Yesterday evening I was on Warren Olney’s Which Way LA talking about the mayor’s school reform plan and the recent vote that took place on Tuesday allowing him to take three high schools—Santee, Roosevelt and Jordan, and most of the middle schools that feed into them—under his mayoral wing.

The mayor is positioning this takeover as a partnership, meaning that he is involving the larger LA community both monitarily (He’s raised $50 million dollars toward the schools transformation he hopes to accomplish) and in terms of services. This is a smart idea in that it suggests an understanding of the scope of the challenges he faces, which assuredly require an all hands on deck approach.

I don’t come on until about halfway through the show, but the person truly worth listening to is Jordan High School social studies teacher, Mark Gonzalez, who outlined the all difficulties that his students at watts-located Jordan deal with daily. It was a formidable list.

Here’s the link: