There are so few of these kinds of surveys that I thought I would post. It's great to learn about the Alliance for a Better Community (ABC) nonprofit that is advocating for youth in Los Angeles schools. What's interesting in the results, as the title indicates, the really large differences in results depending on whether one was an English or Spanish speaker.

I really can't imagine much has changed since 2018-19 as the kinds of issues raised here are systemic in nature. I also can't help but wonder on whether they were worsened by the pandemic. 😬

-Angela Valenzuela

New survey shows big differences in how English- and Spanish-speakers view their schools in LAUSD’s Board District 5

Laura Greanias | February 26, 2019

(Courtesy: LAUSD Board District 5 Facebook page)

Parents whose children attend L.A. Unified schools in Board District 5, where voters will go to the polls next week to choose a new board member, hold widely varying views of their schools depending on the language they speak at home, according to a new survey.

Nearly half of all Spanish-speaking respondents said their child’s school was on the wrong track. They also were three times more likely to say they had difficulty getting help for their children.

English speakers were far more positive about their schools. Those respondents were 14 times more likely to say their school was headed in the right direction. Among English speakers, 86 percent said their schools were on the right track, and the same percentage said it was not difficult to get help for their children.

Overall, only 28 percent of all respondents said their child’s school is generally headed in the right direction; 35 percent said it was on the wrong track.

The survey was conducted by Alliance for a Better Community, a nonprofit organization that advocates for Latinos in Los Angeles. It asked parents and constituents in Board District 5 about their educational priorities and also held focus groups. The group released the results at a candidate forum earlier this month.

Here are six things to know about the survey’s results:

1. All issues were high priorities.

Parents’ top priorities for their children’s schools were teaching quality and safe and welcoming schools. Both received 86 percent of respondents listing them first.

Special education supports and facilities tied for second place. College access and readiness came in third.

The survey’s authors noted that the majority of respondents said all 16 issues listed in the survey were a high priority. Even the lowest-scoring of the issues — support for LGBTQ students — received 59 percent of respondents saying it was a high priority.

Spanish-speaking respondents put a higher priority on supports for English language learners, the budget deficit and equitable school funding.

Among all respondents, equitable school funding and the budget deficit came in ahead of parent engagement and student and staff attendance.

2. There’s a big difference in school perceptions depending on respondents’ home language.

There was a marked difference between how English- and Spanish-speakers saw their schools.

When asked, “Would you say your child’s school is generally headed in the right direction, or do you feel it is on the wrong track?,” 86 percent of English speakers said it was headed in the right direction, compared with only 6 percent of Spanish speakers.

Almost half of Spanish-speakers — 49 percent — said their school was on the wrong track. Only 1 percent of English speakers thought so.

When asked if it is “difficult for you to obtain help for your child from your school and/or the district,” 43 percent of Spanish speakers said yes, compared with only 14 percent of English speakers. Among English speakers, 86 percent said it was not difficult to obtain help, compared with 57 percent of Spanish speakers.

3. Their board member should speak Spanish.

One of the top three most important characteristics in a board member is that he or she speaks Spanish, the survey found.

A vast majority of respondents, 84 percent, said it is important to have a board member who is Spanish-speaker, but only 48 percent thought that person has to be Latino/a or have a Latino background. And 90 percent said their board member should have “a professional background in education.”

4. They’re big on bilingual education.

More than 90 percent of respondents supported each of five statements about bilingual education and support for English learners, such as saying schools should value the native language and culture of every child, and that every teacher should be trained to meet the needs of English learners.

Respondents also wanted graduates to be bilingual.

When asked, “How valuable do you think it is that students can graduate high school being able to speak more than one language?,” 73 percent said it was very valuable, while 17 percent said it was fairly valuable. No respondents answered that it was not valuable at all, and 2 percent said it was a little valuable; 8 percent were unsure.

5. Teachers don’t get enough support.

A majority said teachers are not strongly supported in Board District 5.

When asked, “Do you feel that teachers are supported at your school,” less than 30 percent said they are strongly supported, and 23 percent said teachers are a little supported. About 29 percent said they are fairly supported. Less than 4 percent said teachers are not supported at all.

6. There’s not enough support for English learners and special ed.

The groups of students who respondents said are the least adequately supported were special education students (22 percent), English language learners (17 percent) and those experiencing homelessness (14 percent).

