LAUSD Board – Los Angeles Education Examiner

Split Decision on Board Elections Reverses School Board Alignment – EdX News from Election 2020

Seventeen hours from the close of polls in LA County (LAC) leaves a mixed set of results – from polar opposite wins, to hopeful-anticipation.

While 100% of LAC’s precincts have reported partial results, VBM (Vote By Mail) ballots continue to be delivered to ballot counting facilities statewide, including LAC’s Norwalk, where the count is on-going. Updates to LAC counts will not come before the close of day and starting next week, only twice per week.

When registration for delivery of VBM ballots closed last month, 5,709,853 were registered to vote in LAC. Registrations at Vote Centers since that time, including right up through the close of election day, remain unreported.

Think your vote doesn’t matter? Uneven early voting across LAUSD Districts means it may count more than ever.

Are you wondering whether the vote is effectively all over. Whether so many early ballots have been returned there’s, say, little point still in advocating for Schools And Community First (prop 15)? For community college board members? For Schools local bond measure RR? For your LAUSD BD3 (Schmerelson v Koziatek) or LAUSD BD7 (Castellanos v Franklin) board member?

The TL;DR is Your vote is still needed! Your advocacy is crucial. At best 4 in 5 ballots have not yet been counted as returned. Students are needing their voters’ support.

Who’s already gotten their VBM in? Who votes in the districts electing a school board member?

“When you find hypocrisy in the daylight, look for power in the shadows”

-Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, 10/13/20

Senator Whitehouse laid out beautifully on Tuesday the context surrounding Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearings in Washington as the pushing and pulling of ‘actors inside the frame of a puppet theater.’ He argues that not only are outside forces controlling these actors in the main show but they are integral to the narrative of it. And some of the evidence for broadening focus beyond the proscenium is when characters in the drama adopt “the practice of claiming … moral standards or beliefs to which [their] own behavior does not conform”: hypocrisy.

Just so has Marilyn Koziatek – or the independent expenditure committee (IEC) from which she proudly accepts endorsement of her West San Fernando Valley campaign for school board in the LAUSD3 board district – swerved from insinuation of responsibility for scandals that occurred before his tenure, to antisemitism to anti-LGBTQ and anti-choice bigotry. Schmerelson’s defeated opponent who has endorsed Koziatek, has even hypocritically alluded to Scott Schmerelson’s former republican registration. Meanwhile, swearing brand new allegiance to a political party is precisely the maneuver employed by her endorsed-candidate, Koziatek. The hypocrisy is not without irony, because Koziatek’s unacknowledged switch is in suspicious temporal proximity to her bid for this non-partisan office. Schmerelson’s, on the other hand, is in sharp ethical contrast since in concealing nothing, he has redeemed his revision of four years’ resistance, as ideological repudiation of today’s GOP.

Individual’s campaign contributions reflect ideological, not candidate, loyalty

Table 1 shows contributions to and between these campaigns directly: from individuals, from PACS (union, individuals and political), and from commercial special interests, as well as government entities (and “unitemized” entries). Individuals with campaign contributions to this set of candidates that totals $500 or below is suppressed in the interest of space; available on request.

Outflanking CTA From The Left: How Anti-Racist Demands Are Captured By Privateers

The death of George Floyd in custody of the Minneapolis City Police has roiled our nation. There can be no tolerance of murder, which is all the more abominable at the hands of authority. As citizens everywhere rise – and continue to rise – to protest injustice, and we collectively contemplate systemic and institutional racism, prejudice and bias, our school community reflects these politics and the raising of consciousness in microcosm.

On the last day of its fiscal year, the nation’s largest school district with a democratically elected school board (LAUSD BOE) voted to decimate its school police department (LASPD).

UTLA Calls For School Board To Defund The Police (LASPD)

Yesterday, the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) Board of Directors voted on a motion demanding that the school board de-fund the Los Angeles Schools Police Department (LASPD), the largest school police department in the country. While the full details of the motion and its reach are not public information as of this writing, UTLA has a long history of supporting major reforms in school policing and the Black Lives Matter movement in Los Angeles.

The vote can be understood as support for the Black Lives Matter protests. Concern for the experience of our BIPOC students everywhere – in our schools and on our streets – has taken over the discourse across the country following the murder of George Floyd and the eruption of police brutality in response to protests.

The UTLA is hardly alone in calling for radical changes, or even a complete abolition, of the LASPD. Groups such as the Community Corporation of South Los Angeles, the ACLU, Black Lives Matter, Students Deserve, and the Labor Community Strategy Center (known for projects such as Taking Action Social Justice Clubs in L.A. High Schools and the Bus Riders Union) have been working for change in how middle and high schools mediate behavioral issues with students for years. And that change would include either de-funding or completely abolishing the school police.

