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LAUSD’s chance of getting $40M doomed by LAUSD union stalemate


By Barbara Jones Staff Writer The Los Angeles teachers union has refused to sign off on Los Angeles Unified’s bid for a prestigious Race to the Top grant, costing the district a shot at winning $40 million in federal money, sources said Satur­day.

LAUSD had been negotiating for days with United Teachers Los Angeles, in the hope of gaining the endorsement it needed to submit the the Race to the Top applica­tion.

Superintendent John Deasy had said he needed the application approved by Friday so there would be make revisions and over­night a finalized copy to the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., by Tues­day’s deadline. Sources said talks broke off late Friday, and the district and union had no further contact on Saturday.

Deasy and UTLA President Warren Fletcher could not immediately be reached for comment.

This was the first time the Education Department had opened Race to the Top grants to individual districts, with a total of $400 million to be awarded. Deasy had said
LAUSD’s chance of getting $40M doomed by stalemate


By Barbara Jones Staff Writer The Los Angeles teachers union has refused to sign off on Los Angeles Unified’s bid for a prestigious Race to the Top grant, costing the district a shot at winning $40 million in federal money, sources said Satur­day.

LAUSD had been negotiating for days with United Teachers Los Angeles, in the hope of gaining the endorsement it needed to submit the the Race to the Top applica­tion.

Superintendent John Deasy had said he needed the application approved by Friday so there would be make revisions and over­night a finalized copy to the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., by Tues­day’s deadline. Sources said talks broke off late Friday, and the district and union had no further contact on Saturday.

Deasy and UTLA President Warren Fletcher could not immediately be reached for comment.

This was the first time the Education Department had opened Race to the Top grants to individual districts, with a total of $400 million to be awarded. Deasy had said he considered the district’s application to be very strong, and he had high hopes of win­ning one of the highly competi­tive grants.

Sources said LAUSD’s appli­cation targeted middle school students, with a multi-phased program to get and keep them on track for high school gradua­tion.

The proposal included hir­ing hundreds of teachers, coun­selors and social workers to step in and help underperform­ing students, sources said. It also included the resumption of summer school at the mid­dle school level — courses that have been canceled for the past several years because of the budget crisis.

Finally, sources said, money would have been set aside to create clusters of small learn­ing communities on high school campuses, an effort to boost graduation rates that have reached about 64 percent. Sources said the district’s plan exceeded the grant total by about $3 million, but that money from private donors had already covered the addi­tional costs. One requirement of the Race to the Top process is that dis­tricts include student test scores as a significant factor in teacher evaluations by the 2014-15 school year. That issue has long been a sticking point between LAUSD and its teach­ers union, with the two sides disagreeing over how to mea­sure student success.

Deasy supports a system that uses classroom test scores and demographic data, a com­plex formula known as Aca­demic Growth over Time. LAUSD is in the second year of a no-stakes pilot program that uses AGT to evaluate one teacher at each of the district’s schools.

UTLA maintains that the classroom scores are too vola­tile, and has expressed support for a schoolwide AGT model.

In fact, the two sides have been trying to reach a compro­mise on a new evaluation sys­tem after a federal judge ruled said LAUSD had to start using student scores in job reviews in order to comply with the law. The district has declared an impasse in those talks, even as it tries to meet a Dec. 4 court-ordered deadline for cre­ating a new evaluation system. In an effort to broker a deal on Race to the Top, sources said the district had proposed that nothing agreed to as part of the lawsuit would be bind­ing on the application. How­ever, that apparently didn’t sway union leaders.

barbara.jones@dailynews.com, 818-713-3710

and they want me to vote yes on future tax bills...NOT

Actually, the teachers are opposed to the VAM/AGTtype of evaluation, not evaluations in general. According to my recent UTLA paper, a judge just ordered that "the district must negotiate any changes in the evaluation system with UTLA" (page 1-United Teacher-Oct. 19,2012). That's what is happening now. As usual, the media does not have their facts exactly right.