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United Teachers of Los Angeles has announced it is considering legal action against the recent LA Unified School District’s \u201cSchools Choice Plan\u201d. Through a bidding process, the plan will put 300 schools under new contracts with private or public entities. Potentially all 300 schools could be turned into charter schools. LAUSD says it is finally taking the bold action necessary to fix its notoriously low-performing schools. But according to the UTLA, the plan is a path to education privatization. The debate raging in LA over how to reform education is not just a city or state-wide debate – it is a national problem. Today’s guest Mike Rose recently wrote that the celebration of charter schools by the Federal Department of Education overlooks research that finds that charter schools on average perform no better or worse than public schools. Rose, an accomplished educator, faculty member of the UCLA graduate school of Education and Information Technology, and author, tackles not only the \u201cHow\u201d questions of education, but the \u201cWhy\u2019s\u201d. His recent book, entitled, \u201cWhy School?: Reclaiming Education For All of Us\u201d, discusses what can be done to transform the American way of education into one that values human development and the responsibilities of democratic citizenship. <\/p>\n