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Don’t Water Down Teacher Evaluation, Parent Pleads
As you may recall, Tuesday’s LA Times included an editorial calling for LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy to change the guideline he recently issued to principals that called for student achievement to be no more than 30 percent of a teacher’s evaluation. Thirty percent was perhaps too high a figure, according to the Times, and had been...
By Alexander Russo | March 14, 2013
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Revamp Teacher Evaluation Plan, Says LA Times
Expressing concern about increasing divisiveness between LAUSD and the teachers union, the LA Times editorial page calls for a more thoughtful, balanced approach to making much-needed improvements, including a proposal for LAUSD to make student achievement less than 30 percent of teacher evaluations: “We don’t know what heft test scores should have in performance reviews —...
By Alexander Russo | March 12, 2013
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Read: Misplaced Focus on LAUSD & Deasy
Rather than focusing on the school board election and the preservation of a superintendency, the coalition and the union should have attended to building a new education system in Sacramento and Washington, where the money and power reside. — Claremont University professor Charles Taylor Kerchner in the LA Times.
By LA School Report | March 11, 2013
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Union Schedules Special Session To Reconsider Endorsements*
UTLA Vice President Gregg Solkovits told LA School Report shortly before Wednesday’s House of Representatives meeting that the topic of the dual endorsed candidates for District 6 — Antonio Sanchez and Monica Ratliff — would likely come up, and apparently it did. The union didn’t decide to strip Sanchez of his endorsement immediately, but rather — according to a Friday morning...
By LA School Report | March 8, 2013
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Union Tells Teachers How to Protest Evaluations
Last week, UTLA sent out an “evaluation rights toolkit” to all its chapter chairs to help members “effectively assert their evaluation rights, and to defeat Deasy’s attempted end‐run around the contract.” The “end-run” refers to the guidelines sent out by Superintendent John Deasy, recommending that up to 30 percent of new teacher evaluations be devoted...
By Hillel Aron | March 6, 2013
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Commentary: Why Zimmer *Really* Switched Sides
This is a guest commentary from Unai Montes-Irueste, a former classroom teacher who spent much of last year blogging for Leadership for Educational Equity, the political recruitment spinoff of Teach For America, and is now a contributor to Politic365.com: A school board race in the second largest public education system in the nation has become the...
By Unai Montes-Irueste | February 21, 2013
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UTLA Denounces, Solicits Outside Contributions*
On Tuesday, the Coalition for School Reform announced an eye-popping $1 million contribution from Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City — whom LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa described in a press release as “the most important voice in education reform today.” UTLA denounced the Bloomberg contribution in a press release sent out Tuesday night, calling it...
By Alexander Russo | February 13, 2013
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Interview: Union President Talks Board Elections
At an hour of the morning that many of us might find unfamiliar, United Teacher of Los Angeles (UTLA) President Warren Fletcher walks to the corner and waits for a city bus to take him downtown. As the unlikely leader of the Los Angeles teachers union for the past two years, Fletcher has changed the...
By Jonathan Arkin | January 24, 2013
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UTLA Rails Against “Teacher Jails”
United Teachers Los Angeles announced in the latest edition of its weekly newsletter that it plans to push back harder against LAUSD’s so-called “teacher jails,” where teachers accused of misconduct are sent to wait while the district investigates their cases. As LA School Report contributor Hillel Aron wrote in a recent LA Weekly report, teachers sent to “jail” are usually...
By Samantha Oltman | January 10, 2013