Opinion: In today’s pages: Is LAUSD a school bully?
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An English teacher at the contested would-be charter, Locke High School, Bruce William Smith gives the inside story of the ‘teacher revolt’:
Three days later, when the petition was filed with the district, I was relieved of all my non-teaching duties (coordinating assessments and writing our school improvement plan) and was assigned to supervising our legion of rebellious, tardy students. I lost my summer employment too, and thousands of dollars in pay.... We had a mandatory after-school meeting, at which representatives from the LAUSD and the teachers union attacked the plan for three hours.... Mat Taylor, the United Teachers Los Angeles rep from Fremont High School, told our faculty: ‘You fired yourselves when you signed that petition.’ Others said that Green Dot offered no healthcare benefits (a falsehood retracted after I objected), that a continual stream of unhappy Green Dot teachers reapply to the LAUSD and other distortions.After all that, some teachers withdrew their signatures.
Former pardon attorney Margaret Colgate Love explains why the anonymous hordes waiting for a pardon hold the key to I. Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby’s plea. Washington Kuridsh Institute president Najmaldin O. Karim asks the U.S. to stand by the Kurds, and columnist Patt Morrison gives good reasons for non-recyclers to feel guilty.
The editorial board explains why a fare hike isn’t a cure-all for the MTA, and why Libby shouldn’t be pardoned. A web-only editorial unpacks a recent Pew poll [pdf] of Muslims in the U.S.
On the letters page, readers weigh in on the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War. See why Valencia’s Sandy Hack was ‘amazed that such a comprehensive article manage[d] to omit or distort key facets of the ongoing conflict.’