UTLA members protest Great Public Schools Now’s charter expansion plan

The new executive director of Great Public Schools Now says a hostile LA Unified board resolution, angry union leaders or public opinion will not threaten the group’s goal to create successful schools, whoever’s in charge of them.

If anything, said Myrna Castrejón, the widespread opposition to her organization, its plans and founder, Eli Broad, are providing her a megaphone to “change the conversation” about public education in Los Angeles.

“Business as usual is not an option for anybody, charter schools included,” she told LA School Report, referring to district efforts to address the needs of under-performing schools. “It doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. We want to define success as students define success, through one successful school at a time.”

Castrejón, a former lobbyist for the California Charter Schools Association, comes to GPS Now at a time of heightened scrutiny, skepticism and outright animus from district officials and parents growing fearful of the financial impact of more charter schools in the district. They’re also not too crazy about any connection to Broad, a philanthropist who has investing heavily in education reform.

Officials of the teachers union, UTLA, have accused the group of attempting to “dismantle” public education in Los Angeles, and just this week, the school board went on record opposing the GPS Now plan, of which few details are actually known. Most criticism is directed toward an early draft, which said it wants to spend $490 million to open 260 new charter schools in the district. 

UTLA has been especially critical among the district’s labor partners, pointing to the number of jobs and programs that could be lost with every new independent charter within the district.

Castrejón said much of the early draft no longer reflects the organization’s goals, which, themselves, are a work in progress.

For one thing, she said, the group is not focusing solely on the creation of more charter schools, pointing out, “This is not a charter-only effort. We’re interested in replicating what works, replicating what’s successful in LAUSD.”

She also said one of her first priorities will be to meet with board members, the new superintendent, Michelle King, and the UTLA president, Alex Caputo-Pearl, to discuss ways the new group could be helpful to the district.

Shannon Haber, the district spokeswoman, said King “is open” to meeting with Castrejón.

“The opportunities to coalesce are there,” Castrejón said. “We are certainly planning to extend our goodwill to listen carefully and craft a path forward together. In the end, we’re all measured by our success, and if it’s a tough conversation, I’m fine with that, but I’m energized by the opportunity.”

In the weeks ahead, Castrejón said the focus of the group will be to create a board of a dozen or so beyond the current members — chairman Bill Siart and a seat reserved for a representative of the Broad Foundation — to finalize a mission statement and to start raising money.

As far as dealing with critics, the plan is to engage them as much as possible to the degree she can.

“I don’t worry about detractors or what people say can’t be done,” she said. “I’ve never organized my life that way, and this is no exception.”

She’s the ideal superintendent for LA Unified. For right now.

After all the time and expense — especially the time — district officials spent searching for a successor to Ramon Cortines, the decision to remove the “interim” from King’s job title was the right call —  but maybe not only for the obvious reason, King’s three decades of experience in LA Unified as a teacher, principal and administrator.

More critically, she was the right choice for this particular board — seven people who have lost their taste for a free-lance thinker and would prefer a leader whose problem solving more comports with accepted custom and tradition in LA Unified. In other words, the board wanted someone whose vision was more in line with board group-think than a superintendent clambering along a road less traveled for novel solutions.

Part of all that is the familiarity these board members have with King, a trusted, efficient, loyal aide whose career trajectory was a testament to such old-fashioned concepts as success, collegiality and collaboration.

But there appears more to the choice, as well, and it has to do with the new superintendent’s inheritance — a district on the edge, always on the edge, through serious and unrelenting structural issues that threaten a quality public education for children through no fault of their own.

Unlike new superintendents elsewhere, King is assuming command at a time the spectrum of challenges makes it easy to raise the district’s ultimate and existential question: Is it simply too big to deliver the kind of education hoped for and promised by those in charge of delivering it?

Just think about events of the last six to 12 months: An independent financial review panel has predicted near-at-hand deficits that could reach as much as $600 million. One of its recommendations is cutting back union benefits and pension while the teachers union, for one, has vowed not to let that happen.

The district is losing nearly three percent of its students every year, costing hundreds of thousands in lost state and federal revenues, many of them moving on to charter schools. And the hemorrhaging now comes as charter school groups are mounting a major plan to pull even more kids out of traditional district schools.

Further, academic performance across the district, as measured by the new state tests, was awful, raising questions about the usual culprits of tests, testing, teaching methods, learning abilities, bad neighborhoods, English deficit, something else, anything else. In any case, it’s a major challenge to show improve in the next round, this spring.

No doubt the search firm hired by the district produced a slate of admirable candidates with education backgrounds, including Kelvin Adams, who has won great acclaim for turning around the St. Louis school district as superintendent. Adams was the runner-up. Other candidates also drew high marks from the board, like Richard Carranza, the superintendent of San francisco Unified, who withdrew for unstated reasons but one probably that he was outed in media speculation as a candidate.

But all the also-rans have one thing in common: The districts they lead are far smaller than LA Unified in size, scope, budget and challenge. Adams, for example, oversees 27,000 students with an annual budget of $285 million. LA Unified has 644,000 kids and a budget of $12 billion.

From a practical standpoint, that gives King the added advantage of serving as superintendent starting today, a seamless transition from Cortines, rather than a time months from now after an outsider fathomed the magnitude of the job, not to mention the personalities of the board members in charge.

That difference, alone, makes King the best choice to lead LA Unified through its current briar patch of issues. If she guides it through successfully and demonstrates the political skills to balance competing interests in every issue before her, the board will have no further need of a search firm anytime soon.

The finish line is in view. In all likelihood, by this time next week, LA Unified will have its next superintendent.

Just who that will be remains uncertain to the world beyond the seven board members and a few district officials. The process has been moving along at a relatively brisk pace, considering the enormity of the job, and to the board’s credit, there have been no leaks.

But it’s not that difficult to speculate on the kind off superintendent this board wants to lead the district: In short, the person selected will have qualifications, background and political savvy as close to Ramon Cortines and as far from John Deasy as possible.

More than anything, this board does not want a superintendent with a strong, independent vision or aggressive agenda: Cortines won the board’s love by anticipating where the majority of support lies on a given issue, then acting on it. He also offered wise counsel, reflecting his decades of work in administration.

But as in any other high-profile election —  and that is what this is, with board members who view public education through vastly different prisms — the winning candidate will not satisfy every constituent group on every important issue.

More than likely, the new superintendent will come from a mid-sized to large school district that has been run effectively and without the drama usually present here as it plays out in opposing philosophical views about charter schools and the ever-present challenge to satisfy the district’s largest labor partners.

Given the size of LA Unified as measured by its budget, student population, facilities and needs, there is likely not a Super-superintendent in the wings. The choice will be a mortal, with more strengths than weaknesses, but weaknesses nonetheless; more of a collaborator than a decider, more a steady doubles hitter than a home run threat who strikes out as often as clears the bases.

If that is, indeed, the ideal candidate, and more than one candidate remains under consideration, the final choice in a city as diverse as Los Angeles could be determined by demographics: Since 1937, LA Unified boards have tended to choose white men, with an occasional black (David Brewer) and Latino (Ruben Zacarias, Cortines). What they have never chosen is a woman.

The guess here is that any of the remaining candidates would be acceptable to the board, and the person selected will be the one judged to have the highest ratio of assets to liabilities, gender notwithstanding. And the only element of skin that will matter is not the color but the thickness, for the criticism sure to follow.

