Mother’s Day

“I am the maker of rules

Dealing with fools”

- Lyrics often quoted by my mother

When tales are told around the dinner table at family gatherings, my father has three advantages over my mother:

1. He is no longer alive.

Death tends to sanitize memories so that we focus on the positive sides of the ledger. Perhaps it is our mind’s way of protecting people who mean a lot to us after they are gone or a sense of fairness that people who cannot defend themselves should not be held accountable. …

SILENCING PARENTS

“Six extra days of class time and four days of teacher professional development was an insufficient measure to address the trauma of the last year and a half. This is the time to address critical needs and begin prioritizing the allocation of funds towards real mitigation measures for learning inequities, increasing mental health services, and creating smaller class sizes.”

- Nicolle Fefferman, Parents Supporting Teachers

The block of LAUSD Board Members supported by the charter school industry has a long history of making changes to the school calendar against the wishes of parents. Many parents were blindsided when this group…

SILENCING PARENTS

“We have heard from parents more frequently this year than in the past, due to the intentional inclusion of our standing parent committees in our regular Board meetings.”

- LAUSD Board President Kelly Gonez

Stakeholders from throughout the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) have been contacting Board President Kelly Gonez to express their disapproval with her decision to keep the Parent Committee silenced. One of them received a response from Gonez and posted it on the Parents Supporting Teachers Facebook Page. …

#AnotherDayAnotherCharterScandal

“In short, [AB 1316] does the following:

Creates new auditing and accounting standards to create parity between school districts and charter schools. Requires training for auditors and creates an Office of Inspector General in the Department of Education, among other things.”

- Charter School Capital

Granada Hills Charter School describes itself as the largest charter school in the country and provides an example of the limits of the current system of auditing publicly funded private schools. For years Granada has used the same auditor to fulfill the state’s requirement that an “independent” accounting firm annually review its financial operations. Either…

SILENCING PARENTS

“Board members serve their communities not the other way around.”

- LAUSD Board Candidate Marvin Rodríguez

One of Kelly Gonez’s first acts as president of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) School Board was to keep the Special Education and Parent Engagement Committees from having meetings. In response, board members were swamped with phone calls demanding that these important opportunities for community input be reinstated. Several neighborhood councils also passed resolutions calling for Gonez to allow these committees to begin meeting again. …

LAUSD Superintendent Search

“As stakeholders of the LAUSD, we want to make certain that Superintendent Beutner’s successor holds an education background, maintains and sharpens the focus on safety and resources for the Fall school year, and adheres to the bargaining commitments made on behalf of teachers, staff and families.”

- Parents Supporting Teachers

It would seem logical that the leader of the second-largest school district in the country would be a professional educator, but Austin Beutner, the current superintendent of the LAUSD, had no previous professional experience in public education when he was appointed to the position in 2018. Instead of hiring Acting…

I never used those words but you are free to pretend that I did.

It is curious that you write that ending the filibuster is a way of "writing the rules to ensure that they never lose power," but you say nothing about Republican majorities in red states changing the voting laws to keep themselves in power.

Public School Teachers

“All the adults in the family are simultaneously committed to employment or college courses and cannot provide the consistent supervision required for R.B.’s daughter.”

- Aannestad Andelin & Corn LLP

We live in a society that has deprioritized the needs of children. The days of a parent being able to stay home to raise their offspring are long gone and an appropriate work-life balance is out of reach for most Americans. Decades of trickle-down economics have frayed the social safety net leaving too many children hungry and homeless. Even for those with access to good health insurance, mental health services…