The Sanders Education Plan: Five Good Ideas, One Bad Idea, And A Missed Opportunity

The Sanders Education Plan: Five Good Ideas, One Bad Idea, And A Missed Opportunity

The Sanders Education Plan: Five Good Ideas, One Bad Idea, And A Missed Opportunity

Bernie Sanders has raised the bar for Presidential candidates by offering a hefty set of planks for an education platform. His Thurgood Marshall Plan for Public Education is the first substantive attempt to address education policy in a Presidential campaign we’ve seen in decades.  

In the 2016 campaign, education was supposed to be an issue that Jeb Bush would ride to the White House, but instead conservative opposition to Common Core took the wind out of those sails. Democrats stuck to safe issues— more pre-school, cheaper college. Sanders has gone beyond that with ten broad goals backed up by a long list of specifics. Among those, we can find five really good ideas, one not-so-great idea, and one missed opportunity.  

The Good  

Tripling Title I. Title I funds are designated for schools with a high population of disadvantaged students. There is room for debate about some of the specifics of the title, but it is a good means of moving federal money out to schools that are underfunded and students who are underserved. Increasing the funding has the advantage of not requiring new agencies or mechanisms to gets support out there. Sanders has this listed both under his item for more equitable funding for schools and his goal of fighting segregation, and that makes sense because part of the problem of segregation is the segregation of resources.   

Clamping down on charter schools. The big headlines for Sanders came from his pledge to ban for-profit charter schools, but that’s a nothing-burger. Hillary Clinton tried this angle in 2016, CONTINUE READING: The Sanders Education Plan: Five Good Ideas, One Bad Idea, And A Missed Opportunity

Dana Goldstein: Sanders’s Education Plan Renews Debate Over Charter Schools and Segregation - The New York Times

Sanders’s Education Plan Renews Debate Over Charter Schools and Segregation - The New York Times

Sanders’s Education Plan Renews Debate Over Charter Schools and Segregation

When Senator Bernie Sanders delivered a wide-ranging speech on education Saturday, he became the first major Democratic candidate to propose a detailed plan to racially integrate schools, calling for $1 billion in funding to support local integration efforts, such as magnet schools and busing.

It was the type of robust agenda that integration advocates say they have waited decades for.

But for some, those ideas were overshadowed by more divisive elements of the proposal: Mr. Sanders’s plan to freeze federal funding for all new charter schools, and the link his plan made between charter schools and segregation.

Many Democrats, most notably Barack Obama, support charters as a way to provide more options to families, especially those that are too poor to move to a higher-quality school district or pay for private school. The impact of charters on school segregation is hotly disputed in education circles, and by linking these elements, Mr. Sanders touched a nerve in a highly charged debate within the party.

Blaming charters for school segregation is “galling,” said Amy Wilkins, a vice president at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and a longtime advocate in Washington for racial equity in education. “What Brown v. Board of Education did was say that government can’t tell black parents which public schools they can and can’t send their kids to. What Senator Sanders is saying with his attempt to limit charter schools is telling black parents, who overwhelmingly support CONTINUE READING: Sanders’s Education Plan Renews Debate Over Charter Schools and Segregation - The New York Times

CURMUDGUCATION: Betsy DeVos Lets Down Her Hair

CURMUDGUCATION: Betsy DeVos Lets Down Her Hair

Betsy DeVos Lets Down Her Hair

You probably saw the quote from Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos equating US public education with Soviet East Germany. That was a good headline (and great clickbait), but it's worth it to go and take a look at the full context of that quote. This will be long, but I can't help it-- I find strolling through the inside of Betsy DeVos's head kind of fascinating. I'd love to have her come join me at the local coffee shop for an afternoon.

The occasion of the speech was a presentation to Young America's Foundation at the Reagan Ranch Center. Young America's Foundation was founded in 1969, and it is as conservative as can be-- it is one of the co-founders and forces behind the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). The organization bought the Reagan ranch "Rancho Del Cielo" in 1998 with the help of $10 million from Richard and Helen DeVos (Betsy's parent-in-laws).

So on this occasion DeVos was very much among her people, and we've seen in the past that these are the occasions on which she tends to let down her hair, stop playing to a wider audience, and let's her plutocrat flag fly.

She opens with a paean to YAF and Reagan, but she actually calls back to the group Young Americans for Freedom, founded 1959ish with a series of conversations in William F. Buckley's living room about what it means to be a conservative, resulting in the Sharon Statement (Young Americans for Freedom were eventually absorbed by Young America's Foundation) . That's a complicated topic on its own, as it represented a bit of a break with conservative thought at the time (which was struggling a bit with the not-terribly-popular Richard Nixon in the White House). The ideas of the Sharon Statement were carried into the 80s when all those college radicals grew up-- political freedom is inseparable from economic freedom, CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Betsy DeVos Lets Down Her Hair

Matt Barnum: Summit Learning Misleads About Percent of Schools That Quit Every Year | Diane Ravitch's blog

Matt Barnum: Summit Learning Misleads About Percent of Schools That Quit Every Year | Diane Ravitch's blog

Matt Barnum: Summit Learning Misleads About Percent of Schools That Quit Every Year

Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat reports that the Chan-Zuckerberg tech-based schools called Summit have been underreporting the percent of schools that quit their program every year. 

After multiple news reports of high school students walking out in protest against the Summit tech platform, Summit responded by saying that only 10% of schools leave every year. That figure, writes Barnum, was widely reported.

Summit has led the “movement” for “personalized learning,” which is in fact “depersonalized learning.” To be personalized, there must be interaction between at least two persons, not interaction between a computer and a student.

Barnum writes:

When nearly 100 students walked out of their Brooklyn high school in protest last year, saying they were spending too much of their days in front of a computer, the story took off.

The students were complaining about their school’s use of Summit Learning, a curriculum and online learning system backed byFacebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. But the organizations behind Summit pushed back, CONTINUE READING: Matt Barnum: Summit Learning Misleads About Percent of Schools That Quit Every Year | Diane Ravitch's blog

Is Your School Band Playing this Weekend? Thank a Teacher. | Teacher in a strange land

Is Your School Band Playing this Weekend? Thank a Teacher. | Teacher in a strange land

Is Your School Band Playing this Weekend? Thank a Teacher.

I’m not much of a flag waver, really. I always thought that author James Baldwin captured my feelings precisely in Notes of a Native Son when he wrote:

I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

These days, perpetual criticism is essential. We are headed into dark times, redefining the meaning of patriotism and sacrifice. It’s easy to lose faith in our government and the grand experiment—all men created equal—that founded this nation. It’s easy to let hope die when threats of another pointless war appear on the horizon.

I still believe, however, heart and soul, in the shining but imperfect ideals of a democratic education –equality under the law, the American common school, a free, high-quality education for all children, simply because they deserve it. Thirty years of teaching school have given me a hard crust of cynicism about many things related to education and America. But I never lost my enthusiasm for the Memorial Day parade.

For 25 years, my middle school band students marched through the small town where I taught and lived, in the Memorial Day Parade. There was a whole set of traditions around this event, which grew larger and more complicated every year: the aural passing down of our special drum cadences from the self-appointed 8th grade drumline leaders, mending the color guard flags originally purchased through a pizza sale back in ’88, and patching up hand-me-down snares and sousaphones scrounged from the high school.

There was never a budget for this–middle schools don’t typically have marching CONTINUE READING: Is Your School Band Playing this Weekend? Thank a Teacher. | Teacher in a strange land

Chicago teachers speak on inequality, attacks on public education at downtown rally - World Socialist Web Site

Chicago teachers speak on inequality, attacks on public education at downtown rally - World Socialist Web Site

Chicago teachers speak on inequality, attacks on public education at downtown rally

The Chicago Teachers Union held a rally outside the James R. Thompson Center in downtown Chicago Wednesday under the slogan “Standing strong for the schools Chicago’s students deserve.”

Teachers have grown increasingly disillusioned with the high-flown “social justice” pretensions of the CTU, since it has collaborated for years with the city’s Democratic Party administration and former Mayor Rahm Emanuel in imposing school closings, layoffs, and countless other attacks on teachers and public education.

The CTU rally

As the rally took place, former CTU President Karen Lewis and the union’s political-legislative director Stacy Davis-Gates were holding closed-door discussions with newly inaugurated Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot, a former federal prosecutor, to discuss plans for forthcoming attacks on teachers and public education. The labor agreement for nearly 25,000 educators expires on June 30.

