The most alarming aspect of virtually all discussion of public education reform that goes on between all school stakeholders whose ideas and solutions are covered by the mainstream media is the incredibly superficial and sanitized discussion that continues to misrepresent -- by omission -- the problems we face in reforming public education. These failures necessarily make subsequent proposals incomplete with superficial solutions that clearly have no chance of success, because they do not address many of the real problems we face in public education. There is a depressing irony to the fact that all those who are involved in this discussion are supposed to be practitioners and products of good public education. Regrettably, they seem to lack the facility of expression either verbally or in their written ideas to clearly define the specific problems or solutions we face. The rigorous English or Social Studies class that were required of me to graduate high school in my generation of LAUSD, made mastery of these basic skills mandatory. The fact that 60% of students now arriving at LACC are not ready for college is not just indicative of LAUSD's failure with the present generation of students, but also a clear indication that many of the educators who are now attempting to fix the system do so with something less than the English language skills they need to succeed in this task.
On Tuesday, April 27, 2010, the report of a 50 person task force of "local teachers, administrators, parents,
