Bennett Kayser (L), Andrew Thomas and Ref Rodriguez at last night’s LA Unified District 5 candidate forum

Together for the final time before Tuesday’s elections, the three candidates for LA Unified’s Board District 5 seat were determined last night to set themselves apart from each other.

In a small church in a residential neighborhood in South Gate, incumbent Bennett Kayser, and his opponents, Andrew Thomas and Ref Rodriguez, spoke only to the small crowd, rarely acknowledging the others’ statements or accusations. Another forum is scheduled for tonight at the Camino Nuevo Charter Academy, Sandra Cisneros campus in Echo Park, but only Thomas and Rodriguez have agreed to participate.

In last night’s forum, Thomas sharply criticized his opponents for the financial support their respective campaigns have received from outside interests, either the teachers union, UTLA, (Kayser) or the California Charter Schools Association (Rodriguez). Thomas’s campaign has received no outside support.

“The interests that have put people on the school board have spent over a million dollars so far beating each other up,” Thomas told the audience of about 30 southeast LA residents. “And they’re going to continue that fight onto the board when they’re elected.”

Later in the debate he returned to the same theme, arguing “The priorities of the other two candidates are not the same as the priorities of people who are funding their campaigns.”

Thomas also accused Kayser of supporting inefficient spending of new state money available to the district. Looking ahead at future growth, Thomas said, “I’m worried that money is going to be frittered away on programs that already exist and aren’t very effective.”

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The Los Angeles Times | By Teresa Watanabe

California may be a blue state, but a Republican-led effort to scale back federal intervention in educational reform is drawing support here.

As the House of Representatives moves to vote this week on reauthorizing a 50-year-old education reform law, Republicans are pushing to sharply curtail what they see as federal overreach in prescribing testing, setting achievement goals and imposing sanctions on schools that fail to improve. Instead, the House bill would shift authority for such decisions to states and school districts.

And that suits many in California just fine.

That’s because California has outpaced the nation in developing its own reform measures, including a pioneering school finance system that gives more money to needy students and an effort underway to craft a more complex measure of achievement than simply test scores. The federal prescriptions, many say, too often have interfered with California’s approach.

Click here to read the full story.

It was dubbed the “Stand at Grand,” and while it may not have drawn as many as the “Thrilla in Manilla,” it was an impressive turnout of thousands of Los Angeles Unified teachers at Grand Park last night as they rallied to demand a new contract.

With City Hall behind him and a massive crowd of teachers and supporters in front of him, Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of the teachers union, UTLA, took the stage at the end of the rally, but before he even spoke, his point was already made: the show of force and size of the crowd as the whole point of the gathering.

Caputo-Pearl claimed there were 15,000 people at the park. A group of police officers assigned to the rally told LA School Report they estimated the number at 8,000 to 10,000. Whatever the number, the downtown park was filled with teachers eager to show their willingness to go on strike if asked.

“The goal today is to show that we are not afraid to go out on strike, that if we don’t meet an agreement that we will go out on strike,” said Monica Multer, a teacher at Melvin Avenue Elementary.

The rally comes as the first major event in the wake of an impasse in negotiations between the union and LA Unified, which the two sides declared earlier this month. Negotiations have dragged on for months, with the union rejecting the district’s latest offer of a five percent raise, an increase in starting salary and millions of dollars to reduce class size.

The sides remain an estimated $800 million apart as the union is seeking the first raise for its members in eight years. UTLA’s last demand before the impasse was for a 8.5 percent raise. The district has said that meeting the demands would mean large cuts to other areas of the budget as well as layoffs.

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In LAUSD board election, it’s charter schools vs. labor unions 
Direct campaign donations from individual contributors make up 18 percent of the money spent in the LAUSD’s District 5 school board race. KPCC

Report: New Teacher Prep Rules ‘Too Stringent’
Proposed federal changes to teacher preparation requirements have generated numerous comments from education leaders and organizations. The Journal

Common Core’s unintended consequence?
More teachers write their own curricula. The Hechinger Report

Why Principals Matter
An eighth-grader was featured on the Humans of New York photo blog where he praised his principal as the most influential person in his life. The Atlantic

Three OC school districts forced to prove that they’re making time for PE
Three Orange County school districts must document that teachers are providing physical education instruction during the school day. Orange County Register

The Los Angeles Unified School District has reached agreement with the union on a new labor agreement.

