Today, Tuesday, is the shortened day 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 just after 3:00 p.m. with their designated activity for today
If you are a parent of an LHS student, consider yourself informed on this so that you can put on your parental supervision hat a little earlier today. parents of a child at LHS be "in the know" and adjust your parental supervision
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AN OBSERVATION POSTED IN THE PAST ON THS:
From an earlier posting here on "What is 'Professional Development' anyway?" -
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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And most of this still seems to be as applicable today as it was in 2008 when I first posted it.
5 consecutive years in the PI (Performance Improvement) status puts Lincoln in a perilous state if you are looking at this as a traditionalist and don't want to see operation as a charter school or other radical change as it appears to us, the older alums. And the tradition from "traditionalists" from bygone eras included being able to read and write, including a better "cursive," or 'handwriting" ability than currently produced, with so much less in technology to assist. This is but one part of a lot of things discarded in the name of "progress" and even with civil rights advances were achieved, the decline began in L.A. schools. General respect for teachers or maybe, the authority of the classroom teacher, is probably one glaring change. Parental involvement or lack thereof, is another external factor, too. A call to the student's home was once dreaded. Now, too often, there will be no answer or response, and if any, it may embody a lot of resentment or challenge. Not all parents, of course, but too many. So a lot is confined to what happens in the school itself..
The decline of the vocational classes available on campus began as the 60's ended. That was replaced with the direction towards the "all-college bound" choice for practically every student in LAUSD. Lincoln High saw that result just about completed last June for its campus as the very capable and respected Auto Shop teacher, Mr. Fong, was swept up by the Early Retirement program.
I don't know if anyone else has really connected the enourmous dropout rate achieved by the LAUSD that I think correlates with the ongoing elimination of on-campus vocational education. Technology, old and emerging, always requires people to create, run or repair things at all levels. Your most immediate levels of contact that demonstrated that are readily be seen in the field of plumbing, electrical and automotive, with incomes commensurate with the importance to us.
This trend away from vocational ed was institutionalized by LAUSD's adoption of the "A-G" college track that my CM, Jose Huizar (CD-14), used as campaign boast in his re-election to the City Council. Huizar used it as an example of his accomplishment during his tenure on the LAUSD Board as its President. Two thing wrong: The concept, no matter how well-intentioned, was based on a lot of unproven assumptions, and secondly, the LAUSD Board during that era, and continuing now with some of those results, did not produce much advancement in the laymen's view of things.
LAUSD Supt. Ramon Cortines even stated recently that "one size does not fit all" in the way the schools are run as a comment to the college track situation.
The ROP and Skills Center off-campus opportunities give some level of alternative to a complete rejection of vocational ed but a small one. At this point, there's so much that's slipped by LAUSD in its opportunities to fix things that I think the sheer enormity of the District keeps it from giving any response in both a timely and appropriate manner. The District takes too long to do most things- and see that the school construction program is continuing, displacing residents in many cases, for District with demonstrated shrinking enrollment. The schools already are announced to be up for other organizations than LAUSD to operate. And THAT makes no sense to me, although there will be many to make up some explanation to justify this condition.
THIS LEADS US TO ANOTHER RESULT
There are newly decided outcomes as of about a week ago for parents to begin entry into failing school operations, with 4 routes stated, but that's for another posting. There, however, is no distinct provision that educates parents to wield this authority to be certain that this will not be the blind leading the blind or replacing the deficient institution with well-intentioned but uneducated parents or parent groups.
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