A School Board Member Proceeds With His Plan to Give Away School Facilities
- CCSA Staffer Cassy Horton
A small group of Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) stakeholders gathered last month in the District’s West Valley offices. The meeting was billed as a focus group to gather input on the rating system for schools within the district but had not been publicly advertised. Instead, invitations had gone out through Board Member Nick Melvoin’s mailing list. A mole on this list had forwarded the invitation to various public school activists which allowed them to see firsthand how the system had been constructed.
After viewing a beta version of the “School Performance Framework”, it became clear why the organizers had tried to carefully control access to the focus group. While this system had been sold as a way to provide parents with data so that they could make informed choices about where to send their children to school, the proposed website did not emphasize raw information. Instead, it editorialized data by weighing factors the district had decided were important and then turned the final result into a Yelp-like score. Even worse…