Various national and local union officials, along with longtime political charlatans such as Jesse Jackson, took to the stage to offer demagogic speeches paying lip service to teachers’ aspirations, at the same time attempting to promote illusions in the Democratic Party, which has been responsible for attacking public education and teachers’ working conditions no less than the Republicans.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who has a salary in excess of $500,000, was introduced as “she who shuts it down across the country,” unintentionally summing up her role in sabotaging a whole series of teachers strike over the last year. She stated most bluntly the purpose of the event, saying, “So I’m really glad to be in Chicago today with the CTU welcome party to your new mayor.”

Randi Weingarten (left)

Current CTU President Jesse Sharkey, a leading member of the now-defunct International Socialist Organization, unconvincingly attempted to present himself and the CTU as skeptics and even potential opponents of Lightfoot, at the same time giving credence to her claims to be seeking a “fairer and more just city, not just for downtown but on the South and West Sides too, and the working-class neighborhoods.”

Making it clear that the CTU is opposed to any strike action to fight the new attacks being readied by Lightfoot and district officials, Sharkey has called for the intervention of a federal mediator in the contract talks.

Only a small crowd of 300-400 people were on hand at the rally, reflecting the mass disaffection of teachers with the CTU and the Democratic Party. By CONTINUE READING: Chicago teachers speak on inequality, attacks on public education at downtown rally - World Socialist Web Site

What many black parents think about when teachers are armed in schools - The Washington Post

What many black parents think about when teachers are armed in schools - The Washington Post

What many black parents think about when teachers are armed in schools

A new analysis by a gun control advocacy group says there have been more than 65 publicly reported incidents of mishandled guns at schools in the last five years. They include:

• A teacher’s loaded gun falling from his waistband during a cartwheel.
• A student grabbing an officer’s gun while the officer attempted to subdue the student.
• A teacher unintentionally firing a gun in class during a safety demonstration.

The analysis, by Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, has not deterred legislators in a number of states from moving to expand opportunities for teachers to carry guns in schools.

In Florida, teachers can now carry guns at schools under a new law signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R). In Texas, the legislature has sent a bill to the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, that would allow more teachers and school personnel to carry guns on campus. And in other states — including Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma and North Carolina — legislators are pushing to create programs that would allow for adults to carry guns in schools.

This post looks at the issue from the lens of black parents, whose children are shot by authorities and disciplined at school in far greater percentages than white children. This was written by Rann Miller, an African American educator who directs the 21st Century Community Learning Center, a federally funded after-school program located in southern New Jersey.

Miller spent six years teaching in charter schools in Camden, New Jersey, and is the creator, writer and editor of the Official Urban Education Mixtape Blog. His writing on race and urban education has appeared in Salon, AlterNet, and the Progressive, where I’m an education fellow. Follow him on Twitter:@UrbanEdDJ

By Rann Miller

I am an educator. I am a former social studies teacher and a current director of an afterschool program for a school district. I am also African American and the parent of a school-aged child, with two other children in CONTINUE READING: What many black parents think about when teachers are armed in schools - The Washington Post

School Rankings as Racist, Classist Propaganda | radical eyes for equity

School Rankings as Racist, Classist Propaganda | radical eyes for equity

School Rankings as Racist, Classist Propaganda

On 20 May 2019, the Charleston Post and Courier offered this: Here’s what it takes for a SC school to be the No. 1 public high school in the US. And here is what is newsworthy:

The news was out before the sound of the school announcement system crackled through the halls: Academic Magnet High, long regarded as the top-performing high school in South Carolina, had climbed to No. 1 in a national ranking of public high schools.

Just three days later, The State (Columbia, SC) reported: Richland 1’s elite elementary school is also its whitest and least impoverished. This coverage explains:

Like all parents, Sara McBride just wanted her son to get the best possible education.

That’s why she tried to get her son into Richland 1’s highest-ranked school: Brockman Elementary. A school where class sizes are small and teachers’ advanced degrees and experience nets them a higher average salary.

