Saturday, April 28, 2007 - School reform may have dominated the agenda of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa during his first two years in office, but you’re not hearing much about it now. Local political observers point out that education, in fact, hardly got a mention when the mayor delivered his 2007 budget last week, or during his State of the City Address.
Instead, in the wake of recent state appeals court decisions ruling that the mayor’s school control bill, AB 1381, is unconstitutional, the battle over control of the schools has now shifted to the May 15 elections for the L.A. Unified School District Board of Education, and specifically to the runoff in the Third District. In that
There is also a runoff in the Seventh District, though it fills an open seat left by retiring member Mike Lansing, and both candidates are running on reform platforms.
The Third District race was shaping up as something of a threat to old alliances, with Galatzan backed by the mayor and Lauritzen backed by United Teachers L.A., the district’s main union and historically friendly with Villaraigosa, a former organizer with the union. Despite this rift – or because of it – the race has been as tepid as those in the past, with the exception of a minor flap over campaign mailers. Lauritzen sent one out showing an unflattering image of Galatzan using students as stepping stones to her political career. In response, Galtazan sent a campaign mailer spoofing the situation, showing a woman reading the newspaper headline, “Tamar Galatzan kidnapped Elvis!”
More eye-catching, however, are the amounts of money being spent on these campaigns. Last December, Fifth District board member David Tokofsky announced he would not seek a third term on the board, citing fears that it would be a $2 million race for a part-time job that only pays $24,000 a year, and with AB 1381 showing the mayor’s willingness to fight dirty by eliminating the school board’s paid staff.
Turns out he was right about the money: to date, Villaraigosa’s school board fund, the Partnership for Better Schools, has put $1.5 million into Galatzan’s campaign, and UTLA has put $475,000 into Lauritzen’s, with the final three-week gallop still to come. Galatzan, though grateful for the mayor’s interest in the schools and the endorsement, also says she wasn’t an unqualified supporter of AB 1381.
“You know the old joke about the two things you never want to see being made: sausages and laws? This reminds me of that,” Galatzan chuckles. “In the legislation, there’s a lot in there about giving the superintendent more CEO-like responsibilities, and that is probably a smart direction. The bill would also take away all of the staff for school board members. I fail to see why that really helps kids.”
For his part, Lauritzen says he was disappointed to not get the mayor’s blessing, noting, “I supported him in his first mayoral bid. He is someone I considered a friend. So it’s a little disappointing to have to go toe-to-toe with him on this campaign.”
And they are going toe-to-toe. The issues on which Galatzan and Lauritzen disagree are not just minor. For instance, charter schools.
“Charter schools aren’t bad, per se, but they do have some problems and they haven’t proven themselves to be a valid method of reform, yet,” says Lauritzen, who tried to impose a one-year moratorium on charters. One strike against them, he says, is that they diminish the number of students in the regular district schools, which then lose funding. They are also subject to lesser degrees of oversight regarding curriculum and accountability.
Galatzan says this is exactly the kind of thinking that needs to go. She points out that charter schools are wildly popular with parents, and over 100 of them have been accepted into the school district.
“These are students who are trying to get the best education possible, and what my opponent is concerned about is how it might cost the district money? That offends me,” says Galatzan. “The charter schools are keeping students in LAUSD who, normally, their parents would have pulled them out and sent them to private schools, or would have moved out of
Parroting a line often used by Green Dot charter school chief Steve Barr, Galatzan points out that it should be the job of the district to make charter schools irrelevant, using them as an experiment to find out what kinds of programs truly help reduce chronic district-wide problems, such as dismal academic performance and skyrocketing dropout rates.
