(From Dropout Nation, March 6th, 2013)
A few things are finally clear after yesterday’s election for three seats on the board of the Los Angeles Unified School District. The first? There few strong reform efforts will take place the same way it did in the district between 2009 and 2011, when it embarked on its now-shuttered effort to spin off 198 schools to charter school operators, communities, and teachers. Sure, Supt. John Deasy has managed to at least talk the talk on systemically reforming the district (even as he makes rather weak moves as striking a deal with the AFT’s City of Angels local on a teacher evaluation plan that does little to actually measure the performance of teachers based on their success with the students they instruct in classrooms) and has even allowed for families at 24th Street Elementary to exercise the district’s own Parent Trigger policy and take over the school. It is unlikely that Deasy will be sacked as the district’s chief executive either this year or next. But it is hard for any strong reforms to become a reality so long as the union can count on a majority or a strong plurality featuring the now-re-elected Steve Zimmer and Richard Vladovic to largely do their bidding.
Certainly reformers can take heart in current L.A. Unified Board President Monica Garcia’s strong victory. There are also some good possibilities in the race for the seat held now by Nury Martinez, with both leading vote-getter Antonio Sanchez (an aide to outgoing L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa) and teachers’ union leader Monica Ratliff (a strong supporter of charter schools and other reforms) being reform-minded enough to help put the district on the right course. But the fact that Zimmer has kept office in spite of a strong effort by Kate Anderson to unseat him still means that he will remain in office. The good news is that thanks to the reform movement’s decision to challenge him — as well as the fact that he nearly lost office — Zimmer will now choose his votes carefully if only in an attempt to keep reformers happy enough to not mount back another challenger in four years.
Yet the fact that Zimmer will now have to do more on the reform front in order to stay in office (and avoid a recall attempt), along with Garcia’s re-election victory as well as the run-off between the reform-minded Sanchez and Ratliff should hearten the school reform movement. Why? Because the real impact of this year’s election lies not so much with the results, but in what the effort means for the evolution of the school reform movement itself. The fact that so many reformers stepped up to finance and provide cover for reform-minded candidates is a clear sign that the movement is no longer just concerned with working the corridors of statehouses and gaining the backing of federal policymakers.
Read the full post here.