Schools

LAUSD Chief: 'A Tale of Two School Systems' (Part II)

Superintendent John Deasy expounds further on his philosophy—and LAUSD's policy—of human capital.

Last week, we brought to you excerpts from a captivating speech that LAUSD's new superintendent, John Deasy, gave at Occidental College, about the challenges confronting public schools in Los Angeles, a bellwether for the entire nation. This second installment of Deasy's talk highlights his ideas for creating better teachers—who also display leadership qualities.

Making Better Teachers

It’s very important that people [teachers] understand how to get better—and that they have the right to get better. And they can’t do that if they’re not told what great teaching and leadership is—exactly—and how well they’re doing against that [standard].

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And so, there’s been a controversy about evaluation—and we’ll talk a little bit about that. I would argue that nobody has told me that the current system of evaluation, which is performance review, helps anybody. It is fundamentally useless. It does not actually help you get better at [your] work and it doesn’t tell you how well you’re doing.

One would have to argue: 'So … there are schools where 3 percent of the students are proficient at math and 100 percent of the teachers are at the top rating performance.' That doesn’t make sense to me whatsoever. And it doesn’t make sense because the rating performance does not actually help teachers get better.

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Multi-pointed Evaluation

So we worked and constructed an evaluation system that is based upon multiple measures. And we are rolling that out, and there is stress built into that—and I’m going to talk about that pretty honestly. It’s built on multiple measures, exactly as it would for students—you would never make a judgment about a student about something as important as whether or not he can graduate or be promoted on a single measure.

And we wouldn’t do the same for adults and their work. And so part of assessing the quality of teachers and leaders is an evaluation based on a rubric—and we constructed and are using a very thoughtful model about what good teaching and leadership is, and exactly what behaviors we know lead to student achievement.

And we’re also very interested in the data points around what students and parents and faculty have to tell us about teaching and learning in school. So another data point is surveys of parents and teachers and students. And a third data point that we are using in our evaluation work is how you contribute to the professional growth of your community—the school community and your greater community. And the fourth piece is how students do over time.

So there I said it, value-added—how students do over time. Very controversial—I haven’t the slightest idea why. In every other business, you have single organizational outcome. Schools deal with the promise of achievement: I will know something I didn’t know, I will be able to use it, and I can show you how to do it. It’s fundamentally why we go to school.

There are a lot of other issues at stake and a lot of rich things you learn along the way, but that [achievement] is Number One. You can’t read by the end of third grade, you are likely to end up in the juvenile justice system, which is as much of an oxymoron as juvenile justice is—it’s prison. And when you’re in, the recidivism rate is so high you are very likely to not get out.

If you wanted to evaluate a hospital, you would never say that you can look at any measure you want except infection rates—that’s just off the table. And if you wanted do evaluate the quality of the public transportation system, you wouldn’t say you can look at any measure you want except crash rates—that’s just off the table. And in education, I would argue, that you would never say that I want take a look at how well a school or individual is doing, but you just can’t say how well students are doing.  What’s important in the conversation is the balance with which you do that.

So, how students do over time matters—but it’s not the only thing that matters. But it is something that one would not ignore either. So finding the right balance of that is really important.

The Thorny Issue of Tenure

The other piece around human capital—kind of those thorny issues that people get really nervous talking about—is tenure. Tenure is a very interesting concept. For a kid whose mother was a teacher who got fired because she was pregnant before those [tenure] rules came into place, it [tenure] makes perfect sense. Tenure, in my opinion, has a very important place. There must be a place—there must be a fence—around bias, in judgment about a person when you’re not going to just look at their performance.

However, this issue of tenure in California, for me, is one that is really ripe for improvement—but not for removal. For us, we have about a year and a half to make a tenure decision. And you know what tenure does—it gives a person a whole elevated set of rights given by law, when you’ve demonstrated that you should have those.

People don’t grow linearly, just like students don’t grow [linearly]. Individuals grow in fits and starts. And when you’re making a tenure decision, you’re making a decision on how quickly someone is improving—not are they there yet. I was not the chemistry teacher five years after I started—I got much better.

And when someone made that decision about me—when we make that decision about someone—it’s how rapidly they’re improving. And so I would argue that it takes longer time to have tenure and we’ll work hard at the state [level] at lobbying so that tenure that is currently two years in California is no less than three but no more than five. And that it must include their [teachers’] evaluation.

But until that changes, we have options in L.A.—and we have exercised those options. And tenure is an active decision. For a long time it was passive—people just showed up a year later and they got tenure.

Here, when we started last year, every single tenure was a decision made by you a principal—you evaluate a person and you sign a form, saying ‘I am giving you tenure for the rest of your life and I, as an administrator, make this decision and it’s in your file forever. It has made for a much more thoughtful set of decision-making, just as it was designed to be.

Compensating Teachers

The other issue we talk a lot around [human capital] is compensation. Currently we have a very structured system of compensation—not unlike most places—where you get raises when you earn certain degrees, and you get raises when you earn certain credits, and you get raises when you take on different tasks, and you get raises at certain ages, you just don’t get a raise on how well you go your job—that’s the one missing piece—and I would argue that’s not okay. That people should be compensated for how well they do their job—and other things as well.

And so I look forward to a strong and meaningful conversation around compensation reform. And I’ll give you one good example of that. I think that when teachers get tenure, the whole narrative in L.A. and in this country has got it backwards.

