Don't Forget South Central

US to Focus on Equity in Assigning of Teachers When I was a newer teacher, I used to think teachers should not get to pick their work location. I used to think that if there were superstar teachers, they should be assigned to teach the students who needed them the most, like the ones at the schools where I've taught. Then I realized superstar teachers are few and far between. The process to determine who is a great teacher is flawed , none exists yet. Socioeconomics more greatly determine who is a great teacher than other measures in place today. You could be a failing teacher at a failing school one year, and a superstar the next in another more affluent school or district . How do you define a failing school  anyway? So the problem remains: who will best teach the students from poverty at schools such as mine? First, I would abandon my naive idea of forcibly assigning teachers to work in places they don't choose. It would never work. The resentment and the ...

Teachers in South Central are shocked and aghast at hearing that the school district cannot account for $200,000,000 in money spent on salaries, the Los Angeles Times reported today . "The Los Angeles school district paid $200 million more in salaries than it budgeted last year even as it laid off 2,000 teachers and hundreds of other employees, according to an internal audit" writes Howard Blume, a Times education reporter who sometimes gets things right. Two. Hundred. Million. Dollars. How many jobs could that have saved? At the average new teacher salary of about $40,000, that could have saved 5,000 jobs. At our school, it could have easily preserved our young teaching force, 23 teachers, who were fired and let go in order to "right-size" the district. Over 1,000 students have been affected by having a substitute teacher this year. This could have been avoided. Let's see where this went wrong. Someone was crunching the numbers. Theoretically, LAUSD ha...