Yolie Flores, Departing L. A. Unified School Board Member, Got Pushback From Student Anti-Reform Pawns

By Mars Melnicoff Fri., Mar. 11 2011 at 9:51 AM

Ted Soqui

Yolie Flores

Yolie Flores, lifelong voice for families and students, recently decided not to return to her chair on the Los Angeles Unified School District Board. Her disheartening enlightenment about the state of the district is chronicled in this week's L.A. Weekly print story 'The Education of Yolie Flores' by Jason S. Mandell.

The Public School Choice Resolution -- a radical reform which Flores spearheaded in order to set up smaller, more accountable schools within the failing district -- is being met with a wall of resistance.

Sadly apparent is the fact that students are being played as brainwashed pawns by those opposed to change within the schools:

Flores held a meeting a few months ago -- she intended to discuss with parents some proposal options that Huntington Park High could follow when the plan to divide it into smaller, better functioning schools continued to move forward. Flores was surprised to be met, instead, with an upset group of dozens of students and several teachers.

The meeting turned into a "lets yell at the 'bad lady'" fest.

This month's Huntington Park school newspaper, the Spartan Shield, features a front page article about the meeting. The meeting is referred to by students as a "smack down" and "The Parent Center Smack Down."

The article spews back up what teachers and administrators who are afraid of reform have been feeding students.

The article, and the Huntington Park (HP) students at the meeting, do not seem to comprehend the irony of their arguments and the concerns.

First, students are angered to be chosen as a focus school in the Public School Choice (PSC) process. The school was chosen because of, among other reasons, its failure to obtain a 600 Academic Performace Index (API) rating.

Students (and some teachers) argue that HP scores rose to 603 API - however these scores are an average including a second school: Libra Academy.

As the Los Angeles Wave reported:

Libra Academy is one of the Los Angeles Unified School District's autonomous pilot schools. It opened Aug. 31 with 120 ninth grade students. Enrollment is expected to grow to 400 by 2013, said district representative Eduardo Cisneros.
The school will emphasize the importance of college readiness and success, he said.

The opening of the school is part of the transformation currently under way in the district, which hopes to provide a structure for accelerating education reform efforts, fostering greater accountability and offering families more educational options, Cisneros said.

Libra Academy is the first small, autonomous school in Local District 6 and the Southeast Los Angeles area to open up under the Small Schools policy, introduced by Flores Aguilar and approved by the Board of Education in June 2008.

Without Libra Academy, API scores drop to well below 600. More than 20 points less.

In other words, pupils and teachers at HP want to be able to include test scores from one of the new schools (that is doing better than theirs) in order to make their school look better.

This new school is exactly what they are trying to fight happening on a larger scale.

Many HP teachers and students want to stay below the acceptable level of educational standards, fight the expansion of an idea that is succeeding, and hide behind false test scores by averaging the schools together.

One HP student at the meeting said: "We want this education, we don't want a change. We are here because we want education to stay the same."

As reported by Jason S. Mandell in the Weekly's 'The Education of Yolie Flores:'

"Only 24 percent of its students are meeting California standards in English; just 5 percent are up to par in math."

At the meeting Flores was stunned to find out that students have been told that no Spartan logo will exist once changes take place: school colors will no longer fly.

"You are getting lied to," Flores told the group. "That bothers me. Not only does it bother me, it pisses me off."

She tries to explain that she wants students to base their opinion -- for OR against the plan -- on true facts, not on propaganda that is being fed to them by teachers and administrators who are afraid of the plan -- and who are abusing their role as an authority figures by brainwashing students.

"Be informed," Flores implored the students. "There will be a lot of lies, a lot of misinformation, because there are a lot of people that are afraid of change. They want the status quo. And they don't want things to change. And do you know why? Because everybody is going to be held to a higher account. Principals, administrators, teachers, parents and students."

The Spartan article implies that the fact that Flores is moving on to work with a Bill Gates start-up was discovered in some sort of investigative journalism effort:

"One question on the back of every person's head was to know if Mrs. Flores is an advocate for small schools because of her part-time job revealed by The Wave as a "newly created education advocacy organization backed by Bill & Melnida Gates Foundation, that will focus on education reform ..." The name of that non-profit organization was unnamed."

A graduate of Huntington Park High herself, Flores feels an affinity with the school. The current state of it is disconcerting - just 55 percent of freshman graduate in 4 years -- And according to the Spartan Shield, only 66 percent graduated at all in 2008.

Parents are upset - complaining of the principal who threatens to throw students out if parents step up, teachers who talk on cell phones instead of to kids and others who are racist.

Flores will continue her struggle from outside, at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation - where she feels she will actually stand a chance to make positive changes.

In the meantime she hopes the students will start thinking for themselves:

"What I ask of you, is, if you really want to be a part of this process, read the plan," Flores said at the meeting. "Don't just do what other people tell you to do or say."

Check out the meeting turned verbal attack. Here is a video posted on Youtube labeled "Parent Center Smack Down."

Contact Mars Melnicoff at mmelnicoff@laweekly.com / follow @marsmelnicoff

Tags:

Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, education reform, LAUSD, Los Angeles Unified School District, Mars Melnicoff, Yoli Flores

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rdsathene

Mars Melnicoff has the nerve to quote the mendacious Flores saying she "hopes the students will start thinking for themselves?" Since the LA Weakly [sic] conflates privatization with reform, and lauds the most despicable and depraved LAUSD board member of all time (not to mention Gates Foundation employee), astute readers might ask when your yellow journalist corps will begin thinking for yourselves.

