By Cynthia Liu, CEO/Founder of K12NN. [BREAKING: The FBI carted away 20 boxes of documents relating to the iPad purchase from LAUSD offices late Monday, December 1, 2014.] Two education technology disasters mark the former LAUSD Superintendent’s brief tenure: the iPad debacle, born from cozy relationships with vendors and dependent upon broadband infrastructure that, in […]
Reply to Sandy Banks’ “Deasy’s Exit Leaves Unfinished Work At LAUSD”
Barbara Landis is a native southern Californian (3rd generation — her grandparents came to LA before 1900), and the parent of three children who attended elementary, middle and high school in LAUSD. She also teaches in an independent K-12 school in the Valley. Sandy Banks is right. There’s plenty of work, unfinished and never begun at […]
Marshall Tuck endorsed discredited and disgraced John Deasy
Plagued by multiple scandals, missteps, mismanagement, and allegations of possible malfeasance, discredited and disgraced John Deasy resigned in ignominy from the post of Los Angeles Unified School District’s (LAUSD) Superintendent on October 16, 2014. Marshall Tuck, who failed miserably at both Green Dot Corporate Charters and the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, was among Deasy’s […]
The Deasy Debacle: Six New Rules for a New Superintendent
By Roberta Eidman, MPH. She is a community member and resident of Los Angeles interested in a healthy public commons and excellent public schools for ALL children. The Deasy era was never really about Public Education. It was never really about the kids, or their parents, or the future of Los Angeles as a cultural […]
Why Didn’t LAUSD Perform A Tech Review Before iPad/MiSiS Purchase?
Bad ed tech deals continue to plague LAUSD — currently starting its second month of meltdown, the MiSiS student tracking and class scheduling software mandated by a court-ordered consent decree is a ticking time bomb for high school seniors who need transcripts in order to apply to college and finish classes in order to graduate […]
iPad Watchdog Stuart Magruder’s Re-Appointment: Which Way Will LAUSD Go?
The question for many school districts around the country this spring was this: how are they supposed to give computer-based, end-of-year Common Core State Standards (CCSS) tests? For over a year in Los Angeles Unified, parents, students, teachers, and community members have wrestled with the details of Superintendent John Deasy’s 1:1 iPad program and its […]
United Way's Corporate NPIC Astroturf was thick in front of LAUSD last Tuesday
“By what logic does United Way engage in an activity that is shunned by all the other charities?” — Professor Ralph E. Shaffer Amid all the misleading and mendacious reports in the corporate media about Tuesday’s desk charade, there is one revealing Los Angeles Times photo of so-called “students” setting up desks on Beaudry Boulevard […]
Real Technological Literacy for Public School Kids Instead of iPads for Tests or Code.org
By Cynthia Liu, K12 News Network Cynthia Liu is CEO/Founder of K12NewsNetwork.com, an education news and civic engagement platform for students, parents, and educators based in Los Angeles. In sixth through eighth grade classrooms in Pasadena Unified School District, elective Robotics classes hum with activity as teams of excited kids use laptops to build robots […]
LAUSD iPads and the Will of the Voters: Just the Facts, Please
Commentary by Public Policy Educator, Ellen Lubic, Director, Joining Forces for Education Today, Diane Ravitch posted on her website an article on the LA Times editorial which once again lambasted the Board of Education for micro managing the ‘poor beleaguered’ Superintendent of LAUSD, John Deasy. The title of Diane’s writing is Putting Bureaucrats First. Evidently the LA […]
"Turnarounds" At Two Los Angeles Unified Schools Prompt Deeper Questions Over Practitioner Center Schools
Who and what are Practitioner Center Schools, and what is 24th Street Elementary School like now that PCS is the Education Management Organization (EMO) operating it? Los Angeles Unified is no longer in charge of this public charter, or is it? Unusual procedures for transformation of two Los Angeles public schools under California’s “parent trigger” […]