The exchange over charter schools highlights a style difference between the two: Galatzan openly admits some of her ideas might fail, and in her platform document, “A Plan to Reform the Valley’s Public Schools,” she proposes big changes at every level, including smaller class sizes, intervention programs to reduce dropout rates, increased school safety, increased local control of schools, and – most important – an all-out war on “downtown” bureaucracy sure to please Valley partisans and disturb district administrators. Some of these would cost money, but hers is the righteous indignation of a mom with two school-age children. Lauritzen has supported many of these same ideas, but has approached them with a glacial pace, and with a cautious eye on budgets, of someone who spent 35 years as a teacher and the last four as a board member.
“She’s really unrealistic about the pace of change,” says UTLA President A.J. Duffy, referring to Galatzan. “We have a 20th century school district, and we have to drag it into the 21st century. The worst thing you can do is rush in and do sweeping changes. What we would want to see is a game plan that will show us where we are now and where we need to be in three years.”
To Lauritzen, reform is already well underway: the district is in the middle of what he calls the “the largest construction program in the western hemisphere,” adding, “That requires bureaucrats.” He’s satisfied that programs like small learning communities and the reduction of middle- and high-school class sizes to 38-40 students per teacher are a good start.
Galatzan, however, says the district should be looking at the changes in elementary class sizes, which are now set at 20 students per teacher. “It’s working!” she cries. “Teachers love it, parents like it, students like it. We have an experiment that worked. So we have to figure out a way to expand that to as many classes as possible.”
The Los Angeles Times has sided with Galatzan, saying in its April 22 endorsement, “Incumbent Jon Lauritzen has repeatedly placed the interests of United Teachers Los Angeles, his biggest contributor, ahead of the needs of students,” and citing his attempts to block charter schools as evidence that he’s just dragging his feet on reform.
Lauritzen, however, says that he’s happy to talk reform, but, in the wake of the defeat of AB 1381, the mayor really has yet to propose anything earth-shattering.
“We’ve waited two years now for a plan out of him and we still haven’t seen anything,” he says. “So, what he expects Tamar or Monica Garcia [the only board member to back AB 1381] or any of the others that he’s supported to do for him, I don’t know. I hope there’s no ulterior motives there, but sometimes you look at things like that and you wonder.” School reform may have dominated the agenda of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa during his first two years in office, but you’re not hearing much about it now. Local political observers point out that education, in fact, hardly got a mention when the mayor delivered his 2007 budget last week, or during his State of the City Address.
Instead, in the wake of recent state appeals court decisions ruling that the mayor’s school control bill, AB 1381, is unconstitutional, the battle over control of the schools has now shifted to the May 15 elections for the L.A. Unified School District Board of Education, and specifically to the runoff in the Third District. In that
There is also a runoff in the Seventh District, though it fills an open seat left by retiring member Mike Lansing, and both candidates are running on reform platforms.
The Third District race was shaping up as something of a threat to old alliances, with Galatzan backed by the mayor and Lauritzen backed by United Teachers L.A., the district’s main union and historically friendly with Villaraigosa, a former organizer with the union. Despite this rift – or because of it – the race has been as tepid as those in the past, with the exception of a minor flap over campaign mailers. Lauritzen sent one out showing an unflattering image of Galatzan using students as stepping stones to her political career. In response, Galtazan sent a campaign mailer spoofing the situation, showing a woman reading the newspaper headline, “Tamar Galatzan kidnapped Elvis!”
More eye-catching, however, are the amounts of money being spent on these campaigns. Last December, Fifth District board member David Tokofsky announced he would not seek a third term on the board, citing fears that it would be a $2 million race for a part-time job that only pays $24,000 a year, and with AB 1381 showing the mayor’s willingness to fight dirty by eliminating the school board’s paid staff.
Turns out he was right about the money: to date, Villaraigosa’s school board fund, the Partnership for Better Schools, has put $1.5 million into Galatzan’s campaign, and UTLA has put $475,000 into Lauritzen’s, with the final three-week gallop still to come. Galatzan, though grateful for the mayor’s interest in the schools and the endorsement, also says she wasn’t an unqualified supporter of AB 1381.
