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By Greg Gittrich, Staff Writer
Six years after a rogue group of Los Angeles Unified administrators and consultants dreamed up a plan to build the nation's costliest high school atop an oil field, the district's top two leaders recommended Thursday that the $175 million project be abandoned as a school....
By Jill Stewart
The media frenzy over the Los Angeles Unified School District seems destined to go the way of most media frenzies. That is, it will obscure the biggest story of all.
This story of stories -- if it went Hollywood -- would be titled The Third Floor. It would be a tale of a powerful group of creepy adults who, behind closed doors, control what happens to children in Los Angeles. The story line would parallel the movie Soylent Green, in which a futuristic society subsists on a supposedly wholesome green food product, only to discover that the authorities are using the ground-up bodies of people who were euthanized .
In our version, the authorities would claim to be teaching the city's children to read, but in fact would be lining the pockets of their friends with contracts, playing nasty tricks on their political enemies, and churning out a society of functionally illiterate kids.
Pardon my impertinence, but this is a much bigger story than the ones that have fed the media frenzy over L.A. Unified. The media has focused on juicy developments such as last week's forced retirement of timid Superintendent Ruben Zacarias, the ascendance of interim superintendent and supposed reformer Ramon C. Cortines, the fate of the methane gas-plagued $200 million Belmont High, Cortines' plan to carve LAUSD into 11 semiautonomous "minidistricts," the national search for a permanent superintendent, the disastrous $30 million blown on the abandoned site of South Gate High, and the need to build 100 new schools in L.A. using the gut-wrenching power of imminent domain.
Every story I have just cited is huge news. Huge! These are front-page stories in the Daily News and the Los Angeles Times and are being heavily covered by the top TV political reporters, including my friends Linda Breakstone at Channel 2 and John Schwada at Channel 11.
In fact, these stories are so big that they have sent California's Democratic Party-controlled Legislature into a positive tizzy. In Sacramento, ideas to break up the scandal-plagued district of 710,000 children into smaller districts abound, which somebody then might be able to fix.
But none of these historic struggles is the big story for anybody with their eye on the true prize: raising test scores and actually teaching children. It doesn't matter whether Cortines spends the next few months creating 11 minidistricts, or whether 100 new schools finally get built. It doesn't even matter if toxin-plagued Belmont is built or abandoned. It really, truly doesn't. The Third Floor is all that matters.
The Third Floor is a real place. It is inside the aging district headquarters on North Grand Avenue, a complex on a small hill between Chinatown and the Hollywood Freeway downtown. It is occupied by the infamous and intractable Department of Instruction and Curriculum, which is famous for hiring people who fanatically enforce Third Floor fads. School-based employees (such as principals and bilingual coordinators) who are the most successful at force-feeding teachers and students become bosses in the department.
Whole language. "Bilingual" education. Fuzzy math (as in don't worry about learning to multiply). For more than a decade, these three disastrous fads have been the cornerstones of the Department of Instruction and Curriculum. No matter how low test scores plunge, the department sings its own praises. It is a backward subculture of self-protecting adults, whose work is more akin to that of a secretive religious organization than a department pledged to help teachers impart knowledge in the city's 23,000 public classrooms.
Teacher retraining and instructional reform are the stories behind how to raise test scores and reform the city's horrific school district culture. In Chicago, Texas, and other areas that are now undergoing true and measurable school reform, teacher retraining and curriculum reform have been at the heart of the changes. Both Chicago and Texas are documenting historic jumps in children's skills, test scores, and academic success.
Yet here in L.A., the Third Floor reigns. It is overseen by Deputy Superintendent Liliam Castillo, a longtime promoter of bilingual education and whole language who today gives lip service to phonics and English immersion, even as her staff of 50-plus schemers quietly cook up various plans to resist and shoot down such reforms. I would start this week by firing Castillo and the powerful dunderheads beneath her, who last year got caught ordering a ban on the teaching of phonics and other skills to Latino kids -- but were never punished by the weak-kneed Zacarias. In addition, pink slips should go out to zoned-out Instruction and Curriculum honcho Carmen Schroeder, her manipulative sidekick, Toni Marsnik, and the clueless Geri Herrera, among others.
Thanks to the department's obstinate obsession with whole language, the vast majority of younger teachers in Los Angeles do not know how to teach grade-schoolers to read. Because the department has forced fuzzy math on the schools (if your kid is taking Mathland, you ought to sue), few teachers are left who know how to teach such basics as junior high algebra. Moreover, the politically correct Department of Instruction and Curriculum has helped produce thousands of teachers who are afraid to control their own classrooms.
