LAUSD Sexual Harassment Suit Thrown Out

In June I wrote about the sexual harassment law suit against former Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) superintendent Ramon Cortines. A judge has just dismissed the lawsuit by district real estate manager Scot Graham for being filed too late, according to the 4LAKids Blog. The judge made no ruling on the merits of the case.

The suit stems from events at Cortines’ Kern County ranch in 2010. Cortines, who retired in 2012, admitted his actions were inappropriate and resulted from poor judgment, but were entirely consensual. The district had offered Mr. Graham a settlement, but the deal fell apart when LAUSD announced it publicly before obtaining Graham’s signature. Graham said that the resulting publicity did even more harm and asked for additional compensation.

Graham had reported the incident three times to superiors, who suggested he seek therapy and drop the matter. No investigation was made by LAUSD in response to his complaint.

Deasy Sued in Miramonte Molestation Scandal

When Los Angeles school teacher (LAUSD) Mark Berndt was arrested for molesting students at Miramonte elementary school, Superintendent John Deasy fired the entire staff at Miramonte in a lame attempt to whitewash the tarnished image of LAUSD. Yet there was ample evidence at the time that LAUSD had engaged in years of incompetence and outright obstructionism in the investigation of molestation and abuse claims, though Deasy did not fire any district administrators. Now a lawsuit has been filed against current Superintendent Deasy, plus four former superintendents—Ramon Cortines (who has been sued independently for sexual harassment of an employee), Ruben Zacarias, Roy Romer and David L. Brewer—for deliberately not reporting complaints of teacher abuse.

According to the LA Times, the lawsuit claims the superintendents created an environment in which administrators were discouraged from investigating complaints of misconduct or reporting them to state authorities and law enforcement, while shielding teachers from scrutiny. The lawsuit also accuses the superintendents of lacking a clear and effective policy on child abuse allegations and deliberately not maintaining files on such complaints. A state audit released last November found that LAUSD officials failed to promptly report nearly 150 cases of suspected misconduct to state authorities.

The attorney leading the lawsuit said the officials had a “calculated plan over 20 years to facilitate child abuse at the expense of the safety and welfare of the kids.”

Cheaters Prosper: Disgraced Crescendo CEO Wins $240,000 Settlement

The Crescendo cheating scandal in Los Angeles is old news (see here, here, and here). All of Crescendo’s schools have since been closed, their teachers let go, and their 1,400 students forced to relocate as a result of the 2010 scandal in which teachers were given advance copies of the state standardized exams to help better prepare their students. However, two separate investigations have now blamed the organization’s founder and CEO, John Allen, for ordering his schools’ principals to implicate the teachers in the scam.

The Los Angeles Times quoted an anonymous former Crescendo administrator who said, "He [Allen] said anyone who doesn't get with the program, this will be their last day at Crescendo." The Times article went on to say that most principals complied, according to an unreleased internal Crescendo report. The scandal broke when teachers reported the cheating attempts to LAUSD officials.

Despite LAUSD’s knowledge of the scandal, Allen was kept on as head of the charter network due to the help of Marguerite Poindextor LaMotte, a friend of Allen’s and a member of the Los Angeles School Board. LaMotte even got then Supt. Ramon Cortines (who is now enmeshed in his own sexual harassment scandal) to back Allen and keep the Crescendo schools open. However, once the scandal became public, LAUSD had to do damage control and gave Allen a 6-month, unpaid suspension, while still allowing him to come back as an administrator. The principals received wrist slap suspensions of 10 days.

While Allen supposedly admitted his guilt to a Crescendo trustee, he apparently did not admit guilt publicly and has since sued for wrongful dismissal, arguing that the allegations of testing irregularities were "unfounded." In April, he settled with Crescendo for $245,000 of their remaining assets.

LAUSD Sabotages Harassment Settlement, Imposes Abuser’s Name on School

A settlement with an employee who accused formed LAUSD Sup. Ramon Cortines of sexual harassment may be coming apart at the seams over both the disputed terms of the agreement and the disclosure of the victim’s name by LAUSD without his consent, the Los Angeles Times reported on Wednesday. The proposed settlement would have required the accuser to resign from his post in exchange for $200,000 and lifetime benefits.

The settlement proposal was announced by LAUSD before the victim had a chance to sign it. One point of contention was the value of the lifetime benefits, which the victim believes was agreed to be $300,000, whereas the district publicly announced a value of $250,000.