Scott Schmerelson has revised his LA Unified board resolution that attacks an outside group’s plan to expand the number of charter schools in the district. A majority of the seven board members has expressed opposition to the plan.

But a shift in mission from the group — Great Public Schools Now, supported by the Broad Foundation and others — combined with the changed language in the resolution, suggests it might be more difficult for him to achieve a 7-0 vote from a board that includes several members supportive of charter schools.

The resolution will be voted on at the Dec. 8 board meeting. It is largely symbolic because state law provides school boards only a limited ability to deny legitimate charter applications.

In the resolution he introduced last month, Schmerelson called for a declaration that the school board “opposes the Broad Foundation plan.” It now says the board “stands opposed to external initiatives that seek to reduce public education to an educational marketplace and our children to market shares while not investing in District-wide programs and strategies that benefit every student.”

But officials of Great Public Schools Now say they have revised their plan to include investing in some traditional district schools, including pilots, magnets and other high-performing schools with large numbers of children receiving free and reduced-price lunch.

While those schools do not represent the entirety of LA Unified, the inclusion of them suggests that Great Public Schools Now is seeking to reduce opposition to the plan by addressing at least one major concern of the board, that the initiative would ignore children in regular district schools. 

Further, leaders of the group say they have dropped any language or reference that frames its mission in terms of “market share.”

Schmerelson says he hasn’t had a change of heart, that the revised resolution still reflects his staunch opposition to the plan. In an email to LA School Report, he said he does not consider his revision “a major shift to the original intent of my resolution,” asserting that he is “unaware of any other initiative at this time that identifies LAUSD students in terms of ‘market share.’”

He pointed to another part of the his revision, a commitment to a long list of strategies aimed at attracting and retaining students by developing “a framework for excellent public schools and improved outcomes for every student.”

The list includes such familiar issues as improving student achievement, helping young children overcome the impact of poverty, funding for the arts, assuring student safety and improving student attendance.

“As a new Board Member, I am trying to better define our responsibility to the future of LAUSD and to all our children who deserve an excellent public education despite per pupil resources that rank among the lowest in the nation,” Schmerelson said in the email, adding, “I remain opposed and incensed by all strategies that are clearly designed to privatize public education at the expense of our neediest children who rely on our neighborhood schools.”

At the very least, passage of the revised resolution would put down a marker down to Greater Public Schools Now, forcing the group to make good on its word to do more for traditional schools if the effort proceeds.

At the same time, the new language, nuanced as it may be, could make it easier for the three board members sympathetic to charters — Ref Rodriguez, Mónica García and Richard Vladovic — to vote against it without drawing condemnation from the teachers union, UTLA, which is perhaps the charter expansion group’s staunchest adversary.

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School board member Richard Vladovic

A major contributor to LA Unified’s pending fiscal crisis is unfunded federal and state mandates that have deprived the district of hundreds of millions of dollars in recent years.

The exact number is difficult to calculate because the total not only reflects the amount the district seeks in reimbursement but what percentage the governments return to the district. In some cases, it’s little more than 20 cents on the dollar.

“It’s all very, very complicated,” said school board member Richard Vladovic, who brought the issue to light last week during a budget committee meeting. “The state controls everything; they impose the mandate and we have the responsibility to fulfill them. And the federal government does the same thing.”

The reluctance of the state and federal governments to send dollars into the district and the ever-falling reimbursements rates is nothing new for LA Unified.

But the need for those missing dollars has become more urgent with budget deficits projected within a few years as the number of enrolled students declines and district expenses rise.

A recent report from an independent panel brought in by Superintendent Ramon Cortines warned the school board that under current trends, the district faces a deficit of $333 million in 2017-2018, $450 million in 2018-2019 and $600 million by 2019-2020. And those numbers would erode the district’s credit worthiness, driving the deficits up even higher.

Vladovic suggested that just by meeting its legal obligation on supporting special education, the federal government would ease the district’s financial struggles by $800 million.

“It’s so unfair,” he said. “They only reimburse us at something like 11 percent and law says it should be closer to 40 percent.”

At the budget committee meeting, the district’s Chief Financial Officer, Megan Reilly, told the board the state owed the district more than $200 million.

Vladovic turned to the camera live-streaming the meeting: “They haven’t paid us, for those of you watching, the state owes us that much more money, and I’ll get off this soap box, they owe us more and [we have] more requirements and they do not follow the law and yet we have to follow the law every bit. We can certainly use that $200 million, trust me.”

Reilly’s deputy, John Walsh, told LA School Report that his office is investigating an estimated $227 million owed by the state as well as money owed by the federal government. He pointed out that the independent financial report urges the district to press Washington for full funding for the students with special needs.

The district’s lobbyists have warned that a plan now in the House of Representatives could cost LA Unified $78.7 million of its Title I money for low income schools, which translates to 22.9 percent of its funding.

The district’s looming deficits could also be affected by the future of Prop 30, a ballot initiative approved by state voters in 2012 that raised income taxes on wealthy individuals for seven years and increased state sales taxes for four years. Much of the money has been going to support public education.

The prospect of extending those revenue streams is now in the hands of two groups that want to get a new initiative on the ballot next year. By one estimate, passage would generation as much as $9 billion a year for another 15 years.

Mike Szymanski contributed reporting to this story.

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It’s getting down to crunch time: Thanksgiving . . . Christmas . . . Last day on the job for LA Unified Superintendent Ramon Cortines.

By next week, names for his replacement will begin to flow with a list of candidates that could include such well-regarded figures from across the county as Rudy Crew, a former Chancellor of New York City schools; Alberto M. Carvalho, Superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools;  Valeria Silva, superintendent of St. Paul’s public schools; and Richard Carranza, superintendent of schools in San Francisco.

No doubt all of them have fine resumes.

But in thinking about what awaits the next occupant of Cortines’s 24th floor office, one might wonder if an outsider with little knowledge of the district would necessarily make the best choice for LA Unified, given the issues at hand. Never mind the larger question, why would anyone even want the job. Consider the current state of affairs:

• An independent financial review panel just reported that the district is facing deficits that could reach $600 million within four years.
• The district is hemorrhaging students, nearly three percent a year, costing hundreds of thousands in lost state and federal revenues.
• Pressure is mounting on the district to reduce health care benefits and increase employee pension contribution, already triggering union opposition.
• Academic performance across the district was abysmal, judging by the most recent statewide tests.
• The charter war within the district is intensifying, with a plan by outsiders to create hundreds more charter schools to serve as many as half the district enrollment.
• The seven members of the elected school board, who serve as the superintendent’s bosses, are hard-pressed to agree on what day it is, let alone on how to solve intractable problems.

No doubt, the winning candidate would convince all or most of the board members that the challenges are not insurmountable. Pay and benefits are not likely to be issues. The winner can expect a deal worth upwards of $300,000 a year with lots of perqs.

But here’s the thing. The learning curve to run a district of this size and complexity is long and steep even in normal times, with uncountable numbers of students, teachers, assistants, deputies, administrators, schools, labor leaders, political operatives, state officials —  and issues: Difficult, politically-charged, financially-challenged, board-polarizing issues.

