AN OPEN LETTER TO LAUSD'S SUPERINTENDENT AUSTIN BEUTNER - Perdaily.com

AN OPEN LETTER TO LAUSD'S SUPERINTENDENT AUSTIN BEUTNER - Perdaily.com

AN OPEN LETTER TO LAUSD'S SUPERINTENDENT AUSTIN BEUTNER

The longstanding endemic corruption at a clearly dysfunctional and always prospectively bankrupt Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) will not get better until some of LAUSD's dyfunctional practices- both financial and academic- are finally addressed, eliminated, or radically changed.

After the recent resounding defeat of the Proposition EE parcel tax, that needed 67% "Yes" votes to pass and only got 45% of votes cast, LAUSD's Superintendent Beutner, Mayor Garcetti, and UTLA's Alex Caputo Pearl now want to go to the State of California for the money they were unable to get on the Proposition EE parcel tax.

This actually might be a good and successful course of action, if, big if, Superintendent Deasy et al were finally able to show and convince the California State legislature that agreeing to bail out LAUSD at this time was not just throwing more good money after bad as has now been done for decades.

Some of the following points that could be made by Superintendent Beutner and Co. to the State might just succeed, if they finally had the teeth necessary to fundamentally reorganize LAUSD administration and academic and financial practices to accomplish this difficult task, given the entrenched interests that will fight you every step of the way:

The number one clear reality that stands the best chance of getting the State Legislature to give LAUSD more money is that it presently costs "an average of $407.58 per person per day and $148,767 per person per year" to incarcerate a juvenile. Actually educating these predominantly minority students in LAUSD (Blacks have a 14 times greater and Latinos have a 7.5 times greater chance of being incarcerate than Whites) could be accomplished for a small fraction of this amount. Bottom line: Educated people with gainful employment, for the most part do not wind up in jail.

But up until now LAUSD has continued to socially promote students through grade after grade without mastery of any basic grade-level academic standard. This ultimately leads to the very act of education being humiliating to students put in an Algebra class without knowing their times tables or into a high school Government class with a 3rd grade reading ability.

Ultimately, these students drop out of school, but not CONTINUE READING: AN OPEN LETTER TO LAUSD'S SUPERINTENDENT AUSTIN BEUTNER - Perdaily.com