LA: Strength In Numbers

Gosh, it was hard to see this coming.

On the substance of the issue, school-site autonomy sounds great as a topline theme but earned autonomy seems a better way to go as a policy. The theory of action that struggling schools just left to their own devices will somehow improve seems very incomplete. They’re struggling precisely because they don’t know what to do and need help…It makes sense for a school district to give its high performers autonomy, work with the middle tier to turn them into high performers, and then really get intensive about the low-performers including bringing in outside service providers and so forth. Seems like that is what LA Sup’t Brewer was trying to do here.

Also, at least based on the rhetoric in the LAT article, it doesn’t seem like the teachers’ union in LA has learned a damn thing from the Green Dot episode. That’s too bad.