However, English learners also had the highest percentage of “yes” answers to the question of which students groups are “adequately supported at your school” — 58 percent. The next-highest were low-income students, with 53 percent. Tied for third, with 49 percent answering yes, were special education students and gifted students. The student group with the fewest “yes” votes answers were for LGBTQ students — only 30 percent of respondents said these students are adequately supported.

About the survey:

Alliance for a Better Community collected 452 surveys from more than 30 schools and conducted focus groups with 75 parents and students between December and February. Of the respondents, 85 percent identified as Latino or Hispanic, and 56 percent said their home language was Spanish. Six percent of respondents said they were white, and 26 percent said English was their home language. Both languages were the home language for 16 percent of respondents. The rest — 2 percent — said their home language was Tagalog.

The “Board District 5 Report: Elevating the Voices of Board District 5 Constituents” is available in English and Spanish.

Choosing Democracy: Why Do Billionaires Want Charter Schools ?

Why? Harold Meyerson expresses this well in this piece below.  The short answer for me is—because a system that socially engineers inequality is profitable to billionaires. Much more profitable, for sure, than the Waltons raising workers' wages, for starters, as Meyerson aptly notes.

Ranked third by Business Insider for family-owned enterprises, they are certainly well poised to be the rising tide that lifts many, many boats out of poverty.  Same with all the others listed as The 21 biggest family-owned businesses in the world.

School boards, such as in the recent LAUSD School Board battle, are the battleground for this fight against the billionaires, as this story tells.  So please be aware of this deliberate campaign to erode the public good and how this is bad for democracy.

Finally, remember that which may be good for the individual (or individual family) is not necessarily that which is good for the collective.

Thanks to Duane Campbell for sharing.

Angela Valenzuela

Choosing Democracy: Why Do Billionaires Want Charter Schools ?

by Harold Meyerson

The billionaires, apparently, we shall always have with us — even when
we decide how to run the state-funded schools where they rarely send
their own kids.

In the Los Angeles school board elections earlier this month, a number of billionaires,
including Eli Broad, Netflix founder Reed Hastings and two Walton family siblings,
poured millions into the campaigns of two charter-school advocates. These
billionaire-sponsored candidates defeated two badly outspent opponents
who took a more cautionary stance on expanding charters, lest they
decimate the school district’s budget. In total, pro-charter groups
outspent teacher unions, $9.7 million to $5.2 million. (In the 2016
state legislative campaigns, the charterizers outspent the unions by a
far larger margin, $20.5 million to $1.2 million.)

Though a number of the billionaires who’ve involved themselves in the charter cause are conservatives and Republicans, the actual election battles they join almost always pit Democrat
against Democrat — in part because nearly all big cities are now
overwhelmingly Democratic. In California, where Republicans’ numbers
have ebbed past the point of power, the lion’s share of billionaires’
legislative campaign contributions have gone to more centrist Democrats,
who not only are reliable votes on charter issues but also often oppose
environmental and other measures advanced by their more progressive
colleagues.

Charter billionaires have settled on a diagnosis, and a cure, that
focuses on the deficiencies of the system’s victims, not the system
itself.

Of all the issues billionaires could choose, why charters, and why now?
One reason commonly adduced is that they’ve noticed something troubling:
Public school graduates lack the skills necessary for employment. Many
of those needed skills, however, are the kind that students acquire in
vocational educational programs, not at charter schools.

That there are huge problems in the education of low-income students is
beyond dispute — but this is hardly a recent development. The real
recent development is the rising share of such students as the middle
class has waned.

If the Waltons, say, decided to redirect more of their fortune to
raising Wal-Mart workers’ wages, that in turn might enable hundreds of
thousands of families to have more economically secure and stable lives,
which could have a greater effect on student performance than
charterization.

It’s hardly fair, of course, to tar all billionaire charterizers with
that kind of brush. But the fact is that they have emerged as a force at
a time when our staggering levels of economic inequality have become a
widely acknowledged problem. That’s not just a coincidence.

Indeed, we have to go back to the economic polarization of pre-New Deal
America to find a time when the super-rich felt so compelled to better
the lot of the poor, as they understood it. Andrew Carnegie, who grew
mightily rich by building the American steel industry, famously
established libraries in thousands of cities and towns. Though, unlike
today’s charter backers, he wasn’t draining off funds that could go to
public libraries in the process.

What Carnegie and today’s pro-charter rich have in common is a belief in
individual betterment — but not only that. They also share a fierce
opposition to collective betterment, manifested in their respective
battles against unions and, in many cases, against governmentally
established standards and services.