Cortines was such a genius choice to follow John Deasy’s departure last year because he knew the district, and he knew where the bodies were buried. Heck, he might have buried them. But the lavish praise he has received on this, his farewell tour, after serving twice before as superintendent, owes to his intimate knowledge of the district and its wide array of challenges.

It’s also a tribute to his ability to understand and manage the vicissitudes of seven disparate board members.

It’s a safe bet that the search firm, Hazard, Young, Attea, has scoured the nation to find sterling candidates with resumes that reflect success — but success elsewhere. LA Unified is different; success elsewhere doesn’t necessarily predict success here.

Nor has the board given any indication it wants a superintendent with an out-sized personality or predetermined agenda. The members may not even want a visionary. Deasy was a visionary of sorts. He had his heart in the right place with the iPad thing, but we all know how that turned out.

The district has its roadmap for the next few years. It was laid out rather clearly in the financial panel report delivered two weeks ago. The authors identified problems and recommended solutions. It would appear prudent that whoever is hired would follow closely along.

It could be, though, that an outsider, even a star from somewhere else, might prefer charting his or her own path, rather than be tied to a waiting prescription. That’s totally understandable. But that’s also why it might make sense to turn the reins over to someone more familiar with the terrain — a current or former senior administrator — to steer the district through the potholes that lie ahead.

A return to solvency should take three years, maybe four, during which the board will make the critical decisions that will shape the district for the foreseeable future. By then, a more stable district might be better situated to hire a leader, maybe from elsewhere, who is free to chart a more independent, even visionary course.

Anita Landecker

In what would appear to be a strategic shift, the organization leading an effort to open more charter schools in LA Unified now intends to expand its mission to support traditional public schools that serve low-income children.

The organization, incorporated as Great Public Schools Now, is an outgrowth of a plan by the Broad and other foundations to create enough new charter schools to serve half of the district student population within eight years.

The foundations’ initial plan, articulated through a draft proposal over the summer, did not include consideration of investment in traditional district schools. But the plan now under development has been widened to include a goal of investing in pilot, magnet and other   high-performing district schools that have large numbers of children receiving free and reduced-price lunch.

“In one of the early meetings, the idea was raised, and people said, ‘Definitely, let’s do it’ “ said Anita Landecker, the interim executive director of Great Public Schools Now. “I don’t know how yet; it hasn’t been worked out, but there is an interest in helping high-quality schools that serve low-income kids.”

The willingness of the group to invest in district schools comes in some measure as a response to widespread criticism of the original Broad plan. Opponents, including members of the district school board and the LA teachers union, UTLA, have attacked the proposal as dangers for public education that would cost the district programs and jobs and leave half the student population with inferior assets.

Board President Steve Zimmer, perhaps the most critical of the seven board members, dismissed it as a “some kids, not all kids” plan that he would fiercely oppose.

Landecker described the new approach as an effort that would blunt some of the criticism even as the major thrust of the effort remains adding charter schools to satisfy the growing public demand for them and reducing the long lists of students on waiting lists to get in.

She used as an example a magnet school with dozens of students eager to fill a limited number of openings. “We’d like to figure out what it would take to expand the number of kids who could get to such a high-performing schools,” she said. “I don’t know what that looks like yet, but I know there’s interest in doing that.”

Just how much money would be directed to district schools has not been determined, she said. The ultimate shape of the plan would depend on a number of factors, including more feedback from community groups — “from all kinds of people” she said, “including detractors” — as well as from the school board. She said efforts are now underway to schedule individual meetings with board members to gauge their interest, ideas and concerns.

The organization is also looking to form a Board of Directors, hire a permanent executive director and start raising money. The goal, she said was $50 million a year, for a total of $400 million by the eight year.

The $490 million cited in the draft plan “was aspirational,” she said, but meeting the yearly target was probable. “We wouldn’t have done this if we didn’t think we could raise a fair amount of money,” she added.

While the overall spending plan remains a work in progress, Landecker said several overarching ideas are likely to be consdered. One, she mentioned, is developing a leadership program for teachers and principals with the idea that more high-quality people means more high-quality schools. Another is to spend money where schools, charter or otherwise, have a degree of autonomy over budget, hiring decisions and use of resources.

For now, it’s does not appear that the shift in mission would will temper opposition by UTLA, which has organized several rallies around the district to oppose the plan and still features a photo of Eli Broad on the UTLA website with the admonition, “Hit the road, Broad.”

“It doesn’t change our view of the Broad-WalMart initiative,” UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl said in an email message. “Eli Broad realized that his plan to dismantle the district, stifle democratic decision-making, and create an unregulated system that leaves high-needs students behind and doesn’t guarantee parent involvement – he realized his plan isn’t what the people of Los Angeles want. But this doesn’t change his record of funding similar efforts in Louisiana and Detroit, or the language in his initiative that bases his plan on seeing children as ‘market share.’”

Pointing to LA Unified’s soaring numbers of students living in poverty and learning English, Caputo-Pearl suggested, “If Broad and other billionaires want to ensure a great education for every child, they should invest half a billion dollars, and more, in an LAUSD foundation, run by the democratically elected school board, to fund sustainable neighborhood community schools that address the myriad educational and socio-economic needs of our students.”

The school board’s view of the shift in mission is less clear — but probably predictable. While Zimmer did not respond to a request for comment yesterday, he and three of his colleagues have publicly expressed discomfort with the original plan, and the next meeting, Dec. 7, has a resolution scheduled for a vote, to condemn it even though the board is legally barred from denying charter applications based solely on sentiment.

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Megan Reilly

It’s one thing when LA Unified’s Chief Financial Officer appears before the school board and warns of budgetary troubles ahead, based on current projections and obligations. That’s her job.

It’s quite another when a panel of outsiders, brought in to take a fresh look, reaches the same conclusions and expresses them in a hair-raising way that promises existential consequences if immediate change is not forthcoming.

The “Report of the Independent Financial Review Panel,” the work of nine experts called in by Superintendent Ramon Cortines, is the ultimate wake-up call for a district driving dangerously to the edge. In its essence, they say current trends are unsustainable and will lead to the end of LA Unified as configured if bold steps aren’t taken to accommodate realities that have been so far unaddressed with meaningful response.

“If the District desires to continue as a growing concern beyond FY 2019-20, capable of improving the lives of students and their families, then a combination of difficult, substantial and immediate decisions will be required,” it says. “Failure to do so could lead to the insolvency of the LAUSD, and the loss of local governance authority that comes from state takeover.”

The panel is scheduled to present its findings to the board at tomorrow’s board meeting. The overall message echoes what Megan Reilly, the district CFO, has been saying all along, that despite an improving economy, budget deficits are just a few years away.

But the 75-page report conveys an urgency that Reilly’s warnings have lacked. After all, Cortines created the panel six months ago, which means another half-year has passed without substantial changes from the board and superintendent, leaving financial threats to build.

While the panel makes clear a need for fundamental changes in how the district conducts business — from its relationships with unions to how it pays for cafeteria food — it cites as the root of looming insolvency a steady decline in enrollment, the causes of which the district has only limited control. The major factors are the growing popularity of charter schools, an outward migration of families from Los Angeles and a declining birthrate among city residents.

No real news there, but what is news is the urgency with which the panel implores the board to start recognizing the trends for the impact they’re having on the district and to respond accordingly.

