LA Teacher’s Union Wins the Day

When it was adopted last summer by the Los Angeles School Board, the Public School Choice resolution has heralded as a huge victory for education reformers in California. Under this resolution, charter schools, Mayor Villaraigosa’s Partnership for Los Angeles Schools (PLAS), the teacher union and the district itself would compete to operate not only a set of new schools just coming on line but also compete to run a set of the district’s lowest performing schools. In the first round, the future of 18 new schools and 12 existing low performing schools were up. To the great disappointment of the charter school community, yesterday the school board made its decision, and 22 of the 30 schools were turned over to teacher lead efforts. Three schools will be run by the mayor’s partnership and four will run by charter schools ( By my math that is only 29 and I don’t know what happened to the 30th, and some of the schools divided up to become schools within schools). In total these schools will educate 40,000 students (a large school district in themselves). Given the stakes and the number of teacher jobs involved, it is not surprising that the teachers union was highly motivated to put together proposals to run the schools, and to advocate hard for the schools to continue to be run by United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) teachers. Left out of the running was Green Dot Schools run by education reform rock star, Steve Barr and several other charter school groups including the Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools and Inner City Education Foundation Public Schools.

There was a complex review process that lead to the final board vote. First an internal review team and a superintendent’s panel made recommendations. These reviews lead to the superintendent’s recommendations and then the board’s actions. The board generally went with the superintendent’s recommendation, but did opt for the teacher’s union alternative on occasion. In fact at each stage of the process, there seemed to be a transition from a technical process to a political one, and a few charter school proposals fell off the table to be replaced by the teacher union alternative. Strongly influencing this decision was a non-binding vote of teachers, parents, and community members. The LA Times documents the debacle of this voting process which sounded more like what you would expect out of third world country that as a way to run a school system. But, what was clear from the community voting process is that teachers and their union are really good and well organized when it comes to getting out the vote.

While I am sorry to see that more of the schools did not go to the charter organizations, especially those with strong track records, this is still an opportunity to improve the low performing schools. LA is a strongly centralized school district, and the UTLA has long been advocating that teachers should have more say in how the schools are run, and here is the opportunity to prove how well they can do without as much district oversight. AJ Duffy, president of the UTLA said in an Wall Street Journal article, “The world is going to see what we’ve been saying all along. Give the authority to teachers and we will create quality schools” Can they change the trajectory of the 12 lowest performing schools in the district? Can they work out the governance problems that are certain to arise? The first test of this new governance model will begin next month when LAUD issues thousand of pink slips in an attempt to balance its budget. How will these new school entities fare in the pink slip allocation process which is ususally done based on seniority, disproportionately impacting the low performing schools which are often staffed with the least experienced teachers? Will the new teacher run schools lose a large share of their teachers? This is what happened last year to the mayor’s partnership schools. How will the district’s unfunded retiree health benefit obligations weigh down the district’s ability to invest in these schools? Time will tell if things have changed, or just been rebranded. Of course given that the budget picture looks so bleak for the foreseeable future, failure can always be blamed on the budget

Of course there is national relevance to the decisions made yesterday in LA. The Administration has laid out charter schools as a key component of addressing chronically low performing schools in this country. This was an opportunity to not only expand the number of charter schools in Los Angeles, but also to test the President’s idea of charter schools as takeover option. The LA Times reports that there was only one charter school bid for any of the 12 low performing schools. Now the timeline on this process was extremely tight, but at least in this first round, charter schools concentrated on the shiny new schools and virtually ignored the 12 failing schools up for bid. This is disappointing but not surprising given what the data on school restructuring under NCLB tells us about charter school conversions. Only 0.3% of schools facing restructuring used charter school conversion as their school restructuring option.

Tagged as: Charter Schools, Green Dot Public Schools, Los Angeles Unified, School Choice