'm going to fight."