LA Weekly

Antonio Villaraigosa dominated the outcome of this week’s runoff school board election, yet the biggest question is unanswered: whether the mayor of Los Angeles, whose influence over the board is far from certain, will have any say in a district that is already going through a catharsis without him.

In the pricey war for the Los Angeles Unified school board seat in the San Fernando Valley, Villaraigosa pick Tamar Galatzan whipped incumbent Jon Lauritzen into submission, grabbing 58 percent of the vote for a place on the seven-member school board. Yet her wan 21,563 votes, in a city of 4 million souls, came with a massive price tag — $131 per vote based on the $2.83 million Galatzan raised (more than $2 million from the mayor’s campaign committee).

The Valley battle was bitter, as were remarks by reform-resistant Lauritzen to reporters on election night as his hopes dwindled.

“I think she’s going to find herself taking orders from the mayor, and they’re going to be trying to change the district in a way that is not possible at this time because she doesn’t understand how the district works,” sniped Lauritzen, a retired teacher known for resisting reform, whose run was largely funded by his associates at the teachers union.

Galatzan isn’t so sure. At one debate in Granada Hills between the city prosecutor and Lauritzen representative Donna Smith, a local teacher asked if a vote for Galatzan was a vote for the mayor’s school-takeover agenda, an effort which was deemed unconstitutional by the courts.

“I’m not the kind of person to whom you say ‘Jump’ and I ask ‘How high?’” replied Galatzan, who says she told the mayor point-blank, if he wanted a board member whom “he would call up and say ‘do x, y and z’ — and they do x, y and z — I didn’t think I was his gal.”

She was equally independently minded about the mayor’s school-takeover bill, which he convinced Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to sign into law, only to have it challenged by the LAUSD and trashed in court. Galatzan, who has worked as a Los Angeles deputy city attorney in the Neighborhood Prosecutor Program since 2002, admits, “I’m not surprised about how it ended up in court.”

Villaraigosa’s other candidate of choice, retired West Covina Unified School District Superintendent Richard Vladovic, won with 54 percent — beating a strong challenge by retired principal Neil Kleiner.

It was never clear what Vladovic was offering in the way of “reform” over the schoolhouse veteran Kleiner, but the mayor’s committee poured $511,536 into Vladovic’s campaign. Vladovic’s total war chest, to win a seat representing the strip of Los Angeles from Watts to the harbor, hit $757,404, meaning his 8,552 votes on Tuesday cost him $89 a pop.

Along with the recently elected Yolie Flores Aguilar and Villaraigosa supporter Monica Garcia (elected just last year), neither of whom has articulated a clear plan for ending the high-school-dropout crisis and other pressing problems, Galatzan and Vladovic now comprise a purported Tony Majority.



So, well, he won. He can drop the balloons and confetti, now that his multimillion-dollar mission to get his handpicked minions into LAUSD’s Beaudry Avenue headquarters is over. After his failed attempts in the courts, not to mention those pesky plane rides to lobby Sacramento, success must be intoxicating.

But was it a Pyrrhic victory for the mayor? Or a victory at all? Superintendent David Brewer tells the L.A. Weekly it doesn’t matter if the school board is dominated by the teachers union or mayoral allies: Their mammoth task remains the same.

At the top of the supe’s long list of problems is the structure of the district, which he says suffers from poor delegating by its leaders, and departments that “operate within a vacuum,” with some divisions failing to communicate with others. Yes, LAUSD is concerned about instruction-based reform, which worked in the much-improved elementary schools. But first, Brewer says, he must improve basics like routine communications.

A glaring reminder of the communication problems played out at Locke High School in Watts a week before the election, when chaos erupted after the faculty and staff decided they’d had enough of L.A. Unified.

Students ditched classes and pressed their noses against gates and windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of Principal Frank Wells, who stood across the street from the school he’d tried desperately to turn around, declaring to a group of reporters, “I’m a fallen soldier today, but I’m standing tomorrow.”

Days earlier, the district had stripped Wells of his duties and — in what officials believe was an unprecedented moment in the Education Wars — hauled him off campus, accusing him of taking teachers out of classes to sign a petition to let Locke High become an independent charter school, free of the district’s rules.

More than half the tenured teachers at Locke signed the petition to convert the 2,800-student school into 10 small, Green Dot schools. It was a stunning move by teachers, whose United Teachers Los Angeles union has long deemed the city’s rapidly spreading charter-school movement an attack on public schools.

Many observers probably saw it as fitting that the badly failing high school — which earned the lowest possible score, a 1 out of 10, in last year’s Academic Performance Index (API) statewide ranking — should be ground zero for a revolution.

Locke isn’t the first large L.A. school to seek a conversion to independent charter. In 2003, Granada Hills High School broke L.A. Unified’s hold. It now earns an impressive 9 out of 10 on the statewide test-score rankings, and was recently named one of California’s 39 certified charters — a designation of excellence.

California Charter Schools Association President Caprice Young says Granada officials got tired of being told “you can’t have that discipline plan, you can’t have the teachers staying after school, you can’t have a longer school year — Granada said, ‘Forget it. We know what the kids need.’”