That's certainly what the LAUSD vote on which of 30 schools to hand over to outside operators sounds like. We've been covering this issue for several months, praising the fact that the district finally realized it might need to go outside its own bureaucracy to makeover some of its worst schools. (Of course, whether turnarounds are a successful strategy is a whole other issue. For the purposes of this blog post, let's assume it is.) Parents even took matters into their own hands when they got the district to agree to a "Parent Trigger," whereby if a simple majority of current and feeder parents said they wanted a new operator, the school would be bumped to the top of the outsourcing list. But from all accounts, the way the school voting has been set up, the "election" will be mostly meaningless.
Individual votes for each of the 30 schools are happening at each school's campus. Eligible voters include parents from feeder schools (i.e., elementary schools whose students typically go to an up-for-a-vote middle school), feeder grades (i.e., fourth grade for middle school and eighth grade for high school), or current parents. It's not completely clear how a parent determines if they qualify in the "feeder" category--or how a "feeder grade" parent is different from a "feeder school" parent. Can the former be from any school in the city? If a parent falls into both categories, do they get to vote twice? More questions abound...There are also two amorphous voting blocs ("community" and "unverified parents") that allow virtually anyone from anywhere in the city (or maybe even the state? the country?) to vote. It's unclear how these, as the LA Times calls them, "kitchen sink" voting groups will be counted in the final tally, or if they will count at all. Finally, school employees who are also parents seem to be able to vote in both capacities... i.e., twice. Same thing for parents with more than one enrolled child. Say you've got three kids in Middle School X. That's three votes.
Topping this all off is the ballot stuffing. The LA teachers' union is encouraging all of its members to vote in as many elections as possible--even at schools on the other side of town--as "community" members (under the aforementioned amorphous voting category). The union claims they are worried that charter supporters are encouraging their own folks to do the same. (This is all after the union announced it was going to be helping groups of teachers prepare applications, seemingly demonstrating that competition really is the universal motivator.) Does any of this matter? Maybe not. The vote is, after all, only advisory. Final decisions on the fate of these 30 schools lie with the school board and the superintendent. (Sound familiar?)
More promisingly, the applications from potential operators are available on the LAUSD website. These include the operator's vision for the school, its operational plan, and, when applicable, an overview of test scores from other schools run by the operator. Unfortunately, none of the applications are in the same format, and many of them seem to be sort of rambling discourses on the operator's "mission," as opposed to hard concrete step-by-step changes that would be made, such as, we will extend the school day to X time, have special pull out reading groups, and make students wear uniforms, or whatever. I wonder if parents will read these applications or really be able to make sense of them. (See "Application Information" under each school's name here. Helpfully, the applications are also available in Spanish.)
This process seemed like it had so much promise. LAUSD seems to have simply made a mess of it.
--Stafford Palmieri
