Today, Tuesday and the next two Tuesdays this month are shortened days at Lincoln High for students who will get out at 1:34 p.m., following a shortened instructional schedule for a "Professional Development Day." The teachers will stay to 3:04 p.m. with their designated activity.
So any parents of a child at LHS be "in the know" and adjust your parental supervision radar to expect an early arrival home. If your son or daughter tells you that they were staying at the library, you might want to check that to see if it was the LHS school library, an undeniably beautiful place, but with so much potential use to spare. The L.A. Public Library in Lincoln Heights, Chinatown, Cypress Park, or El Sereno might be the library of choice here, open from Noon until 8:00 p.m. today.
What is "Professional Development" anyway? Good question. It might be many things to different people, but let me give a try to describing it. Conceptually, it's to make the current teachers better ones by providing instruction or activity to advance education or performance of the teacher. Sometimes it's just to get everybody on the same page, from a District standpoint. There could be new directives from the Beaudry headquarters that have to be explicitly pronounced so that a teacher can't say they didn't know. This could be something like reinforcing- or for some schools- introducing the policies against school bullying, harassment or other aspects of school life where teachers have been known to "drop the ball." Sometimes it covers health issues of various types or the teacher's career requirements that must be met, of which there always are more.
Another area that the "Professional Development" day includes is the planning within the particular school for anything, curriculum materials and approaches taken for teaching, departmental choices in what choices the LAUSD allows to be made. It's also an opportunity for training "on-site" without having teachers take school time off to go to training sessions, thus creating a vacuum that a substitute teacher is paid to fill, at the expense of interrupting any classroom routine or momentum. It also avoids having to do after-hours training for teachers to squeeze in. The "Professional Development Day" training could be considered as a consolidation of assorted trade-offs in the operation of a school program.
Effectively, the "Professional Development Day" is where 1-1/2 hours is open to fix, fill-in, enlighten, entertain, propagandize, mystify, demean or otherwise hold a captive audience of teachers on-site for things that have any arguable level of quality or utility. In my experience, some things of relative importance will wallow in a state of neglect, while there particular areas, "pet projects," if you will, that are given the spotlight.
But the opinions of this area are mine, and they do change with the specific focus of the contents for each of these days, since some items are good ideas but many just never really get to be applied, and others matters have the LAUSD quality of "dubious value" stamped all over them. And meanwhile, even though this might look at first glance to be a teacher's break from the students, they really aren't. Teachers still have to get back to make up any teaching such shortened days might have infringed upon. But that is just my view. Some teachers look at this as part of the scheduled day that's taken into account in lesson plans and pacing, and not as a loss of classroom time, or the "instructional minutes," that seem to be less and less over time.
Again, from the parent’s standpoint, your child or children will be home early- or let's just say, they will be "out" early. Where they will be is a separate matter. And from my observations at LHS, the school library is such a good resource that is so under-utilized, first due to "hours of operation" that did not extend much past 3 p.m., AND, second, because there is just a pervasive condition of inadequate English language skills, starting with reading itself. Most of LAUSD is pretty clearly in denial on this, not addressing the problem squarely.
Undeniably there are many students that do well and many excel. These are not the majority and these are not the students I discuss here. They will survive anyway, and that is why they also will excel. It's only the changes as to the degree of higher performance that their teachers will affect.
What I look at are the ones that DON'T have an ability to read up to grade level, and the ones who will someday get to the point where they just stop coming to school and become one of the many "Dropouts." Theses are the under-achievers and the ones that many teachers would prefer be put in someone else's class. The "problem students" or "trouble-makers" would not be the first or early picks if teachers could choose their students like two captains would choose up their softball teams on the playground. But then you don't want to make your job tougher by stacking the deck, or in this case, the classroom, with any problems if you can avoid it. It's human nature, or something of a self-preservation instinct that influences that attitude, I believe, leaving the "problem students" more firmly cast in that negative image they carry throughout the school career.
They are the "at risk" students, and the risk here is losing them altogether in the educational system. Many will be re-directed to or just accelerated on a path that includes low or no real job opportunities, criminal activity, dysfunctional family life and on and on. This is a consequence that happens from not getting even that level of education that LAUSD offers now. Of course it's a two-way street, and each student bears some responsibility for the results, but there are ways to guide and retain students in the system that improve the conditions instead of making "dropping out" the eventual outcome.
That eventuality is something that LAUSD cannot explain, but their highly touted, or should I say, highly self-touted, "A-G" curriculum that replaced all, or nearly all, of the on-campus vocational opportunities has something to do with it. The P.E. requirement reduction to 2 years out of the 4 years of high school also hurts both the students' performance and their health. Also affected by this minimal P.E. requirement but maybe not so obviously, is the school sports programs of today. The ones that still survive suffer from lack of involvement that the 4-year P.E. requirement created. Many students of old thought of going out for a sport instead of just taking the regular P.E. class that they would have to take anyway. There was more money, too, for handling sports programs, but the interest today is not as widespread as before, but the students who participate do so as intently as did any of their predecessors of days gone by. Everything that keeps a student in school and involved is something that should be viewed as a "positive" factor and should be enhanced, not reduced.
Until that realization happens, too many of your 9th graders entering Lincoln won't make the 4 years trip to their Graduation Day, regardless of how loudly LAUSD Board President Monica Garcia proclaims, "We will have a 100% graduation rate." Keep beating that drum, Ms. Garcia, and the only thing that you will do is lose your hearing, your vision apparently is already affected. There has not been ever an LAUSD 100% graduation rate, to my knowledge. Even during the Vietnam War era, when student deferments- based on being enrolled in school- were clung to tenaciously as a way to avoid being drafted, we still had a dropout problem.
First, maybe we should try for a 100% literacy rate- wouldn't that be something? And THAT change might lead to better graduation rates for LAUSD. Politicians are so full of themselves, and this is one instance of that, a truism, as far as I see it.
That all will be left as topics for another day here, just another regular development day on the blog, you might say.
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