Los Angeles Schools Supt. Deasy to resign — report
Los Angeles Superintendent John Deasy (AP)
John Deasy, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District who has been at the center of a troubled $1 billion technology initiative, has told Board of Education members that he will soon resign just weeks after getting a one-year contract extension, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Deasy has abruptly resigned from a schools superintendency before; in 2008, he quit as chief of the Prince George’s County public school district after two years to accept a job as deputy director of the education division of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The Los Angeles newspaper did not offer a reason for the latest move by Deasy, who took over the district in April 2011 and proceeded to push a series of controversial school reforms, including a new teacher assessment system that based part of a teacher’s evaluation on the standardized test scores of students and an ambitious project to give an iPad to every child in the 650,000-student district and their teachers for home use.
The iPad effort was immediately controversial; Deasy chose to fund it with school construction bonds, and it was discovered early on that nobody had allocated money to
