Najee Ali, Executive Director of Project Islamic HOPE - "The candidates have to find ways to help close the achievement gap and improve the graduation rates of Black and Latino children in their districts. Also, the candidates in the runoff need to have the political will to put the interests of the school children first as opposed to being swept up by the current political opposition that the mayor and school board are involved in."
Neal Kleiner, LAUSD School Board Candidate, District 7 - "Whether the students of LAUSD are going to be held hostage by the mayor of Los Angeles who is using public education for his "whipping boy" as he makes a run for higher office. His attempt to take over the District, right after his election as Mayor of Los Angeles, instead of offering to work together with the Board to improve the quality of education in LAUSD, was politically motivated. The mayor of Los Angeles has a great deal of moral leadership. He has raised issues like the "drop-out" rate which are serious and need to be addressed. If he wished to work in a collaborative manner there is much that he could do as mayor to help public education. The key issues of class size reduction, smaller learning communities, local community control of school site selection, and increasing the graduation rate have been lost in the mayor's attempted take over of LAUSD."
Richard Vladovic, LAUSD School Board Candidate, District 7 - "We need to establish a 'Safe Passage' network in and around our schools to ensure our children can make it to and from school safely, and put successful early intervention anti-gang programs like the Gang Alternatives Program (GAP) in all our schools. We must redirect money to the classroom by reducing central office bureaucracy, increasing efficiencies and identifying savings. Also we need to provide School Accountability Report Cards to parents so they can more closely monitor their local school’s performance, and create a parent resource center and parent coordinator at every school to help keep parents involved."
CADRE Executive Director Maisie Chin. CADRE members conducted a survey of 120 young adults about why they dropped out of high school.
Photo by Martin Lipton
By Christine O’Keefe
Staff Writer
The LAUSD Board of Education unanimously passed the Discipline Foundation Policy for School-wide Positive Behavior on February 27. This policy aims to move discipline procedures away from a focus on punishment and towards positive behavioral support. According to both grassroots and district stakeholders, the passage of the policy is only a first step. Various stakeholders must now work together to find ways to implement the policy that address everyone's needs.
Parents and community activists want to find solutions that support positive changes in students who act out by getting to the root of their problems. LAUSD teachers, who teach some of the largest classes in the country, want to find consistent and effective ways to promote positive student behavior.
By Christine Senteno
Editor
Freshman Oscar Gomez is pretty typical of many students his age. He is not sure what he wants to do after high school. He might go to college, but he has also expressed interest in becoming a forklift operator or finding work in construction.
As Gomez considers his future, researchers at UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access (IDEA) have produced a series of reports that may provide him some help. The 15 reports examine the notion of creating a high school curriculum that prepares all California students for both college and the 21st century workforce.
Laila Hasan (left) works with Belmont parents and UCLA TEP "Novice Teachers" to improve student achievement.
Every Thursday evening Emilia Martinez, mother of two teenagers attending LAUSD schools, has her husband drop her off at Belmont High School. She meets with 26 other concerned parents and 17 “Novice Teachers” as part of the Parents and Teachers Working Together. UCLA’s Teacher Education Program (TEP) facilitates the group. The Novice Teachers are first-year teachers from UCLA’s TEP doing their student teaching in the Belmont Complex and Berendo Middle School.
Program Coordinator Laila Hasan said the goal of the program is to assist new teachers in collaborating with parents, school and community members. Together they can support student competency and academic achievement.
Dolores Huerta will celebrate her 78th birthday. March 31 is the birthday of her colleague and friend, Cesar Chavez.
Long before I ever met Dolores Huerta, I used her as a role model for my children, especially my growing daughter.
Huerta seemed to have it all — certainly not in terms of material possessions, but in spirit and strength. She was not only brown and beautiful, she was bold.
Liz Sullivan is the Right to Education program director at the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative (NESRI) based in New York.
The LAUSD Board of Education adopted a new discipline policy on February 27 aimed at reducing suspensions through “positive behavior support” that prevents and constructively intervenes in student misbehavior. This is a positive step toward changing the harsh suspensions and extreme interventions by police students now face.
All children have a basic human right to receive a quality education and be treated with respect. School discipline should be a vehicle to protect these rights by helping students develop positive behavioral skills and creating productive, respectful school environments. Many students need counseling and supportive services to work through their conflicts and to help them develop as human beings.
Yet in a recent report produced in collaboration with community organizations in Los Angeles, the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative (NESRI) documented practices in Los Angeles schools that severely undermine students’ rights to education and dignity.
The report, “Deprived of Dignity: Degrading Treatment and Abusive Discipline in New York City and Los Angeles Public Schools,” shows that discipline is playing a distorted role creating destructive school environments and pushing young people to dropout of school. This reflects a disturbing trend in districts across the country to use law enforcement personnel, zero-tolerance suspensions and other punitive strategies against students. Supporters of these policies believe that they will help make schools safer. But instead, many students feel threatened by these policies which do little to address the causes of conflict and ignore students’ educational and emotional needs.
In New York City in 2004, Mayor Bloomberg created the Impact Schools program placing 200 police officers in two dozen schools with the most disciplinary incidents. This policy has prompted outrage and concern from parents and advocates about the harassment and inappropriate arrest of students and teachers, increases in suspensions, and decreases in attendance. The LAUSD should avoid the same destructive policies and reduce such practices in schools.
In Los Angeles, police and safety officers currently intervene in everyday disciplinary issues, like ticketing students $250 when they are late for school, removing disruptive students from classrooms in handcuffs, and even forcefully slamming students against walls after fights and spraying mace on bystanders to break up crowds.
A seventeen year-old female African American student said, “One time the security guards came into the classroom and made everybody take their bags out to be searched and did pat downs on the students. They pulled the teacher out and wouldn’t tell us what was going on.”
Schools also repeatedly suspend and exclude students from the classroom for minor misbehavior, such as arguing with other students and shouting in hallways.
According to LAUSD data, at Van Nuys Middle School there were 538 suspensions last year, a suspension rate of 38.5 percent or over one in three students. By contrast, at Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood, where positive behavior supports have been implemented, there were 165 suspensions, a decrease of 26 percent from the previous year.
Schools also hand out suspensions unevenly, and arbitrarily punish some students more severely than others for the same behavior based on stereotypes about their race, their neighborhood, or because they have a ‘bad reputation.’ Furthermore, most students interviewed in the report said schools do not provide counseling or mediation when students are suspended for such things as fighting even when they reach out for help. Guidance counselors tell students they are too busy or can’t help.
The LAUSD should fully implement the new policy, providing quality training and resources for staff to identify and encourage positive behavior and intervene constructively in patterns of disruptive behavior. Suspensions, expulsions or transfers to other schools should be the last resort, and students must receive continued access to education when removed from the classroom.
Furthermore, the LAUSD must go beyond this new policy to end the abusive intervention of police and safety officers. Police officers should not be involved in school disciplinary matters. School security can play an important role creating secure environments for all students and staff, but they must be trained appropriately to interact with adolescents and to treat all members of the school community with respect.
Finally, the LAUSD must guarantee students and parents their basic right to participate in the development of discipline and safety policies. Parents and students know better than anyone the devastating impact that abusive discipline policies can have, and they know what young people need to stay engaged and productive in school. Without their participation, the school system will not be able to meet the needs of our young people.
-Liz Sullivan
To view the report Deprived of Dignity: Degrading Treatment and Abusive Discipline in New York City & Los Angeles Public Schools, go to:
http://www.nesri.org/programs/dignity_report.html