LA Teacher’s Union Wins the Day
When it was adopted last summer by the Los Angeles School Board, the Public School Choice resolution has heralded as a huge victory for education reformers in California. Under this resolution, charter schools, Mayor Villaraigosa’s Partnership for Los Angeles Schools (PLAS), the teacher union and the district itself would compete to operate not only a set of new schools just coming on line but also compete to run a set of the district’s lowest performing schools. In the first round, the future of 18 new schools and 12 existing low performing schools were up. To the great disappointment of the charter school community, yesterday the school board made its decision, and 22 of the 30 schools were turned over to teacher lead efforts. Three schools will be run by the mayor’s partnership and four will run by charter schools ( By my math that is only 29 and I don’t know what happened to the 30th, and some of the schools divided up to become schools within schools). In total these schools will educate 40,000 students (a large school district in themselves). Given the stakes and the number of teacher jobs involved, it is not surprising that the teachers union was highly motivated to put together proposals to run the schools, and to advocate hard for the schools to continue to be run by United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) teachers. Left out of the running was Green Dot Schools run by education reform rock star, Steve Barr and several other charter school groups including the Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools and Inner City Education Foundation Public Schools.
There was a complex review process that lead to the final board vote. First an internal review team and a superintendent’s panel made recommendations. These reviews lead to the superintendent’s recommendations and then the board’s actions. The board generally went with the superintendent’s recommendation, but did opt for the teacher’s union alternative on occasion. In fact at each stage of the process, there seemed to be a transition from a technical process to a political one, and a few charter school proposals fell off the table to be replaced by the teacher union alternative. Strongly influencing this decision was a non-binding vote of teachers, parents, and community members. The LA Times documents the debacle of this voting process which sounded more like what you would expect out of third world country that as a way to run a school system. But, what was clear from the community voting process is that teachers and their union are really good and well organized when it comes to getting out the vote.
While I am sorry to see that more of the schools did not go to the charter
Step One: Make a Plan
This week I’ve been blogging about ES’s recent report on student loan default rates and the report’s big message–that institutions matter in preventing loan defaults.
But what steps, exactly, can a college or university take to reduce loan defaults? I encourage anyone who wants to answer that question to read the whole report for its many, brilliant insights on default aversion. In the meantime, though, here are a few of the strategies we found at institutions that were successful in lowering loan defaults:
But what steps, exactly, can a college or university take to reduce loan defaults? I encourage anyone who wants to answer that question to read the whole report for its many, brilliant insights on default aversion. In the meantime, though, here are a few of the strategies we found at institutions that were successful in lowering loan defaults:
