A JOKE OF A VOTE: LAUSD board should take reform advisory election with a grain of salt

LA Daily News Editorial

4 Feb 2010 -- SPECIAL ed teacher Randy Ebelhar perfectly summed up the advisory election held Tuesday at 30 LAUSD schools slated for takeover by outside operators: "a joke of a vote."

What else can you call an election in which people were allowed to vote more than once on which bidder they want to run that particular school? Or one in which it was perfectly acceptable to drag strangers in off the street to cast a ballot into a cardboard box? Or one that had virtually no restrictions on age or place of residence? Or one fraught with charges of electioneering and nasty campaigning by competing bidders?

Farce might work. Fiasco might be even better.

What you can't call it is a legitimate election, with results that truly reflect the desires of stakeholders. The only good thing about it is that the results are advisory and in no way binding.

Officials and board members at the Los Angeles Unified School District concocted this two-day election (voters can vote again on Saturday - and many probably will) as a goodwill gesture.

The idea was to give parents, students, teachers and staff a voice as the district embarks on its School Choice reform plan, which opens up the operation of the district's lowest performing school to a competitive bidding process involving teacher groups and charter schools. Undoubtedly, the lives of the stakeholders in the 36 school choice campuses will be upended when they are handed over to yet-to-be-determined outside operators.

But it was a flawed concept from the beginning, one that politicized what should be an educational decision. An election with such lax rules is a prime candidate for manipulation, and those concerns were raised at a few of the schools voting this week. At San Fernando Middle School, for example, most of those voting Tuesday morning was done by school employees, not parents or other community members.

The campaigning before the election set a negative tone. Competing operators reportedly verbally attacked each other, stretching truths and in some cases even lying about what the other bidder would do if it won the bid. In addition, there have been reports that teachers have lobbied students to vote a certain way.

Yes, democracy is messy. But in this case it is just a mess - and not the best way to handle a decision that is the responsibility of the school board.

When voting reopens on Saturday, we encourage parents and community members of San Fernando Middle School - and all of the school choice campuses - to go vote to ensure a fair representation of stakeholders.

Still, LAUSD board members, who will ultimately award the bid for each of the 36 school sites, should take the results of this joke of a vote with a grain of salt - a very large one - and make the right decisions for the students, and not for their own political careers.