Satisfied with efforts to spread experienced teachers more uniformly across Los Angeles’ 750 schools, a judge lifted a consent decree imposed 15 years ago on the school district.
The decree was issued in 1991 after parents filed a lawsuit claiming that schools in poor neighborhoods suffered because they had fewer experienced and qualified teachers.
On Monday, Superior Court Judge Joanne O’Donnell refused to extend the decree for five years.
The nation’s second-largest school district has spent $11 million a year to create a better teacher mix. Nearly 93 percent of the district’s 34,610 teachers are now fully credentialed, officials said.
Teachers have 10.3 years of experience on average in all of the school district’s eight regions, except for South Los Angeles, where the average is 8.2 years.
“We were pretty disappointed in the decision, because there’s still a great deal of disparity between the number of qualified, properly credentialed teachers in different parts of the school district,” plaintiffs’ attorney Lew Hollman said.