School chief's plan would divide L.A. school district into 32 networks - Los Angeles Times #VoteTuesday #LAUSD #UTLA

School chief's plan would divide L.A. school district into 32 networks - Los Angeles Times
School chief's plan would divide L.A. school district into 32 networks

Los Angeles schools chief Austin Beutner is working out a plan to radically reshape the nation’s second-largest school district by greatly shrinking the central bureaucracy and moving decision-making closer to schools.

The aim is to boost student success and also to save money at a time when district officials insist that grave financial problems threaten the Los Angeles Unified School District with insolvency.

Under a proposal being developed confidentially, Beutner, who spent much of his career in business, would divide the school system into 32 “networks,” bringing authority and resources out of the central office and into neighborhoods.

In the downtown headquarters, managers and other employees recently have been asked to explain their duties — and to justify why their particular jobs should continue to exist in a leaner, more efficient, more localized school system.

The network strategy is not a plan to break up or end L.A. Unified, but it could transform the way the school system functions.

“The superintendent is trying to move toward a decentralized system that puts the student first,” said one person close to the process, who requested anonymity because he is not authorized to speak. “He’s trying to generate better educational outcomes. That’s the No. 1 goal.”

“Savings from the central bureaucracy could be plowed back into education at the school level as well as to deal with the fiscal crisis the district faces,” he added.

Beutner declined to comment, saying it would be premature to talk about a work in progress.

The Times learned details of Beutner’s developing strategy through documents and interviews. The broad outlines of the plan were confirmed by numerous people involved in the work at various levels. No one was willing to be quoted on the record.

The record of similar attempts is not necessarily on Beutner’s side. Some past L.A. Unified reorganizations have been short-lived or fell far short of expectations. Sometimes what’s meant to save money turns out to be costly.

“If the underlying services are not different or better, then the structure doesn’t matter Continue reading: School chief's plan would divide L.A. school district into 32 networks - Los Angeles Times

Go vote. The best civics lesson requires you to leave the classroom #VoteTuesday

Go vote. The best civics lesson requires you to leave the classroom

Go vote. The best civics lesson requires you to leave the classroom
Election Day isn’t just for those 18 and older; younger teens can celebrate it too

Election Day is one time you shouldn’t scold your teenagers for cutting class. After all, walking out of school to vote or to support your friends’ constitutional right to do so is evidence they learned something in civics class, their grades notwithstanding. As the philosopher John Dewey wrote in his classic book Democracy and Education in 1903, “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”

On November 6 at 10 a.m., thousands of students under voting age from coast to coast will walk out of school and march with their voting-eligible peers to the polls to make a statement that their voices and votes matter. Election Day is the most sacred of holidays for a democracy, a time when citizens 18 years and older can select representatives charged with shaping our laws and running our governments. In the U.S., elections give meaning to the lofty opening words of the preamble to our Constitution: “We the people…”

The right to vote is paramount, because without it one’s very right to exist can be subject to the whims of others. Immigrants currently recognize the importance of Election Day in ways that women and blacks, who have historically been denied that right, know too well. And our children should understand it too, based on a similar rationale.

By law, youth under the age of 18 can’t vote in an election and are subject to the rulemaking of others on issues such as gun control, net neutrality, climate change and immigration, which affect them perhaps most of all. It’s like being required to attend a school without having a say in how it’s run, which is the prime reason that students must march. Youth should refuse to sit at their desks while others vote on more than 150 ballot measures across the country, dozens of which directly or indirectly impact education, according to the left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress.

Related: Youth will determine the outcome of the 2018 midterms

The Future Coalition — a national network of youth-led groups — helped organize more than 500 school walkouts on Election Day Continue reading: Go vote. The best civics lesson requires you to leave the classroom

Idaho’s Border-Wall-Costume School Cited in 2016 for Segregating Classrooms by Sex | deutsch29 #VoteTuesday

Idaho’s Border-Wall-Costume School Cited in 2016 for Segregating Classrooms by Sex | deutsch29

Idaho’s Border-Wall-Costume School Cited in 2016 for Segregating Classrooms by Sex

Fourteen Middleton School District (Idaho) teachers and staff have been suspended with pay pending results of an investigation into actions related to the employees’ choosing to dress up as a border wall and Mexicans on Halloween, for what district superintendent Josh Middleton identified as a “week-long team building activity,” according to CBS 2:

“We have talked to the principal and our assistant superintendent human resources director now is conducting interviews up at the elementary school and just to be safe we have beefed up security at our schools,” Middleton says.

He tells CBS 2 that the costumes came from a week-long team building activity, which he says was meant to focus on acts of respect and kindness.

“There were six countries, two of those countries decided to get with the theme and chose to dress in those outfits,” Middleton says.

In efforts to address the situation, Middleton and the school board have posted the following message to the community on the school web page:

Important Message

November 3, 2018

Middleton School District Parents and Community:

I want to bring you up to date on events within the district during this difficult time for our Middleton School District students, staff, and community.

Our school board held a special Board meeting this morning at 10 am.  The Continue reading:  Idaho’s Border-Wall-Costume School Cited in 2016 for Segregating Classrooms by Sex | deutsch29

Why it matters who governs America’s public schools - The Washington Post #VoteTuesday

Why it matters who governs America’s public schools - The Washington Post

Why it matters who governs America’s public schools

Does it matter who operates America’s public schools?

That’s a central question in the national debate about education and the movement to find alternatives to school districts that are publicly funded and operated. While charter schools are publicly funded, they are privately operated and are not required in most places to be as transparent as publicly operated schools. The public also has no say in the operations of private and public schools that accept publicly funded vouchers.

This post, written by Carol Burris and Diane Ravitch, looks at the issue of governance and why it matters who is in charge.

Burris is a former New York high school principal who now serves as executive director of the Network for Public Education, a nonprofit advocacy group. She was named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, and in 2013, the National Association of Secondary School Principals named her the New York State High School Principal of the Year. Burris has been chronicling problems with modern school reform and school choice for years on this blog. She has previously written about problems with charter schools in California and a number of other states.

Ravitch, an education historian, became the titular leader of the movement against corporate school reform in 2010, when her book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” was published and became a best-seller. An assistant secretary of education under President George H.W. Bush, she explains in the book that she dropped her support for No Child Left Behind, the chief education initiative of President George W. Bush and standardized-test-based school restructuring, after looking at evidence about how it was harming public schools.

By Carol Burris and Diane Ravitch

At a meeting of the California Charter Schools Association during the spring of 2014, Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings told the audience that the problem with public schools is that they are run by elected school boards. He contrasted this style of school governance with that of charter schools, governed by private boards, which operate beyond the reach of the people. Hastings justified the movement of school governance from public to private hands by claiming that the private boards of charter schools are more stable. This is an odd claim considering that 33 percent of all charter schools that opened in 2000 were closed 10 years later later. By year 13, 40 percent were Continue reading: Why it matters who governs America’s public schools - The Washington Post