In a letter to members of the Los Angeles Unified School District community – families, students, educators and staff – newly seated superintendent Alberto Carvalho, who took the helm of the country’s second largest school district Feb. 15, pledged to accelerate opportunities for students to excel, thrive, and reach their full academic potential.
An integral part of Carvalho’s 100-day plan to achieve that goal is to “explode choice” for LAUSD students and families, a promise he is qualified to fulfill based on his performance as superintendent for Miami-Dade County Public Schools.
During his nearly 14-year tenure there, Carvalho raised Miami-Dade’s profile nationally, in part by pushing traditional district schools to compete with private and charter schools. Over the course of a decade, the percentage of Miami-Dade students enrolled in magnet schools, career academies and other district options climbed from 35 to 61%.
Today, about 75% of students in Miami-Dade have chosen the school they want to attend.
“There are some high-quality educational opportunity deserts in Los Angeles, meaning there are no exciting, motivating, relevant, and rigorous offerings in certain areas of our community,” Carvalho recently told the Los Angeles Times. “So of course, if a charter school comes in, parents are going to be drawn to them. Well, why not reinvent this school system through high-demand, high-quality educational options that parents want and students need? We have some schools with thousands of students on a waitlist, why not replicate and amplify those experiences in Los Angeles?”
He added:
“I’m talking about additional magnet programs, additional expansion of single-gender schools, additional career academies, additional thematic instruction provided by the school system.”
Carvalho explained why providing greater choice is necessary:
“We are living in a highly competitive educational environment where in some instances, for-profit entities want to dominate the marketplace of education. The way to combat that is to … launch your own programs to create excitement about publicly offered opportunities for students.”
You can read more about Carvalho’s new challenge here. You can read his 100-day plan here.
[…] This article originally appeared on reimaginED. […]