Students return to classrooms tomorrow and in lots of ways it will be like every other first day of school: seeing friends, sizing up new teachers, having the rules read to you over and over again.
But for the first time the Los Angeles Unified School District will be back-to-schooling with its new boss, and he promises things are going to be different.
Alberto Carvalho took the reins at LAUSD in February after 13+ years running Miami-Dade County Public Schools. By all accounts, he is a good talker who enjoys the limelight. His pet patter includes "Skill set will set," "Academic temperature," and talk of "lost children" for students the district has lost track of.
In addition, Alberto Carvalho loves him some tech. "Digital Empowerment." During a Discovery Education confab "Transition to Digital Classrooms" speech he gave in 2013, he pumped technology as "the most noble and dignifying of investments in our country at this time." In 2011, eSchool News selected him as "one of 10 winners of the 11th Annual Tech-Savvy Superintendent Awards" for, among other things, "increasing virtual school enrollment by 800 percent." That aged well.
Carvalho is a slick salesman, but does what he says always add up? This morning he was on Face the Nation ostensibly to talk about the school staffing shortage, and when asked why teachers are leaving the classroom, his answer was a medley of insufficient pay, the pandemic with its "virtual learning," and somehow those dumb teachers who take early retirement before they even qualify for full benefits. Unsurprisingly, there was no mention of the other 150 reasons the job has become unsustainable. (see Edxit or: Where'd Everybody go?)
When asked about using alternative certifications and permits to fill vacancies and whether that lowered standards, Carvalho replied that "these are fully credentialed individuals" who have college degrees but "may not have the state certification." Um, what?
He then defaulted to his talking point that the district is "for the very first time in over a decade fully staffed going into August 15th, the very first day of school." Which is, to say the least, unlikely.
He carried on with somethingsomething wide net and with what was apparently his safe word: micro-credentialing.The teachers union (@UTLAnow) finds it 'improbable' that @LASchools was able to fill about 700 vacancies in the last week. #LAUSD #caedu #edchat #LosAngeles https://t.co/C3qY8fA4Bm
— EdSource (@EdSource) August 12, 2022
The way I read the district website, these look to me like specialized credentials available to already credentialed staff. If you're out there and you know more, please comment here or email me at nowwaid@gmail.com and educate me. Also, if the Super is hiding behind micro-credentialed newbies to say "these are fully credentialed individuals," I'd love to know about that, too.
He countered a predictable "is it really about money, though?" question with a nod to cost of living and working conditions (fleetingly) before landing squarely on "recruitment," almost as if they weren't connected. As with the "pay, pandemic, and early retirement" above, Carvalho again conflates teachers' problems (cost of living, working conditions) with his own (recruitment). It made me wonder if he is even capable putting himself in the shoes of LAUSD staff, of seeing students, families, and schools through their eyes.
He took one more bite at the "fully staffed" apple and talked about the "lost children" who have left school, and that was it.
Nothing I've seen gives me confidence that Supt. Carvalho understands the inside of a classroom, or ways to support and recruit staff, or the limits of his own power and where to look for help. I know it's difficult right now to get young people to commit to a life in teaching, but it's not that complicated. The reasons teachers retire early are the same reasons people decline to become teachers in the first place:
... teaching has been made unattractive and unsustainable. The drain won't stop until compensation, micromanagement & management through fear, de-professionalization, overwork & make-work, politicization of curriculum are addressed.
— Anne Lutz Fernandez (@lutzfernandez) August 4, 2022 (h/t @nancyflanagan)
You can't fix it if you won't admit what's broken. And unless Carvalho expects some nonprofit or public-private partnership send an army of teachers, he doesn't seem to have an answer. (I discussed his Miami-Dade dependence on Teach for America here.)
Staffing is a big and chronic problem, but it's not the only thing the Super wants to tackle. Carvalho sees himself as a transformational figure and he has plans. As I wrote here back in February, Carvalho is a big believer in school choice, which translates to competition among schools, which inevitably leads to test scores, which are bullshit.
In fact, while boss at MDCPS, Carvalho facilitated the mass exodus of students from their neighborhood schools. This is from Answer Key back in December:
In a 2018 article, the corporate school-reform website The74 reported that then-Miami schools chief had a "sweeping vision for dramatically expanding educational choice," and went on to say this about Carvalho:
"Understand this fact: In Carvalho’s district, the fourth-largest in the country, more than 70 percent of the roughly 400,000 students do not attend their zoned public school. That’s not a typo. These students attend charter schools, take classes over the internet and at local colleges, and even attend private, faith-based schools — all with taxpayer funds or under tax credit scholarship programs." (emphasis mine)
As I wrote here back in February, another of Carvalho's favorite aphorisms is "One size fits none." It will be interesting to see if he applies that same principle to the district's standardized testing obsession. I'm thinking probably not.
And finally, as you prepare to greet your students at the door and hand out those schedules and discuss your class rules and expectations, as you try and remember last year's names and start memorizing new ones, you apparently will be doing it without a contract.
Of all the troubling aspects of the new boss, from his self-promotion to his faith in tech to his devotion to school choice, to a sense he just might be in over his head, nothing beats Carvalho's autocratic approach to leadership for "number one thing to be most worried about."
The UTLA contract expired at the end of June and Carvalho has refused to negotiate a new contract in good faith, instead counter-proposing language that would turn the union itself into a strikebreaker.
Carvalho also scheduled four additional (optional) days of instruction without negotiation or discussion, further evidence of the "my way or the highway" style of leadership that has been tried--unsuccessfully--before. Nevertheless, both examples are alarming signs of what might lie ahead.
In that Discover Education talk Carvalho declared, "Reform needs to be swift. Reform needs to be pervasive."
He also detailed how he used the catastrophe of the financial crisis of 2008 and the recession to advance his policies in Miami-Dade. Carvalho described it this way:
We decided that the crisis was our friend. We're not going to complain. We're going to embrace the crisis and do every crazy great thing we always wanted to do today and blame it on the economy. And that's what we did.
And what were some of those crazy great things Carvalho did?
In four and a half years I have replaced, terminated, demoted, promoted sixty-four percent of all principals in [the] fourth largest school system in America. I did not renew 6,000 teacher contracts in four and a half years.
Carvalho goes on to say that they avoided national scrutiny by intentionally keeping a lid on what they were doing, thereby preventing blowback from "national forces."
Behind the patter and the pageantry, Superintendent Carvalho is a dedicated "transformer," and intends to disrupt and break the district in order to remake it in his image. We should not allow ourselves to be fooled by the high-gloss exterior and we must not be taken by surprise.
If any of you out there have additional information, I would be glad to receive it. If there is any way I can be helpful, please reach out.
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