Today, the district's embarrassing test scores reveal that about 400,000 perfectly normal children in Los Angeles cannot read, compute, write, or understand history or science -- except at pathetically rudimentary levels. Those test scores will not change, no matter how many new schools Chief Operating Officer Howard Miller helps the district build, and no matter how many minidistricts acting Superintendent Ramone Cortines creates.
Only by upending the Third Floor will reform of classroom instruction finally take place.
Yet I despair while reading the daily newspapers these days, because I have been waiting for months for our great school leaders to unmask the disaster that is the Third Floor. Where is the outrage from the reformers on the L.A. School Board -- Genethia Hayes, Caprice Young, Mike Lansing, Valerie Fields, and David Tokofsky? Why haven't Cortines and Miller announced top-down reform of the Department of Instruction and Curriculum?
Last Thursday, the media ignored a huge story that involves the Third Floor, which just goes to prove my point. It was a presentation made to the school board's powerful Curriculum Committee by school board member Mike Lansing, a longtime math teacher and administrator in private schools. Lansing knows what works inside the classroom. He wants to sweep "fuzzy math" out of elementary schools in L.A. and bring back a rigorous, traditional math program based on adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. Lansing's reforms would use math specialists to teach all grade-schoolers. Today, Lansing notes, grade schools are dominated by perplexed "nonmath" teachers who "often cannot even pass the simple math test on the CBEST (teacher's) exam" and who are steeped in the antiskills philosophy of the Third Floor.
"Kids who can memorize how to get to the 12th level in a video game can memorize eight times eight," Lansing argues. "We have got to bring back the multiplication tables and all the other basic skills we have been withholding from these children."
In his presentation last week, Lansing urged the district to hire permanent math coaches for junior highs (for the teachers) and buy rigorous math textbooks. In high school, Lansing says students who are up to speed in math "should be pushed toward traditional math. There is a huge war over fuzzy math, but it is obvious that the children who have good math skills need to stay on the path of traditional and more rigorous path."
As a compromise to the fuzzy-math fanatics, children who lag in math by the time they hit high school should be moved into fuzzy math (which is far easier), Lansing says. Whether you agree with the details of Lansing's plan or not, the truth is that this is big news. If the Third Floor is not upended and if new leaders are not hired to bring back traditional math, phonics, and other known methods for reforming classroom instruction, forget all the rest.
"We have to retrain our teachers in reading and math; everything else is way behind in importance," says Lansing. "The search for a superintendent, the South Gate debacle, the minidistricts, yada, yada, yada. You get slapped so many times, you get reactive to that stuff. But it isn't the problem. The classroom is the problem."
I wish Lansing and the rest of the school board would turn to David Tokofsky for wisdom about the Third Floor. A former star teacher now in his second term on the board, Tokofsky could be the board's Yoda. Unlike the newcomers elected last June, he understands the crucial role of Third Floor officials in the district's downward spiral and their vicious fight for their own survival.
"Cortines has not declared to anyone that one of his first duties is to nuke the Third Floor," says Tokofsky. "He isn't dealing with the virtual cult that's running instruction at district headquarters."
If somebody doesn't wise up, and I mean now, Los Angeles will end up with a strange new disaster on its hands. The city will have its 100 new schools and its 11 new minidistricts and its nationally vaunted new superintendent and its plethora of new reading books, but if it doesn't scour the Third Floor right down to the tiles, test scores won't move up an iota.
By Greg Gittrich, Staff Writer
Raising questions about the use of Proposition BB money, members of the bond oversight committee complained Wednesday that Los Angeles Unified's top leaders do not consult them on critical policy decisions. "We'd like to not be a hindsight committee; we'd like be an oversight committee," said Steve Soboroff, chairman of the citizens panel.
The complaints arose during a contentious meeting between the oversight committee and Howard Miller, chief operating officer of the Los Angeles Unified School District. It was the second such face-off between them in two months.
Among the issues the oversight panel criticized were the district's construction management agreement with U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, its application process for federal technology money, its handling of toxic tests at school sites, its management of a landscaping program and its use of bond money at a failed school construction project in South Gate.
The panel also objected to the school board's recent decision to have LAUSD investigator Don Mullinax audit Proposition BB projects. Soboroff, a Los Angeles city mayoral candidate, said the $250,000 probe would duplicate the committee's own audit.
