School & District Management

Mayor’s Candidates Win Board Seats in L.A.

By Lesli A. Maxwell — May 22, 2007 4 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is set to revive a stalled effort to intervene in the Los Angeles school system after two candidates that he backed for the school board won in a runoff last week.

The election of Tamar Galatzan, a city prosecutor, and Richard Vladovic, a retired school district administrator, to the board of the Los Angeles Unified School District gives the mayor four allies on the seven-member panel. All four have said they support Mr. Villaraigosa’s bid to run at least some of the city’s lowest-performing schools.

A campaign committee aligned with the mayor raised and spent roughly $3 million to back Ms. Galatzan and Mr. Vladovic in an election that drew fewer than 7 percent of registered voters in the city of Los Angeles.

Mr. Villaraigosa, a Democrat, set his sights on electing members who would support his plan to win partial authority over the 708,000-student system after district officials challenged a state law passed last year to grant him some control. A superior court judge and a panel of state appellate judges have ruled that the law violates the California Constitution, so far keeping it from being implemented.

Though he has sparred bitterly with some current school board members over who should be responsible for running the schools, Mr. Villaraigosa last week said he wants to cooperate with the district on raising student achievement and driving down the city’s high dropout rates.

“We’ve been to the legislature. We’ve been to the courts. We’ve been to the ballot box,” the mayor said at a party as the election results were still being counted. “Now it’s time to join hands and forge a genuine partnership.”

Charter Petition

A big test of who will lead the charge to improve achievement in the nation’s second-largest district—especially in high schools whose graduation rates are often no better than 50 percent—may turn on events at Locke High School, a troubled campus in the Watts section of Los Angeles.

Teachers at the 2,800-student high school, one of the city’s poorest and lowest-performing schools, are seeking to leave the Los Angeles district and join Green Dot Public Schools, a charter school operator.

A majority of the members of the school’s tenured faculty signed a petition circulated by the charter organization to convert the large campus into 10 Green Dot campuses by the fall of 2008. California’s charter school law requires that a petition seeking to convert a traditional school to a charter contain the signatures of at least 50 percent of the tenured teachers in the petitioning school.

However, the signature-gathering process is being disputed by United Teachers Los Angeles. Frank Wells, the principal at Locke High, has been relieved of his duties by district officials, who are investigating whether he improperly allowed teachers to use class time to collect signatures.

Steve Barr, the founder and chief executive officer of Green Dot, said the Locke faculty had invoked the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which requires schools to “restructure” if they have failed for five years or more to meet student-achievement targets. One option under the law is to shut down failing schools and reopen them as charters, which are public but largely independent schools.

“There is such a disconnect between downtown bureaucracy and what is going on at these school sites,” Mr. Barr said last week. Under state law, the school board must verify the signatures and vote on the charter petition within the next two months, he added.

The move—which came a month after negotiations on a joint reform effort for Locke High between Green Dot and Los Angeles Unified Superintendent David L. Brewer III broke off—prompted district leaders and officials of the 48,000-member UTLA to meet with Locke teachers, answer questions, and present possible alternatives to becoming a Green Dot charter.

“It is very clear to us now that some of the staff didn’t understand what they were signing,” said Kathi Littmann, the executive director of the district’s new division of innovation. At least some of the confusion came from a few teachers who didn’t realize that they would have to reapply with Green Dot for their jobs, Ms. Littmann said.

Both she and A.J. Duffy, the president of UTLA, an affiliate of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, said some Locke teachers have since asked that their signatures be removed from the charter petition.

“Given all the confusion over this,” Mr. Duffy said, “I don’t think the school board is ultimately going to look upon this as a process that they have to honor.”

Among the other options for Locke, Ms. Littmann said, would be to become a “pilot school” with autonomy in hiring, spending, curriculum, and scheduling. The district, the teachers’ union, and community groups are creating 10 such schools in the city’s Belmont attendance area; two of them are scheduled to open in the fall.

“We needed to give them credible information so that they can make a choice,” Ms. Littmann said. “It’s not easy in this short time frame and in such an emotional environment.”

Mr. Barr said that any attempt by the district to fight the charter petition would be wrong and would prompt him to go to other struggling high schools in the city.

“I’ve got about eight other schools teed up that want to do the same thing,” he said.

Still, Mr. Duffy, a fierce opponent of charter schools and an adversary of Mr. Barr’s, said the dramatic turn of events at Locke should serve as a wake-up call to district administrators. For his part, Mayor Villaraigosa has repeatedly expressed his support for charter schools.

“In a very real-world way,” Mr. Duffy said, “it’s good that this happened because now the district should finally get that attention must be paid to these schools that have been totally ignored.”

A version of this article appeared in the May 23, 2007 edition of Education Week as Mayor’s Candidates Win Board Seats in L.A.

Events

Ed-Tech Policy Webinar Artificial Intelligence in Practice: Building a Roadmap for AI Use in Schools
AI in education: game-changer or classroom chaos? Join our webinar & learn how to navigate this evolving tech responsibly.
Education Webinar Developing and Executing Impactful Research Campaigns to Fuel Your Ed Marketing Strategy 
Develop impactful research campaigns to fuel your marketing. Join the EdWeek Research Center for a webinar with actionable take-aways for companies who sell to K-12 districts.
This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
Privacy & Security Webinar
Navigating Cybersecurity: Securing District Documents and Data
Learn how K-12 districts are addressing the challenges of maintaining a secure tech environment, managing documents and data, automating critical processes, and doing it all with limited resources.
Content provided by Softdocs

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more.
View Jobs
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
View Jobs
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
View Jobs
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.
View Jobs

Read Next

School & District Management The Eclipse Is Great for Learning. But It's Tough on School Logistics
A total solar eclipse will cross a large swath of the country on April 8, sparking tough management choices for leaders of the districts in its path.
5 min read
A woman and stands outside with her arm on the back of a boy as they look up at the sky while wearing special paper glasses made for viewing a solar eclipse.
Jackie Johnson and her son Bradley Johnson, 9, watch a partial solar eclipse at the Frost Science Museum on Oct. 14, 2023, in downtown Miami. In 2024, some districts are planning to delay or cancel school on the day of a total eclipse, out of safety concerns.
Matias J. Ocner/Miami Herald via AP
School & District Management Opinion A Good Principal Knows When It's Time to Leave
I didn’t leave my job because of burnout; I stepped away from being a school leader because it was in everybody’s best interest.
Matthew Ebert
4 min read
Conceptual illustration of someone handing off a baton to someone else over a completed puzzle.
Vanessa Solis/Education Week via Canva
School & District Management Principals Tell Politicians on Capitol Hill: We’re Burning Out
Students' mental health top principals' growing list of concerns.
6 min read
People walk outside the U.S Capitol building in Washington, June 9, 2022.
Visitors walk outside the U.S Capitol building in Washington on June 9, 2022.
Patrick Semansky/AP
School & District Management Women Superintendents Experience Bias on the Climb to Leadership
Interpersonal slights and inequities make it hard for women to land the job and stay in it.
3 min read
Woman stands in front of a staircase in different colors. She is about to walk up the stairs. Concept of standing in front of a challenge and finding the right solution and courage to move on.
mikkelwilliam/E+