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Substitute teachers become permanent fixture in Los Angeles schools
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Substitute teachers become permanent fixture in Los Angeles schools
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Content
SUBSTITUTE TEACHERS BECOME PERMANENT
FIXTURE IN LOS ANGELES SCHOOLS
by
Hayley Alexandra Fox
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(PRINT JOURNALISM)
May 2011
Copyright 2011 Hayley Alexandra Fox
ii
Table of Contents
Abstract iii
Poorer Schools Hit Hardest In Los Angeles Schools 2
High Teacher Turnover Rates Creates Cycle of Low- Achieving Schools 4
Last Hired, First Fired 7
Maximum Use, Minimal Standards 9
The Campus Circus 11
Quantity vs. Quality 13
A Self-Perpetuating Style 17
The Possibility of Change 18
Bibliography 23
iii
Abstract
As California’s education budget continues to shrink and the Los Angeles Unified
School District continues to layoff teachers, the quality of student learning is rapidly
diminishing. Schools are forced to rely increasingly on substitute teachers to fill the void
left by these teacher vacancies. Students in low-income, high-minority urban schools are
hit the hardest by this trend, causing already struggling students to fall further behind
academically and socially. Three of these flailing schools, Markham, Gompers and John
H. Liechty middle schools, filed a class-action suit in 2010 against LAUSD and the State
of California, to fight for their right to a fair education. The court’s settlement has
proposed sweeping legislative changes that may lead to educational reform at a state and
national level, as well as sparking a discussion of policy change between the public and
the teachers’ union.
1
Sharail Reed is an eighth grader at Markham Middle School. She said she had so
many teachers last year it was a “blur.”
She wasn’t the only one. Other students at her school had as many as 10 teachers
in a semester. This is because these teachers are substitutes, rotating through classrooms
to replace the approximately 35 teachers who were laid off from Markham the year
before.
“There’s nothing wrong with having a sub for a day if a teacher is sick,” Reed
said. “But it’s not okay to have a sub over and over and over again.”
Long gone are the days when substitute teachers were a rare occurrence in Los
Angeles public schools, good for a “free day” of goofing off by the students. Now,
teacher lay-offs, shrinking budgets, and California’s fundamentally “hands-off” system of
monitoring sub usage has left many Los Angeles schools floundering. It has nearly
destroyed others.
Tim Sullivan, the principal of Markham, said he has worked in schools for 21
years and has never felt as hopeless about the state of education as he does now.
“We find money for the spotted owl and the desert turtle, but in California we don’t find
the money for our children,” Sullivan said in a court statement. “This has to end.”
2
Poorer Schools hit Hardest in Los Angeles
The comments of students and teachers at Markham are part of court testimony in
a lawsuit that is the latest manifestation of a poor economy and the impact on poor
schools. To make budgetary ends meet, the Los Angeles Unified School District has been
all too willing to staff schools-many of them in poor urban neighborhoods- with a
preponderance of substitute teachers who bring with them little or no training to teach.
Markham is a case in point.
On a broader scale, the widening use of substitute teachers also represents the
continuing battle over resources between poor schools with large minority populations,
and wealthier schools attended by white students. For decades, California and most other
states have been embroiled in costly lawsuits over equitable or adequate school funding.
Most of these lawsuits often included qualified teachers as part of the equation, educators
who are master teachers, with high skill sets in their field of specialization and rich
management experience.
Before this recession, many states introduced and approved legislation and plans
that sought, on paper at least, to close the gaps between rich and poor schools. But with
the collapse of the economy and shrinking public dollars for public services, including
education, the fragile gains made in prosperous times face erosion. Markham is a clear
example of that.
3
Located in Watts, all of Markham’s students are either African American or
Latino and 82 percent of the students are “economically disadvantaged,” according to
LAUSD statistics. The rough neighborhood produced equally rough classrooms.
Eileen Leckenby taught sixth grade at Markham for four years, and said the
neighborhood surrounding the school pervaded the classroom and created volatile
learning conditions.
Markham is bordered by four housing projects, and many of her students came
from these projects, Leckenby said. This led to territorial fights, gang clashes and overall
tumultuous friction at the middle school. With approximately 1,500 students, it’s hard for
individual students to get the attention they need and budget-mandated layoffs don’t
make it any easier.
Markham lost almost 60 percent of its teachers to layoffs in 2009 compared with
some L.A. schools that lost less than 10 percent. “People slip through the cracks,”
Leckenby said. “There’s not a lot of support for them.”
Samuel Gompers Middle School in South Los Angeles and John H. Liechty in
MacArthur Park, were also crippled by teacher losses. Both schools are populated mostly
by minority students and located in poorer neighborhoods, with 90 percent of Gompers’
students being classified as “economically disadvantaged.” In the 2009-2010 academic
year, Gompers lost 48 percent of teachers and Liechty lost 60 percent.
4
High Teacher Turnover Rates Creates Cycle of Low- Achieving Schools
These three schools bore a disproportionate amount of L.A.’s educational cuts.
Parents and students from these schools responded by filing a successful class-action suit
against the State of California and the LAUSD, suing for their right to a fair education.
“We, the teachers, the adults, know that it is our city’s poor students of color who
are being disproportionately affected by the layoffs,” Nicholas Melvoin, an English as a
Second Language teacher at Markham Middle school, said in a court statement. Even in
the best of economic times, these schools have a difficult time retaining long-term
teachers.
In the 2008-2009 school year, the average amount of teaching experience at
Markham Middle School was approximately 7 years. At Gompers, teachers averaged 5
years and at Liechty the number was even lower- a little over 3 years. District-wide, the
average teacher’s experience hovered between 11 and 12 years and across California the
average was even higher: 13 years.
Schools like Markham are where new teachers often begin their careers, because
they are willing to take any job offered to them. Some even have s refreshing optimism
and hope for change that accompanies many well-meaning novices in any career. Many
seasoned teachers wouldn’t even show up for a preliminary interview at schools like
Markham, said Leckenby, the Markham teacher. Most teachers try to transfer out of
Markham as soon as possible, and the school offers no real incentive to stay, she said.
5
“Nobody would want to retire at Markham,” Leckenby said. But Leckenby also
saw great potential in the students at Markham and blamed much of the school’s under-
achievement on the high teacher turnover rate, which undermines the stability of the
school as a whole.
If teachers would make a commitment to stick-it-out at challenging schools like
Markham and the school district would promise to help secure these teachers’ jobs,
students could flourish. Firm policies, structural organization and classroom stability are
right all students deserve.
Adrian Acosta made a five-year commitment to Gompers Middle School.
Through threats of layoffs from the district and threats of violence from his students,
Acosta remained at the school year after year. He was called rude names, pushed,
intimidated and head-butted. He had students who threw chairs across the classroom,
punched the walls, and forcibly restrained him when he tried to break up fights.
But each year, the abuse lessoned and the students’ respect for him grew. Acosta
was one of the few teachers who never yelled at students, he said, and his rules were
simple but effective. “I made a point not to get kids in trouble if I could easily teach them
a lesson instead,” Acosta said.
When teachers leave, as they often do at schools like Gompers and Markham,
students take it personally, Acosta said. “They don’t really understand the difference
between a teacher leaving because they hate them and a teacher who lost their job but
wants to stay at the school,” Acosta said in an email interview.
6
Many of these students have unstable, difficult lives and bring their hardened
personalities to the classroom. Kirti Baranwal has worked in the Los Angeles Unified
School District for 11 years, and has been a Gompers employee for eight years. She’s an
intervention teacher, which means she provides extra support to students struggling in
academics.
Baranwal said that effective teaching comes from forming relationships between
teachers and students. “Many of our students are in foster care, have had numerous
family and friends shot and killed, or have parents who are incarcerated,” Baranwal said
in an official declaration. “Schools should not replicate that instability in young people’s
lives.”
7
“Last Hired, First Fired”
On top of this, the state’s sweeping system of lay-offs known as “last hired, first
fired,” disproportionately affects schools with younger teaching staffs. Under this system,
teachers with the least amount of experience are automatically fired first. California uses
this system blindly and does not consider which schools these teachers are coming from.
For Markham, Gompers and Liechty, their extremely young staffs bore the brunt of these
firings.
“Last hired, first fired” is part of a contract established between the school district
and the teachers’ union. It ensures that more experienced and often tenured teachers
remain safe and secure in their positions even as they may wane in effectiveness.
This system is also not very cost effective, according to expert reports from the
lawsuit. Newer teachers are paid much less than those with seniority, so the district needs
to fire even more of these inexperienced teachers to adequately reduce salary costs and
meet budget constraints, said a report by educational think tank policy analyst Robert
Manwaring.
David Sapp, an ACLU lawyer, said that central to the recent class action lawsuit
is the fact that it puts the entire system of state-mandated teacher lay-offs under a
microscope. “One of the big problems is that data on how those lay-offs were being
distributed were not publicly available, it is not something that’s tracked at all,” Sapp
said. “It’s just by the state, systematically.”
8
While teacher lay-offs have become standard fare in California education, the
recent lawsuit has put a spotlight on the use of substitute teachers to fill long-term
vacancies. A substitute is supposed to be a temporary solution to a teacher absence, but in
recent years they are used increasingly as a staffing crutch. This can cause long-term
repercussions for the students who are consistently taught by them.
9
Maximum Use, Minimal Standards
The requirements to become a substitute are minimal; applicants must have a
bachelor’s degree, pass a basic math and English standardized test and clear a
background check. Each substitute takes a five-day training course that instructs them
mostly, on how to control a classroom and follow district regulations. Actual class
instruction is an afterthought, as substitutes are typically thought of as mostly
placeholders or babysitters.
These basic prerequisites, a six-hour workday and a $175 daily paycheck attract a
wide range of candidates. While some of these substitutes are passionate about teaching
and committed to their students, many other teachers are out-of-work actors, retired
parents, people between careers, or anyone else looking for a part-time job. This can lead
to less-than dedicated substitutes in the classroom.
In the 2009-2010 school year, substitute teachers were used in LAUSD schools
over 124,000 times, according to district statistics. Although the district has
approximately 30,000 teachers, these substitutes were heavily concentrated schools in
poorer neighborhoods.
There are no requirements for checking on substitutes at individual schools, said
Deborah Ignagni, assistant chief of human resources at LAUSD. It’s up to each school’s
principal to check on subs and ensure that they’re doing their job.
10
But even for a principal with the best intentions, a school day can slip by too fast.
Between meetings with parents, disciplining rowdy kids and all the logistics that go along
with running a school, principals do not always have time to check on the subs.
While a lack of monitoring may leave the kids stranded with a lackluster sub, it
can be equally detrimental to the substitute. Substitutes often arrive at their assigned
classroom for the day and are confronted with 30 rambunctious students and no lesson
plan. Without any help, the substitutes are forced to wing it, creating assignments off-the-
cuff and struggling to maintain control of the class.
Nicholas Melvoin, and ex-Markham teacher and the assistant to the executive
director of Teach For America, Los Angeles, said the district’s system of substitute
monitoring is failing the students, but it it’s also failing the substitutes. “Everyday a new
substitute would walk into chaos and be somehow expected to reign that chaos, and they
couldn’t,” Melvoin said.
Oftentimes, actually teaching a full day’s worth of lessons is simply unrealistic.
At Markham, quality substitutes were the exception, not the rule, Melovin said, and it is
nearly impossible to get a substitute fired, let alone transferred out of a school. “There’s
really no way unless you witness a substitute physically hit a kid, to stop them from
coming back,” Melvoin said.
At Markham, some substitutes did not even speak English. There were at least
three teachers at Markham who had this language barrier, and one of them subbed at the
school seven or eight times, Melvoin said.
11
The Campus Circus
Yvette Grageda, an elementary school substitute, said she’s seen first-hand the
detrimental results of an uninvolved principal. At one LAUSD school, the principal stood
by and watched as students ran amok after lunch. They were disrespectful and
disobedient to the full-time teachers and substitutes alike, and the principal did nothing to
intervene. “I waited 20 minutes for students to line up after recess,” Grageda said.
David Sapp, the ACLU attorney, said that even before the lawsuit, community
members had contacted him with horror stories about their children and substitute
teachers. Anecdotes included teachers talking on their cell phones during class, doing
crossword puzzles at their desk, or reading the newspaper. Other substitute teachers
recycled worksheets the students had already done and refused to grade assignments,
Sapp said.
“Stories of subs coming in [to history class] who didn’t know anything about
history,” Sapp said. “Giving homework and just crumbling it up and throwing it in the
trash [at the end of class].”
Shannon Garrison, a 14-year veteran teacher at Solano Elementary School, said
she’s had substitutes who completely disregarded her lesson plans and offered no support
to students. “We had a sub come into my classroom and ignored everything that I had left
and just brought two things; one packet of math…told them to ‘shut up and work’ and if
they did they could get a coloring packet,” Garrison said.
12
Another substitute instructed the class to do “silent reading” for the first hour of the day,
so that he had time to read the paper.
Not all substitutes are uninvolved or unenthusiastic, but many have personal
quirks or alternative jobs that influence the way they handle a classroom. “There’s one
substitute who is a very nice woman but she is a clown on her private time- a clown, she
performs as a clown,” Garrison said. Garrison returned to her classroom one day to find
the room in mass “chaos”- puppets, balloons and screaming children were not Garrison’s
idea of a successful learning day.
When Eileen Leckenby, the teacher from Markham, returned to her classroom
after a day away, her room was completely destroyed, Leckenby said. The kids had run
rampant, tore posters off the wall, and students from other classes had wandered in to
take advantage of the substitute . “I had to spend hours cleaning up my room,” Leckenby
said.
In another classroom at Markham, a substitute happened to be teaching in
Concepciona Manuel- Flores’ seventh-grade classroom the day grades had to be
submitted. The substitute, having no actual basis for evaluating the students, decided to
give everyone in the class a C.
With no root in performance, homework or testing, this grading system was
discouraging, debasing and unfair, especially for A-student Manuel-Flores. “My friend
cried when she got the C and I cried a little too,” said Manuel-Flores in an official court
statement.
13
Quantity vs. Quality
Concepciona Manuel-Flores has had so many substitutes in her English class last
year, she lost count whether the exact number was six or seven. This inconsistency makes
it difficult for students to build relationships with teachers and to gage academic progress.
Although the quality of substitutes is a large factor in student learning, the sheer
quantity of teachers a student has can affect their development and learning as well.
Studies have shown that stability in the classroom helps facilitate learning, and forming a
relationship of trust with the teacher is crucial in this process.
High teacher turnover rate focused in high-poverty public schools has had
“devastating effects…on the stability of the school and on student’s learning,” said a
2007 report from the California State University Center for Teacher Quality.
Personal connections with students, building relationships with parents and
helping the class build on previous lessons and knowledge is crucial to academic
achievement. This consistency applies to the school as a whole as well. During his five
years at Gompers, Adrian Acosta worked under three different principals.
“When you have a revolving door of staff, everyone has their own ideas and their
own policies,” Acosta said.
Principals define the culture of the school and set the rules and regulations. When
these standards are constantly changing, the students begin to understand that their school
is operating under chaos, Acosta said. Creating a stable learning environment fosters
emotional and intellectual progress.
14
“Many low-performing schools suffer from low organizational and instructional
capacity caused by high teacher turnover, unqualified teachers, unfilled vacancies…” a
report from Heinrich Mintrop, a UCLA educational researcher, said. The solution,
Mintrop’s report claimed, was that schools need support from the district and the state.
These low-achieving schools need a complete overhaul and organizational support from
the greater educational powers.
But California’s finances are in ruins and the LAUSD merely executes state
orders. In the 2009-2010 school year, California was ranked 45
th
in the nation in spending
per student, according to the California Budget Project. California was spending
approximately $8,800 per student, while the average for the rest of the country was over
$11,000.
These numbers mean that almost every other state in the country was spending
more money on public education than California. This makes it extremely difficult to try
and improve conditions at schools throughout the state.
In budget-mandated layoffs, individual Los Angeles schools have little control
over how their campus is affected. Policy trickles down from the state board and the
school district, but often times these organizations are unaware of their policy’s effects on
the ground level.
There are no state laws that require school districts to monitor what schools are
using substitutes, how often they’re used, or how effective these subs are. The state
considers teacher layoffs a budget issue and does not see the way it hurts students at the
learning level, Sapp said. The school district already has the technology to track which
15
schools are using subs and how often, Sapp said. Still, the district hardly ever reviews
these numbers or tracks substitute trends.
“If on any given day we seem to have a higher number than usual of sub requests
we’ll do the research finding out what are the schools, what are the reasons,” said
Deborah Ignagni, the district’s human resources officer. The district also monitors how
long subs are in one particular classroom, Ignagni said, because state law mandates that a
regular substitute can only teach in one class for up to 30 days.
However, this leads to a parade of teachers being shuffled from one class to the
next. Instead of being taught by just one un-credentialed teacher, students end up being
taught by multiple un-credentialed teachers during the course of an academic year.
Leckenby said she witnessed this first-hand at Markham Middle School. After 21
days of teaching in one classroom, substitutes’ pay rate shoots up to over $200. Right
before teachers hit this 21-day mark, they were quickly moved into a new classroom, so
that the school could avoid paying this increased fee, Leckenby said.
“There’s a lot of research that would support the idea that having a class staffed
by rotating subs is very, very bad for kids,” Sapp said. “Yet, on a statewide level, it is
something that the state of California is ignoring.”
At Markham, some students can go through an entire day without a single adult
checking in with them or acknowledging that they exist, Melvoin said. This can cause
serious psychological damage for students and often mirrors the instability they are
receiving at home. “There’s really no proof points for these children that the school can
offer them anything that the streets can’t,” Melvoin said.
16
Especially when the school begins to physically resemble the housing projects
where many students live, Melvoin said. At Markham, dirty classrooms, broken
windows, and tagging on the walls reinforces the idea that these students are “relegated to
second-class status” in every aspect of society.
17
A Self-Perpetuating Cycle
In 2010, only 15 percent of Markham students were meeting the standards of their
grade level in Math and English. The district average was more than double that.
“A shameful number of these students are now too far behind to catch-up to their
peers in certain subjects,” Melvoin said, the Markham teacher. “They will be expected to
demonstrate proficiency when they were never taught the material.”
Besides academic failings, this structural instability at schools like Markham and
Gompers has led to a soaring number of discipline issues. Students at Markham have
gotten really bold, Acosta said, and they know they have control of the adults at school
and their campus. “Last year we were at the point where students felt comfortable to
verbally threaten us,” Acosta said. “This year, they’re at the point where they can
physically threaten teachers and actually assault them.”
School with high teacher turnover rates perpetuate this damaging and
discriminatory cycle; the affluent and privileged continue to succeed while the poor and
disadvantaged get left further and farther behind. “American urban adolescents, and by
extension their developmental trajectories, are thrown into deep waters with few means to
come up for air when their schools become unstable,” according to a report from the
Graduate Center at the City University of New York said.
18
The Possibility of Change
The silver lining of these mass layoffs is that Los Angeles has a greater possibility
for credentialed, qualified teachers working as subs. After teachers are fired in the
LAUSD, they are eligible to enter the substitute pool and fill in on an as-needed basis.
Some of these teachers even end up working at their same schools in their same positions,
but with a pay-cut and demotion in title to “long-term substitute”.
This is what happened to Eileen Leckenby at Markham. After being fired from
her position has a 6
th
grade teacher, she was re-hired as a long-term sub and worked the
entire year in her original classroom. Paying for a long-term sub is cheaper than paying a
teacher on salary and with benefits. Leckenby chose to take this diminished role because
she remained committed to her students and improving the conditions at Markham.
Nick Melvoin also returned to Markham as a long-term sub after the principal
personally requested he do so. Not only did Melvoin take a pay-cut, but he was not paid
for vacations like winter break and received no billable sick days.
This policy results in many teachers showing up to work when they’re ill, putting
the students and the entire school at risk. Melvoin went from a salary to being paid
hourly, and wasn’t allowed to participate in school organizations like the school site
council.
Still, for Markham students, credentialed and committed teachers like Melvoin
and Leckenby provided an opportunity to actually learn in the classroom. “More of the
19
substitutes that we have in the classroom now are of a higher caliber than we had a few
years ago,” said Principal Bertrand from Solano.
“More” is still not enough however. In the 2009-2010 school year, regular
substitutes were used about three times as often as laid off teachers. In the month of April
2010 alone, over 10,000 regular subs were used district-wide compared to 3,000 laid off
teachers, according to district statistics.
As California’s education budget continues to shrink, parents at Markham,
Gompers and Liechty are trying to spur systematic and governmental changes through
their class-action lawsuit. They may not be able to solve the state’s financial crisis, but
aim to create a fairer system that requires all schools to share the burden equally.
The class-action suit against the state and the school district reached a settlement
in January 2011 that aimed to protect Markham, Gompers and Liechty middle schools
from future layoffs, beginning in the 2011-2012 academic year, and to establish district-
wide policy changes that would protect all low-performing, disadvantaged schools from
falling further behind.
In the next couple of years the LAUSD will most likely face unprecedented
budget cuts, an expert report said, due to inevitable financial constraints like the end of
federal stimulus funding and reductions in state resources as California grapples with a
$28 billion budget issue. These necessitate swift and decisive preventive action on the
part of the schools, teachers, district and state.
The court ruled that 45 LAUSD schools receive protection from state-mandated
layoffs. Included in these 45 will be the 25 lowest-performing schools in the district.
20
Many of these schools have high teacher turnover rates, ranging from 41 percent to 73
percent, and need assistance in building productive learning environments.
The settlement also gives the LAUSD and the United Teachers of Los Angeles
more responsibility in actively improving the conditions at these schools. Under the
proposed settlement, the school district’s new responsibilities include helping fill teacher
vacancies at these flailing schools, ensuring that all the teachers are properly qualified for
their classrooms, and providing incentives for new teachers and administrators to remain
at the school for an extended period of time.
While all parties agree that every student has the right to an equal education and
that teacher layoffs can interfere with student learning, the United Teachers of Los
Angeles (UTLA) rejects the terms of the settlement and is planning an appeal.
This new system undermines the teachers union’s seniority system and threatens
the stability of all Los Angeles teachers, UTLA said in a written statement. The court’s
ruling violates their agreement with the school district and “tramples the rights of our
teachers,” the union said.
Repealing the “last hired, first fired” policy won’t solve the big-picture problems,
the union said. The settlement “does nothing to solve the systemic problems at hard-to-
staff schools or address the inequities suffered by our most at-risk students,” the union
said.
Not all Los Angeles teachers feel this way though.
21
“I’m all for protecting teachers but I’m more for protecting kids and this idea that we
can’t do both is ludicrous,” Melvoin said.