The South Carolina Department of Education provides for 1270 public schools in the state a Poverty Index; for 2018, Academic Magnet High is the #1 least impoverished school in the entire state, and Brockman Elementary is #57, placing these two celebrated schools in the top 4.5% of all schools in the state in terms of extremely low poverty as well as disproportionate racial imbalances (Brockman is 75% white and AMH has only 3.5% black enrollment).

SC as a state ranks in the bottom ten of high-poverty states (about an 18% poverty rate) and has a relatively high percentage of black citizens (28%) as well as about 5-6% Hispanic/Latinx.

Across the U.S., there are some harsh facts about measurable student outcomes and demographics of students being served. Race, School Rankings as Racist, Classist Propaganda | radical eyes for equity

Report: The cost of charter schools for the West Contra Costa Unified School District – In the Public Interest

Report: The cost of charter schools for the West Contra Costa Unified School District – In the Public Interest

Report: The cost of charter schools for the West Contra Costa Unified School District

In the Public Interest, in partnership with California’s West Contra Costa Unified School District (WCCUSD) staff, directly measured the financial impact of charter schools on students who attend the district’s traditional public schools.

The report is a follow-up to our 2018 Breaking Point: The Cost of Charter Schools for Public School Districts, which was the first, and continues to be the only, effort to measure the direct cost of charter schools on California school districts.

Key findings from the report include:Charter schools cost WCCUSD $27.9 million during the 2016-17 school year.

• Charter schools cost WCCUSD $27.9 million during the 2016-17 school year.
• WCCUSD loses $978 a year in funding for each charter school student.

In the Public Interest recommends that each California school district should produce an annual report assessing the economic impacts of charter school expansion on district students. This data and analysis will empower local officials to balance the potential value of charter schools against the needs of students.

Report: The cost of charter schools for the West Contra Costa Unified School District – In the Public Interest

Our Resources on Public Education

	The Cost of Charter Schools for Public School Districts 5/8/2018A first-of-its-kind analysis revealing that public school students in three California school districts are bearing the cost of the unchecked expansion of privately managed charter schools.
	Fraud and waste in California’s charter schools 3/1/2018A report documenting that total alleged and confirmed fraud and waste in California’s charter schools has reached over $149 million, which represents only the tip of the iceberg due to lax regulation and little transparency.
	How charter schools impact public school district budgets 2/23/2018A compilation of studies by a variety of institutions and authors, all which share a similar finding: districts and the students they serve are undermined by prioritizing charter school growth over educational opportunities for all students.

Our Resources on Public Education - http://www.inthepublicinterest.org/?p=7919

Eliminating Worldwide Illiteracy with Electronic Tablets but Without School Teachers? | janresseger

Eliminating Worldwide Illiteracy with Electronic Tablets but Without School Teachers? | janresseger

Eliminating Worldwide Illiteracy with Electronic Tablets but Without School Teachers?

This blog will take a one-week early summer break and come back in June on a new, three-day, Monday-Wednesday-Friday summer schedule.  Look for a new post on Monday, June 3.

Diane Ravitch made the announcement yesterday morning on her blog:  A U.S. philanthropy has awarded $10 million in prize money to two companies—Kitkit School and Onebillion—for developing and testing out in Tanzania an electronic tablet program for teacherless education.  “You knew this was coming, didn’t you?” writes Ravitch.

First it was Bridge International Academies, the for-profit, international private school venture underwritten by Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and other philanthropists and operating in Kenya, Liberia, Uganda and India. At Bridge Academies, students must pay tuition, teachers in the schools must continually recruit new students, and teachers must present scripted curricula delivered to them electronically from a central site.  Critics have pointed out that by employing less educated teachers who merely present scripted lessons, colonialist efforts like this one are undermining the development of a strong profession of well qualified school teachers in the locations of such experiments.

This week the news is not about scripted curricula delivered to teachers in the Global South. This week’s XPRIZE is for newly developed, programmed tablets to do the job of the teachers.

