Don't Forget South Central

Here's what I said today: Good afternoon, everyone, my name is Martha Infante, and I thank you all for inviting me to speak on the issue of Educational Equity as it relates to schools in California and the nation.   I, like David Cohen, am a member of the Accomplished CA Teachers Network, am Nationally Board Certified, and am currently a middle school history teacher in an urban, industrial area of Los Angeles. My educational background began in the public schools of East Los Angeles in the 1970’s.   I was fortunate to partake in a strong Gifted and Talented Education program and received a robust and fulfilling arts education as well.   As a graduate of UCLA, I continued benefitting from the investment made by the state in public schools and chose to return the favor by becoming a public school teacher in the hardest to staff area of the Los Angeles Unified School District:   South Central Los Angeles   where I have dedicated my service for 20 years....

 L.A. Academy is rapidly approaching the end of its year-round calendar era.  For 12 years, our overcrowded school has operated on a three-track system, with two tracks of students on at any given time, and one on vacation.  Thanks to a massive school-building effort, all LAUSD schools will be placed on a traditional school calendar, with 180 days of instruction, like the majority of the district. Recently there was a meeting of stakeholders, the Shared Decision Making Council, to get feedback on next year's bell schedule, with the issue of school start time as the main topic.  Two bell schedules were proposed:  one with school starting at 7:30 am, another with an 8:00 am start. All the educational research shows that later school start times are much more productive for students due to teenage sleep cycles, circadian rhythms, etc., and our current 7:30 am start is particularly brutal for our middle school students.  Even if teachers had not read the re...

  L.A. Academy Teachers Melissa Naponelli, Carla Colindres L.A.Academy students have the good fortune of being served by classroom superheroes on a daily basis--why wait for Superman when you have Superwoman and Batgirl on your side?

These are the people who will be vying to take over my school.  See my comment below. Gigi, The charter school PR machine does a tremendous job of painting a pretty picture about purported academic success at its schools. You repeat it verbatim, with not a single critical question asked, or alternate point of view presented. You do the public a disservice. Public, please google "Stanford charter school study" and you will quickly find that only 17% of charters outscore public schools. 17%. If you choose to highlight successful charters (to which you must apply, impose a parent participation requirement, and in some cases legally hold back students a grade, none of which public schools are allowed to do) then you present the public with a misleading view that all charter schools are better than all public schools. Attrition at the "best" charters is high. Where do the students who don't want to be flunked a grade go? Right back to publ...

UTLA's response to Public School Choice process, Round 3, from utla.net: November 3, 2010 PSC Round 3 – Is this really reform? Late in the day on November 2 (election day!), LAUSD released the list of focus schools for Round 3 of the Public School Choice (PSC) process. PSC Round 3 is an escalation of LAUSD’s irresponsible school giveaway. UTLA contends that the LAUSD school board is abdicating responsibility for L.A. schools by giving them away instead of providing resources and addressing schools’ challenges. Public School Choice unnecessarily politicizes school reform The Public School Choice process promotes top‐down decision making from the Superintendent and LAUSD school board rather than bottom‐up reform. School board members should be held accountable for micromanaging what should be bottom‐up reform. LAUSD has not taken action against many charter schools with similar API scores to those of the targeted focus schools.  Student learning should not be made to suffe...

A vigil was held tonight, in front of the L.A. Times building, to remember the life and work of Rigoberto Ruelas, a dedicated teacher in the South Central community.  The students' signs say it all: R-responsible U-united with the communtiy E-expert L-free A-friendly S-social Yet newspapers that serve corporate interests deemed this esteemed man ineffective. I say, L.A. Times, your reporting is what's ineffective.  

When our school lost 23 teachers in the 2009 Reduction in Force, we lost some very accomplished individuals who had chosen to work at our previously hard to staff school, and were making progress with our students in South Central Los Angeles. When $17,000,000,000 in budget cuts occurred over the last 2 years, we pulled ourselves together and made do with less counselors, less supplies, less professional development, less, support staff, and less summer and Saturday school opportunities for students. When our school got hit with layoffs again this year, we gritted our teeth, knowing that the positions would not be filled in a timely manner because when all is said and done, the sad truth is that South Central has a bad reputation, some of it well-deserved, for being a scary place to work. We still have not staffed unfilled positions from 2009. So it was no surprise to anyone on the campus when we received the news that we did not achieve our test growth target according to the...