“You know the old joke about the two things you never want to see being made: sausages and laws? This reminds me of that,” Galatzan chuckles. “In the legislation, there’s a lot in there about giving the superintendent more CEO-like responsibilities, and that is probably a smart direction. The bill would also take away all of the staff for school board members. I fail to see why that really helps kids.”
For his part, Lauritzen says he was disappointed to not get the mayor’s blessing, noting, “I supported him in his first mayoral bid. He is someone I considered a friend. So it’s a little disappointing to have to go toe-to-toe with him on this campaign.”
And they are going toe-to-toe. The issues on which Galatzan and Lauritzen disagree are not just minor. For instance, charter schools.
“Charter schools aren’t bad, per se, but they do have some problems and they haven’t proven themselves to be a valid method of reform, yet,” says Lauritzen, who tried to impose a one-year moratorium on charters. One strike against them, he says, is that they diminish the number of students in the regular district schools, which then lose funding. They are also subject to lesser degrees of oversight regarding curriculum and accountability.
Galatzan says this is exactly the kind of thinking that needs to go. She points out that charter schools are wildly popular with parents, and over 100 of them have been accepted into the school district.
“These are students who are trying to get the best education possible, and what my opponent is concerned about is how it might cost the district money? That offends me,” says Galatzan. “The charter schools are keeping students in LAUSD who, normally, their parents would have pulled them out and sent them to private schools, or would have moved out of
Parroting a line often used by Green Dot charter school chief Steve Barr, Galatzan points out that it should be the job of the district to make charter schools irrelevant, using them as an experiment to find out what kinds of programs truly help reduce chronic district-wide problems, such as dismal academic performance and skyrocketing dropout rates.
The exchange over charter schools highlights a style difference between the two: Galatzan openly admits some of her ideas might fail, and in her platform document, “A Plan to Reform the Valley’s Public Schools,” she proposes big changes at every level, including smaller class sizes, intervention programs to reduce dropout rates, increased school safety, increased local control of schools, and – most important – an all-out war on “downtown” bureaucracy sure to please Valley partisans and disturb district administrators. Some of these would cost money, but hers is the righteous indignation of a mom with two school-age children. Lauritzen has supported many of these same ideas, but has approached them with a glacial pace, and with a cautious eye on budgets, of someone who spent 35 years as a teacher and the last four as a board member.
“She’s really unrealistic about the pace of change,” says UTLA President A.J. Duffy, referring to Galatzan. “We have a 20th century school district, and we have to drag it into the 21st century. The worst thing you can do is rush in and do sweeping changes. What we would want to see is a game plan that will show us where we are now and where we need to be in three years.”
To Lauritzen, reform is already well underway: the district is in the middle of what he calls the “the largest construction program in the western hemisphere,” adding, “That requires bureaucrats.” He’s satisfied that programs like small learning communities and the reduction of middle- and high-school class sizes to 38-40 students per teacher are a good start.
Galatzan, however, says the district should be looking at the changes in elementary class sizes, which are now set at 20 students per teacher. “It’s working!” she cries. “Teachers love it, parents like it, students like it. We have an experiment that worked. So we have to figure out a way to expand that to as many classes as possible.”
The Los Angeles Times has sided with Galatzan, saying in its April 22 endorsement, “Incumbent Jon Lauritzen has repeatedly placed the interests of United Teachers Los Angeles, his biggest contributor, ahead of the needs of students,” and citing his attempts to block charter schools as evidence that he’s just dragging his feet on reform.
Lauritzen, however, says that he’s happy to talk reform, but, in the wake of the defeat of AB 1381, the mayor really has yet to propose anything earth-shattering.
“We’ve waited two years now for a plan out of him and we still haven’t seen anything,” he says. “So, what he expects Tamar or Monica Garcia [the only board member to back AB 1381] or any of the others that he’s supported to do for him, I don’t know. I hope there’s no ulterior motives there, but sometimes you look at things like that and you wonder.”
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