Philanthropy News Digest describes the challenge XPRIZE presented to several tech developers when it asked them to come up with teacherless teaching: “Launched in 2014 with support from the Merkin Family, Dick & Betsy DeVos Family, and Tony Robbins foundations, Elon Musk, and other funders, the Global Learning XPRIZE challenged innovators to develop scalable solutions that enable children to teach themselves basic reading, writing, and math skills within fifteen months.  Each of the five finalists received $1 million to field test their CONTINUE READING: Eliminating Worldwide Illiteracy with Electronic Tablets but Without School Teachers? | janresseger

States’ Math and Reading Performance After the Implementation of School A-F Letter Grade Policies | VAMboozled!

States’ Math and Reading Performance After the Implementation of School A-F Letter Grade Policies | VAMboozled!

States’ Math and Reading Performance After the Implementation of School A-F Letter Grade Policies

It’s been a while! Thanks to the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA; see prior posts about ESSA here, here, and here), the chaos surrounding states’ teacher evaluation systems has exponentially declined. Hence, my posts have declined in effect. As I have written prior, this is good news!

However, there seems to be a new form of test-based accountability on the rise. Some states are now being pressed to move forward with school letter grade policies, also known as A-F policies that help states define and then label school quality, in order to better hold schools and school districts accountable for their students’ test scores. These reform-based policies are being pushed by what was formerly known as the Foundation for Excellence in Education, that was launched while Jeb Bush was Florida’s governor, and what has since been rebranded as ExcelinEd. With Jeb Bush still in ExcelinEd’s Presidential seat, the organization describes itself as a “501(c)(3) nonprofit organization focused on state education reform” that operates on approximately $12 million per year of donations from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Michael Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Northwest Evaluation Association, ACT, College Board, and Educational Testing Service (ETS) testing corporations, among others.

I happened to be on a technical advisory committee for the state of Arizona, advising the state board of education on its A-F policies, when I came to really understand all that was at play, including the politics at play. Because of this role, though, I decided to examine, with two PhD students — Tray Geiger and Kevin Winn — what was just put out via an American Educational Research Association (AERA) press release. Our study, titled “States’ Performance on NAEP Mathematics and Reading Exams After the Implementation of School Letter Grades” is currently under review for publication, but CONTINUE READING: States’ Math and Reading Performance After the Implementation of School A-F Letter Grade Policies | VAMboozled!

CURMUDGUCATION: OH: Union Reps Fired By Turnaround CEO

CURMUDGUCATION: OH: Union Reps Fired By Turnaround CEO

OH: Union Reps Fired By Turnaround CEO

Lorain City Schools is one of the three Ohio districts that has been subjected to HB 70, a takeover law that replaces both the school board and the superintendent with a single all-powerful CEO. You can get the background of Lorain's troubles here, and see what has been happening in the fight against HB 70 here.

The short form for Lorain is this: HB 70 is a terrible piece of law, calling for a CEO who is knowledgeable and competent in every single aspect of school management, from teacher assignment to bus schedules, and this super-competent person has to be able to run every aspect of the district while building relationships with all the local folks who are still smarting from having the state strip all of their local power.

Location of my first teaching job

So let's start by accepting that nobody is going to be able to do this job well. But Lorain won some sort of reverse lottery, and got CEO David Hardy, Jr., who is especially not good at this job. Hardy's background is Teach for America and charter schools. I've reached out to someone who worked with him previously, and they suggest that he doesn't take criticism well, nor does he much care for teachers. That's just one person-- but nothing about his history in Lorain suggests otherwise. He has refused to move his family to Lorain, has refused to meet with the elected school board, and has not established positive working relationships with any CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: OH: Union Reps Fired By Turnaround CEO

Learning from Our Teachers: The Education Strikes of 2018 - Los Angeles Review of Books

Learning from Our Teachers: The Education Strikes of 2018 - Los Angeles Review of Books

Learning from Our Teachers: The Education Strikes of 2018

Red State Revolt By Eric BlancThe Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class PoliticsPublished 04.23.2019Verso224 Pages

IN SPRING OF 2018, tens of thousands of K–12 educators and support staff in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona went on strike, demanding livable salaries and other concessions from the state. Where did these uprisings in Trump country come from? How were they able to win in states where public sector strikes are illegal and other anti-labor laws prevail? In Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics, Eric Blanc sets out to answer these questions.

