LAUSD District 5: What's at Stake

I went over to the Luis Sanchez for School Board campaign office last week to make some “get out the vote” phone calls.  It was a dingy little place, barely lit, and covered with hand-made posters and banners supporting Luis.  A card table near the entrance was strewn with 2 liter bottles of soda, a pile of home-made brownies, and a half-eaten bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.  Around the room, a dozen young people, mostly personal friends of Sanchez from his years of working with non-profit Inner City Struggle, were intensely working through phone lists.  There was a purpose and conviction in their work: they believe that LAUSD can be improved.  Luis Sanchez sat that the table where an assistant input call records into a laptop calling back undecided voters, personally. 

The fact that the Sanchez campaign on its shoe-string budget is competitive at all is miraculous, and significant.  His opponent, Bennet Kayser, has been riding a  well-financed UTLA smear campaign that has portrayed Sanchez of being a free-loading bureaucrat, Beverly Hills suck-up, and consigliore to Wall Street Bankers. 

If the claims sound far-fetched and conspiratorial, it is because they are.  Sanchez makes $87,000 per year as Chief of Staff to Monica Garcia.  The UTLA has produced much slander but not one eyebrow-raising expense or travel itinerary.   As for raising money in Beverly Hills, isn’t that where the money is?  The UTLA collects around $30 million every year from compulsory dues deduction and the school district itself signs the checks.  What is an independent candiate to do?  Sensibly, Sanchez has sought out many of the same philanthropists who keep charter schools above water and a few others who will pitch in.

The insinuation that charter schools make money would come as a surprise to most charter school operators.  While they receive similar per-pupil funding from the state, they must pay for their own facilities which city schools get for free.  It is incorrectly reported that charter schools pick and choose their students.  What really hurts is when a new parents sues a small charter school for a special needs private placements which may force the school to pay another school hundreds of thousands per year plus legal fees.  For a small charter school, these placements are financially ruinous.   Finally, the state is actually deferring payments to charters this year.  Traditional school districts have access to funds at 1-2% interest.  Charter schools pay usurous rates (15-20%) that they simply cannot afford.

What seems unreported about this race is that for the first time in memory, the unions of employees who work in the schools are supporting different candidates.  How so?  The “rich” unions comprising of teachers, administrators, and building managers – those making enough money to send their children to private schools – are supporting the UTLA candidate, Bennett Kayser.  However, the working class, “poor” unions which include bus-drivers and janitors -- the folks whose kids are stuck in failing public schools --  are supporting Luis Sanchez. 

Much has been said about the public school choice (PSC) program championed by outgoing board-member Yolie Flores.   PSC allows the District to close chronically failing schools and reconstitute them outside the suffocating yoke of the 330 page teacher union contract.  The only way to do this is to “give away” the school to an independent charter school operator.  Predictably, this outrages the UTLA which accept neither more flexibility in the contract nor more charter schools.  For them, no amount of educational malpractice can ever justify firing or even involuntary transferring a single staff person.  Sanchez supports PSC while Kayser would shut it down.

Another issue is teacher evaluation.  Would you believe that in a system where only 50% of the students graduate and 5% make it through college, a system that spends $7 billion per year not including $10 billion on construction, teaching performance is not systematically measured?  Using the “Stull” system in place now, only 4 teachers were fired for bad performance, in the entire school district of 33,000 teachers, over a 10 year period.  At the same time, programs like Teach for America cannot place more than 30,000 graduates of our nation’s top colleges and universities who want to teach in places like Los Angeles, because there are no jobs for them.  The new Superintendent John Deasy has proposed a fair and thorough evaluation system but the UTLA (and Kayser), wants none of it.  One of their suggestions is that teachers evaluate principals.  Sanchez supports strengthening the teacher evaluation system.

UTLA control of the LAUSD is troubling for many other reasons as well.  For instance, do we want the UTLA controlling what we know about our own school district?  Remember how outraged they were for the LA Times to show that some teachers were vastly more effective than others, but paid the same or less?   And what about the upcoming strike in the fall around the UTLA contract?  What will we hear from the Board when the UTLA demands for more money, less accountability, no charter schools, and student performance data lock-down?  Who is going to represent us parents and tax-payers? 

Luis Sanchez remains a long-shot in the SB5 school board race.  Despite numerous endorsements, he is fighting a 45,000 teachers union packed with willing political volunteers who view teaching chidlren as a right not a privilege.  The LAUSD is a better feeder program today for prison than it is for college.  When will we put students first?  Luis Sanchez hopes the answer is now.