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#  What, Teach Critical Thinking Skills at LAUSD? It Might get you Fired!

January 21 2016

Written by Leonard Isenberg.

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EDUCATION POLITICS-Sixty-two years after *Brown vs. Board of Education* supposedly made integration the law of the land, why is it we still have *de facto* segregation and an objectively inferior public school system in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and beyond?

The best explanation is the least cited reason: People who are not themselves subjected to inferior segregated public education are loathe to comprehend how impossible attaining a good education is in a district like LAUSD that has sanctions in place for any teacher who tries to buck its clearly inferior system.

The corporate media, bent on supporting the privatization of public education for profit, continues to censor information regarding the abysmal state of affairs in the vast majority of LAUSD and charter schools.

Parents without children in these schools have no personal knowledge or any way of knowing how deplorable public school conditions are since their predominantly white children are safely ensconced in comparatively high functioning private or parochial schools.

These students are being taught critical thinking skills in all subjects through a rigorous curriculum that rarely, if ever, exists at the super-majority-minority-poor-segregated LAUSD schools -- not to mention in many other districts like it throughout the country.

Those outside the failing LAUSD system are effectively limited to what actions they might be willing to take to change things, mainly due to their media-nurtured ignorance as to what is really going on.

Add to this the pernicious, unchallenged racial stereotypes that foster low expectations for minority students -- with no expectation that *better is even possible* – and you are left with the disingenuous rhetoric that “every child should be a lifelong learner who is going to college,” *even if they can't read, write, or do basic math.

So, if 94% of the white population is able to avoid integrated public education by escaping to private, parochial, and certain majority-white charter schools, then it’s no wonder they continue to rationalize their choices, often by falsely believing that the same quality of education might be available in our degraded public schools.

Another reason inferior segregated public education still exists in 2015 is that no regulatory agency seems willing or capable of taking action against clearly segregated, failing public schools that are in violation of the law. A conspiracy of silence continues to block any objective media coverage of the neglect that remains a closely guarded secret in plain sight.

Again, this dearth of knowledge has everything to do with the corporate ownership of both the commercial and public media – entities that continue to censor any news that contradicts their corporate masters' move to privatize the $2 trillion a year public education "business for profit.”

All this negativity tends to create low self-image and low expectations for all involved in segregated public education. Some good teachers still try to get their students to accomplish just one thing that they had formerly been taught was impossible within the “no-expectation” public and charter schools. Good teachers persist in doing this with the knowledge that, once their students master just *one thing* they didn't think they could do, they might have an epiphany – they might just come to believe they are capable of learning everything.

Ironically, teachers who go this extra mile are too often targets for removal at LAUSD where, in the vast majority of charters, positive rhetoric takes the place of substantive critical thinking skills. One substitute teacher, who is in high demand at predominantly white charters, related to me how she was censured at a mostly Latino charter when she tried to teach critical thinking skills to her Latino students. She was punished for trying to develop the notion that *ideas are interrelated;* she was punished for *not* teaching rote *fill in the blanks*, the norm at that particular school and others like it.

Since she knew from prior teaching assignments in predominantly Latino schools in Greater Los Angeles that the students were painfully aware of Presidential candidate Donald Trump's defamatory statements against Latinos, she pointed out that Trump in no way supported any of his allegations with facts. She went on to point out that what was conspicuously missing from all of his diatribes against Latinos and Muslims were any facts to support his inflammatory statements.

Immediately, her students were able to see not only the weakness of Trump's attacks, but also their own deficiencies in the assignment they had been working on, where they had been asked but did not make a connection between the story’s thesis and the ideas that supported the thesis.

A passing Vice Principal happened to overhear this teachable moment and consequently requested that this teacher *not* return to this school in the future.

*(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles observer and a contributor to* CityWatch*. He’s a second generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at **[perdaily.com](http://perdaily.com).** Leonard can be reached at* [***Lenny@perdaily.com***](mailto:Lenny@perdaily.com)*) Edited for* CityWatch *by Linda Abrams.*

*-cw*

CityWatch

Vol 14 Issue 7

Pub: Jan 22, 2016

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