For example, the report concludes that despite the loss of about 100,000 students over the last six years, representing a revenue loss of nearly $900 million, “the district had not reduced staff commensurate with the loss of enrollment and, in fact, had experienced higher salary costs because of both salary and benefit increases and increases in staff.”

The report recommends “even broader future changes”  beyond cutting the workforce. “At some point,” the authors conclude, “the number of schools will also need to be examined as the District ‘right sizes’ itself.”

This is hardly a description of a healthy, vibrant, growing district. And even if a majority of board members agree that it’s time to act on the panel’s four dozen recommendations to stave off insolvency, other outside forces will make the challenge even more difficult.

First, there is the escalating growth of charter schools within the district, with hundreds more to come if the Broad Foundation makes good on its plan to to serve half the district’s student population in charters within the next eight years. Currently, about 15 percent of district students attend charters. Independent charters siphon money away from district control.

Second, there are the continuing efforts by the district’s labor partners to increase the number of jobs and at least maintain the current level of benefits, which the report says are almost 10 percent higher than the statewide average. For months now, the teachers union, UTLA, has been warning its members that the district will try to reduce benefits during the next contract negotiating period. Counter-measures by the teachers to fight any givebacks are now underway.

Finally, the district is facing the possibility of declining revenue from the state, a result of temporary taxes scheduled to sunset between 2016 and 2018.

Well-funded charters, determined labor unions, uncertain state tax policies — these are formidable challenges for a district that has largely ignored the structural issues putting it in jeopardy.

The CFO has done her job. Now a panel of outside experts has weighed in. What happens next depends on the seven members of the elected school board, who are also trying to find themselves a new superintendent by Dec. 31. 

What an unpleasant gift they are waiting to present.

The effort to find a consensus candidate to follow Ramon Cortines into the superintendent’s office is playing out as difficult issues sometimes do in LA Unified, with good intentions undermined by political pandering and a bit of disingenuousness.

While Steve Zimmer, the board president, has set in motion a thoughtful and reasonable approach to the search by hiring a well-regarded firm to identify quality candidates, he and his board colleagues are doing their best to shatter unity, rather than build it.

The friction has developed over the district’s decision to involve the public while keeping confidential — as head hunters recommend — the actual recruiting, selection and hiring.

Both are noble pursuits but for reasons that are entirely incompatible if the board is truly seeking the best candidate available.

The decision to include public opinion mirrors the district’s oft-professed need for “transparency,” a worthy goal in many circumstances. But the invitation with regard to the superintendent search is only for h’ors oeuvres, not the entree. In this case, that’s probably the way it should be.

Through open meetings and an online survey, the district has been asking what “characteristics” the new superintendent should have. “Your voice counts,” says the invitation to take the survey.

But counts for what?

The survey asks people to rate a series of assertions in the order of relative importance. Here’s an example, the “Instructional Leadership” page: 

• Holding a deep understanding of the teaching/learning process.
• Providing guidance for district-wide curriculum and instruction
• Promoting the importance of providing safe and caring school environments.
• Integrating personalized educational opportunities into the instructional program.
• Utilizing student achievement data to drive the District’s instructional decision making.

Wouldn’t the most highly-qualified candidate hold all these choices with equal and utmost importance?  Put another way, would anyone want a superintendent who values any one choice less than the others? In that context, a public preference is meaningless.

It could be that people across the district are seeing the effort for what it appears to be, a feel-good exercise to give parents and students a sense that they’re involved when they’re really not.

After a week, about 4,000 people took the survey, one for every 162 students in the district, and many of the meetings held across the city have attracted crowds in the tens.

Various community groups are upset that they are being shut out of the process, an angry mood that has caught the attention of the board’s two Mónicas. At a meeting a few weeks ago, Mónica Ratliff introduced a motion to bring the finalists before the community for a weigh-in. It failed, 4-3.

At a meeting yesterday, Monica García introduced a motion to create a committee of outsiders to vet the finalists. That one went down, 5-2.

Five of the seven board members saw some value in the two motions — or got a loud enough earful from community groups — because only Zimmer and board vice president George McKenna voted no on both. They were right to do so.

Imagine yourself a valued and successful superintendent in a medium-to-large district who is poised to take the next career step. You’re an ideal candidate for the LA Unified job. But as one of a handful of finalists, you are told you need to undergo public scrutiny before a final decision is made.

“Have a blast,” says your current board. “But don’t come back.”

In one of his arguments against the Ratliff proposal, McKenna reminded his colleagues that constituents elected each board member to carry out the responsibility of running the school district.

So far, they have held fast to a process in which confidentiality is assured for the sake of finding the most highly-qualified candidates. Otherwise, there is no real need for a search firm. The last time the district hired a new superintendent, the board decided against using a search firm.

Anyone remember how that turned out?

Eli Broad

Steve Zimmer, president of the LA Unified school board, said today that plans by Eli Broad and other philanthropists to expand the number of charter schools in the district represents “a strategy to bring down LAUSD that leaves 250,000 kids vulnerable to damage.”

A draft report of the plan appears show how the organizations involved would be creating the equivalent of a parallel school district, one with a defined goal of serving half the number of students attending LA Unified schools within eight years.

The “Great Public Schools Now Initiative” says the expansion would cost nearly half a billion dollars by 2023, through 260 new charter schools to serve an additional 130,000 students “most in need — low-income students of color.” Currently, about 151,000 students now attend charters in LA Unified, which has more charter schools, 264, than any school district in the country.

The 54-page report, dated “June 2015,” omits the names of authors or sponsoring organizations. But Eli Broad’s name appears at the end of a cover letter accompanying the report that makes a case for charter schools as “the greatest hope for students in L.A.” And alluding to the number of students on waiting lists to get into existing charters, now about 42,000, the need for more charters, he says, is urgent.

“We are committed to closing the waitlist and ensuring that every family in L.A. has access to a high-quality public school,” Broad writes. “Such dramatic charter school growth would address the needs of families who have been underserved by public schools for years, if not generations.”

He also argues that, “The stakes are extraordinarily high. In all our years working to improve public schools, we have never been so optimistic about a strategy that we believe has the potential to dramatically change not only the lives of thousands of students but also the paradigm of public education in this country.”

But Zimmer characterized the plan as a destructive one that would ignore the needs of thousands of other children “living in isolation, segregation and extreme poverty.”

“This is not an all-kids plan or an all-kids strategy,” he told LA School Report. “It’s very explicitly a some-kids strategy, a strategy that some kids will have a better education at a publicly-funded school that assumes that other kids will be injured by that opportunity. It’s not appropriate in terms of what the conversation should be in Los Angeles. The conversation should be better public education options and quality public schools for all kids, not some kids.”

He added, “To submit a business plan that focuses on market share is tantamount to commodifying our children.”

A spokeswoman for the Broad Foundation did not respond to numerous messages, seeking comment.

The draft report, a copy of which was given to LA School Report, represents the most comprehensive accounting so far of what the organizers intend to do, provided they can raise the considerable funds necessary. Broad says in his letter that $490 million “in new philanthropy” is necessary.

A full list of who is involved in the effort remains a mystery. So far, officials have acknowledged only the involvement of the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, along with the W.M. Keck and Walton Family Foundations — all leading players in educational reform efforts around the country. People familiar with the plans say the effort also involves more than a dozen other groups as well as wealthy individuals, some of them from Los Angeles.

The report says the Broad and Walton foundations are the initial funders for the effort.

