| New LA Way to School Reform: From the Ground Up |  |  |
| EDUCATION Monica Garcia  As we begin this new school year, we face extraordinary challenges for public education and for this District. We have absorbed the body blow of over a billion and a half dollars in budget cuts. Our communities, meanwhile, continue to demand equity and quality in our schools now.In order to survive, this District has had to change. We owned the fact that we were spending billions of dollars a year, but fundamentally failing in our core mission of teaching our kids to read and getting them across the finish line to graduation, college-ready and career prepared. We cast off this district's stubborn defense of the status quo and we shed old practices that just didn’t work. LAUSD has redefined the scope of our work. We no longer argue about whether there is a crisis in our educational system. We recognize that there is a crisis, and that the crisis is ours to address. And we have also changed the way we go about doing our work. Guided by our wise Superintendent, we have defined a shared theory of change. I like to call it, Reform the LA Way. Reform the LA Way isn't a cookie cutter, top down approach. It is a portfolio of school models, created on the ground by innovators in the community and at our school sites, and always accountable to our parents. Reform the LA Way means empowered school communities, freed from bureaucratic red tape, making their own decisions about how to budget appropriately, what work rules to adopt, and how best to meet the unique instructional needs of all their students. And finally, Reform the LA Way is a recognition that the smartest answers do not come from district headquarters at Beaudry. They |