The saga began in West Virginia. Teacher salaries were stagnant as state legislators continued to defund public education. At the same time, these politicians granted enormous tax breaks to corporations. They also took a pair of scissors to any document that resembled a pro-labor bill. Although anger among educators had brewed for decades, resignation was the norm. When another premium increase for employee health insurance was announced at the end of 2017, few people had any reason to suspect that there would be resistance in West Virginia.

But there was. After two months of protests and strikes, not only did these employees stop the proposed premium increase, they also forced the state to drop its pro–charter school and anti-labor legislation. In the process, they secured a five percent raise for all state employees. Inspired by the victories in West Virginia, teachers and support staff followed suit in Oklahoma and in Arizona, again forcing the hands of their Tea Party–influenced governments. They achieved more in two months than they had in the past two decades.

What propelled the shift from resignation to resistance? Blanc went to these states to get some answers. Through numerous interviews and a discerning attention to broader issues of labor and politics in the United States, he paints a clear portrait of the forces at work in this historic moment. Of note, he traces the influence of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign that popularized an alternative to the status quo. His influence was most felt in West Virginia, where he won every county in the Democratic primary. At the level of action, the Sanders campaign pushed people to get involved in grassroots politics. By the time the health-care premium increases in West Virginia were announced, there were a number of self-identified “democratic socialists” with radical ideas and organizing experience.

In the words of West Virginia teacher Emily Comer:

The role of the Bernie campaign of 2016 on organizing in West  CONTINUE READING: Learning from Our Teachers: The Education Strikes of 2018 - Los Angeles Review of Books

Seattle Schools Community Forum: The Entire Board Must Vote No on the Science Adoption

Seattle Schools Community Forum: The Entire Board Must Vote No on the Science Adoption

The Entire Board Must Vote No on the Science Adoption

You'll note the use of the word "must" in the headline for this post.  I have gone from "should" to "must" based on new information I received today via public disclosure documents from the district.

I had put in a request weeks ago and received a message that there were over 900 emails between the head of Science, Mary Margaret Welch, and Amplify.   I'm not surprised that there were some but that is quite a volume for less than two years.

However, there were 25 other emails between Welch and several other people that I asked the good folks in the Public Disclosure area to send as soon as they could.  They were kind enough to get them to me yesterday.

They reveal that Welch entered into an agreement in early August 2017 with Lawrence Hall at UC Berkeley (who had a grant from IES - a federal agency, Institute of Education Sciences) and SRI International (who is the entity carrying out the research for the grant).  The grant was to study the efficacy of Amplify Science for first graders around literacy and science.  

If funded, districts would receive the full curriculum package along with teacher professional development and support over the two years of implementation at no cost to the participating districts.  Districts also receive a stipend to partner with us to CONTINUE READING: Seattle Schools Community Forum: The Entire Board Must Vote No on the Science Adoption

LAUSD’s Measure EE Highlights the Need For Charter School Oversight

LAUSD’s Measure EE Highlights the Need For Charter School Oversight

LAUSD’s Measure EE Highlights the Need For Charter School Oversight

This is a compromise, but we owe that to our children and the way that we can model compromise as a Board and as a community. Let’s not forget that the disenfranchised here are our students…If you don’t compromise it leads to this retrenchment and cynicism that then goes to this downward spiral and even more resentment and cynicism and disappointment, and that is never the source of progress.”
– LAUSD Board Member Nick Melvoin

Last July, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) Board had the opportunity to put a parcel tax on the regularly scheduled November ballot. Unfortunately, the California Charter School Association (CCSA) opposed the resolution by George McKenna and Scott Schmerelson, falsely claiming that “the proposal [excluded] 110,000 charter public [sic] school students.” Therefore, Ref Rodriguez (in one of his last actions before pleading guilty to felonious acts related to his campaign), Nick Melvoin and Monica Garcia voted against asking the voters for funding that was desperately needed by the students of the district.

Less than nine months later, Melvoin and Garcia had a change of heart. Perhaps they read the writing on the wall and realized that Jackie Goldberg’s impending election meant that the parcel tax was going to pass without their support. Or maybe it was the fact that Melvoin’s expectations for a quick victory in the January strikecrumbled when parents and the community supported the demands made by the teachers. In any case, they finally joined McKenna and CONTINUE READING: LAUSD’s Measure EE Highlights the Need For Charter School Oversight