The rationale for the expansion effort is based on the report’s assertions that charters do a better job of educating children than traditional public schools. Citing data from the California Charter Schools Association, the authors argue that charter students generally score better on statewide tests and have higher graduation rates even though it has widely been demonstrated that not all charter schools out-perform all traditional schools.

In building its case, the report is highly critical of LA Unified, the second-largest school district in the country, and its ability to provide quality education to young people in the city.

“Los Angeles has struggled mightily to educate its K-12 students, mirroring the challenges faced by many American cities,” the authors write, adding, “The achievement of students attending LAUSD schools is poor.”

It goes on to say that the Great Public Schools Now Initiative would serve as a model for other large urban districts so that “governors, mayors and other leaders across the country can point to Los Angeles as a city where a coordinate set of important investments significantly improved opportunities for students, families and the city.”

Even before details of the initiative were made known, powerful forces within LA Unified are already mounting efforts against the expansion. Among the opposition leaders is the LA teachers union, UTLA, which has fought long and hard against charters for years, arguing that they siphon off public money from traditional schools, attract a high percentage of higher-performing students and operate without the same scrutiny required of public schools.

UTLA, like its sister unions across the country, also oppose charters because their teachers are generally not union members.

Just two days ago, as the new Broad Museum opened downtown, UTLA teachers staged a protest rally against the charter expansion plans at the museum, aiming much of their invective at Broad.

Zimmer acknowledged that the foundations’ plans have opened a new front in public education wars that have roiled LA Unified and other large districts for years. This one, he said, would bring before the board a sharp focus on issues of choice and equality.

“The board,” he said, “has many strategies, tools and existing structures to raise questions about how quickly this could happen,” he said, without identifying them.

Besides the union and possible board opposition, the expansion effort faces several other major challenges, as well, which the report describes in detail.

First among them is finding suitable facilities for the new schools. Many charters have struggled to find adequate space, leading to neighborhood fights with public schools who share space with charters under the state’s co-location regulations. The report notes that in Los Angeles “available and useable real estate is scarce and expensive.”

Next, the authors acknowledge that the sources of “effective teachers and school leaders” are insufficient to meet the need of the expansion plans at a time the number of California teacher preparation programs is declining and a prime source of the charters for new teachers  — Teach for America — is producing fewer candidates.

The report also says the search for quality teachers will be hampered by UTLA’s new labor contract with the district that provides teachers a 10 percent salary increase over the next few years.

As a third factor, the report says the effort can only succeed through an strategy of finding quality charter operators, pointing out that the state charter association has taken steps in recent years to reduce the number of “under-performing” charters  and “growth for growth’s sake” is not the aim.

A final challenge is raising money. The report says the initial support for the plan from the Broad and Walton foundations “should help to catalyze support from other philanthropic sources.” It mentions no other groups who have made contributions.

The report lists 21 foundations and 35 wealthy individuals as potential investors — all of them worth at least $1.2 billion and many of the individuals familiar names, including Elon Musk, David Geffen, Sumner Redstone, Ed Roski and Steven Spielberg.

They’ve been talking about these new statewide tests in terms of setting a baseline for the years ahead. 

As a redline.

Statewide, more than half of students taking the test (56 percent) failed to meet state standards for English and a full two-thirds, 67 percent, failed to meet the standards for math.

In LA Unified, the state’s largest district, the numbers were worse: 67 percent fell below the line in English and 75 percent in math.

So now what. The easy thing to do is point fingers. But two hands don’t have enough of them, which is to say, there’s no simple solution here, and no one group is more responsible for the dismal results than the next.

Remember that village we’re always talking about that needs to raise a child?

Let’s start taking roll:

Teachers, principals, school counselors, parents, clergy, extended family, tutors, mentors, volunteers. Oh, and let’s not forget the students, themselves. They bear some responsibility for this, especially the older ones who have been in school long enough to understand the lifelong rewards for paying attention.

LA Unified has plans underway to do its part. Superintendent Ramon Cortines’s recent reorganization of area superintendents includes a requirement for each area chief to design learning strategies tailored to each individual student. Subsets of the overall test scores included breakdowns on specific skills in addressing English and math challenges to help educators identify where help is needed most. Interim tests throughout the year are also part of the plan, to use as measuring sticks for progress.

That’s inside the class room, and in most respects, that’s the easy part.

The hard part is what happens from the end of one school day to the beginning of the next.

For too many students, home is a vacuum of scholastic support. For any number of reasons students are left on their own with no supervision, no encouragement, no role models: Parents are working. No one speaks English. Family responsibilities take precedence over homework. Neighborhoods provide an unsafe environment for study. In some cases, there’s little food in the house to stave off hunger.

Need help with that math problem or essay? You’re on your own, kid.

These are well beyond educational challenges. These are entrenched societal issues that are short-changing a generation of young Americans. They are especially urgent in districts like LA Unified, where vast numbers of children are growing up in poverty.

The new test scores illustrate the magnitude of the problem because they are designed to prepare students for a successful life beyond high school. Unlike the statewide tests they replaced, the new tests require more than memorization of multiplication tables. They require critical thinking and deeper levels of comprehension — that’s what college and job markets demand.

As low as the results might be, they at least provide educators a clear pathway forward. As professionals, they are trained to identify areas of academic need and address them. Even with overcrowded classrooms, a shortage of teaching materials and inefficient technologies, they now know how to engage the process, and most will succeed to the extent they can.

It’s the rest of us we should be worried about. 

Eli and Edythe Broad

Another charter war is brewing in LA Unified. But the early warning shots are taking aim at ambiguity, not facts.

The flashpoint was two sentences in an Aug. 7 story in the LA Times that described a meeting at which three major foundations discussed plans to expand the number of charter schools in the district. The participants are the usual bete noirs of teacher unions for their roles in the education reform movement — the Broad, Walton Family and W.M. Keck foundations,

Here is what the story said:

“One person who attended a meeting said the goal was to enroll in charter schools half of all Los Angeles students over the next eight years. Another said there was discussion of an option that involved enrolling 50% of students currently at schools with low test scores.”

The story did not discern which observation hewed closer to the truth, leaving the impression that an all-out assault (the first sentence) was entirely possible, and maybe it is.

The LA teachers union, UTLA, certainly thinks so. It has repeated the assertion in a recent wave of material from leadership to rally the troops in the name of unity and union survival.

In an email to members, UTLA referred to “Broad the Billionaire” (Eli Broad), saying, “He is attacking public education with the likes of John Deasy and has plans to take 50% of students out of LAUSD and put them in unregulated, non-union charters. Deasy works for the Broad Foundation and is leading Broad’s attack on LAUSD.”

The union went on to say, “If they were able to pull off their plan, it would be devastating for LAUSD students, educators and public education as a whole. It would be disastrous for our highest needs students, because unregulated charters have a history of not serving those students, and a history of draining funding from the public district that does serve them.

“Removing 50% of our students could mean 50% of our jobs would be cut, and funding cuts would be used to justify future cuts in health benefits.” 

UTLA also produced a flyer that makes the same points.

All that is understandable. UTLA, and its national affiliates, the NEA and AFT, are threatened when charter schools open with non-unionized teachers.

But what if the union response is based on incorrect information, which apparently is the case.

