Teachers and LAMP Project

Re “LAMP Is Yet to Catch Fire,” editorial, Nov. 9: It is unfortunate that the Los Angeles Metropolitan Project school reform effort is proceeding at a snail’s pace when programs in New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco seem to have progressed in a timely manner and with great zeal.

Perhaps I can make a suggestion of how LAMP can get on track. Contacting teachers through the teachers’ union, United Teachers Los Angeles, would be the key to jump-start LAMP. To date, neither UTLA nor any teachers have been consulted or even informed of the reform effort. The Annenberg grant is very specific about teacher training. Our practitioners are the people who will have to carry out the program, yet they have been ignored and left out of the process.

LAUSD is on the cutting edge of reform because UTLA negotiators bargained reform provisions in our contract in 1989; school site decision-making and school site-based management. This reform effort was brought to a higher plain when UTLA worked with the business community and was part of creating LEARN. The success of all these programs is because UTLA teachers and support services personnel made them work.

With the LAMP project, UTLA and the 32,000 teachers and others we represent have been left out of the planning room, never mind having a place at the table. Reform takes time, training and continuous growth to address new ideas, approaches to learning and strategies aimed at improved student achievement. How can LAMP expect the practitioners to carry out a plan in which they had no involvement?

I’m fearful that LAMP is in danger of well-meaning reform being wasted, along with the funds, because UTLA and teachers were iced out. LAMP officials are in the back room talking to themselves while we teach students in overcrowded classrooms, in schools in disrepair without the basic resources to educate and prepare our youngsters for the 21st Century. Who knows better what children need?

HELEN BERNSTEIN

UTLA President