Flores-Aguilar is laughing all the way to the bank while considering her bright future political career now that she has loyally served the reactionary Anschutz and the Broad/Gates/Walton Triumvirate.

Alliewall

Mars,

First of all, the $144,000 salary is just part of Ms. Flores future compensation. Add in any housing allowance, expense account, company car, retirement, and on and on, and that compensation figure can double or triple. Pretty good for a poor Chicana from the barrio. That Gates job is actually an after-the-fact bribe for doing the bidding of her corporate masters. Those pigs---Yolie's once-and-future employers--- did their job perfectly... get a money-motivated sell-out from the barrio with a Latino surname to run for the school board, while posing as one of the poor Latino underclass, who will fight for the rights of the same... That's the facade. Then, once in power, have her give away hundreds of millions of public property and annual school budgets to outside private companies... whose bosses will pay themeselves $300,000-500,000 dollars a year. They accomplish this by paying their teachers less than their union counterparts, and giving them far inferior benefits. All the while, the public whose money Yolie's corporate masters are given---again, thanks to sell-outs like Yolie---HAS ABSOLUTELY NO SAY WHATSOEVER IN HOW THESE PRIVATE CHARTER SCHOOLS./CHAINS RUN THEIR OPERATIONS. No transparency to the public, no input from the public. All their board meetings a closed. Any-hoo, the voting citizens in Yolies LAUSD Board District are positively livind over this corporate whore giving away their precious public school system. Yolie did the polling ,and she knew. That's why---had she chose to run again---she would have gotten her ass kicked in any attempt to get re-elected. In steps Bill Gates----allied with the corporate masters who have been controlling Yolie---and he offers her forty pieces of silver as payment from services rendered. Put simply, you pay a whore for sex. You pay a corporate whore for votes.

rdsathene

Your comments are brilliant! The mendacious woman's picture is used for the definition of self-colonized in the dictionary.

mwalimu

In discussing her proposed charter school at Huntington Park High School, Yolie Flores made a big issue about matching students' learning styles with teachers' teaching styles. She planned to do this with a series of tests for both prospective students and teachers.What a nice idea! But let's put it to the test.

I remember the time a prospective student teacher from the UCLA School of Education asked me to describe my teaching style. My answer: "off the wall and in your face." I preferred a whacky, zany teaching style that I hoped would engage the students. Whenever I could, I selected material that would lend itself to spoofing and cutting up. (Basically, I'll do the cutting up, so you don't have to.) But beyond my desire to earn the title of the Craziest Teacher on Campus, I wanted my madness to link into my students' innate creativity - which I felt I needed to recognize, nurture, and develop. Every assignment I gave revolved around this concept. *

Now, I need to ask Yolie Flores, how is a test supposed to measure this teaching philosophy? And how can the tests that Ramon Cortines, Yoli Flores, and LAUSD regard as the Word of God measure what went on in my classroom?

And while Yolie's proposals might work well with a small group of carefully screened students, and teachers who might be selected by nepotism rather than ability, what happens when you apply this concept to an overcrowded school of 4,000 students and an over-worked counseling staff? How does this matching concept apply to a programming a thousands of students into hundreds of different classes? What happens when masses of students unexpectedly show up, or when schools get OT's from other schools?

And while Jaime Escalante might welcome overflowing classes, most teachers don't have enough desks or space in their classroom to accommodate 60 or 70 students. In addition, most teachers would like to at least learn their students' names, something that's pretty difficult if you have a load of 200 or 300 students. And while big classes might work for Escalante, he never tried to teach English. Huge classes mean huge reading loads, especially if you want to add constructive coaching comments to each essay you read.

Like all so-called warriors and reformers, Yolie's ideas don't really work in a real world situation. Yet she continues to trash teachers for trying to make a difference in horrible working situations - working conditions that Yolie Flores as a board member have helped create.

* I might also add in all fairness, I worked in a magnet program. To some extent students got to choose to be in my class. Those givens helped me develop my teaching style. That was not a luxury that most of my colleagues enjoyed.

mwalimu

Yolie Flores complained that her critics malign her. She insists that charters are not to be traded like NABISCO stock. Yet, just as L. A Weekly published its puff piece on Yolie Flores, as a warrior for reform, guess what happened? The Los Angeles Times ran an article by former L.A. Weekly reporter Howard Blume, titled "L.A. Charter Schools in Merger Talks."

Bloom's article is full of corporate style references, starting with the term "merger talks." The decision to merge charter schools originated at a charter school conference held in a posh hotel in San Diego. The discussions are all going to be closed door affairs. A number of "low Performing" and "under-enrolled" schools are going to be closed. All sorts of references were made to various executives from various charter school organizations: Judy Burton, Mike Piscal, Caprice Young, and former mayor Richard Riordan, who spent a lot of time talking about investing in companies with money problems, as if charter schools are supposed to pull a some sort of profit.

To be sure, if we follow the business model, a lot of money will go into the pockets of various executives and school reformers. What's left will go into the classroom. Teachers will have to work for free. Such is the world of corporate charter schools.

Very little in this article mentioned the concerns of students or parents. Yes, there was some lip service to school choice at the end. But what happens to school choice, when charter school operators decide to merge or shut down schools without even consulting parents?

Basically, charter schools are getting traded off like stocks in NABISCO. And Yolie Flores is leaving LAUSD to accept a $ 144,000 a year salary as one of the NABISCO traders. Both Yolie Flores and LAUSD are lying to the public.