“Reformers” or “Post-Reformers” or “Post-Post-Reformers”?

Reformers® love their label but people with other views seem to need some help with labels

I propose Post-Reformer® to umbrella all views…and even include Reformers.

Reformers are a group of people seeking a package of changes to how we do education in this country.  They are capable of only working in dichotomies and can’t accept multiple solutions, hence the need for an umbrella term for everyone else.  Reformers are stuck in a turn of the (20^th) century industrial era style logic loop. Reformers insist there is a single package of free-market solutions to "fixing" education.  Reformers want to extend the industrial trappings of public education; top-down management, efficiency benchmarks, and refining work to the tiniest task possible.  You can literally hear the banging of the standardized steel plate being fastened to a kid's head by teachers who are being checked by a foreman.  The only "advancement" a Reformer has accepted is including technology to improve management and the development of benchmarks.  The name “Reformer” wreaks of a Mad Men slogan for selling rehashed and stale product.  The name Reformer, implies new and bold. This is why it is a genius label for selling old, tired and failed.

Post-Reformers believe problems can have multiple antecedents and multiple solutions.  Post reformers place a primacy on collaboration towards a goal utilizing (not just respecting) everyone’s backgrounds and talents. Because Post-Reformers are broad (no pun intended) coalitions, they will contradict each other at times. To the Post-Reformer contradictions are relished.

A large part of the disconnect Post-Reformers experience when first meeting a Reformer is that each is  operating in a different era and think with different philosophies.  Reformers lust for technocratic bell curves and value added models remind me of phrenology and eugenics from the 1900s.  There often is value in a passion for data, legalese, working-papers, and astoturfing. The challenge for the Post-Reformer is to dig deeply for these nuggets of value. 

Here are a few ways the Post-Reformer can bring a Reformer on board.  A Post-Reformer should never reject a Reformer, they to belong under the umbrella and should always be respected.  Ask a Reformer to bring their legalese to help you draft Board Resolutions or their astroturfing skills to engage parents.  Reformers need to feel ‘new’ and current while staying in the comforts of their old philosophy, often using email.  Despite the Reformer’s  need to feel new facebook and blogs are not yet for Reformers. Reformers need rules and a clear vision of a miniature utopia that they hope will scale to the whole world, focusing on making the miniature world is another great place to engage Reformers. 

The real challenge is when the Reformer meets the Post-Reformer.  Because Reformers spend so much time building walls to define themselves, Post-Reformers should be patient as they explore these new ways of dealing with people.  Post-Reformers have different views and do not speak a single set of ideas. For Reformers to accept Post-Reformers, they need to accept that conflicting ideas can still make sense and are worth listening too, or at least don't dismiss Post-Reformers for having conflicting ideas.  Reformers will need to accept that not everything is a dichotomy nor is every disagreement worth a "for us or against us" mentality   Reformers will need to accept that people can and will work toward a common goal and that laws and contracts are not a means to making people do things. 

Post-Post-Reformers educate children regardless of policy and don't care about wonk ideas.  A good pseudonym for the Post-Post-Reformer is “Teacher.”

but no other orifice was available.

notyetLAUSD will not talk sweetly to you and then punch you in the face.  There is a disturbing trend of sugar coating bad news starting at the highest levels of government and working its way down local school districts.  Whether it is Obama signing NDA Act, best covered by Colbert.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
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Or maybe every time you hear Arne Duncan say "Teaching is more than just test scores and needs to include the arts,"  you think "YES!"  Then you read Race to the Top and you see that only test scores are being focused on, you think "f$$K!"

Or maybe it is your Superintendent at the start of a letter about Prop 39 and schools:

"I am writing to inform you that, after carefully weighing various educational, safety, and space-related factors, and benefiting from the valuable engagement and recommendations of Local District Leadership and Board offices..."  and you think all right this can't be too bad

but then...
"I personally approved a preliminary proposal for a charter school to potentially co-locate on your campus in the upcoming school year (list attached). This is a painstaking process and while there will be impacts to campuses, we have worked diligently to minimize the impact on campuses, and most importantly, to students."  right up the old pucker without a drop of KY.

For a list of all schools getting Donkey Punched please read here.  Its a long list.  (If you don't know what Donkey Punched means it is completely NSFW.)


notyetLAUSD will tell it to you straight.  

Dear Principal,

We noticed you are under enrolled and I am not much interested in changing enrollment patterns unless the Board forces me to.  Therefore I am giving up a part of your school to a charter school in accordance with Prop 39.  Yes this is probably the same charter school that has been dumping the kids it can handle on you all year and the low test score kids on you right before CSTs.  Please allow this charter school to recruit top students from your school.  Your library, cafeteria and common area are now belong to charter.

Indifferently,

notyetLAUSD

OccupyLA gets it worse than Occupy LAUSD

I poop you not, I did not fake this.

LA City Attorney to Occupy: pay for brainwashing lessons on limits of free speech and we'll drop the charges

Could you imagine if a social studies teacher in Occupy LAUSD having to attend lessons on the limits of the constitution and free speech.  Any teacher in California has had to take the civics test to before they are allowed in the classroom.  I don't remember limited free speech as one of the questions.

NOT SATIRE: L.A. Tells Arrested OWS Protesters They Can Pay for "Free Speech" Classes to Avoid Court (Thanks, phosphorious!) (Image: Police Lines blocking City Hall entrance, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from neontommy's photostream)

2011 retrospective

2011 was a great year for LAUSD.  PSC reached it's third act and then like any good Shakespeare play quickly went through acts 4 and 5.  AGT was released multiple times and from multiple sources, we're looking forward to the meta AGT based on all value added measures.  2011 brought a new contract and a pilot evaluation system, both exude the best in idealism and remind us how little a piece of paper affects student outcomes.  In true LAUSD fashion we wanted to wait until 2012 before we release out best of 2011, those last dozen or so people that stumbled on our site yesterday, your page views count.

