Beyond union rabble-rousing ahead of what’s sure to be a contentious contract negotiation, Occupy LAUSD highlights a stark and widening disagreement about what American public education should be. With their billion-dollar endowments, Gates and Broad are powerful players among an ideologically diverse coalition of reformers that includes conservative Republicans, Milton Friedman libertarians, and urban Democrats. But Gates and Broad are hardly the prime movers or the last word in education reform—a point that UTLA and its left-wing union allies refuse to concede. In general, reformers hold that public education should teach students how to be autonomous, knowledgeable, and self-governing citizens. The how and the where matter less than the what. So reformers advocate empowering parents with a range of options, whether they’re charters or “virtual schools” or opportunity scholarships aimed primarily (but not exclusively) at lower-income families. Traditional public schools should compete with alternative models. Excellent teachers should be rewarded with higher pay. Bad teachers should be eased out of the system.

When Deasy took office this summer, he laid out a handful of proposed contract changes, including more school-site flexibility with hiring (thus curtailing the “dance of the lemons”), overhauling tenure rules, and experimenting with merit pay. Occupy LAUSD opposes every one of those ideas. For the occupiers, public education means tax-funded schools operated by union-organized administrators and teachers with little testing and accountability and no choice. Seen in that light, Occupy LAUSD is less radical than reactionary.

For the rest of the article, go to The Union’s Occupation

Digital Learning Now!, a project of the Foundation for Excellence in Education, and the Alliance for Excellent Education looked at which states were taking new approaches — such as dropping calendar restrictions for the completion of courses offered online and allowing middle school students to take high school courses on their home computers — and which states were lagging behind. And the nation’s top laggard was California, a finding that belies the state’s reputation — increasingly fanciful and self-deceiving — for innovation.

Online education is not, in and of itself, better than more traditional approaches, and when poorly executed, it can be much worse. “Virtual schools” in Colorado and Minnesota have significantly underperformed in comparisons with peer schools, so it’s clearly possible to lose ground by failing to find the right mix between computer screens and more personalized instruction, among other variables.

For the rest of the article, go to OUR VIEW: Digital schools must be in our state’s future