I've now gone from optimistic to doubtful to disappointed on the LAUSD outsourcing plan. If you recall, the district decided to outsource the management of 12 low-performing schools and 18 new ones. Teachers, parents, charter organizations, and other non-profits were invited to apply. Sounded like a good idea, since LAUSD seemed to be unable to do anything with these schools to improve their dismal achievement and graduation rates. The competition even lit a fire under LA teachers, who, in the face of possible charter takeover and with district and union support, put together management plans in a matter of weeks.
Then LAUSD held a vote for parents, teachers, and community members to have their say. And they made a mess of it. I suppose that should have been the first warning signal that this good idea had succumbed to the entrenched interests of LA's education status quo. Though it's not clear how much these votes even counted, it was clear that the grass-roots campaign launched by UTLA leading up the election made a difference. It probably helped that under the "community" voter category, the same person could vote multiple times simply by going to the different school-based polling stations!
As of Tuesday, the school board has made their decisions (based for the most part on Cortines' suggestions): twenty-two schools will go to teacher groups (read: UTLA), ??three go to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, and charter operators or community groups got the rest.
A few points of interest:
1. The three big charter contenders, Green Dot, Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools, and ICEF Public Schools got no schools at all. I find it hard to believe that the school board thought Green Dot, for one, incapable of taking over these schools based on the merit of their applications during this process. So was this a slap on the wrist? An attempt to avoid the big names? (Yet another) freebie for UTLA? Aspire, another better-known charter organization, got one.
2. A bunch of the schools were given to multiple groups. Ostensibly what this means is that these schools will be broken down into smaller schools in the same building. Word on the street is that there was some griping here over who could work well with whom in the same building. Charter organizations typically lost out when schools were broken up, and in some cases, it looks like competing groups of teachers got pieces of the same school in the same building. Hmmm.
3. Some schools were handed back to parent/community/teacher groups from the schools themselves. The ramifications of this are again not clear, but if the school was struggling, what's to say MORE autonomy from the district is going to help? That assumes the problems stemmed from LAUSD's micromanagement and/or poor oversight. It doesn't take into account that maybe the school had internal problems.??Philosophically, it's a nice thought to empower the teachers and parents of the students in the school in question; in practice, I'm not so sure.
The silver lining here is that this really is putting UTLA's reputation on the line. They blow it and that's it. But all this holding hands and singing kumbayah doesn't strike me as the best way to make radical changes for the better in some of LA's worst schools.