Living in separate eras when the middle class was — and is — embattled
and the gap between rich and poor was — and is — immense, billionaires
have largely shunned the fights that might truly narrow that gap:
raising the minimum wage, making public colleges and universities free,
funding sufficient public investment to create genuine full employment,
reviving collective bargaining and raising progressive taxes to pay for
all of that.

As the billionaires see it, it’s the lack of skills, not the
dysfunctions of the larger economic system that they (or their parents)
mastered, that is the cause of our national woes. Pure of heart though
some of them may be, the charter billionaires have settled on a
diagnosis, and a cure, that focuses on the deficiencies of the system’s
victims, not the system itself. How very comforting for them.

Harold Meyerson is executive editor of the American Prospect. He is a contributing
writer to Opinion.

"Teacher ownership."  Wonderful words!  I'm seeing this happening in our own district in AISD and it makes me really happy to see it.  Long overdue and surely the outcome of our advocacy at local, state, and national levels. 

To this, I would add the vital importance of parent and community ownership of public education, too.

-Angela

Teacher Ownership and the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)

Op-Ed

Published on March 30, 2017

By Marisa Saunders

Discussions of educational reform often turn to the influence, competence, and accountability of teachers. While a highly capable and effective teacher workforce is understood as critical for improving student outcomes, teachers are too often viewed as “implementers” rather than as experts who are best positioned to identify and meet the needs of their students. The result is growing teacher dissatisfaction and a mounting teacher shortage, especially within underserved communities.

A recent study conducted by AISR suggests that the conditions that support teacher ownership – a teacher’s sense of alignment with an improvement effort and their agency to influence it – are associated with a range of positive outcomes including greater teacher satisfaction. Teachers who indicate that they have an opportunity to both shape and spread school improvement plans – through shared decision-making, collaborative practices, and leadership – are more likely to indicate positive teacher relationships and an increased sense of accountability. Teachers with a sense of ownership feel invested in their profession, in their schools, and in their students’ learning.

The study was part of the Time for Equity project, funded by the Ford Foundation and carried out by AISR from 2012-2016, with the goal of building the capacity of schools, districts, communities, and partner organizations to improve educational opportunities in the nation’s most underserved school systems through expanded and reimagined learning time.

PDFs: full report, summary, sample survey, handout 

Focused on a network of schools within the Los Angeles Unified School District, our study paid close attention to the conditions and practices that contribute to teachers’ sense of ownership of their school improvement efforts. We found that teacher ownership develops:

•  in environments where space and time is provided for them to work with other teachers to co-construct knowledge and to influence and lead school improvement efforts; and
• when supports and practices are in place that enable teachers to break down barriers and work collectively to build system coherence.

In other words, teacher ownership is not built in isolated classrooms; it is nested within a school culture that values teachers’ expertise, knowledge, and deep understanding of schools as social and cultural institutions.

Teacher ownership is a powerful construct with the potential to create meaningful change in schools and systems. And, as state departments of education revise accountability systems to meet the new requirements of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), we have an opportunity to support and strengthen teacher ownership.

ESSA signals an important move toward a more holistic approach to accountability by encouraging multiple measures of student and school success. This shift creates new opportunities to develop approaches to accountability and improvement that move beyond test scores to include the resources and conditions that matter most for student success, including measures of school climate. Many districts and states are working to integrate school climate measures as a critical non-academic indicator of school quality into their school accountability systems, and these measures should also include how teachers and other staff experience the school as a work environment. Schools must cultivate a healthy and positive workplace that promotes collaboration, professional learning opportunities, and growth through leadership – all contributors to teacher ownership.

Incorporating measures of teacher ownership into state accountability systems provides a mechanism for dismantling the isolation of classroom teachers; creating the space, time, and autonomy that teachers need to collectively define their schools; encouraging multiple roles for teachers, including leadership; and ensuring that adequate and equitable resources are available to support teaching and learning. By coupling measures of school climate (capturing levels of teacher collaboration, trust, and positive teacher relationships) with teacher ownership, we can begin to shine a light on the importance of creating learning environments that help both students and teachers thrive.

If we are serious about transforming our schools, then we must find ways to engage all teachers in the effort – not only as implementers, but as the creators and directors of change. Teachers have the capacity to transform their classrooms, schools, and educational systems. To promote positive and sustainable change, teachers must be included in the development of transformation efforts, have the opportunity to share their knowledge, and lead. In order for positive change to take hold, teachers need to feel ownership of their craft, of their profession, and of the efforts aimed to improve teaching and learning.

Marisa Saunders is a principal associate on the Research & Policy team at AISR.