The mayor's emphasis on struggling schools comes as city officials are wrestling with a deficit of at least $350 million and trying to retain services even after deep budget cuts.
by Maeve Reston and Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times | http://lat.ms/dFrdvq
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa signs autographs for students at Stevenson Middle School on Tuesday. (Gary Friedman, Los Angeles Times / April 12, 2011)
April 13, 2011, 12:01 a.m.-- In his sixth State of the City address Wednesday, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa will turn his sights to education and call for throwing out the telephone-book sized teachers contract as a fundamental strategy for reforming the state's largest public school system.
The result, he argues, will be more freedom for teachers, higher pay for the best ones and a better education for students who are not well served.
Villaraigosa's focus on struggling schools comes as city officials are wrestling with a deficit of at least $350 million and trying to keep services flowing even after deep budget cuts. In tackling school reform during his final two years in office, he returns to an issue that he embraced as a mayoral candidate, when he vowed to take over the Los Angeles Unified School District — a battle for direct control that he lost.
Since then the one-time union organizer has used his substantial influence to elect an allied majority on the Board of Education, which, in turn, just selected a like-minded superintendent of schools. With new leadership of the teachers union about to take charge and an expiring teachers' contract, Villaraigosa will argue that now is the time for groundbreaking reforms that would have once seemed impossible.
"With the stars aligned, we have to seize this opportunity," the mayor plans to say according to a draft of the speech provided to The Times. "Let's stop dictating at the District level and let our local schools make the calls....Our time is now. The nation is watching. L.A. must take the lead."
Villaraigosa's remarks offer his latest challenge to United Teachers Los Angeles, for which he once worked. In a December address he called UTLA "one unwavering roadblock to reform." On Wednesday, he will lay out his aspiration for a thinner, simpler contract. A school site — its teachers and administrators — should have latitude to choose from a broad menu of options or even come up with their own, and then be held accountable for the results, Joan Sullivan, deputy mayor for education, said in elaborating on the mayor's plans.
The mayor believes the new contract should include a teacher evaluation system that is based, at least in part, on student test scores, although he would oppose the public release of a so-called "value-added" measure for individual teachers. And teachers should be able to earn extra pay for superlative, measureable performance, Sullivan added.
Villaraigosa also reiterated his call for changing rules that grant virtually automatic tenure to teachers after two years. And he asserted the need to alter the quality-blind "last in, first out" seniority rules that govern who is laid off during budget-related cutbacks.
The mayor chose to deliver his speech at Jefferson High School in South Los Angeles to underscore its progress under reforms he has supported. In 2005, he will note, student brawls disrupted the campus. Later, low academic achievement prompted the district to allow outside education groups to submit bids to take over the school. Jefferson's own teachers and principal eventually won control.
The mayor's speech presents a rosy picture of his City Hall accomplishments in areas such as crime and traffic reduction. The address makes little mention of the major budget cuts that the mayor will propose next week. On his watch, city leaders have already eliminated about 4,000 job positions through a combination of layoffs, early retirements, staffing reorganizations and a hiring freeze.
Two bright spots have been a pending labor agreement in which some civilian employees would pay for retiree health benefits and voter-approved changes scaling back pensions for new police and firefighters.
Though the mayor's focus on schools may be more palatable to voters than how he may be forced to reduce city spending, the strategy also carries risk. There is no guarantee that he will be able to achieve the kind of education reforms he is seeking, which require negotiation with unions and even new legislation. He also could be accused of disengagement from the city's most pressing troubles.
Deputy Mayor Sarah Sheahan said Villaraigosa can manage multiple priorities at once and "believes that the best way to turn our economy around for generations to come is to focus on education today."
The mayor's strategy could also reap political rewards. His background as a union organizer is likely to draw more attention to his ideas, and he will have a national platform as the incoming leader of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Should he decide to stay in politics, his effort to pull away from his labor roots could help moderate his image as a liberal from the West Coast.
Villaraigosa's address may also be his last chance to frame his legacy before he is termed-out in June 2013. By next year, the race to replace him will be well under way, with candidates debating his successes and shortcomings.
He has the political capital to do "one more thing that's big enough to make people pay attention," said Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC. "Since taking office, he's been the 'jobs mayor,' the 'crime-fighting mayor,' the 'transportation mayor,' the 'green mayor' and on at least a few occasions the 'education mayor,' but he's not strongly identified with any of those things," Schnur said. "And at this point in his term in office, his best bet is putting all of his policy eggs in one political basket."
Villaraigosa, who took office in July 2005, has offered few hints of his plans when his term wraps up. The state Democratic Party's elders — Gov. Jerry Brown and Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer — are all in their 70s, and Villaraigosa's name has been mentioned less frequently than in past years as a natural successor.
But Schnur said Villaraigosa can still enhance his political viability. On education reform issues "Villaraigosa's own very unique political biography gives him an opportunity to make a major impact," he said. "It's a risky choice, but if he sticks with it, it could pay off for him politically."
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