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accountability, budget cuts, pay negotiations, responsibility, school budgeting, school funding, UTLA
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John Deasy claims an authority in adjudicating “responsibility” that seems a little premature.
With what is itself “breathtaking” hubris, he fairly spits out to the LA School Report an avowal of sanctimonious incredulity that thousands of LAUSD teachers might threaten strike should their years of voluntary pay cuts and wage freezes not be reversed.
Says he: “I would never even have a conversation about something as ludicrous as saying to the public that we might have a strike when we met people once”. Evidently the superintendent considers the negotiating-clock to be re-zeroed each year such that past history and betrayals have no standing.
Therefore it is hardly surprising that his own recent personal history of leveraging a threat to quit our district mired in the unmitigated fiscal and physical disrepair of his watch, into a multi-year employment contract replete with tidy salary increase of $30K – this little party trick was evidently fine because, perhaps, it never was a “conversation” with the public. Instead his own contract was carefully controlled and remanded for negotiation via inside baseball behind closed doors exclusively. All this remains just one of those “undiscussable” personnel matters.
So what does it mean anyway, to “behave responsibly”? That just means to behave in a way that the critic expects or considers desirable.
Irresponsible would be to operate under the chimeric authority of an academic degree dishonorably attained.
Irresponsible would be to persistently disregard his board’s resolution to implement its “Arts At The Core” mandate.
Irresponsible is to be in any way complicit or complacent in accepting LAUSD class sizes at upwards of 50 pupils per teacher, 2-4 times the rate of charter and private school counterparts.
Irresponsible is compelling a curriculum that ignores a vast population’s need and legitimate desire for vocational classes.
Irresponsible is accepting a school system where music and art is taught by itinerant teachers on a rotating schedule irregularly for part of a school year.
Irresponsible is refusing to provide arts budgetary information to your very own board of governors.
Irresponsible is squeezing funding to such an extent that even long-standing arts programs of superior quality fall prey to the relentless drive of test-mediated ELA and math curricula du jour.
Irresponsible is invoking civil rights as the justification for championing vanity tablet technology whose unconscionable price tag precludes schools from adequate operating funds.
Irresponsible is depriving schools of vital academic and health services by closing libraries, decimating the ranks of librarians and pitting them against their aides in a grotesque anti-union voodoo-sabotaging of “MarionTheLibrarian”, eliminating on-site nurses, counselors, and administrators.
Irresponsible is betraying the public’s trust in approving school infrastructure and repair bonds by raiding those funds for derivative purposes.
Irresponsible is to substitute vast swathes of instructional time with time spent in the classroom filling out worksheets aligned to some random test, taking that random test, waiting for others to take that random test or futzing around with untested philosophies tethered to that random test.
Irresponsible is to relegate our children and their teachers and support staff to decrepit facilities, the habitation of which is unpleasant and pedagogically self-defeating, and the maintenance of which – if accomplished at all — is extravagantly expensive.
Irresponsible is to champion the de facto segregating of our children by encouraging charter school proliferation and the financial and enrollment district school hemorrhaging that follows the influx of these schools.
I’m not really sure what utility is to be derived from the extreme irony of very publicly charging a brand new union leadership with impatience in such a palpably insensitive and impatient manner. Given that there are pending legal negotiations to be conducted, with the burden of their failure falling disproportionately upon children, this sort of intemperate challenge would seem in itself to be paradigmatically irresponsible.
How does this pot get off calling the kettle so black?
It is nothing short of absurd to finger teachers as parlaying an irresponsible negotiating tactic when the preponderance of the group’s individuals continue to exhibit the very model of responsibility, teaching our children day in and day out on just a fraction of the salary commensurate with comparable professionals’. As actual on-the-ground troops actually dealing with difficult day-to-day logistics, these are the people who subsume responsibility, not don it in name only.
Great leaders are every bit as heroic as they are essential, but leading with a hollow core amounts to no leadership at all. This is irresponsible.