The problem here is that no one from from the foundations has stepped forward to define the goal. There’s a huge difference between enrolling 50 percent of all LA Unified schools and enrolling 50 percent of students at failing LA Unified schools — or maybe the goal is something different altogether.

A spokeswoman for the Broad Foundation told LA School Report last week that plans haven’t evolved that far. She did go so far to say that the target would more likely be kids at failing schools rather than at all schools. But she wasn’t certain about that, either, and couldn’t offer anything more.

So what we’re left with is a huge public disservice — by the LA Times for leaving the issue hanging without context but more by the foundations for imprecise leaks, on-going ambiguity and silence; and by UTLA for assuming the worst without recognizing the uncertainty of it all.

It is hard to blame UTLA for its response. Now that the teachers have a new contract that sets salaries higher than before, they are turning to other priorities, a list of issues that includes the threat of union dilution through an increase in the number of non-unionized charter schools.

This is a real problem for UTLA, which is losing membership by retirements and shrinking student enrollment in LA Unified. Fewer teachers reduces the union’s political power and influence, at Beaudry and in Sacramento. It also means less money through union dues, which is one reason the leadership is proposing to increase dues for the first time in 45 years.

One way for UTLA to mitigate the coming expansion, if it actually materializes, it to use new charters as new opportunities for unionization. UTLA is moving forward with such efforts with the Alliance Charter schools; the foundations’ plan would provide other opportunities.

But that’s not really the point here. Responsible parties have an obligation to help the public understand what the plans are — and aren’t — and what the consequences may be for LA Unified students and teachers. 

What we have so far is ambiguity on one side and a hasty response on the other. Neither is especially helpful. 

Eli and Edythe Broad

It was a bombshell of a story on Saturday, the LA Times reporting that a group of foundations is exploring plans to expand the number of charter schools within LA Unified to serve many beyond the 100,000 students who now attend charters in the district.

What would that mean exactly? Unclear for the time being. No details were included, and charter officials talked about the effort only in the most general terms. As close to specifics was an unidentified source telling the Times that the goal was to enroll half of LA Unified’s 650,000 students in charters within eight years.

Today, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, one of the participating groups along with the Keck and Walton Family Foundations, said the guiding force behind the effort was to satisfy parents of children in low-performing schools who desire more and better educational choices.

“L.A. families still want more high-quality public school options in their neighborhood,” the foundation said in an email to LA School Report. “Too many of our school children still aren’t getting the quality of education they deserve, which is why tens of thousands of students are currently on public charter school waiting lists. We are in the early stages of exploring a variety of ideas about how to help give all families—especially in low-income communities of color—access to high-quality public schools and what we and others in the philanthropic community can do to increase access to a great public school for every child in Los Angeles.”

What the public response will be when any official announcement is made is unclear — but from some sectors, it’s not hard to guess.

In all likelihood, the strongest objection would come from UTLA, the LA teachers union, a group that fights charter expansion as part of its DNA. Most charters do not employ unionized teachers, even as the union is accelerating unionizations efforts at some of them. Also, the mere mention of the name “Broad” is Pavlovian and symbolic to all teacher unions: Broad, as in “oh, you mean the billionaire corporate interests intent on destroying public education.”

Nor would such a plan be warmly embraced by the LA Unified board. Federal and state dollars, which follow the student and now contribute to a $12 billion annual budget, would migrate outside the of the district, radically reducing its budget and ability to sustain programs.

It would be as if those who always thought the district was too large to be manageable suddenly got their wish, leaving half the students in traditional public schools and the other half to wherever their parents could find new slots to enroll them.

There are not-insignificant logistical issues for the foundations to address, as well. For example, if a new wave of charters is expecting to educate upwards of 300,000 children, they will need buildings to house them. And teachers. And support staff. Why announce a plan as ambitious as this without an ability to identify such bare essentials.

The one group for whom this expansion might sound especially appealing is parents who believe their children are not getting the best education possible at their neighborhood public school. While that’s a conclusion not always reached for rational or objective reasons, look at it this way: If you think your child has better options at the new charter across the street, and it costs nothing to make a change, what would you do?

It could be also be a viable option for district teachers if the new charters offered pay and benefits packages more attractive than the ones they have. Further, the hundreds of LA Unified teachers recently laid off to help offset the district’s budget deficit would have new markets for their services.

“It’s really early in the process,” said someone familiar with the planning underway. “But there are definitely people thinking about the fact that the number of charters is growing, parents don’t think schools are as good as they should be and kids deserve options. It’s still early, but a lot of people are talking to each other.”

UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl

Alex Caputo-Pearl, president of United Teachers Los Angeles, used his state of the union speech Friday night to call for a raise in union dues of $19 a month, an increase he said would enable the union to prepare for future challenges “greater and more dangerous” than those of recent years.

Reminding members that UTLA has not changed its dues structure since 1970, he warned that the current level of contributions would leave the union “bankrupt or dramatically weakened” in the years ahead. 

“UTLA needs to invest in itself the way serious organizations have always invested in themselves,” he told a crowded room at La Quinta, where the union held its annual leadership conference over the weekend.

Then, alluding to the union’s successes of the last year, which included a new labor agreement with LA Unified and successful campaigns in three of four board seat elections, he added, “Let’s be clear, we are a more powerful union than we were a year ago, but we must be a stronger union tomorrow than we are today because the challenges in front of us are greater and more dangerous than they were yesterday.”

Currently, UTLA’s full-time teachers pay $689 a year in dues. Raising them by $19 a month, taking the annual cost to $917, would bring in an additional $8 million for the 35,000-member union.

As the new school year starts in a few weeks, Caputo-Pearl said union leaders would begin conversations with members to explain the urgent need to increase revenue. Later in the year, he said, members would be asked to vote to approve the increase.

While the call for higher dues was new, the fragile state of UTLA finances has been well-known to union leadership. In a financial overview to members in May, the union treasurer, Arlene Inouye, wrote that the union has been operating at a deficit for seven of the last 10 years, partly due to a drop in membership of 10,000 members since 2007. In the last three years alone, she wrote, the union lost “more than $2.5 million.”

Caputo-Pearl said the dues increase was part of a broader strategy to build on UTLA’s successes of 2014-2015 in anticipation of events to come that could weaken overall union strength locally and nationally. He mentioned several looming trouble spots, including a case before the U.S. Supreme Court that is seeking to allow members of any union to stop paying that part of their dues used for political activity.

He also predicted that LA Unified will attempt to rollback UTLA health care benefits in 2017 and suggested to his audience that fighting back against such an effort might require a strike.

As he has in other public appearances, Caputo-Pearl built some of his arguments on the backs of familiar bogeymen, particularly his favorite, LA Unified’s former superintendent, John Deasy.

Early in the 40-minute address, Caputo-Pearl congratulated the members for efforts that “sent the most prominent corporate superintendent in the United States packing.”

Deasy resigned last October, largely as a result of the ill-fated iPad program, the not-ready-for-schooltime student tracking system and his own steely management style. It did not help him that UTLA leadership despised him and frequently rallied against him and the policies he championed. 

“Good bye, John Deasy; can I hear you say that?” Caputo-Pearl said with glee to the audience.

He expressed similar disdain for Eli Broad and John Arnold, billionaires who have funded education reform efforts that union leaders across the country say undermine the integrity of public education.

“Broad and Arnold, they’re the one percenters,” Caputo-Pearl said. “We have to stand for the rest of us.”

