Tug of war over LA Unified reform models

Groups that want to take over governance of several dozen Los Angeles Unified schools have less than a week to apply. The process is part of a major policy change approved three months ago to improve education by handing over control of up to 300 low-performing and new campuses to groups that submit reform plans.

A coalition of education-focused nonprofits, including one headed by Veronica Melvyn, staged a press conference outside United Teachers Los Angeles headquarters on busy Wilshire Boulevard. She described how people at dozens of L.A. Unified campuses are trying to sully the name of proposed school reform models.

"It’s essentially that parents are being told, for example, that charter schools are private schools, that charter schools don’t serve special ed kids," said Melvyn. "We’ve heard, for example, that they’ll be deported if they sign a charter school petition. We’ve heard on the Pilot Schools that teachers have no rights when they’re part of a Pilot Schools agreement. We even heard something that went so far as to say that charter schools don’t educate black students."

Melvyn’s group and several others at the press conference support all these models. These groups spoke with reporters at about the same time the teachers union also planned to talk to journalists about their effort to submit reform plans for several dozen schools.

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The teachers union organized a half-day workshop in a second-floor conference room for about a dozen groups. Clusters of people hunched over laptops.

Teachers union vice president Julie Washington said the documents are due next week. "They’re actually putting in the data, the vision and the mission statements, and all that into the actual document that needs to be submitted."

Washington is one of about a dozen union staffers helping the groups of teachers, principals, and parents write a document that outlines their reform plans.

Half a dozen people worked on the reform document for Hyde Park Elementary in the Crenshaw district. Second grade teacher Daniel Bagby said that school needs more project-based learning.

"We really need to move away from a textbook driven approach that can be kind of very boring, so that kids have more of a say in how they learn and what they learn," said Bagby. "Of course the state standards will drive what we teach. Also we would like to see a more enriched program around the arts."

These groups and the ones advocating other school reform models say a lot’s at stake in this process – the education of future students and the vitality of L.A.’s neighborhoods. Also at stake are all the financial contracts that will accompany the takeovers at some of these new and low-performing L.A. Unified schools.