Outing Lemon Teachers at LAUSD

From Roque Burio, Jr. , the lemon who can dance but can also sing. Here is my song on this article written by Beth Bareth to support the Charter schools of Caprice Young and those schools are actually the alter egos and the off springs of LAUSD. They belong to the same banana with different names-- and that is the reason why I did not respond to the requests of Beth Bareth to comment on how LAUSD maltreated us teachers at the Teachers’ Jails, when she called me several times at home. The targets of this article are actually the teachers whether innocents or not. I am one of those only four old veteran teachers that are mentioned in this article; however, the other three can only dance but cannot sing. The Charter Schools have the same purpose as its mother LAUSD to use us teachers as cover ups and scapegoats for LAUSD financial and academic failures due to its bad management and bad administration, to obtain more anti teacher Education Law, and to obtain more funding through initiatives of selling bonds to public, and to increase the taxes on income and properties to fund the unexplained financial failures of this dismayingly failing school district LAUSD. The tax payers will decide soon in November election, and I am almost sure that they will reject increasing their taxes for extravagant and wasteful expenses of LAUSD. After this rejection, the politicians will have to start agreeing to dismantle this financially and academically failing school district into city schools, smaller school district, and private schools. I am very sure that the people, taxpayers, parents, students and teachers will not just swallow the obviously fabricated false statements in this article of LA Weekly of Beth Bareth. Long Live democracy, long live free enterprise, honesty and hard work. Down with corruptions of evil government officials. Long live the teachers, students, and parents. Long live the citizens, the taxpayers and the US peoples. He, he, he, and hah, hah, and hah, hah.

Aaron,Excellent piece. Thanks for writing it.It disgusts me when teachers blame the parents and make as if it's OK that only 4 of 40,000 teachers in 10 years get fired for poor performance.What is happening in the LAUSD is a holocaust for poor children.Ant

Without parents who care, education will always fail some. Bad teachers are not as bad as bad parents.

George Vreeland Hill

As a teaching for LAUSD, I can say that the major problem with education, is not teachers but parents. I can't list how many time I have given students "D"s and "F"s and never received a call form a parent. Yes, it is true that bad teachers must go, with that said, you are going to have a very hard time filling those positions in the poor income districts. Good teachers simply will not work there for the money them make. Again, bad teachers but go, but the conversation needs to focus on improving parent participation in the educational system. It is not okay for your kid to get a "D" or an "F" in class and the parent not come to the school. Parents need to carry their load.

What is ironic to me is that the L.A. Weekly continues to whore for not just Yolie Flores, who is a stalking horse for the corporate feudalists who want to shovel kids into the maw of corporate America, but for Mayor Tony Showbiz, whose job performance is just crap. The guy is a narcissistic hustler and yet the L.A. Weekly gives him credence as if he is qualified to speak on anything or even capable of being honest. .

The problem, though, starts with the local school boards because they are the ones who approve those teacher contracts that some find distasteful, they are responsible for allocating resources on the local level and they are the primary sources for impeding innovation. Most school board members are complete fools and few of them are professional educators. In corporate America, we don't allow this kind of amateurism, so why should we allow it with regard to something as important as education.

The L.A. Weekly hasn't rarely gone after the LAUSD's members and has given us no insight as to how to change education in a holistic way. Instead, they go for the most facile device here, teacher bashing. While children are the ultimate victims here, the fact remains that teachers have to put up with the bullcrap from dumbass school board members every day. How about we look into abolishing school boards and really put accountability in the hands of teachers by having them run their campuses? Because leaving the decisions in the hands of school board members isn't working and, as the saying goes, doing the same thing over and over again with no results is the definition of insanity.

As for tenure, I had a professor when I was in college who used to teach high school in Tustin. He got fired for discussing with his kids the Japanese-American internment during WWII. That kind of crap is why we need tenure, to protect teachers from power hungry and easily offended narcissistic bozos on school boards and in the principal's offices.

It's real simple: students must pass the state tests or fail the classes and teachers must show the bulk of their students can pass the tests or get out. Now, that is a fair assessment.

A Teacher

LA WEEKLY has Tea Party Agenda? Thanks, LA Weekly, for giving us your valuable insite into the world of LAUSD teachers. What better place to learn about the difficulties that LA teachers face than from a weekly publication that is 45-50% porn adds and head shop advertisements. Once a stallwart of the Los Angeles cultural scene, the LA Weekly is now attacking teachers unioins and gasping to remian relevant, while they feign interest in such relevant social events as the occupy movement or the CFA strike that is rocking the CSU system. Now I remember why I stopped reading this bullshit along with nearly everyone else in Los Angeles.

To the author of this article: Hillel Aron you arrogant fuck. Seems like someone has had some teacher issues? Maybe still harboring some misdirected resentment towards a certain teacher? Maybe mommy and daddy were a little soft with you, so you weren't ready to have a big bad teacher tell you that you needed to put in more effort and that you are not special, just a complete lazy ass.That fact is apparent when reading your poorly researched and written article. I'm no journalist, but niether are you.

Let's play a game. It's called "Apply this logic to any fucking thing else". Here we go:

Question: The crime rate in Compton is higher than it is in Malibu. Does this mean that the cops in Compton just aren't doing their jobs, and that they are lazy and undeserving of a paycheck? Should we evaluate each police officer individually and attack the police officer's union?

