Technology – Los Angeles Education Examiner

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.

The Price Of Pandemic Opportunities – Laptops, Public Policy And Science Awareness

All this isolating and cowering in the shadow of a revolution of computerized learning shouldn’t remove us from the exhilaration of making a difference. Our actions as individuals and as families may well be making a significant difference; data is too poor to know for sure yet. So while a “bend” in the curve is hard to attest, still the trend of cases is not truly exponential. The cases reported daily by LA County’s Department of Public Health are far from the predicted exponential plotted on a log scale below as the straight, dashed line in yellow (an exponential trend plots on a log scale as a straight line).

There are other aspects of slight positivity. The pandemic may be creating budding physicians and virologists and epidemiologists in the students among us.