This isn’t about awarding a protection, as opposed to celebrating a level of arrival and confidence. Tenure is an award that says, ‘you are part of a distinguished level of performance—and I think, as such, you deserve a substantially different salary.’ So the ways that we’ve thought about salary need to be condensed and awarded upon certain thresholds—and one of them is tenure.

So, for a period of time you’ve demonstrated that you’re growing really well. Why do you wait for this salary for the next 10 years when you actually need it now to afford to live in this unbelievably expensive town on already a ridiculously low salary in unbelievably punishing circumstances? Quite the opposite.

One of the ways to attract and keep high performance—and we’ve already told you about your high performance because we gave you tenure—is to give you a substantial raise right at the beginning. And over periods of time, when we review performance for those who have become tenured, we should attach portions of the ability to get substantially larger raises—based on performance.

I think it’s our obligation, both at the federal level, but certainly at the state level, to say, ‘if we want to do substantial compensation reform, then reform the tax code for teachers.’ Pension reform is another way to think about compensation differently. If we want to keep our best and brightest, then we actually have to honor them with appropriate salaries.

Letting Ineffective Teachers Go

The last issue is placement and termination. When someone is not performing and they’re not getting better, they need to not be in the profession. It seems elegantly simple, but we’ve really struggled around this point. We tell students pretty clearly, ‘you’ve failed and you’re not going to the next grade.’ And we tell students pretty clearly ‘you’re not graduating because you didn’t demonstrate this level of performance.’ We have a very hard time having that conversation with adults. And I think we’re going to be able to grow to be able to have that conversation.

I’m not talking about bad, egregious or illicit behavior. I’m talking about ‘you just don’t know how to grow, get better at this act of teaching—or leading—and that we have shown you that it’s not working. And we need to be really clear—that in a reasonably short period of time you can’t work here.’ Because students really have the right to be in the school—in the classroom—where they are learning.

Performance Evaluation

Those are some of the conversations around human capital that we are having in LAUSD. I think about the other issue that we’ve been talking about—how do we run the system? Kind of simply, actually. And that is, we run the system by saying where we’re going to go, how we’re going to measure that we’ve been there, and we’re going to let you know whether we’ve got there.

Performance management! That’s why we’ve set 15 key performance indicators, which was different from L.A.—I understand that—and they are discreet points that we think are very very important: Graduation rates, achievement rates, school safety rates, parent involvement rates etc. And we’ve set a range of targets for myself—for which I’m accountable to the Board—and for every single leader in the system and for every school.

And the idea is that, the most important work that I do is manage my team—and how they manage the system around them. And there should be no mystery about what’s expected. Students do really well when they’re told exactly what’s expected.

And the same is true for the system. But that requires the courage to have conversations. And it’s really difficult to have those conversations. So I’ll give you an example of two of the conversations about that.

If we want to have a conversation about attendance, which is one of the key performance indicators, and drop out, which is another one, you can’t just have it about attendance. And you can’t just have it about the drop-out rate. You have to have it about who’s in school, who’s not in school on a daily basis.

Which means that we’ve had to have a conversation at LAUSD about suspension rates—because that is directly related to attendance. If we tell you to go home, that’s an issue of attendance. If you choose not to come to school, that’s also an issue of attendance. And we tend to talk about the last one—but not the first one.

Students Don’t Drop Out—They’re Pushed Out

So, I came to this issue about drop-out rates as a little bit bogus and somewhat of a red herring. What has become painfully clear—and what we’re going to work on—is that we have a far greater push-out rate than we have a drop-out rate at LAUSD. And this is profoundly—profoundly—evident when you disaggregate suspension by race, socioeconomic status, ethnicity and gender.

And so, when we looked at the data as we came into this school year, [we found that] in our middle schools where 9 percent of our youth are black, 39 percent of the suspensions are for youth who are black—for issues that we call non-mandatory.  

Mandatory issues are pretty clear: sell drugs, bring a weapon, you’re violent, you’ve violated others’ rights—you don’t come to school. I don’t think anybody has a problem with that—we get that.

‘Defiance’ is the number one category of suspension for youth who are nonviolent. And the discrepancy for certain categories of youth are mind-boggling. And so when we want to understand why students don’t come to school, we have to understand why we send them away—and for what reason and how that happens.

And in the understanding of that this year, we learned a great deal very early on. And when we think about suspension, we tend to think, ‘hmmm, principal suspended me—so I did something bad.’

When we dug deeper we found that wasn’t quite the truth—that we had individuals who had been empowered to oversee discipline in schools who aren’t the principal, and that that authority was delegated. And that in many, many ways, what we’re tracking is who actually is making the decision to send a student home, and then simply sending off the paperwork to the principal to sign that.

Nine Times More Blacks Suspended Than Any Other Ethnicity

That process is no longer okay—just to look at suspension for non-mandatory acts, and that we have to explain that data on a monthly basis. It’s been a pretty painful conversation: Why are sixth-grade African American boys suspended at nine times the rate of any other student [ethnicity] in the school—for defiance in the sixth grade?

Okay, sixth-graders are defiant. That is what they do. That is the issue. Our role is to help shape that behavior differently, so they learn not to be defiant. ‘Failure to bring your materials to class.’ ‘Did not do homework three days in a row.’

That’s not defiant—‘defiant’ is more like, ‘I’m going to take your head off!’—that’s like not doing homework. And this, over time, over time, over time, over time, has told some sets of our students, ‘we don’t want you here—not only do we not believe in you, we don’t want you on our property.’

That’s completely within our control—and we will have that conversation.

To be continued—stay tuned.


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