For more than a year, students, parents, community groups and even LA Unified members, themselves, have demanded greater transparency in how the board conducts the business of the nation’s second-largest school district.

Too often, critics say, the board moves with no apparent effort to broaden the conversation or even allow the public to watch the process unfold, let alone participate.

And now it’s happened again.

Maybe it’s only a small example, but it’s a perfect metaphor that illustrates the sometimes cavalier approach the school board takes to informing the public, thus strengthening community participation, input and trust.

The LAUSD board had a meeting last night — an open session, followed by a closed session. The agenda went up early in the week, along with the reminder that the open session would be televised on KLCS and live-streamed over the internet. Closed sessions remain private.

But when 6 pm came, time to start, screens stayed blank.

No video. No audio. Nothing.

A parent, a student, a community member who might have wanted to see what the members were up to were shut out. And so they missed an update on the federal government’s efforts to reauthorize No Child Left Behind. They missed a flurry of committee assignments.

And they missed seeing a vivid example of democracy in action, a real, live event of students protesting a federal program that has delivered military-grade weapons to school districts across the country, including LA Unified.

OK, so maybe these weren’t Man-Bites-Dog moments. But they were part of a public agency’s work with publicly-elected officials in charge. That means taxpayers have the right to see what’s up, but they got to see nothing.

What happened? It’s not entirely clear, but it was hardly an anomaly. Sometimes when the open part of a meeting is pre-judged to be too short to turn on cameras and microphones, the people in charge of these things decide not to turn them on. Saves money.

Last night, a decision was made to skip the video but provide audio. Then word came from a district official, “The TV crew failed to throw the switch to broadcast the audio.”

And so, we got blanks. And silence.

School board meetings, by their nature, are inconvenient. Whether they are scheduled at 1 pm, 4 pm or 6 pm, they disadvantage large numbers of people whose jobs and family responsibilities deny them the ability to attend.

That’s why televising and live-streaming them makes so much sense. It educates. It allows for participation, It builds trust. It provides transparency.

The opposite of all that happened yesterday. 

Vanessa Romo

This is a bittersweet day for LA School Report.

After two years as our lead reporter, Vanessa Romo is leaving us to pursue a fellowship at Columbia University in New York.

She is among three journalists who were selected as the school’s Spencer Fellows in Education Reporting, for a program that provides participants the time and resources to investigate critical issues in education. Vanessa intends to examine new initiatives for Standard English Learners.

Vanessa came to us from KPCC, where she won a first place award from the Education Writers Association for a series of stories on the Los Angeles school district’s school discipline policies.

For LA School Report, she’s been at the forefront of reporting on all the major issues affecting LA Unified, including budgets, iPads, faulty computer systems, board politics, union issues, instructional changes, charter schools, elections and activities involving the superintendent.

More than that, she’s been a terrific colleague.

Only a seasoned reporter could fill her shoes, and we think we’ve found the right one in Mike Szymanski, whose years as a journalist include working for Studio City Patch, the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Daily News, E! Online, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and was the Movies Editor for Zap2it.com.

His freelance work has appeared in a variety of publications, including US Magazine, Newsweek, Entertainment Weekly and New York Newsday.

Mike has won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers, Valley Press Club, Lambda Literary Awards and Hearst Awards for Newswriting and Investigative Reporting. He also teaches journalism at UCLA Extension and guest lectures at local public and private schools in journalism and writing.

We at LA School Report wish Vanessa all the best as she embarks on this new chapter of her career, and we hope you’ll welcome Mike to our team.

OK, so let’s play this out.

One of the Mónicas — Ratliff or García, or maybe both — offers a resolution next week waiving the rule that sets term limits at two, enabling Richard Vladovic to serve a third one-year term as the LA Unified board president.

The effort needs four votes to pass. How do the members vote? Here’s a guess:

Mónica García:  Already indicating she’s in favor of a one-year suspension of current rules, she votes yes.

Mónica Ratliff: Ditto.

Newly-elected Ref Rodriguez: He votes for it. Why? The last person he wants as board president is Steve Zimmer, the current vice president. Zimmer trashed Rodriguez for standing by as Rodriguez surrogates trashed Bennett Kayser in the election campaign.

Newly-elected Scott Schmerelson: He favors term limits so he’s a no vote.

George McKenna: On Tuesday, he voted against Ratliff’s resolution to waive the rule, so he’s a no. Unless he flips.

Zimmer: No.

That makes it 3-3, with Vladovic’s vote decisive.

Vladovic voted for term limits in 2013. On Tuesday, he abstained (along with Kayser), leaving Ratliff’s effort one vote short of passing. Does he abstain again, thereby assuring that the gavel passes into new hands? 

It comes down to how badly he wants to serve another year as president. It also comes down to how active a role he wants in the search process for who succeeds Ray Cortines as the next superintendent.

Vladovic has become much more assertive in recent months as board president. He’s appeared more energized and engaged.

If he votes no or abstains, he would appear consistent to his position, respectful of the board rules as they are, and the board will have a new president.

A yes vote would require an explanation.

The members vote in alphabetical order. If this speculation holds, it would be 3-2 in favor of the one-year waiver when it’s Vladovic’s turn, which means Zimmer will know the outcome before it’s his.

That was quite a board meeting yesterday, with more emotion on display than Nixon or LBJ ever showed in announcing their decisions to leave the White House.

The first wave came in The Long Goodbye to Bennett Kayser, whose bid for a second term was thwarted by a member of the group he most detests, a charter school executive.

For more than 90 minutes, a parade of admirers praised Kayser as the conscience of the board — for standing up to former superintendent John Deasy, for supporting teachers no matter what, for opposing charters no matter what, for holding to his principles and for demonstrating how a neurological challenge, Parkinson’s disease, is no barrier to public service.

All well and good — although spending more than a third of a four-hour meeting on good-byes seemed a tad excessive, even for this board.

Maybe the farewell would not have seemed so gaudy were it not for the polar-opposite manner in which his colleague Tamar Galatzan finished her day.

She, too, lost last month, ending eight years of service on the board, twice as long as Kayser. She had requested no public ceremony, due in part, perhaps, to the lingering animus of members who could not abide by her loyalty to Deasy. She was as faithful to him as Kayser was to UTLA, the teachers union.

But political sympathies aside, it was stunning to see her disappear without anyone at least acknowledging her public service over the years, if not for holding to her principles.

No one from the board, including the other Deasy acolyte, Mónica García, said a word. Nor did anyone else in the room.

Poof . . . Gone . . . What was her name, again?

The other passion play was Superintendent Ramon Cortines’s weepy, halting speech — about the 2016 budget!

Conceding that the board can no longer pay for everything it wants — which it was willing to do under Deasy — he choked up through his remarks and bawled openly at the end after reminding listeners, “There are no more presents under the Christmas tree.”

It was odd in a way. This was the district’s most robust spending plan in years, nearly $8 billion worth, with thousands of teachers and other employees getting a raise for the first time since the Big Bang. Abandoned and neglected programs would be blooming back to life. New money to spruce up schools. More than 125 countries don’t have that much to spend annually. 

Yet the prospect of looming deficits and scores of unavoidable layoffs left him visibly shaken, so much so that he suggested he could serve only another six months, not the year he had agreed to.

