You are here: Home / Archives for Los Angeles

Mandarin pulls new students to LA school

December 31, 2011 By

A Mandarin immersion program is drawing white and Asian students to what was a heavily Latino, under-enrolled elementary school, reports the Los Angeles Times. Enrollment is up:  Dual-language students may outnumber students in regular classes in a few years.

In 2009, 81% of Broadway’s students were Latino, 15% were black, six were white and none were Asian, reports the Times. “The next year, the new classes of Mandarin immersion students were almost exclusively white and Asian,” though a handful of black and Latino students have chosen the program. Few students are native Mandarin speakers.

Students spend half the day learning exclusively in Mandarin, half the day in English with a different teacher.

“These programs have had very good results for the English speakers, sometimes not quite as great for the other language speakers,” said Sacramento-based bilingual consultant Norm Gold. “But it all depends on doing a quality implementation.”

Even excluding the students in the Mandarin program, Broadway has boosted its standardized test scores — up more than 100 points to 869 on the Academic Performance Index from 2008 when (Principal Susan) Wang arrived. Mandarin immersion students were too young to be tested last spring, but the school’s scores could rise again next year.

Mandarin immersion attracts the children of ambitious, educated parents, most of whom are Asian or white and middle or upper-middle class. No wonder it’s popular with parents.

Via Alexander Russo.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , ,

Black bean burgers or Flamin’ Hot Cheetos?

December 23, 2011 By

Students are refusing to eat the new healthier lunches at Los Angeles schools, reports the LA Times. The black bean burgers, tostada salad and pears on the menu at Van Nuys High is “nasty, rotty stuff,” says Mayra Gutierrez, who lunches on Flamin’ Hot Cheetos and soda instead.

Earlier this year, the district got rid of chocolate and strawberry milk, chicken nuggets, corn dogs, nachos and other food high in fat, sugar and sodium. Instead, district chefs concocted such healthful alternatives as vegetarian curries and tamales, quinoa salads and pad Thai noodles.

. . . Participation in the school lunch program has dropped by thousands of students. Principals report massive waste, with unopened milk cartons and uneaten entrees being thrown away. Students are ditching lunch, and some say they’re suffering from headaches, stomach pains and even anemia. At many campuses, an underground market for chips, candy, fast-food burgers and other taboo fare is thriving.

With fewer students buying lunch, the district’s meal planners have decided to bring back hamburgers and pizza (whole-wheat crust, low-fat cheese, low-sodium sauce) and eliminate unpopular dishes. No more lentil and brown rice cutlets or quinoa and black-eyed pea salads.The new meals were tested and approved by students in the summer, notes Megan McArdle in The Atlantic.

Andre Jahchan, a 16-year-old sophomore at Esteban Torres High School, said the food was “super good” at the summer tasting at L.A. Unified’s central kitchen. But on campus, he said, the chicken pozole was watery, the vegetable tamale was burned and hard, and noodles were soggy.

“It’s nasty, nasty,” said Andre, a member of InnerCity Struggle, an East L.A. nonprofit working to improve school lunch access and quality. “No matter how healthy it is, if it’s not appetizing, people won’t eat it.”

It’s a lesson from the universe, writes McArdle: Promising pilot programs don’t always scale up.

In the testing phase, when the program was small, they were probably working with a small group of schools which had been specially chosen to participate. They did not have a sprawling supply chain to manage. The kids and the workers knew they were being studied. And they were asking the kids which food they liked–a question which, social science researchers will tell you, is highly likely to elicit the answer that they liked something.

Furthermore, it’s easier to cook a palatable meal for a dozen testers than to cook mass amounts on a modest budget.

. . . the things that make us fat are, by and large, also the things that are palatable when mass-produced. Bleached grains and processed fats have a much longer shelf life than fresh produce, and can take a hell of a lot more handling. Salt and sugar are delicious, but they are also preservatives that, among other things, disguise the flavor of stale food.

In response to complaints that salads with an Oct. 7 “best served by” date were served on Oct. 17, a manager said lettuce wasn’t actually rotten. Then the district removed the dates because they were “confusing.”

Nobody eats 10-day old lettuce voluntarily, writes McArdle.  The old mentality — “don’t poison anybody” — may still dominate the cafeteria staff, she speculates. “There isn’t much difference between Chicken nuggets that won’t poison you, and Chicken nuggets at their absolute peak of freshness.  And the employees just sort of assumed that the same set of rules would work for lettuce.”

