Accountability Task Force for LAUSD

The great majority of L.A. Unified schoolteachers are dedicated, hard-working professionals. By almost any evaluation, 98% would qualify for higher salaries than they now earn, if they were in some other profession in the real “working world” you refer to in your March 29 editorial, “LAUSD: Make Merit Count.”

Look at the job we ask them to do: More than 80 languages are spoken by the immigrant children who have flooded L.A. classrooms, classrooms that chronically lack textbooks and supplies. In some schools, falling ceiling tiles are a hazard, air conditioning is a perennial promise, and parking so scarce that teachers must leave their cars blocks away. Mix in parents indifferent to their child’s education and incompetent administrators loath to yield any of their authority to shared decision-making.

It’s a wonder anyone comes back after their first year teaching in L.A. Unified, or even sticks it out for a whole school year. Yet we do come back, if we really have it in our hearts to make a difference in kids’ lives. Teaching is a calling, a public service profession, much as is being a police officer or firefighter. Are you willing to apply market principles to them? By what performance standard would you evaluate cops and firefighters? Solely by the number of arrests made or fires knocked down?

No one is more concerned by the few “bad apples” than teachers. At UTLA we are developing a system of peer review so we can help troubled teachers improve, or if they can’t do better, to help them out of the profession. UTLA members will vote to accept or reject any proposed accountability system for LAUSD teachers. We want a system that not only ensures due process rights and is in tune with the realities of the classroom, but a system that is stronger on guidance than it is on punishment. And we already do have incentive pay: UTLA last fall negotiated into our contract with the school district a 15% salary increase for teachers who achieve National Board Certification.

DAY HIGUCHI, President, United Teachers Los Angeles

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It seems like every time I open the paper I see another reference to “accountability” in our public schools. It always seems to be the teachers or principals or schools that are solely responsible for the conditions of the campus and the students. How about holding the students and their parents responsible for learning and for not destroying the buildings?

Each morning when my son heads to school my husband and I expect him to put forth his best effort and learn from very devoted teachers. So far we have not been disappointed in him or his schools. Public schools are like democracy, as good as we ourselves make them.

BRIDGET RISEMBERG, Los Angeles