More than a few observers watched him break down at the end, dabbing his eyes with tissue, and wondered if he were ill. Discrete questions brought an answer: No, he wasn’t suffering; he had just worked so hard on the budget and he really felt bad about the inability to rescind more layoff notices and the possibility, however remote, that the budget would not be approved.

The members loved him for it. Cortines, after all, is the district’s protector, the father figure, the un-Deasy. They missed no opportunities to thank him for his hard work, his collaborative management style, his willingness to take on the hard issues of running a bureaucracy as large and unwieldy as LA Unified is.

Imagine how long his farewell will be. Better bring a sleeping bag. And tissues.

Tamar Galtatzan

Tamar Galatzan, now an out-going LA Unified board member for District 3,  congratulated the career school administrator who defeated her yesterday, Scott Schmerelson, issuing a statement in which she expressed “great respect for my colleagues on the school board and what we have been able to accomplish during difficult financial times.

“I’m grateful to them for their commitment and dedication in helping our students succeed,” she said.

But she was not available for any questions about the campaign, her board office said.

Of results in the three LA Unified board elections yesterday, Galatzan’s loss seemed the most unexpected. In the primary, she fended off five challengers and out-polled Schmerelson by 2-to-1. Yesterday, Schmerelson beat her with 55 percent of the low turnout vote —  they drew just 9.1 percent of District 3 voters to the polls.

Or maybe the outcome was foretold, after all.

About three weeks ago, the political action committee for the teachers union, UTLA, began pulling money out of Bennett Kayser’s race against Ref Rodriguez, who had defeated him in the primary in District 5, and put it behind Schmerelson. The teachers were the only outside group in his corner, spending $525,000, in part a reflection of the favorable reaction to him by UTLA members.

That support was, apparently, the third leg of the stool on which he stood for winning.

The other two? iPads and and anti-incumbency.

“iPads were the defining issue across the board, and it was especially acute in District 3,” said Dan Chang, executive director of a reform group, Great Public Schools: Los Angeles, that spent heavily on Galatzan’s behalf.

Putting an iPad in the hands of every LA Unified student and teacher was the hallmark initiative of former Superintendent John Deasy. Galatzan was his strongest supporter on the board, and by now everyone knows the program was a disaster, a $1 billion disaster.

It was an issue that combined with the MiSiS crisis and Deasy fatigue to bedevil the campaigns of Bennett Kayser, who lost his District 5 seat, and Richard Vladovic, who hung on to his in District 7.

“This was an electorate predisposed to disfavoring the district,” Chang said. “The issue of the iPads was in the press for months and months;  it continued to stay in the press, and the news was all negative. UTLA made it remain in the news, and Tamar couldn’t overcome it.”

Others suggested that Galatzan, who is also a city prosecutor, played a role in her own demise.

“She didn’t campaign,” said Ben Austin, now policy director for Students Matter, the group that financed the Vergara case. “Who knows if she even wanted to win in the first place. I didn’t sense that she ran any kind of campaign.”

For evidence, Austin pointed to the individual contributions to her campaign, $56,405, according to the latest accounting by the city Ethics Commission, and the amount that remains unspent, $38,205 — although that’s likely to decrease as campaign bills come due.

That said, outside groups did much of the bidding for her, spending $777,894 for campaign support in praising her and bashing Schmerelson.

* UPDATED

Voters wanted change, but the changes came from opposite directions.

For the first time since 2009, two seats on the LA Unified school board turned over at the same time in elections yesterday that proved once again how little Angelinos care about the people setting policy for the 643,000 kids attending city public schools.

Two incumbents lost — Tamar Galatzan in District 3 and Bennett Kayser in District 5. But each winner hews more closely to the views of the incumbent who lost in the other race, making the day’s results a political wash.

Scott Schmerelson, the primary runner-up who won with 55 percent of the vote to beat Galatzan, is a career LAUSD school administrator who had heavy backing of the teachers union, UTLA. 

Ref Rodriguez, the primary winner who won with 54 percent of the vote to beat Kayser, is a charter school co-founder who had heavy backing from the state’s charter schools association and other reform interests.

The charters did everything they could to defeat Schmerelson. The teachers union did everything it could to defeat Rodriguez.

Where that leaves the board in terms of ideology is probably not much different than where it was on Monday, with Schmerelson replacing Kayser as the pro-union member and Rodriguez replacing Galatzan as the pro-reform member.

At the very least, the results brought the board its only Republican, in Schmerelson, and its only openly gay member, in Rodriguez.

In the other race, voters in District 7 kept board President Richard Vladovic in place for a third term, a winner over Lydia Gutierrez, although it remains to be seen whether he’ll be reelected as president. He was the only candidate who had the support of both the charter schools and the teachers union.

All three winners get a 5 1/2-year term, as the city is moving these off-year and largely ignored elections to the even-year ballot that includes Federal and state elections. The incumbents who lost will remain on the board until June 30.

The outcomes yesterday remove one of the testiest relationships among the board’s seven members, that between Galatzan and District 6 representative Mónica Ratliff, two lawyers who rarely view policy through the same lens.

On the other hand, it creates what could become an even testier one between Rodriguez and Steve Zimmer, District 4, who set aside his usual calculated language the other day in favor of a blistering attack against Rodriguez and his backers for the nasty and personal nature of their campaign material against Kayser.

His remarks came a few weeks after he appeared at a Kayser fundraiser in which he gave an emotional us-versus-them stemwinder, pointing to the Armageddon ahead if a charter-backed candidate wins the seat.

“We cannot let them take control of the school board because if they take control of the school board, they’ll have control of who becomes the next superintendent of this district,” he warned at the time. “They’ll have control over the budget. They’ll have control over the policies. They‘ll have control over the schools.”

Among all board members, Zimmer is the one who casts himself as the Solon of the group, seeking peace and compromise, even if his side doesn’t get the better of the argument.

Now, he will sit beside a colleague at board meetings whom he apparently loathes — ideologically, if not personally.

As for whether Zimmer’s fears are justified, a lot depends on Schmerelson. While the teachers union spent half a million dollars to support him, he said last night, “I intend to be perfectly fair,” dismissing any notion he can be categorized as pro-this or anti-that.

As for turnout, it was pathetic. The largest numbers came in Schmerelson’s race, where 9.1 percent of registered voters cast a ballot. In Rodriguez’s race, it was 8.4 percent, and only 5.8 percent turned out in the Vladovic race.

And in each case, those who voted by mail determined the outcome. Schmerelson, Rodriguez and Vladovic all had leads before the first precinct was counted, which suggests they had the most passionate voters.

No one could blame the candidate backers for the lousy turnout. By a rough and still incomplete accounting, the charter schools spent about $1.2 million in since the primary on Galatzan, Rodriguez and Vladovic, with a new reform-based group, Great Public Schools: Los Angeles, kicking in another $475,000 for the same three.

The teachers union spent about $950,000 on Schmerelson, Kayser and Vladovic, and the service employees union, SEIU Local 99, spent about $440,000 for the Galatzan, Kayser and Vladovic. Former LA Mayor Richard Riordan spent $67,000 to help Galatzan and Rodriquez. 

Add it up and it’s over $3 million, a number sure to climb — all to get an average of 7.6 percent of eligible voters to set policy in the nation’s largest independent school district.

* Corrects earlier version to say Rodriguez becomes the only openly gay member of the board, not the first. Others have served before him.

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