What’s going on behind the curtains in Sacramento City USD
News leaked out over the holiday week that locally our own Sacramento City Unified School District (SCUSD) outside counsel Lozano and Smith principal, Lou Lozano, will be doing a presentation with school board member Darrel Woo, and outgoing Superintendent Jonathan Raymond sharing how they subverted seniority rights during rounds of massive layoffs in recent years. The presentation will take place at the California School Boards Association conference where they will be teaching their tricks to other districts.
After sharing this on Facebook, Larry Ferlazzo, whose Luther Burbank High School was especially hard-hit by the skipping, left the following comment:
Shades of Edelman’s workshop at Aspen bragging about their manipulation of the political process. Just as that came back to haunt Stand For Children, this workshop will haunt district/teacher relations….
Larry is referencing an event a few years back when the edublogosphere’s collective jaw dropped as a video showing Jonah Edelman at the Aspen Institute revealing “sausage-making secrets practiced in Illinois” to try to make it impossible for the Chicago Teachers Union from striking by requiring any strike authorization vote from union members pass by a 75% margin. You can see the video, and analysis from Anthony Cody here. It was a rare moment where we got to peek behind the curtain of so-called education “reform”.
In the case of Edelman, this brought him and his organization, a lot of harsh comments and scrutiny. It was also was resoundingly unsuccessful is stopping Chicago teachers from striking, as when they did hold a strike