2 Comments
August 12, 2014 at 8:06 pm
Absolutely inspired, Sara Roos. I never considered the superintendent’s comportment in such close juxtaposition, but you have done a stellar job of exposing his hypocrisy . Unfortunately, his tantrums are indulged as a definite divide exists between his comportment and that of teachers, whose union leadership actually advocated for Deasy during last October’s evaluation of Deasy, which should have ended his reign of error but didn’t because astroturf, Alex Caputo-Pearl and his UP Slate conspired with local big shots to keep this menace on board in exchange for special favors. For UTLA leadership, there was the permission to cheat in the election. For lawyers, mayors, socialites and investors there is the common core, iPad, charter school free market free-for-all which leaves teachers, students and parents with little cause for celebration.
What is happening in LA and other American cities is terrifying. With so many public schools facing closure based on bogus test data, there is clearly an unjust trend in education politics that could foreshadow an unprecedented brand of tyranny that allows oppressive advantages for those who have every advantage. This is coming at the expense of the disadvantaged, a demographic that is swiftly growing as the Democrats fall under neoliberal influences that exchange their financial support and power for control of public schools and other public sector concessions like the post office.
These efforts have had a devastating impact on urban schools and communities, bankrupting Detroit and Philadelphia, two cities already weakened by the profiteers and political puppets that prop up their policies at the expense of the people. The ramifications of these betrayals is clear. The educations of poor children have already suffered profoundly while millions of teachers, most of them baby boomers, move into their twilight years with uncertainty. Cheated out of their full pensions and healthcare, there are already many teachers whose long careers of service are rewarded with despicable defamation, denial of due process, and a desperate future of public aid, foreclosure, homelessness, handouts and other undeserved horrors.
Many teachers have humble roots and most have lead humble professional lives where reward is centered on the numinous effort to make a difference in others’ lives.
No doubt this provoked the wrath of plutocrats, still steaming over affirmative action. But the rich have a long-standing hatred for public educators. Read one of Eli Broad’s sanitized foundation reports and the rhetoric cannot conceal his frustration and fury at the resistance teachers have to surrendering to his will. I suppose this could explain why the assault has become so brutal, but I suspect no matter how compliant they become as fear usurps reason, teachers would be unwise to expect anything close to mercy from these reformers. Likewise for poor inner city children, whose civil rights are being perverted to serve an ugly agenda. Perhaps the knowledge that middle class children attending public schools are also in peril should provoke more outcry from parents
like you. Instead, they are deferring to charters, which for now, may seem superior but in time will fall away with standardization, cost cutting that replaces teachers with tech and part time babysitters, and eventually an education that revolves around impersonal lessons sent through cyberspace to cut the high costs overhead. K-12 online schools are raking in obscene profits and with CEO flavored concerns it will not be long before more schools defer to this model, which is already in play at many for profit colleges as well a universities and two year schools.
While I have no problem with distance learning as an option, the word option is emphasized. This kind of education reform is not just an affront education, educators and ethics, it is an injury and insult to Democracy. If we do not rise up now, we will have an unfortunate future to suffer, but nothing as awful as what our children will have to confront.
August 7, 2014 at 12:11 pm
The real reason LAUSD got the iPads so fast was so students could take the computer-based Common Core tests. This priority was revealed at later Board of Education meetings. The Common Core adaptation, funded by Bill Gates, got very little teacher input & is still a controversial national standard. California law does not recognize electronic textbooks, so students still need to carry books. Educational publisher Pearson was suspiciously contracted as the main supplier, but Board members are still not allowed to see all the content. Students need technology, but not at the expense of counselors, teachers, nurses, clerks, aides & staff.
I saw iPads distributed to students without restricting their ability to delete or add apps. (If you have an iPad, go to Settings, then scroll down to Restrictions and tap. Touch Enable Restrictions. That is it.) After students “hacked” the iPads at the first high schools that received them, most principals opted not to distribute the iPads. Now, thousands of iPads are in storage. Technicians needed to program restrictions in iPad Settings were not hired because the iPads were rushed out. Sup. Deasy was trying to bypass critical public opinion about using construction bonds while schools continue to decay. (See the FaceBook group “Repairs not iPads.”)
Is this controversy or lies?