Four 4 Reform: Will the LA School Board Elections Make a Difference?

The Los Angeles Unified School board races are finally over—with a fraction of the voters believing the runoff election mattered enough to come to the polls. Two more candidates favored by Antonio-the-Mayor have won, bringing the Villraigosa-backed number on the seven-member board to four. Yesterday’s winners, Tamar Galatzan and Richard Vladovic, who joined the previously elected, Yolie Flores Aguilar and Monica Garcia, are all theoretically reform-minded people.

The most significant defeat was handed to the Valley’s Jon Lauritzen, the candidate who got buckets full of money from the local teachers’ union, UTLA, (yet was outspent, with the mayor’s help, by Galatzan).

Okay, so we’ve got ourselves a new school board. But does it matter?

So many questions remain to be answered. Things like:

1. Will the Four for Reform give any actual power to the Mayor? (Like, say, dominion over a “cluster” or three of schools, like he wanted and didn’t get with his Constitutionally-challenged school reform bill?)

2. Is that even a workable idea at this point?

3. Will they instead decide, screw the union’s objection to charters, and partner in some way with Green Dot’s successful charter school king, Steve Barr?

4. Or will they really throw all caution to the Santa Ana winds and go for both of the above?

5. And, last, can the new Fab Four manage to resist and defeat LAUSD’s Evil Bureaucratic Force-Field (EBFF) that has sucked the souls out of previous board members?

Question Number Five is, of course, the one that will determine the outcome of the other four.

(By the way, mad speculation about What It All Means may be found in the LA Times, the Daily News and the LA Weekly. For my money, the Weekly’s column by former LA Times blogger, Janine Kahn, has probably has the most interesting analysis of the three.)

Sure, it’s easy to be pessimistic about the ability of the district to reform itself (as I generally am). Yet, the news has been SO bad for so long, that there seems to be a new sense of desperation in the air that might possibly, for the first time in years, bode well for real change. For instance….



…Superintendent (& Admiral) David Brewer wrote a kick-ass editorial for the Times on Monday, in which he was candid about what’s wrong at the district including: “lack of accountability throughout the organization.”….a “vicious, failing cycle”… an “old way of trying to fix our ailing schools [that] will take longer than any of our lifetimes….” and more.

Similarly, when the Reform Four held a post victory Photo Op at 9th Street Elementary school in downtown LA, they talked about “urgency,” their “deep desire” to work with the charter community, a commitment to “streamline” the bureaucracy. And, along with Brewer, they said they would “seek out” partners, “and that includes the mayor.”

All good words.

Yet, the aforementioned LAUSD EBFF is a mighty power.

An emblematic example: Last week, after the majority of the 73 tenured teachers at failing and gang-ridden Locke High School voted bravely —and with the blessing of their principal, Frank Wells—to hand over Locke to Steve Barr and Green Dot for a “conversion” into 10 smaller charter schools, how did the district react to this completely legal maneuver? (A maneuver that is, FYI, completely in keeping with the No Child Left Behind mandates.) Did they applaud the teachers’ wonderfully pro-active move to improve the educational life of their students? Or did they wipe their collective brows with relief that someone else was going to “partner” in saving the chronically bottoming out school?

Nope. And nope. They fired the principal and escorted him off campus for supposedly “allowing” his teachers to “leave class” in order to sign and circulate the Green Dot petition. (An accusation that both the teachers and Wells say is preposterous.)

So much for partnership.

Like I said, the LAUSD EBFF is a mighty power.

Stay tuned. The complete foursome will be seated in July, and it’s at least bound to be interesting.