Education is the only thing that everyone in the country has experienced, Melvoin
said, and this creates a strong affinity for teachers and an overwhelming desire to protect
them and put them on a pedestal. “You can respect someone and you can say I so
appreciate what you’re doing, you’re a hero- but you’re not very good at it,” Melvoin
said.
No other industry would tolerate sub-par work performances or protect failing
employees merely because of age or tenure, Melvoin said. The way in which the district,
state and society evaluate teachers needs to be reformulated.
“It’s pretty sad to me when we lost all those new teachers,” Garrison from Solano
Elementary said. “A whole generation of young, energetic, well-trained new teachers was
lost to our kids.”
Although the policy changes may be temporary, they will provide crucial
protection during this exceptionally difficult period in education, supporters of the
settlement said.
The resolution of the Reed class-action suit also brought to light the multiple
dimensions of people and politics that are involved in shaping Los Angeles’ educational
system. It has highlighted the drastic discrepancies within the school district, between
affluent, Caucasian neighborhoods and poorer, minority neighborhoods.
22
“A quality education is a critical step to overcoming the impact of poverty,” said
Robert Manwaring, a senior policy expert at an educational think tank, in a court
declaration.
Recent studies have shown that teacher experience has virtually no relationship to
teacher effectiveness, Manwaring’s expert report said. Average teacher effectiveness
improves incrementally for the first five years, but then levels off over the rest of a
career, suggesting that overarching “last hired, first fired” policies do not always
safeguard the most effective teachers.
“The baby boomers are going to be retiring and all of a sudden we are going to
need all those people [new teachers] and they’re not here,” Garrison said. “And I don’t
blame them. Why should they stick around in a system that doesn’t value them?”
23
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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
As California’s education budget continues to shrink and the Los Angeles Unified School District continues to layoff teachers, the quality of student learning is rapidly diminishing. Schools are forced to rely increasingly on substitute teachers to fill the void left by these teacher vacancies. Students in low-income, high-minority urban schools are hit the hardest by this trend, causing already struggling students to fall further behind academically and socially. Three of these flailing schools, Markham, Gompers and John H. Liechty middle schools, filed a class-action suit in 2010 against LAUSD and the State of California, to fight for their right to a fair education. The court’s settlement has proposed sweeping legislative changes that may lead to educational reform at a state and national level, as well as sparking a discussion of policy change between the public and the teachers’ union.
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Fox, Hayley Alexandra
(author)
Core Title
Substitute teachers become permanent fixture in Los Angeles schools
School
Annenberg School for Communication
Degree
Master of Arts
Degree Program
Journalism (Print Journalism)
Publication Date
04/26/2011
Defense Date
04/25/2011
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
classroom standards,education,LAUSD,Los Angeles,OAI-PMH Harvest,socio-economic differences,substitute teachers,Teachers
Place Name
California
(states),
Los Angeles
(city or populated place),
school districts: Los Angeles Unified School District
(geographic subject),
USA
(countries)
Language
English
Contributor
Electronically uploaded by the author
(provenance)
Advisor
Celis, William, III (
committee chair
), Hentschke, Guilbert C. (
committee member
), Smith, Erna (
committee member
)
Creator Email
hfox@usc.edu,hfox510@yahoo.com
Permanent Link (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3783
Unique identifier
UC1124355
Identifier
etd-Fox-4437 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-464746 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3783 (legacy record id)
Legacy Identifier
etd-Fox-4437.pdf
Dmrecord
464746
Document Type
Thesis
Rights
Fox, Hayley Alexandra
Type
texts
Source
University of Southern California
(contributing entity),
University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses
(collection)
Repository Name
Libraries, University of Southern California
Repository Location
Los Angeles, California
Repository Email
cisadmin@lib.usc.edu
Tags
classroom standards
education
LAUSD
socio-economic differences
substitute teachers