History of IDEA
Jeannie Oakes, Founder and Former Director
Youth Voice in School Finance
NEW REPORT: Los Angeles' road to A-G for all
Without Dollars and Sense Powerpoint
Past Educational Opportunity Reports
Freeing up LAUSD
- 12-06-2011
-
Editorial/Los Angeles Times
A decade ago, the Los Angeles Unified School District centralized authority over education, including over reading instruction. The district had recently gone on a hiring spree to achieve smaller class sizes in primary grades. Many of those new teachers came with little or no pedagogical training, so the district adopted Open Court, a rigid, heavily scripted literacy curriculum. Teachers chafed at the lack of instructional freedom, though test scores improved markedly among younger students. Another few years, another swing of the educational pendulum. The school district and leaders of United Teachers Los Angeles have reached tentative agreement on a new contract that would phase in extraordinary new autonomy for individual schools so that they could determine curriculum, hiring, work rules and expenditures. (more...)
Send this
Print this