The LAUSD Budget Under Covid: An “Economy of Care” or of Institutional Protection?

Now we have seen manifest the power of budgets.

In the wake of the profoundly inequitable calamity of Covid19, has grown an international paroxysm that Black Lives Matter. In Los Angeles Mayor Garcetti is calling for “$250 million in cuts from city departments, including the LAPD, … steer[ing] the funds to invest in job programs, health initiatives and other services supporting the Black community and other communities of color.” And since it is the city council that is in charge of the purse, more weighty still is a resolution from Council President Martinez co-introduced with CD10’s Wesson and CD9’s Price instructing identification of least $100m-$150m to be cut specifically from LAPD’s budget.

The teacher’s union board, UTLA, has voted to reallocate school police funding.

So it is that a budget is proverbially “a political document”: what politics are reflected in Superintendent Beutner’s Revised May 2020 Budget for LAUSD?

Portfolio Management At LAUSD: Private Security, Promotional Hats, Outsourced Instruction, No-Bid HighTech Contracts

In mid-May, 2020 the LAUSD board reviewed the Deputy Superintendent’s weekly lists of purchases and contracts for March 16-May 8, 2020, part of “the $540m in expenditures for Covid19” approved through the LA County Office of Education (LACOE).

That $314m is detailed below, authorized under the emergency conditions declared two months earlier at the board’s special meeting of March 10, 2020. This is also when last the board met in regular session prior to 5/19/20; three days later the District shuttered ordinary operations on March 13, 2020.

Under this “Emergency Resolution” the Superintendent may “…enter into necessary contracts to respond to emergency conditions.” That is, these expenditures are subject to neither venerable bidding protocols that control waste, fraud and abuse, nor oversight by the school board, which sets District policy. LACOE now approves these expenditures but according to what directives?

Houston, We Have A Problem: Digital Liftoff Without Direction

In his March 11, 2020 weekly address, LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner misleadingly refers to the emergency effort transiently supporting disrupted schoolsite instruction with internet applications (e.g., Zoom for conferencing, online worksheets and textbooks for resources), as an explicitly sanctioned “transition to online learning.” In the logical sleight-of-hand at 2:52m, Beutner considers the technological “transition” a foregone conclusion and proclaims efforts to achieve it a “moonshot”. Varnishing the de facto pedagogical revolution with declarative assurance (known colloquially as “fake news”), he deadpans that “the rockets have been built and liftoff has occurred.”

But while technology certainly is being utilized, online learning is less assuredly a thing.

The emergency imperative of social distancing may compel the district’s efforts, but no shift in fundamental policy has been declared by its policy-setting school board (BOE). On March 10, 2020 the BOE authorized “the Superintendent to take any and all actions necessary to ensure the continuation of public education and the health and safety of District students and staff….” However there has been no accordance on equating emergency public education measures with a new normal in public education consisting of online instruction.

Bain And Company Arrive At LAUSD

While families have been scrambling to homeschool and accessorize their 20 million+ LAUSD GrabNGo meals, the District’s Superintendent and improbably employed former investment-banker, Austin Beutner, has sought guidance from his own comfort-sector, the world of corporate management consulting.

Last Wednesday, May 6 2020, LAUSD announced that Bain & Company will work on a pro bono basis “to evaluate and implement strategies to help teachers, students and families in remote, online learning.” Meanwhile the firm of Bain & Company itself announced a very different mandate to “identify and prioritize potential initiatives [based on research and insights by education experts, key district stakeholders and Los Angeles Unified personnel…] that have a tangible impact, are fiscally responsible and can be implemented quickly. Based on agreed-upon priorities, Bain will then design a high-level plan of action for Los Angeles Unified to consider. … At Bain we are committed to investing in high impact education initiatives.”

That is, notwithstanding direct authorization from LAUSD’s elected, policy-setting schoolboard, the Superintendent has invited activist, business management consultants to filter LA’s Unified School District through a sieve of market efficiency – not educational –strategies.

Rounding Up the Top News

Every week we’ll be rounding up the top education news. Here’s the top news from the last eight days.

Who is funding the LAUSD elections?

LAUSD Board elections are becoming more and more expensive. We’ve already discussed how much of that money is from dark money PAC’s, but over the last week larger, legacy media have taken a look at the mega-bucks that are taking over the LAUSD Board elections.

LAist notes that the record for spending in an LAUSD primary election is at least $5.7 million. That record is being challenged with a couple of weeks left, and the figure of over $4 million spent so far is rising rapidly.