How “all kids” is the current LAUSD?
Steve Zimmer. Photo by Carla Acevedo-Blumenkrantz
In decrying the recently leaked memo outlining a plan to create more high-quality public charter schools in our city, LAUSD School Board President Steve Zimmer said: “This is not an all-kids plan or an all-kids strategy…it’s very explicitly a some-kids strategy, a strategy that some kids will have a better education at a publicly-funded school…[t]he conversation should be better public education options and quality public schools for all kids, not some kids.”
I agree with that last part. And yet I have a hard time seeing how LAUSD itself has engaged in an “all-kids” strategy. I’m confused as to how policies that have led to only twenty-six percent of high school students being on track to graduate can possibly be called part of an “all-kids” strategy. It seems to me that this is a “quarter-of-kids” strategy. That’s not to say that Zimmer and others don’t believe that all kids should succeed; on the contrary, I believe that they do. But by denouncing various school innovation plans as a “some kids” strategy and touting the district’s as an “all kids” one, Zimmer is not only unnecessarily incendiary, but he also invites scrutiny of how “all kids” this district has been of late.
Although local media criticism of LAUSD is not unusual, it’s not every day that someone with the stature of Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez is compelled to say of this district: “You’ve got to be kidding me.” And yet that’s exactly what he said earlier this week when writing about the district’s asinine decision to rehire an attorney who, only months prior, had not only argued in court that a “13-year-old student was partly to blame for her 28-year-old math teacher’s sexual abuse of her,” but also said on the radio that it was more dangerous for her to cross a street than to have sex with a teacher. Only when that comment came to light did the district apologize. It was bad enough that this argument was used in court (which it can no longer be, thanks to a law passed in response to LAUSD’s tactics), but then to rehire the lawyer? I highly doubt that the student tragically implicated in this situation believes that this is part of an all kids strategy.
Sadly, it’s not the district’s response to these cases, but the fact that they exist in the first place that’s the most difficult to stomach. The year before I started teaching at Markham Middle School in Watts, an assistant principal was arrested and charged with five counts of forcible lewd acts on a child. That’s horrible enough, but here’s the kicker: he was moved to Markham “even though police had alerted the district that they suspected [he] had had sex with a minor.” To echo Lopez: “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Have things improved since his arrest in 2008? Unfortunately not. Last year, the district paid over $139 million to settle the case of an educator who was convicted of committing 23 counts of lewd conduct upon a child. What is appalling about these cases is not only that they happened, but that they could have been prevented. In the case of the assistant principal at Markham, the district had been alerted to his actions; in the more recent case, the conduct had been occurring since at least 1996. Regrettably, the students affected were not part of an all kids strategy.
Horrific incidents like these unfortunately detract from the work of the district’s incredibly caring and hard-working teachers who labor day in and day out on behalf of the district’s nearly 700,000 students. So what is the district doing to ensure that all kids in LA have access to high-quality teachers and that all teachers in LA are adequately supported in their work? Instead of standing with California students who brought a landmark civil rights case aimed at reforming anachronistic, regressive policies that actually prevented all kids from having effective teachers (the judge went so far as to say the evidence “shocks the conscience”), some district leaders condemned the case and even attempted to vilify these kids. Kids who, it is worth noting, How “all kids” is the current LAUSD? | Opinion | Jewish Journal:
