Is the Mayor Listening?
Today’s guest blog post on InterACT comes once again from Lisa Alva, a National Board Certified Teacher at Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles. (Lisa recently shared a post with us regarding the “Job One” panelconvened as part of NBC’s Education Nation programming). While some large cities have experimented withmayoral control of schools, the approach in Los Angeles Unified School District has been to try out mayoral control in a subset of schools. Roosevelt High School is among those schools, and Lisa recently had an opportunity to talk with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and some of the other teachers in the Mayor’s “partnership” schools.
How much rage the whole question of teacher quality and “failing schools” inspires! Pile on corporate efforts to secure a competent workforce and political issues and you have the current educational climate in Los Angeles, where roughly half of our low-income minority population does not graduate in four years with a diploma. Add mayoral control, which is getting increasingly bad press, to bring the whole thing to a frothy boil. For teachers in the Mayor’s Partnership for Los Angeles Schools (PLAS) this is a time of extreme change and challenge. Luckily for us, once in a while, the mayor gives us his ear.
PLAS recently hosted a “listening session” between the mayor and fourteen teachers. The session, planned by teachers with support from PLAS, was intended to align priorities between the mayor and teachers in “his” schools. Encouragingly, this was the second such session in two months. Because the teachers expected a meeting with a problem-solving focus, the conversation turned to how the teachers defined good leadership. This