Tidbits from the last three weeks:
Half of all art & music positions will be eliminated next year, and the remaining ones will be cut the year after. In 2012, there will be no art, music, dance, or theater teachers in LAUSD.
A teacher who went down to file paperwork at Beaudry (the district-owned skyscraper downtown) told [...]
Posts Tagged ‘bureaucracy’
Ugh!
Ever More Bureaucrats
This week teachers learned the district is thinking of:
1. cutting days out of the school year
2. increasing class sizes in January
3. cutting the number of teachers again.
And then the following landed in my inbox:
Position/Title: Director of Operations
Organization: The Partnership for Los Angeles Schools
Organization Description: Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has made education reform of [...]
Hot!!!!!
Another brilliant idea from the LAUSD bureaucrats downtown. Three years ago they spent hundreds of millions of dollars installing classroom ac units with thermostats programmable only downtown (remember all those bond measures you’re still paying for?). This summer we’ve returned to our classrooms to find that they’ve reprogrammed the thermostats so that the ac units [...]
The Keeper of the Testing Papers (LAUSD Waste, cont’d.)
Teachers are cut. Class sizes go up. Summer school goes away.
But somewhere, perhaps on a campus near you, sits a person paid to watch tests. I’m not sure which tests: CELDTS go to Sacramento, as do CSTs (I think). Maybe it’s the forms and affidavits teachers sign before administering the tests? [...]
Pink Slips Continued
OK, so maybe it’s not the clearest data on Planet Earth, but it’s what arrived in my mailbox today. Basically, it says the union is asking for a 95:5 teacher: administrator ratio.
That would mean 30,057 teachers and 1024.18 administrators in the union’s ideal world.
The latest district proposal is 30,057 teachers: 1582 administrators (rounding so we [...]
Buy-bye Brewer?
All week LA’s newsmedia have been buzzing excitedly about the possibility that flailing David Brewer might be forced out or bought out or somehow thrown overboard the leaky ship that is LAUSD. The LA Times (which, not so by the way, has rolled its education blog, The Homeroom, into a new blog that covers not [...]
Oh I Wish I Were in Washington D.C.!
What a difference a day makes!
Today’s New York Times online included a story on Michelle Rhee, the controversial year-long superintendent for the troubled D.C. school system. She’s one of the many Ivy Leaguers who used a few years of teaching in urban schools via Teach For America to springboard into the forefront of educational policy [...]
Thank God We’re Not Washington, D.C.
I just discovered an amazing, horrific series done last year by The Washington Post investigating D.C.’s school district. Bureaucratic red tape, mismanagement, fraud, outright thievery! Granted, educating in D.C. is tougher than in LA because the US Congress, not any particular state, controls funding for the District, and so they get buffeted by all sorts [...]
And Now for Something Less Fun
A Safe Classroom
Today’s LA Times featured a heartbreaking story about a 14 year-old, learning diabled boy named Jeremiah Lasater who shot himself in the boys’ bathroom of his Acton high school on Monday. He was 6′ 5, awkward, and nerdy, according to kids quoted in the article. He’d been bullied for quite some time, though [...]
