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Our statement on school construction costs

What’s the difference between students failing to learn inside low-cost school facilities and those failing to learn inside really expensive ones? The answer is simple: there is none. The construction of the nation's most expensive public school ever is a gleaming distraction from the more-than-dismal state of public education in the LAUSD. No matter how beautiful and expensive the four walls surrounding a classroom may be, nothing excuses a status quo where 50% of students don’t even graduate from high school and 90% don’t make it to college. Parents want their children to have schools with nice facilities, but more than anything they want their children to get a great education, and to learn the skills they need to be successful in college and in life. We have seen beautiful new LAUSD schools open and fail their students literally from day 1, with no improvement whatsoever in the status quo. That is why the parents of Los Angeles demanding LAUSD pass the Public School Choice resolution last summer – to provide communities with real choices and options for who will run the beautiful, expensive new schools being built in their neighborhoods.

We here at Parent Revolution are founded on one simple--yet sadly revolutionary-- principle: education should be about children, not adults. This means holding all adults accountable for student performance, putting money into classrooms instead of a huge bureaucracy, and giving parents more a lot more choice in where they send their children. Everyone loves beautiful buildings--including us here at the Parent Revolution--but, even more than that, we love seeing children graduate from high school and attend beautiful four-year universities. Parents want to see a lot more effort going into transforming the indefensible failure happening within classrooms, and a lot less concern about the landscaping outside of them.

Some belated thoughts on the LA Times piece

Research has shown that ensuring every child has an effective teacher is one of the important aspects of a kids-first agenda. In a 600,000 student district where 50% of children don’t graduate high school and 90% don’t make it to college, this is a particularly critical task. It is a stark illustration of the “Alice in Wonderland” nature of education policy, then, that providing basic data-driven evaluation of teachers’ performance is a task not even attempted by LAUSD, but rather left up a few heroic reporters at our local newspaper.

Like Elena over at The Quick and the Ed, I thought by far the most telling aspect of the piece was the reaction of John Smith, a teacher that was shown to be the in the bottom 10% of his peers in terms of student performance. One might expect that Mr. Smith, when presented with this, would be angry and defensive – he was being singled out in the LA Times as one of the last effective teachers in Los Angeles! His reaction, however, was quite the opposite:

Told of The Times' findings, Smith expressed mild surprise.

"Obviously what I need to do is to look at what I'm doing and take some steps to make sure something changes," he said.

In one sentence, Mr. Smith captured both the absurdity of the status quo and the urgent need for change. I’m sure he cares deeply about his students, and wants them to succeed. But nobody has ever even bothered to tell him that his students are consistently, year after year, falling behind their peers down the hall. How is he supposed to improve when he isn’t even aware that his children are falling short?

There are a lot of caveats that should come with the type of teacher evaluations published by the LA Times on Sunday. While data is a critical piece of understanding teacher effectiveness, it is only a piece of the puzzle, and must be weighed alongside more qualitative measures such as principal, peer, and parent evaluations. California’s Race to the Top proposal, which promised an evaluation system based 30% of value-add data and 70% of other factors, seems to strike a reasonable balance. Creating thoughtful and fair teacher and principal evaluation systems is an important area where teachers and kids-first reformers share a common goal, and a great illustration of how what is good for children is so often great for teachers as well. But any reasonable discussion of this issue must start and end with the embarrassing fact that we currently don’t even bother to evaluate teachers at all!

So while we commend the LA Times for taking the first step and forcing this conversation to be had, there is much work to do on this vital issue. We urge teachers to stand with the parents of Los Angeles in demanding a fair and comprehensive teacher evaluation system, strong professional development programs to help all teachers master their craft, and accountability for all adults involved in educating our children.

Context for turnaround costs

Sam Dillon of the New York Times wrote an article on June 24th examining the "high" costs of the turnaround at Locke High School. The reason I mention this piece now is because it still needs to be placed into its proper context. The article shows much concern for the fact that Green Dot Public School's total expenditures to successfully turnaround Locke have surpassed $15 million—a sum which, as Dillon accurately notes, "is more than twice the $6 million in federal turnaround money that the Department of Education has set as a cap for any single school."

However, the article fails to offer readers a nuanced discussion about these high costs and incorrectly infers that Locke’s turnaround may "give pause" to future school turnarounds (as per the article’s title). By including some vital omissions, the article begins to construct an insufficient discourse about school turnarounds. First, it is important to understand that Locke is a unique case and not every turnaround—particularly at the elementary and middle school level—will be comparable. In addition, there is no serious acknowledgement in the piece of California’s more-than-dismal budget for K-12 education. California has dropped to 44th in how much it spends on students—and the evidence suggests that this will only get worse in the near future.

By not giving all of the relevant facts, the Times article potentially misleads its wide readership into believing that turnarounds are—more generally speaking—infeasible. It does, however, document some of the wonderful changes that have taken place at Locke. This aspect of the article offers us a sobering reminder of the wonderful benefits that do, in fact, come with school turnarounds--despite their individual costs!

There’s nothing “moderate” about reform

While following the recent back and forth over Rep. Obey’s attempt to gut Race to the Top and other Obama reform efforts, one headline from Alyson Klein over at Education Week caught my eye. “Moderate Democrats Push Back on Cuts to Race to the Top, TIF” the banner proclaimed. Curious, I read on, eager to find out who these “moderates” were. Klein identified four Democrats in various stages of opposition to the move:

- Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO)

- Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO)

- Rep. George Miller (D-CA)

- Senator Evan Bayh (D-IN)

Other than Evan Bayh, who has been a constant thorn in the side of progressives in Congress, I was hard pressed to identify what I would call a single “moderate” in that group. But not wanting to merely trust my own political perspective, I took a minute to look up the National Journal’s most recent ideologically rankings based on Congressional voting records. Lo and behold, there is nothing terribly moderate about the other three Democrats at all! Polis certainly isn’t a liberal hero in the mold of George Miller (he’s also been in Congress about 30 years less), but he weighs in as the 110th most liberal house member, putting him squarely in the middle of a fairly progressive House Democratic caucus. Heck, he’s even just a few spot behind notorious liberal firebrand Rep. Barbara Lee, and ranks as more liberal than either Carolyn Maloney (who spent months mulling a challenge to Sen. Gillibrand from the left) or Maxine Waters, an old school liberal representing South Los Angeles. Senator Bennet isn’t so shabby himself, clocking in as the 34th most liberal Senator, just a few spots back of the likes of Senator Leahy (D-VT) and Senator Wyden (D-OR). And then of course there’s the small fact that reform programs being cut were created by President Obama, who has already racked up the strongest record of progressive accomplishments since FDR or LBJ (depending on who you ask).

So what gives? Is it that Bennet and Polis’ support for education reform makes them “moderates,” despite their otherwise solidly progressive voting records? Seems odd to me – fighting to fully fund a progressive president’s programs to reform a status quo where 50% of LAUSD students don’t graduate high school and 90% don’t make it to college looks like a solidly progressive position from where I sit.

I think what we see here is the continuation of a misguided media narrative where anything related to education reform must be “moderate,” because one time there was a Republican somewhere that supported it, or something. Progressives all across the country, led by President Obama, are standing up every day to fight for kids-first education reform so that every single child can get a great education, regardless of their skin color, zip code, or income level. We progressives need to keep standing up and reminding reporters, politicians, and everyone else – there is nothing “moderate” about education reform. It is a fundamentally progressive agenda to challenge the status quo and reshape public education for the 21st Century.