School Board OKs Task Force on Teacher Accountability

The Los Angeles Board of Education voted Monday to impanel a task force to comb the nation for ideas on how to hold employees accountable for students’ performance.

The findings, to be reported by the end of July, will be used by the board to draft its position in negotiations with teachers and administrators over how to write accountability standards.

The panel will tread in the delicate arena of labor relations. The district’s three-year agreement with its unions already obliges it to develop such standards.

The panel will consider 12 questions in its search for accountability models. They cover such issues as the extent to which student achievement should be a measure of teacher success; whether monetary and nonmonetary incentives should be employed, and whether the district should consider a parallel system of accountability for parents and students.

Supt. Ruben Zacarias has until April 15 to appoint the panel.

Board member Jeff Horton, who proposed creating the task force, said the panel’s work would make the process more open.

“Do it in a public way,” Horton said. “The public has a right to know what we are talking about.”

But the teachers union objected, saying Horton was muddying the waters.

“I would like to go into negotiations to develop a proposal,” said Day Higuchi, president of the teachers’ union UTLA-Los Angeles. “It would be much more useful and valuable to enter the process than to have a cloud over the process because no one knows what is going on.”

Higuchi said the teachers’ current three-year contract, which took effect in October, calls for the union and the district to jointly work out a system of performance evaluation based on peer review and various measures of student assessment.

Horton said his proposal was “not an end-run on collective bargaining, not an attempt to shove something down our employees’ throats.”

The unanimous board vote followed more than an hour of debate over whether creating such a panel could violate labor laws by introducing a third negotiating party.

To gain support, Horton agreed to scrap one portion of the motion directing Zacarias to appoint parents, business representatives and academics to the panel--but not union representatives.

Instead, Zacarias will decide what groups should be represented, a resolution that left some confusion as to how the dispute was actually settled.

After the vote, Horton said he trusted Zacarias to appoint parents, but said he did not think it is appropriate to have union members, whose officers are forming a negotiating position on accountability.

Higuchi said he expected Zacarias to appoint union representatives.

Board member Valerie Fields initially opposed Horton’s proposal.

“With all good intentions, this could slow things down,” Fields said.

She proposed instructing Zacarias to pursue negotiations with the district’s bargaining units while the panel worked on its report.

Horton rejected that as “a total contradiction of everything I intended.” The district should not enter negotiations before the board has formulated a position, he contended.

Board members Barbara Boudreaux and Victoria Castro supported Horton.

“When you fight accountability, that’s bizarre,” Boudreaux scolded.

But board member David Tokofsky and board President Julie Korenstein said they were concerned, based on legal advice offered during a previous closed session, about conflicts with district-union negotiations.

However, when Korenstein asked the district’s general counsel for an opinion, he said he thought the motion would be consistent with the law.

The panel’s report will be considered at a special board meeting in July.