Answer: Crime already existed. There will always be crime, more in some places than in others. We pay poilce officers to do the best that they can do, and accept that they can not be everywhere at once. No matter how much evaluation or union busting you do, there will always be some crime, even though each police officer is well trained, well equipped and doing his job. I personally thank God that these people exist.

Question: I still see litter and garbage on the street sometimes, so does that mean that garbage men aren't doing their job, and so we should attack their union?

Answer: When you live in a city with 3 million occupants, there will always be garbage. Sanitation has always been a huge problem in large cities throughout the 20th century. Despite the fact that we have a very organized system of trash pick-up and removal, there will always be SOME litter and garbage on the streets of a large city like Los Angeles. This is not an indication that garbage men aren't doing their jobs.

Do I need to do another one? Ignorance has always existed. Schools were created and teachers put in place to combat ignorance and to teach people. Unfortunately, people have lost the ability to communicate the importance of an education to their children and have forgotten all together why schools were put in place to begin with. So, the product that we as teachers receive from parents is of increasingly poor quality. We as teachers can only do so much to motivate learning. If the parents are not re-enforcing those ideas at home, then there is little chance that a student will be successful, regardless of who the teacher is or how that teacher scored on his/her evaluation. But let me guess, this is our fault right?

Finally, in the course of writing this, I came up with another heading for this article:Group of common opportunists rides the latest wave of Republican created distraction and sues teacher's union for not being able to educate their lazy, unmotivated and uncontrollable offspring, instead of becoming involved, taking a genuine interest in education and becoming teachers.

How about we start evaluating parents, too? We can draw up a 4-page evaluation document and critique them on their parenting skills and see how they measure up to their peers. We'll then use said results to conjure some type of scale with which to rate parents; and we could even print these results in the newspaper for all to see! You could see how your neighbors measure up, how your hairdresser measures up, how the single mom down the street measures up compared to the stay-at-home mom two doors down.

Or...... how about we start examining the real sources of the problems that prevent these kids from graduating: parents in prison, kids shooting up in the restrooms at school, kids rampantly cheating just to get points (who cares about learning????), kids texting each other in class, kids sleeping in cars because they're homeless, girls keeping track of condom wrappers in their wallets as trophies, kids showing up for free/reduced lunch because it's their only meal of the day, kids walking to/from school in neighborhoods where murders and abductions are commonplace events, victims of sexual abuse trying to sit there and learn about prepositional phrases.

These are only a few of the issues that teachers encounter on a daily basis in their classrooms. For these kids, learning is about the LAST thing on their minds. They are in survival mode--and they are NOT in the minority.

You can evaluate the teachers on any scale you wish, using any criteria you like. Until people decide to look at the real sources of our problem, the results will never improve; kids will continue to fail, and the dignity, integrity, and self-worth of educators will continue to be under assault for wrongs the teachers cannot hope to correct alone. Teachers today face obstacles that their predecessors couldn't possibly have conceived of; and yet, they are forced to tow the line in an antiquated school system that desperately needs an overhaul in an era where parents are increasingly deflecting blame for their children's actions & situations away from themselves and onto external sources (like teachers, because they are easy targets).

Why are teachers held to a higher standard than the rest of the populace? It seems like a premise destined for failure.

Wow another article on teacher evaluations! What a groundbreaking and fresh look at education. You guys at the LA Weekly are really thinking outside the box. Why are kids performing poorly? Can't be the billions in cuts, the poor home environments, the lack of security in the school and neighborhoods, must be the terrible teachers! Looking forward to your next piece on the evils of teacher unions!

It is ironic that many sdministrators at LAUSD are failed teachers who have a limited amount if experience in classrooms. They ascend not because they are educators but because they are careerists. This means they are not concerned with students or community , much less quality control in instruction. They abuse their power, teachers and funding, ultimately betraying the public's trust. Mr. Deasy, like Arne Duncan, is not an educator and his education itself is dubious given reports he has a degree he didn't earn and that he was forced to resign from one of his posts due to unethical comportment.if these allegations are true, it isn't surprising to find he fits right in with white chalk criminals entrenched at LAUSD.

"schools where 3 percent of the students are proficient at math and 100 percent of the teachers are at the top rating performance."

Maybe bad genetics, bad family systems, bad peer groups and social settings & no money come in to play. Teachers can only present the material, learning is up to the student and parents.

The idea of tenure was created so college professors could include unusal ideas and not be fired for it. College not gradeschool. Tenure was never intended for grade school and high school where they follow a set curriculm anyway. Tenure makes no sense at lower grade levels.

9th Street (Ninth Street (sic)) Elementary School no longer exists. It has been shutdown by LAUSD in order to reopen a newer facility to cater to the rapidly gentrifying downtown community. So how could the author of this poorly researched piece write that "Ninth Street School's principal and district officials insisted to the Weekly that all was well."Who did the writer talk to?Check for yourself on LAUSD's listing of schools...http://notebook.lausd.net/scho...

As a grandmother I'm just disgusted by these teachers who pretend to do their job but are protesting every waking moment. Either they picket for higher salaries or bigger pensions. Do you know that 40% of the states budget will be going toward union benifits/pensions. That's insane. Politics should never enter the classrooms. Good luck with that. Last week teachers were complaining there's no money or time to teach science. What a crock. Science is not tested so it's not a priority. Our tax dollars are being wasted by our education system. Unions have bankrupted every state but they complain there's no money. Let's send the unions and all democrats/liberals a message this next election. We're mad as hell and we're not taking it anymore. Go protest that.