The oversight committee's complaints, if not addressed, could have far-reaching ramifications since its members are required to approve the use of funds from the $2.4 billion bond measure. The district is relying on that money to finance part of its school building program and to match as much as $431 million in federal funds for computer technology in classrooms.
Addressing the school board's recent agreement with the Army, the oversight committee unanimously passed a resolution Wednesday that calls for the pact to be rewritten. The panel charged that the agreement, which calls for the Army to help manage LAUSD's building program, can be amended without review, pays the Army in advance and was approved without adequate discussion.
Miller said he was not interested in arguing with the panel. At several points in the meeting, he said: "I come in peace." He told the panel he would provide them with a detailed account of the Army's work for the district in March. At that time, the panel could release bond money if it agreed the work had been done well and at a competitive price, Miller said.
That scenario did not sit well with members of the panel who had expected to speak with Army officials Wednesday. "You're saying you're going to do it and we can pay for it if we want," Soboroff said. "Why not use us, instead of doing it your way and then coming to us?"
The most relentless criticism came from oversight panel member David Abel, who complained about Miller's policy direction and the district's ability to communicate with the public. Abel likened Miller to Dom Shambra, the former district official held most responsible for the $175 million Belmont Learning Center fiasco. Miller dismissed the comparison as "a cheap shot" from a hostile committee member.
They should be welcomed because no one is better suited to help our students achieve learning goals.
By RUBEN ZACARIAS
When I became superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District 2 1/2 years ago, I said: "Children and parents at every school have a right to expect the principal and the staff to focus on improvement, no matter where they are on the achievement scale. And they have a right to hold us accountable." Now that a newly elected majority of the board of education has decided that my job should go to someone else, I am obligated to speak to those to whom I owe a great measure of accountability, the primary stakeholders of our schools: the children and their parents.
In too much of public education, those stakeholders are ignored or neutralized by those who seem to believe that they and they alone know what is best for our schools and those they serve. Among the powerful are the elected, appointed and self-appointed leaders and experts who march to a variety of tunes that only they seem to hear. Most of the time, in their view, success can only be measured in one form of achievement--how well students or schools perform on mandated tests that critics often charge do not fairly or accurately measure a child's real knowledge or abilities.
Those who labor in the schools to educate young people find themselves headed first in one direction and then another as they are whipsawed by the demands of the moment or the latest hoped-for outcomes, higher scores being the most common. In such an environment, many lose hope and, too often, faith in public education.
I have proposed one solution: to break the LAUSD into a dozen smaller, mini-districts. My successor, interim Supt. Ramon Cortines, sees merit in that possibility and is proposing 11 such groups. Others demand that we break up the district entirely, letting the pieces come together in districts determined by larger geopolitical realities than those I proposed, but smaller than the current LAUSD.
Changing the configuration of the district will help all parties to focus more attention on accountability. However, regardless of the changes, whether they result in one-room schoolhouses administered by teacher-principals, a dozen or so mini-districts or a vast district like the current $7-billion giant administered by a chief executive and his assistants, I fear that, again, the smallest voices, the ones most often ignored or paid lip service to, will be those of the children and their parents.
Those familiar with my service know that after focusing on student achievement and accountability, I emphasized serving and empowering parents. I had hoped that parents would find a welcoming place at the LAUSD table. By that, I did not mean attending "back-to-school" nights or occasional PTA meetings. There are simply too many in education, at all levels, who resist bringing parents into the process in a meaningful way. Educators must accept that parents bring a special power to every school: They have the most access to our students. As one example, if our young people's rate of literacy is at abysmal levels, let's consider that they spend 35 hours a week with television--more time than they spend in their classrooms. Who other than a parent can be an integral part of the process for changing such student behavior and helping us to improve academic achievement?
No plan for the future of the LAUSD can continue to ignore full parental involvement and empowerment, even if it means special training for the board of education, principals and teachers to better understand the power that parents can bring to the process.
Despite the dangerous and huge shortfall in qualified classroom teachers, regardless of the sometimes oppressive weight of mandated obligations directed by the courts, Washington, Sacramento and our own school board, and no matter how complex the suggested cures for what is ailing education, unless the stakeholders, especially the parents, are given primary consideration, more say in the day-to-day process of education and more responsibility for its success, we educators will continue to founder and fail those we labor to serve.