It was not clear from the Times article whether the victim has agreed to resign. State law prohibits an employer from firing an employee because he has filed sexual harassment charges against his employer, but they can tie a voluntary settlement to his resignation. However, considering that his yearly salary (not including benefits) was $150,000, it would not be surprising if he was unwilling to accept this conditon.

In related news, a delegation from the Ramon C. Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts met with Board of Education President Monica Garcia to request a name change for the school. While it is completely reasonable to not want one’s school named after an accused harasser, the controversy over the naming of this school has a longer and more sordid history. According to the Times, Garcia and her colleagues overrode an earlier pledge to give students, parents and teachers a say in the naming of their school, and then imposed the Cortines name on them. Now Garcia is ignoring parent’s and teacher’s claims that the stigma of the name is harming student and teacher morale, arguing that the school’s name is a good one since Cortines promoted the arts and played a key role in the development of the school.

It is disturbing and ironic that LAUSD fired the entire staff at one school because of the sexual misconduct of two teachers, yet just a few years earlier had actively covered up the sexual misconduct allegations against its own superintendent and then allowed him to retire with benefits (see here).

End Due Process for Abusive Administrators?

One of the most vitriolic and idiotic elements of the Ed Deform and Teacher Bashing movements is their assertion that the schools are filled with terrible or dangerous teachers who are impossible to remove because of tenure and due process protections and that these parasites force novice teachers (who are all presumed to be better than their more senior colleagues) out of jobs.

But what about administrators who lack the time or competency to effectively monitor and evaluate their employees or who wield evaluations as a weapon to harass teachers they do not like? The fact is that administrators themselves can be incompetent, abusive and even guilty of criminal misconduct.

Should we end due process, seniority and tenure for administrators?

Oh yeah, they don’t have these protections. They have something better: status and power.

Consider the case of Ramon Cortines, former superintendent of LAUSD, SFUSD, Pasadena and New York. He was accused of sexually harassing a colleague and allowed to retire with benefits, while LAUSD was forced to pay out $200,000, plus lifetime health benefits worth $250-300,000 to Scot Graham, LAUSD’s former director of leasing and asset management, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Cortines, like other high powered abusers, denied that he harassed anyone, but admitted that he engaged "adult behavior," and insisted that it was consensual. Yet Graham had complained of Cortine’s behavior to superiors on three occasions. Meanwhile, the district refused to investigate and encouraged him to drop his complaints.

While the out-of-court settlement precludes us from ever knowing whether Cortines was guilty of wrongdoing, some are asserting that the large size of the settlement is an indication of his guilt and the district’s fear of going to court and losing. What is clear is that Cortines enjoyed the protection of his district, which refused to pursue the allegations, investigate his behavior, or otherwise threaten his professional or social wellbeing.

San Francisco Breeding Ground for Corrupt, Inept and Abusive Administrators

Not long after Cortines left San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), the Bill Rojas administration oversaw the misallocation (and theft) of millions of dollars from the district. Up to $68 million disappeared into the hands of nonteaching staff, including several who were indicted. Rojas ultimately fled to Dallas, bringing with him several of his loyal criminal cronies, where he managed to continue his incompetence and corruption while evading the long arm of the law. William Coleman, who was Rojas’ No. 2 guy in SFUSD and continued in Rojas’ new administration in Dallas, eventually pled guilty to charges of attempting to influence a grand jury. However, while Rojas was fired from his job in Dallas, he quickly landed a job at a for-profit charter school in Boston, proving that no bad deed goes unrewarded.

At SFUSD, Rojas was followed by Arlene Ackerman who finagled a $250,000 salary, plus a $2,000-a-month housing allowance and $375,000 severance package, payable even if she quit, which she was forced to do not long after taking over. As superintendent of SFUSD she pretended to clean up the district’s sloppy financial records and the scandals of the Rojas years, while completely missing Trish Bascom’s embezzlement scheme which was occurring right under her nose. This blunder was no doubt due to her obsession with quashing dissent and getting her underlings to toe the line. “I can’t continue to tolerate the dissension,” she said about her SFUSD staff and teachers.  Part of her strategy for reducing dissent was to spend $400,000 a year of district money on a PR firm to put a positive spin on her leadership, money that should have gone to classroom instruction.

