Failed DC Chancellor Michelle Rhee Comes to Los Angeles; The City Shrugs
Failed DC Chancellor Michelle Rhee ’s StudentsFirst group is holding a “Teacher Town Hall” meeting in Los Angeles on September 5, 2013, as part of a multi-city tour.
I can’t fathom why anyone would be excited.
As a Californian (since 1990), as an Angeleno (since roughly 2001), and as the parent of a public school-attending fourth grader, I’m hard pressed to think of a single thing on her agenda that speaks to me as a parent or would appeal to teachers.
So here are four reasons why Angelenos might, as Hollywood mogul Samuel Goldwyn was rumored to have said, “stay away in droves.”
- People who care about their neighborhood schools care that even after passing Proposition 30 in November of 2012, we’re STILL 49th in the nation in per pupil funding. How can that be? Thirty-five years of chronic underfunding from Proposition 13, passed in 1978 — that’s how.
I had the galvanizing bad luck to send my child to kindergarten just as the Great Recession began in 2009. Five billion dollars a year were cut from the roughly $50 billion annual K-12 education budget for four years straight. Teachers received pink slips every March, and waited to see if schools could scrape together enough budget to hire them back in August, right