Education Reform

The crisis in Los Angeles public schools — where only about half of the students graduate from high school and fewer than 30% of those who do are college-ready — can't be solved until we make excellent teaching a top priority. Teacher quality alone can't solve the problem, but every child in every school in every neighborhood must have an effective teacher. A study released last week by the National Council on Teacher Quality calls attention to just how dramatically we are failing when it comes to recruiting, training, evaluating and compensating teachers.

Gloria Romero is a Democrat. She was elected to the California Assembly as a Democrat and later to the state Senate. She served as Democratic leader of the Senate, the first woman to do so. Ben Austin is a Democrat too. He worked in the White House under President Clinton and was an ardent supporter of Barack Obama. Both Austin and Romero support reform of the nation's education system, and when Romero helped found an organization to push that effort, she and her co-founders (fellow Democrats)

Gloria Romero is a Democrat. She was elected to the California Assembly as a Democrat and later to the state Senate. She served as Democratic leader of the Senate, the first woman to do so. Ben Austin is a Democrat too. He worked in the White House under President Clinton and was an ardent supporter of Barack Obama. Both Austin and Romero support reform of the nation's education system, and when Romero helped found an organization to push that effort, she and her co-founders (fellow Democrats)

Los Angeles should be treated more like a state when it comes to education, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said Friday in an attempt to persuade the U.S. Department of Education to give the city some special treatment. The mayor wants the city to receive federal money directly through Race to the Top, a competitive grant program, and get a waiver from No Child Left Behind, the President George W. Bush-era standardized-testing policy. Both options have been available only to states. Villaraigosa floated the plan at a panel discussion with New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Education Secretary Arne Duncan at American University.

The SAT is to college admission ... " ... As a root canal is to a dentist?" said Peter Lee, 16. He and several other weary-looking high school students had just emerged from a four-hour SAT prep class in Glendale. "As a root canal is to a patient?" suggested Emin Gharibian, 17. Neither of those worked for Anthony Kwon, 16. "As a root canal is to pain," he said. Pain is typically the refrain when college-bound youngsters jaw about the SAT. But some relief is coming.

A small group of university students staged a sit-down demonstration Sunday in Tian An Men Square in the heart of Beijing to press for increased funding of education and higher pay for intellectuals. The protest came after several days in which posters critical of government educational policies and supportive of political democratization were put up--and allowed to stay up--at Beijing University, the nation's most prestigious educational institution.

In 1973, at age 58, John Henry Martin suffered a severe heart attack, the result of a viral infection he developed after cutting himself while clearing his property in Cold Springs Harbor, N.Y. He was dead on arrival at the hospital but physicians revived him. Then, as he recalls it, after 30 days in intensive care, he was sent home to die.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, in an inflammatory speech last month, referred to United Teachers Los Angeles as the "loudest opponent and the largest obstacle to creating quality schools. " In his enthusiasm to join the national chorus blaming teachers unions, he chose to ignore the myriad positive reforms teachers are making in L.A. schools with the support of our union leadership. We are UTLA representatives at schools in the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, or PLAS, which is affiliated with the mayor's office, and which the mayor has repeatedly identified as "my partnership schools.

In many third-grade classrooms in California, students are taught — briefly — about obtuse and acute angles. They have no way to comprehend this lesson fully. Their math training so far hasn't taught them the concepts involved. They haven't learned what a degree is or that a circle has 360 of them. They haven't learned division, so they can't divide 360 by 4 to determine that a right angle is 90 degrees, and thus understand that an acute angle is less than 90 degrees and an obtuse angle more.

In his previous Oscar-winning documentary, filmmaker Davis Guggenheim handled Al Gore, manmade climate change and imminent global peril. This time, he's really grabbing something hot: education reform. In "Waiting for Superman," which opens Sept. 24 in Los Angeles and New York City, Guggenheim vies to do for education reform what "An Inconvenient Truth" did for global warming: raise awareness, make people care and push toward a solution. But this latest docu-editorial will divide some of his biggest fans.

The first "parent trigger" petition in California, which sought to allow a charter organization to take over a Compton elementary school, ultimately failed amid bitter charges on both sides that parents had been harassed and lied to. The state Board of Education had a chance to make the process less chaotic by requiring open meetings at which both reformers and opponents would lay out their arguments, enabling parents to make an informed decision....

Rick Santorum, asked by an audience member about No Child Left Behind, said he supported President George W. Bush 's signature education reform law that is now reviled by conservative voters out of loyalty to his party. “It was against the principles I believe, but when you're part of the team, sometimes you take one from the team for the leader, and I made a mistake,” he said, and some in the audience booed. Santorum reiterated that he would like to see federal and state power over education returned to the local level, and added that his personal life showed his commitment.

Deviating sharply from education reform policies championed by President Obama, California Gov. Jerry Brown is calling for limits on standardized testing and reduced roles for federal and state government in local schools. Brown's positions, outlined in Wednesday's State of the State address, align closely with the state's two major teachers unions, but also embody Brown's independent streak. The governor's call for a reduction in standardized testing comes at a time when such tests are gaining influence across the nation, due in part to heavy federal support.

The price of war Re "Remembering California's war dead," Nov. 6 You cite figures indicating that there have been 6,204 U.S. military deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. As a veteran of World War II, I can still remember the wounds and suffering of that long-ago time. Veterans Day will soon be upon us, and it should bring home the fact that every war really represents a failure of humans to conduct their affairs in a sensible and civilized way. Dead soldiers are victims even more than they are heroes.

The Obama administration is poised to spare school districts from potentially harsh penalties for low-performing campuses if states agree to broad reforms favored by the federal government, including the linking of teacher evaluations to student test scores. The plan, outlined by senior administration officials Thursday, would relieve school districts from the requirements of the decade-old No Child Left Behind Act, which requires nearly all students to be academically "proficient" by 2014.

On several occasions over the last few years, A.J. Duffy sat in a conference room with the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times and expounded on the evils of charter schools, the value of teachers union contracts that included pages and pages of extensive work rules, the importance of the teacher seniority system and the nefarious intentions of those who sought to streamline the firing of bad teachers. So it came as a bit of a surprise when Duffy, who recently was termed out as president of United Teachers Los Angeles, announced that he wants to open charter schools that will make it harder for teachers to receive tenure, easier for them to lose it and allow schools to move much faster to fire ineffective instructors.

It was annoying to read Michael Greve's "School Reform Yields to Politics" (Opinion, June 24). It was just another in an unending series of conservative attacks on public schools using the perpetual mantra: Ted Kennedy and the National Education Assn. are bad; vouchers are good. As long as Greve and his fellow conservatives continue to ignore the incontrovertible fact that test scores can be predicted accurately by the level of education of the mother in a household and/or the income of a family and the ramifications of that situation, education reform will continue to be, as Greve states, "business as usual."

The crisis in Los Angeles public schools — where only about half of the students graduate from high school and fewer than 30% of those who do are college-ready — can't be solved until we make excellent teaching a top priority. Teacher quality alone can't solve the problem, but every child in every school in every neighborhood must have an effective teacher. A study released last week by the National Council on Teacher Quality calls attention to just how dramatically we are failing when it comes to recruiting, training, evaluating and compensating teachers.

The 2,863 boxes of papers and memorabilia recently moved to Cal State Long Beach's library represent a hefty portion of late 20th century California's political history. The archives of former Gov. George Deukmejian's administration cover many key state issues, including the death penalty, education reform and the aftermath of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. In the large storage room where the cardboard boxes are shelved, framed photographs show Deukmejian with superstars of politics, entertainment and sports: Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, Tommy Lasorda, Sylvester Stallone and John Travolta, among others.