re: #76 Indy GOP Refugee

Glad you’re here. I was waiting to give you this before I signed off for the night:

Larry Sand
Deasy’s Defeat
Another superintendent is beaten by the too-big-to-reform L.A. school district.

John Deasy is a blunt man with little use for nuance. At times, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District seems to enjoy getting in people’s faces. As Doug McIntyre observed in the Los Angeles Daily News, “Even Deasy’s supporters acknowledge he can be prickly, humorless, stubborn and thin-skinned.” Others describe him as bull-headed and impatient. School board member Steve Zimmer observes that Deasy often used a sledgehammer—sometimes joyfully so—when a scalpel would have sufficed. Deasy’s deficit of politesse drew the ire of the teachers’ union from the beginning of his three-and-a-half year tenure and eventually cost him friends and allies on the board. Sensing his days in Los Angeles were numbered, he tendered his resignation on October 16.

Deasy’s record is mixed. He had some success in bringing teacher evaluations into the twenty-first century. He championed charter schools. He supported California’s parent-trigger law, which empowers parents at an underperforming school to force a change of governance. After the Miramonte Elementary School sexual-abuse case in 2012, Deasy enacted a zero-tolerance policy that led to the dismissal of more than 100 teachers for misconduct and the resignation of about 200 others in lieu of termination. He also testified on behalf of the plaintiffs in Vergara v. California, the class-action lawsuit in which Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Rolf Treu ruled that the state’s archaic seniority, tenure, and dismissal statutes were unconstitutional.

Reformers give Deasy credit for the district’s improved test results. Even though test scores did go up somewhat under his tenure, it’s difficult to attribute that improvement to Deasy. A recent Brookings Institution study found that superintendents on average account for just “0.3 percent of differences in student achievement.” Deasy’s supporters also say he reduced the district’s dropout rate, but their argument relies on some fuzzy math. In April 2013, LAUSD reported a 66 percent graduation rate. Last month, the district proudly announced its graduation rate had improved to 77 percent. That higher rate was made possible by excluding students in “alternative schools”—where the graduation rates can be as low as 5 percent—and so-called “invisible dropouts,” who leave during or after middle school. They don’t count as high school dropouts because they never dropped in.