Filed Under: Health Tagged With: , , , , ,

Getting into a good grade school in LA

December 19, 2011 By

There are good public elementary schools in Los Angeles Unified, writes Leslee Komaiko. But for parents who can’t afford to buy or rent near a desirable school, getting your kid into a good grade school is a mind-bending game. The savvy parent looks for ways to amass points in the district’s assignment system.

What you’d be looking for is a house in an area with a crummy home school, a school that’s overcrowded, without enough books and desks. That gives you points. So does a PHBAO home school. No, that’s not one that serves PH-balanced pork-filled dumplings to its charges. It stands for “predominantly Hispanic, black, Asian or other.” (Never mind that every school is predominantly Hispanic, black, Asian or other. Hello, LAUSD — “other” means everyone else.)

Submit your application to your desired school the winter before your child can begin kindergarten. If you’re applying for next fall, you’ve just missed the Dec. 16 deadline.

Of course, parents should find out which race or ethnicity is underrepresented at the school of choice to figure out how to identify their mixed-race child.  (Or your child who’s 1/16 Cherokee. There are a lot of “Native Americans” in school districts with similar systems.)

A kindergarten rejection earns points for the following year.

And of course if the magnet (or program) of your dreams doesn’t start until first grade, what you want is a kindergarten rejection. So study the numbers carefully in the Choices guide, which has moved online this year and which should really be called the You Wish guide. It will reveal the schools that are most in demand, the ones that therefore have the stinkiest odds. That’s where you should apply to kindergarten, because remember, rejection and thus points are the goal here.

It’s good practice for college applications.

Los Angeles Unified will let groups led by teachers and administrators run low-performing and new schools with charter-like independence, but charter operators will be excluded from the choice program for three years. Few charter organizations have been granted control of schools under the existing program.

 

 

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , ,

LA won’t release names with value-added data

November 21, 2011 By

Los Angeles Unified has calculated value-added scores for 14,000 teachers, but won’t release teacher names, reports the Los Angeles Times, which published the names of teachers and their scores last year.

Principals will see the “academic growth over time” ratings of their school’s teachers.

The rapidly growing use of value-added measures has strained district’s relationships with teachers, reports Ed Week.

Update:  Most California voters want teachers’ evaluations made public, according to a new poll. A majority said students’ test scores should count for at least 30 percent of a teacher’s evaluation, but “a range of measures used, including parent feedback and classroom observation, to determine an instructor’s effectiveness.”

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,

Pomp, circumstance and then what?

October 11, 2011 By

Few high schools track graduates to see if they’re succeeding in college or careers. Some states are linking high school and college data to evaluate success rates.

Also on Community College Spotlight:  Community college construction has stopped in Los Angeles. The district has billions in bond money, but can’t afford to pay for building maintenance or for instructors to use the new space.

Filed Under: College Tagged With: , , ,

Ex-union head will run charter schools

September 2, 2011 By

After fighting charter schools in Los Angeles as head of the teachers’ union, A.J. Duffy plans to start charter schools that will make it harder for teachers to earn tenure, reports the Los Angeles Times.

And if a tenured teacher becomes ineffective, he wants to streamline dismissals. The process now in place can stretch out for several years, even with substantial evidence of gross misconduct. Some union leaders, notably Duffy, have defended this “due process” as a necessary protection against administrative abuses.

“I would make it 10 days if I could,” Duffy now says of the length of the dismissal process.

Duffy, 67, will be executive director of Apple Academy Charter Public Schools, which hopes to open one or more schools in south Los Angeles by the fall of 2012.

Caprice Young, who ran the California Charter Schools Association, will serve on Duffy’s board.  Young was president of the Los Angeles Unified school board till United Teachers of Los Angeles mounted a successful campaign to oust her in 2003.

A.J. Duffy and Caprice Young are collaborating on charter schools? Repent of your sins.

While opposing charter schools, Duffy tried to unionize them.

. . . he argued for charter school-like freedoms at traditional schools, running up against the L.A. Unified bureaucracy and, frequently, his own union’s reluctance to risk weakening contract protections.

Duffy’s Apple schools will be unionized, though UTLA will have to agree to his new systems for granting tenure and firing teachers.