Most Popular:
notyetLAUSD to release Value Added Parent Score

runner up:
Wasserman foundation pays $4 million in reparations to LAUSD for PSC.

Most Popular helLAUSD
Beaudry Fish

The one that started it all.
Contracting


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Teenagers Complain

notyetLAUSD will not back down from bold and innovative food.  We are certain that next to learnings the subject/ verb agreement, learning to eat something other than carnival food is in the realm of possibility for LAUSD students.  LA Times story about LAUSD's capitulation to whining teenagers can be found here.

870 tiny wounds

I'm trying to figure out this UTLA/LAUSD contract.  UTLA doesn't lose any members for the next 3 years because of a hold on PSC (PSC was probably going to die anyway).  Schools now get to get create mini-reformish experiments. Up to this point I am neutral, no real negotiating and as I mentioned, I think this was a mercy rule decision.



 My paranoia:  I can only see teachers fighting with each other at schools.  In the end its not the reforms the district is pushing or the saved jobs that standout.  In the end its moving to a school culture where there is more hostility within the school among teachers.  Now a small fraction of teachers get to work together to change the school towards a few predefined acceptable reforms.  In reality only a small number of teachers will believe enough in these reforms and have the will to make it happen, most likely in the face of a variety of oppositions.  Changing a school would require at least 50% approval on the changes.  Some people will just want the status-quo either due to apathy or they are veterans and know how to get their way regardless of the ed-reform fashion.   I'm not interested in these people.  What about the teachers that want to make changes, but they don't fall in-line with pre-approved script of reforms negotiated by UTLA and LAUSD, these people will also fight.    I've been part of a PSC school and I know that only a few teachers at a given school will have the will to write 300 page plans.

I don't think anyone really comes out ahead on this, but hey its reform.

Update: PSC is not “public school choice

This post is an update to: PSC is not “public school choice"

Update for 12/12/11 contracts, board members, and the limits of self-delusion

Public School Choice is looking to go the way of numerous other district innovations, oblivion.  While most district innovations tend to get ignored from successive bureaucrats, PSC is dying a different death.  PSC’s death is the result of dozens of stakeholders running away from it in different directions, not a simple union vote. 

Death number 1, not with a twenty-foot poll.  Whatever PSC was, no one who worked on it in central wanted to keep it going at a day to day level.  The position to run PSC within the district could not be filled, it got talked about, even posted for a time, but no one wanted to run it.  Who was running it before? The previous keepers of PSC were people that were assigned to run it after their prior jobs were eliminated. 

Death number 2, limits of self-delusion.  PSC relied on some god awful criteria that would have chewed up most of the district’s schools if it had kept increasing raw API 20 points a year up to 800 points.  Whatever PSC was, it was targeted to improve chronically low performing schools, once you’ve tackled all the chronic low performing, why keep it going?   The PSC 3.0 criteria relied on strict achievement measures regardless of the some schools having high Value Added scores, in other words some schools were on PSC because of outside factors and not the teachers.  Once the district crossed streams with its Value Added and PSC goals, they discovered some schools were severely mislabeled and took them off PSC 3.0.  Not only were some schools taken off PSC, once you account for the teacher’s role in educating students via Value added measures, some schools that had appeared to be high achieving were in fact abysmal.   With two different criteria for evaluating schools the district would not be able to keep PSC while pursuing Value Added Models.

Death number 3, Board members found their voices. Tamar Galatzan cracked the veneer when she kept her new schools to herself, she wanted new schools fed by high achieving schools to remain public schools.  Once the idea that fundamental parts of PSC could change, there was a frenzy of board members looking to tweak it.  Why new schools were ever put on the list made little sense, unless it was the district’s way of saying they had no faith in their administrators to handle opening new schools.  Tamar, Kayser, LaMotte, and Zimmer all gave dissents to the status quo with PSC.

Death number 4, Voting. The votes on PSC schools, parent, advisory, community, faculty, etc, really meant nothing until the Board vote.  Keep in mind the vote on PSC schools is not on all schools that got put on PSC, just those that Deasy allowed to get past him.  In other words Deasy was able to come up with new criteria late in the game for PSC 3.0 schools and took a bunch off.  This was the right move and acknowledged just how backwards the PSC 3.0 criteria was, at the same time it meant schools that were not taken off had lost the confidence of the superintendent to keep running under their current formation.  No matter what the public thought, it didn’t matter because their voice had been removed by a report furnished by our new director of parent involvement Maria Casillas, then head of Families in Schools.  Families in Schools was dismayed to see 80% of parents at PSC schools were happy with their school .  The only information the Board members have to vote on is their own presumptions about reform® and Deasy’s passive dismissal of the school when he had a chance to save it.  If your thought the Board followed the recommendations of the readers and the superintendent, please look at PSC 2.0 votes.

Death number 5, The Mercy Rule.  There is simply too much embarrassment for the district to continue PSC as the PSC policy would begin to attack wealthier and wealthier schools with it's backwards criteria. UTLA came in with a mercy offer to embed language that nullified PSC in it's new contract.  UTLA makes it look like they fought off PSC with the district to look good for its members and LAUSD gets to drop PSC.  It’s a win for both bureaucracies, LAUSD doesn’t admit a wrong the UTLA gets to pretend it got a “major victory” for its members.

At the end of the day we have to ask is getting rid of PSC for the wrong reasons acceptable, or could we have had an honest conversation so we could learn?