Ackerman then went on to head Philadelphia public schools where she secured a raise that pushed her salary higher than those of the mayor or governor. While in office she gave a $7.5 million no-bid contract to cronies at IBS Communications to install surveillance cameras despite previous work with the district that involved cost overruns 12 times what they had originally estimated.  She then scapegoated underlings for the scandal and squeezed the Philadelphia school board for a $900,000 buyout package to get her to resign and go away.

Cheaters Prosper

In Washington, D.C., schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee presided over one of the largest cheating scandals in the nation. In Atlanta, Superintendent Beverly Hall oversaw an even larger cheating scandal. In both cases the administrators threatened to fire teachers if test scores didn’t go up. In both cases, there were abnormally high rates of erasures and implausibly high improvements in test scores.

Rather than relying on independent outside evaluators, both Rhee and Hall conducted their own biased internal investigations that not surprisingly absolved them and their districts (see New York Times), despite the flagging of numerous schools by McGraw Hill for the suspicious erasure patterns (see USA Today report). The State Superintendent of Education also recommended that the scores of many D.C. schools be investigated because of their unusually high gains, something Rhee’s administration refused to do.

Rhee was never fired, punished or held accountable for the cheating scandal. She did resign when the mayor who had appointed her, Adrian Fenty, lost his re-election bid. Yet she remained the darling of the right wing Ed Deform movement, securing millions of dollars in donations to her bogus student advocacy non-profit, Students First, and numerous $50,000 speaking engagements. To her supporters she is still seen as a hero who took a tough school district and turned it around by being tough on teachers and their unions. It doesn’t matter to them that those “gains” were fabricated because they don’t really care about improved educational outcomes for children. What is most important to them is improved business opportunities, something that Rhee has championed through her support of high stakes testing, private charter schools and her general attacks on unions.

Hall, who has since retired, may not get off so easily. There is currently a grand jury investigating the scandal and District Attorney Paul Howard has not yet determined whether to file charges against her. (See Atlanta Journal Constitution 4/22/12). However, her former top adviser Kathy Augustine resigned after one day on the job as superintendent of the DeSoto Independent School District, with a severance deal worth $188,000, which is a far cry from punishment for her role in the Atlanta cheating scandal. Three other former superintendents are still on the Atlanta Public Schools payroll earning six-figure salaries.

Gates & Broad Purchase LAUSD One Boss At A Time

Los Angeles Unified School District new superintendent, John Deasy, has hired five new over-priced administrators at a time when LAUSD is slashing jobs and educational services and faces a $400 million deficit. The new administrators will be partially funded by philanthropists, particularly the Broad and Gates Foundations, according to the Los Angeles Times. The school board approved all five administrators in a closed door session.

Not surprisingly, Deasy chose the appointments to increase teacher accountability and support the creation of more charter schools. Both goals are consistent with the Broad/Gates agenda of privatizing public school systems and exerting greater managerial control over teachers. Furthermore, many of the new administrators, as well as some of the returning ones, have backgrounds working for charter schools and no doubt share these goals. All of which confirms that Deasy has become LAUSD’s new educational hit man, owned by Gates and Broad, given the task of gutting LAUSD for the benefit of private educational profiteers.

Not all administrators are on board with this agenda. The Times quoted Judy Perez, head of Associated Administrators of Los Angeles, who said she was concerned about where Deasy’s loyalties will lie. "Broad basically has said a number of times publicly that he wants to dismantle Los Angeles Unified."

Broad has already been heavily involved in manipulation of LAUSD. He had been paying for several of former Superintendent Ramon Cortines’ aids. He also paid $250,000 for consultants to help with Deasy’s transition, according to the LA Times. However, the 4LAKids blog puts that figure at $775,000, including $500,000 to look for inefficiencies in the budget, money that would have been much better spent directly in the classroom. The Gates Foundation will pay for a data specialist (an expensive and unnecessary factotum who will most likely waste time and money obsessing over value-added scores. Both Gates and Broad have funded numerous private charter schools in the district.

Overall, Deasy’s team will cost nearly $1 million to pay six-figure salaries to numerous unnecessary bureaucrats, like Maria Casillas, a retired senior L.A. Unified administrator who runs the right wing nonprofit Families in Schools, who he has resurrected to serve as parent and community liaison for a bloated $170,000 a year. Casillas is also a supported of NCLB and is anti-union.