Under his tenure model, teachers would undergo a three-year probationary period, with a review by the principal and an experienced mentor or “master teacher” after two years that would enable them to continue on to the third year or be let go.

After the third year, they would earn tenure for two years, after which they would have to be recertified. After each tenure period, they would earn an additional year of tenure before undergoing the next recertification.

Teacher dismissal would be decided by binding arbitration within a 10 to 20-day period after the principal and master teacher agree the teacher should be fired. Under the current system, firing a teacher can take years.

In a large, bureaucracy such as Los Angeles Unified, “it continues to be necessary for teachers to be overly protected, but I have always said that UTLA would be willing to give up certain traditional protections if they got in return academic autonomy,” Duffy told AP.

He hopes to hire union teachers from the Crescendo network, which lost its charter this spring after a cheating scandal.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , ,

LA gives insiders first crack at running schools

September 1, 2011 By

Teachers and administrators will get first crack at running new schools in Los Angeles, the board of education has decided, changing policy for the Public Choice Initiative. Only if inside groups’ plans are rejected will charter operators and others be able to apply.

The district will accept proposals for 15 new campuses by Nov. 18.

Since the policy began, 11 charter schools won bids to run new district campuses and one existing campus is being operated by a charter organization. About 40 campuses are operated by inside district groups, mainly led by teachers.

The board hopes to pressure the teachers’ union to be more flexible on performance evaluations, job requirements and other conditions at the new schools.

Los Angeles charter schools outperformed district schools at every grade level on the state’s 2011 Academic Performance Index, according to the California Charter Schools Association.  Latinos, blacks, low-income students and English Learners earned higher scores at charter schools.  “All but one of the new charter schools authorized by the Los Angeles School Board during the first phase of its Public School Choice initiative outperformed similar new schools run by LAUSD”

 

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , ,

Teachers move, kids stay at LA charters

July 21, 2011 By

Los Angeles charter school students are 80 percent less likely to switch schools than similar students at traditional public schools, concludes a study by Policy Analysis for California Education researchers at Berkeley. However, LA charter teachers are more likely to leave their school at year’s end, according to a companion study.

“While charter teachers are churning in and out of where they work, charter students and parents seem more loyal to their school choice,” said Luke Dauter, a Berkeley doctoral student in sociology and lead author of the study on student mobility, in a statement.

While teachers in charter secondary schools were considerably more likely to leave than comparable teachers at traditional schools, elementary charter teachers under 30 were less likely to leave.

Both studies looked at the time frame between 2002 and 2009, when the number of charter schools in Los Angeles tripled from 53 to 157 campuses, notes Ed Week.

At all schools, mobility is lower for Latino teachers and students at all schools and higher for African-American students, the study found. Blacks were likely to leave traditional schools for charters.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Should homework count?

June 28, 2011 By

Homework will count for only 10 percent of a student’s grade in Los Angeles public schools, a new policy dictates.  The goal is to equalize grading for students with “varying degrees of access to academic support at home.” Some teachers fear students won’t bother to complete assigned work.

Because many teachers grade on effort, rather than performance, the policy will lower grades, predicts Darren, who teaches math in Sacramento.

In my classes, homework counts for 20% of a student’s grade–still too much for LA Unified, but much less than so many others teachers. This means that 80% of a student’s grade comes from tests and quizzes, which are measures of performance.

In my classes, students must demonstrate some level of mastery of the material in order to pass the course; I don’t give courtesy D’s for those who learn nothing but “try” all the homework.

I don’t think teachers should assign homework that requires “academic support” at home.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , ,

Locke boosts graduation numbers

June 23, 2011 By

Locke High School’s last class of students from the pre-charter era will be graduated today in Los Angeles. The 484 graduates represent an 85 percent increase from 2008, the last year Locke was under district control, according to Green Dot. The number of graduates completing the A-G college-prep requirements has tripled.

When Green Dot took over the school, it placed 10th graders in Launch to College Academies (LCA). Of  340 LCA students, 306 will walk at the graduation ceremony. Also graduating are 41 students at Animo Locke 4, a school for over-age and credit-deficient students and those returning from juvenile detention.

I’ve been reading Alexander Russo’s Stray Dogs, Saints and Saviors on Green Dot’s struggle to turn around Locke. There are no miracles. It’s a long, hard slog.

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , , , , , ,
« Older Posts