No, not that union

The district and Unit E, Los Angeles/Orange County Building and Trades Council, which represents 1,300 electricians, plumbers, carpenters, roofers and other skilled workers, have agreed to terms on a three-year deal that includes a lump-sum payment of 2 percent for the 2013-14 school year and salary increases of 2 percent in 2014-15, 2 percent in 2015-16 and 2.5 percent in 2016-17.

“I want to thank the Building and Trades Council for their professionalism and dedication to our students,” Roger Finstad, LAUSD’s Director of Maintenance and Operations, said in a statement. “This agreement not only allows us to attract and keep the very best and well-trained employees, it strengthens and prioritizes maintenance and repair services to those school communities who need it the most.”

Chris Hannan, Business Representative for the Trades Council, said the deal “brings in a fair and competitive wage structure to our members and will attract high-quality apprentices to the District. It is a true win-win and we look forward to bringing this tentative agreement to our membership for ratification.”

The agreement will go into effect upon ratification by unit members and adoption by the Board of Education.

LA Unified broke ground Saturday on South Region High School #8 with a ceremony attended by district and community leaders. The school is the last of 131 to be built under the district’s current $27 billion bond program.

The school will be on a  9.24 acre campus consisting of three learning communities, according to LA Unified. Facilities will include classrooms, science labs, a library, a multi-purpose building, a food service area, lunch shelter, administration offices and a gymnasium. The school is scheduled to open for students in 2017.

Take a look at the below video for a computer-generated tour of what the new school should look like.

Tommy Chang finalist for Boston superintendent

Tommy Chang, LAUSD’s superintendent of the Intensive Support and Innovation Educational Service Center, is one of four finalists to become the superintendent of Boston  Public Schools.

As part of the process, Chang participated in a forum this week where he answered questions from the public, according to the Boston Globe. The public forum is one of the last steps in the process, and the school board will select a new superintendent on March 3, according to the report. Take a look at video from Chang’s public forum here.

KLCS director wins award

Alan Popkin, KLCS’s director of Television Engineering and Technical Operations, was presented this week with the Association of Public Television Stations (APTS) 2015 EDGE Award. The EDGE Award is “given to an individual who has excelled in the use of technology, groundbreaking partnerships and other pioneering work to advance public television’s public service mission.”

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Bennett Kayser

While the LA Unified’s District 5 board incumbent, Bennett Kayser, did not make himself available for an interview with LA School Report as part of our candidate profile series, he has nonetheless played a high profile role on issues before the school board during his term in office.

With strong support from the teachers union, UTLA, Kayser is running for reelection against two challengers, Andrew Thomas and Ref Rodriguez, in what has become the nastiest of the school board races, heading into next Tuesday’s elections.

Here is what we know about Kayser, based on his voting record on major issues and his stated positions since he was first elected to the board in 2011:

Charter Schools

Kayser and his wife co-founded one of LA Unified’s charter schools, but over the years he has turned his back on them. When once they were akin to scrappy start-ups launched by community members with an interest in pioneering new teaching and learning techniques, he now contends they have become cookie-cutter, money-making operations run by corporations.

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We’ve all seen this in person or on TV: One lawyer says something provocative or inappropriate, and the opposing lawyer leaps to his feet, saying “Objection, your honor.”

“Sustained,” says the judge. “The jury will disregard that last remark.”

After yesterday, we’re now all in the jury box, trying to figure out what to make of Scot Graham’s third and latest lawsuit against the district with his descriptions of sexual misconduct by Superintendent Ramon Cortines and the atmosphere of intimidation and sexual intemperance inside LA Unified headquarters.

We also have to decide whether unseemly remarks Graham attributes to Cortines about Monica Garcia and the rest of the board deserve to be carefully considered or summarily disregarded.

Sadly, though, in the confines of LA Unified, a school district that seldom gets out of its own way, it really doesn’t matter.

Whether true or false, the images shaped by Graham’s characterizations are hard to shake: Cortines, as a sexual predator; Cortines, describing Garcia as a “fat slovenly lesbian”; Cortines, regarding the board as a group of special interest ciphers.

Only a court can decide the veracity of such claims as they create a hostile work environment. But the possibility than even some of it might be true will linger, undermining whatever trust parents, teachers and board members have in a man who led the district as superintendent twice before, making him the board’s singular choice to succeed John Deasy last year, paying him $300,000 for an eight-month contract. 

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