A Comparison Chart of LAUSD High School Distance Learning (chart inside)
At the beginning of September, we held a briefing on LAUSD’s distance learning plan and the Worth More LA campaign. We hope that together, we can prevent COVID-19 from deepening Los Angeles’s education inequities, and build the community power necessary to make significant systemic change at the local and state level.
We know that we will need to work together, alongside families, to secure better for the children of Los Angeles. As you heard directly from parents, LAUSD is providing students with the least amount of synchronous learning time of the 5 largest districts in CA, reducing student learning time with teachers by almost 60%, cutting over 11 million teacher hours, and providing no promise of focused equity efforts targeted to support Black students, Latino students, English learners or students with disabilities.
We believe that Los Angeles’s children are worth more, and we hope to work with you to fight for that. Please reach out to us directly if you would like to get further involved.
As soon as the legal filing is ready, we will be in touch with rapid response information, including:
An invitation to the filing press conference (both live and online)
Opportunities to elevate on social media
Ways to activate your members as supporters
In the meantime, please follow the Worth More LA campaign on Twitter and Facebook, and be sure to visit the Worth More LA website at https://worthmorela.org/. You can always reach us directly through our contact information below.
Hannah: hgravette@innovateschools.org, 619-890-3801
Seth: slitt@parentrevolution.org, 917-239-8287
Many participants asked us for some of the facts that we shared from the meeting. We’ll be getting out full graphic comparisons, but wanted to share them with you sooner:
Other California districts are offering total instructional minutes beyond the minimums required by the state during COVID. Using High School as the comparison point.
The difference each day adds up. A high school student in San Diego will get 90 more days of school than a high school student in Los Angeles this year. That is half a year more school.
Los Angeles has the least learning time with a teacher and peers than any of the five biggest school districts in California:
LAUSD is also providing less training for teachers and less support for families that these other districts. The undervaluing of Los Angeles’s children is clear and it did not have to be this way. It is the direct result of choices made by LAUSD.
One of these choices is that of the five largest school districts in CA, Los Angeles is the only one that reduced the daily hours that teachers are supporting students and families for the 2020-2021 school year. The teacher workday is normally 8 hours and LAUSD agreed to reduce it to 6 hours. Over the course of the school year, for LAUSD’s 30,000 teachers, this adds up to 11,800,000 hours that won’t be used for students. After the Spring semester, when so many students received no instruction, these hours should be used to protect students from the lifelong harms of learning loss and disconnection from school.