Teachers

California's top education official sought Tuesday to counter federal criticism of the state's reluctance to use student test scores to evaluate teachers, paying a visit to Long Beach to highlight one of the few California school districts to make extensive use of such data. The Long Beach Unified School District's use of student scores to assess the effectiveness of programs, instructional strategies and teachers is a rarity in California, and state Supt.

A former Catholic high school teacher sued the Diocese of Orange on Friday, alleging he was fired this summer in retaliation for blowing the whistle on his principal's son, who brought a handgun to campus. After eight years of teaching science at Santa Margarita Catholic High School in Rancho Santa Margarita, Michael R. Bodkin said he was told in June his contract would not be renewed because he hadn't earned his master's degree or required teaching credential. "Without a doubt, I've been singled out," said Bodkin, who said the school employs other teachers who don't hold advanced degrees or credentials.

The financially strapped Los Angeles Unified School District says it cannot afford to hire any new teachers next year from Teach for America, a prestigious program that places high-achieving college graduates in low-income, underperforming schools. The district has worked with the nonprofit since the early 1990s; more than 600 Teach for America members have taught in L.A. Unified classrooms since 2004.

The Los Angeles Unified School District is trying to make the transition from a centralized bureaucracy that dictates the minutiae of daily education in its schools to a model that confers more power on individual schools and holds them accountable for the results. Yet the central office still seems to have trouble knowing when to let go. Its waffling is the latest obstacle to the district's new initiative to open perhaps 250 schools to outside management, such as charter operators or community organizations.

Sipping a cup of coffee in the Los Angeles courthouse where he is on trial for fraud, math teacher Matthias Vheru said all he wanted to do was write the best algebra book possible to help his students and those of his colleagues. "I spent my life trying to help underachieving kids," said Vheru, wearing a tie with a mathematical equation that read: 2 teach is 2 touch life 4 ever. "I'm just trying to make the language of math easy to understand."

On a quiet Sunday morning, a man wearing baggy shorts and a black hoodie stood in a parking lot and pulled out a can of spray paint. His burly right arm, inked with the image of a dragon, hung in midair as he worked the nozzle. Across the way, where railroad tracks met an overpass, a concrete wall covered with black letters displayed the work of neighborhood taggers.

When the school board in this rural community voted to get rid of popular math teacher Ryan Dutton in September, the students at Tioga High School were so upset, the entire school boycotted class the next day. Then they decided to save his job. What started as a civics class project soon became much more: a campaign to remove all five board members of Big Oak Flat-Groveland Unified School District.

No teachers will lose their jobs this school year, Los Angeles Unified School District officials announced Friday, a calculated gamble that will preserve classroom continuity in the short term but lead to a larger deficit next year. The decision reverses course from last week, when the school board voted to give Supt. Ramon C. Cortines the authority to send pink slips to nearly 2,300 instructors.

A mistrial was declared Wednesday in a fraud case against a former Los Angeles Unified School District math teacher who prosecutors said conned the district into placing a $3.7-million order to buy math textbooks he wrote. After deliberating for eight days, the jury was unable to reach a unanimous verdict. The panel was hung 11 to 1 in favor of acquitting Matthias Vheru, 53. The U.S. attorney's office has until March 23 to decide whether to retry Vheru. "I feel great," Vheru said.

Thomas Shelden, a fourth-grade teacher at Charles White Elementary in Westlake, is one of about 160 school district employees "housed" by L.A. Unified. Shelden was accused of sexually harassing a fellow teacher. A district inquiry did not substantiate that, but LAUSD assigned Shelden first to a district office and later to home, saying he repeatedly had contacted the woman against district orders. He is forbidden to teach, seek a second job or leave the premises during the school day.