With California facing a possible lockout from a $4.35 billion federal education grant, Los Angeles Unified officials are hoping to branch out on their own to compete for the funds apart from the state.
Superintendent Ramon Cortines sent a letter to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan this week requesting to apply for “Race to the Top,” a competitive pot of stimulus dollars designated for school reform.
The grant is designed to be awarded through state departments of education, but recent criticisms by President Obama on California educational policies have led LAUSD officials to consider their own effort.
Obama reprimanded California for a policy that prohibits school districts from using student test scores to evaluate teacher performance.
The use of test scores is a hotly contested issue, strongly opposed by teacher unions in California, but the Obama administration has stressed the need to use data to cull good teachers from bad ones. Duncan has said prohibiting that use could disqualify states from receiving grant funding.
But cash-strapped LAUSD - which by itself has more students than many states - hopes to override those concerns and circumvent the state education department by applying for the grant on its own.
“I am writing to ask you to consider an application for Race to the Top funds directly from the Los Angeles Unified School District rather than through the state of California,” Cortines wrote.
“If you compare LAUSD’s enrollment of over 688,000 students to other states, we would rank 25th in the country in size.”District officials said they could not estimate how much money LAUSD might receive if it qualified for the grant.
For the district losing out on even a portion of the stimulus money could be disastrous as officials ponder what sacrifices may have to be made under the state budget signed earlier this week by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
A desire for change
LAUSD has already cut more than $1.3 billion from its budget over the next three years and laid off more than 2,000 teachers and 2,800 other district employees to close a multimillion budget gap.
District leaders also said that at the core of the request is a desire to change the district, and improve years of dismal test scores and graduation rates, despite a bleak financial picture.
“What you are seeing is very strong Los Angeles leadership,” said LAUSD board president Monica Garcia.
“We are not going to be victims. We are not going to let anything get in the way of reform. . . . We are willing to change the way we do business.”
“At this point we are not aware of any plans to allow individual districts to be recipients for the “Race for the Top” funds,” said Hilary McLean, communications director for the California Department of Education.
States that receive funding will get it based on addressing four key criteria that include adopting academic standards that prepare students for college and careers; recruiting and retaining good teachers and administrators; using data to improve student achievement; and turning around low-performing schools.
In his letter to Duncan, Cortines stressed that LAUSD is either meeting or actively working toward all the criteria listed in the grant guidelines.
Cortines said the district already collects some of the most extensive data in the country on students and plans to make more use of it.
The district has also launched the School Report Card as a key accountability system for schools, and a new data program, coined MyData, will be a user-friendly system for teachers to access individual student data.
Cortines also said he is planning to take direct control over the district’s lowest-performing schools where he will implement “aggressive changes and supports” that could include closing schools and reconstituting them with new personnel.
While Cortines stressed using test scores to guide instructional decisions, the superintendent said he did not believe that alone should be used to evaluate teachers.
Labor leaders left out
A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, was pleased to hear the superintendent stand behind the union on that issue, but he was disappointed that labor leaders were not included in the drafting of the letter.
“I believe that Cortines understands that there are equity problems across the board with evaluating teachers based on test scores,” Duffy said.
Longtime parent advocate Bill Ring also cautioned the district about pursuing the federal funding without first studying the district’s failings.
LAUSD is in its third year of “program improvement status,” a designation that means the district has failed to meet certain federal benchmarks under No Child Left Behind.
“If they are asking for Race to the Top funds, it presumes that they are in a position to demonstrate that they know what to do to be effective,” Ring said.
“There has to be a recognition that what we’ve been doing has not been working. If we are just going to posture so that we can collect the money, then the kids are going to be the ones who lose.”