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No big bucks = no chance in L.A. Unified elections
The apparent venality of Tuesday's school board elections brings to mind a knock on my front door a while back. It was the weekend, and as I recall my wife and I were covered with that aromatic dirt that Home Depot sells in big plastic bags.
The neighbor standing on our doorstep pretended not to care how we smelled. He was gathering signatures to run for the Los Angeles Unified School District's Board of Education. Our children had gone to school with his daughter at the neighborhood elementary school. The moment felt all-American.
It was illusory.
School board elections, education histories tell us, once reflected democracy at its cornpone purest. In Tuesday's contest for four seats, vested interests have shoveled well over $2 million into the coffers of candidates running for part-time jobs that pay less than a high school dropout might make as assistant manager at a fast-food joint.
To figure out how this makes sense, try this problem in basic school board math:
About the time that school board candidates began campaigning in earnest, those on the board were agreeing to hand the teachers union a 6% raise, plus benefits, retroactive to July, and worth perhaps $200 million.
If reelected, board members Marguerite Poindexter LaMotte and Jon Lauritzen, the only incumbents running, would immediately be drawn into the decision about how much to give the union next time. For its part, the union has given more than $450,000 to each of them.
Meanwhile, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's Partnership for Better Schools, a group created to advance the mayor's education agenda, had, at last glance, raised more than $1.6 million, much of it from builders and business types who usually don't have much to say about education. Prosecutor-turned-board candidate Tamar Galatzan alone received more than $800,000 of that largesse.
Galatzan is running against Lauritzen, who, like LaMotte, bucked the mayor on his takeover bid. Which helps explain why, as my colleague Howard Blume has noted, individuals sympathetic to the mayor are giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to LaMotte's opponent, charter school operator Johnathan Williams.
So: If X = a school board member's salary of about $25,000, and Y = the amount people are willing to spend to get their preferred candidate elected, what is the value of Z, the possible payoff?
Answers:
A) The future of the children, upon which no monetary value can be placed.
B) Many millions in slam-dunk salary and benefit increases and other concessions for the union.
C) A potentially massive piece of the district's $19-billion construction budget or some of the stray billions floating around for contracts on everything from algebra books to umpteen gallons of cafeteria teriyaki sauce.
D) All of the above.
Alas, like a once wonderful teacher who burned out because the union opposed the sort of merit pay that might have motivated him to keep working hard (and who now can't be fired because principals are hamstrung by contract restrictions), I don't really have an answer.
I do know that my neighbor, Scott Folsom, decided not to run for the school board seat in part because of the "obscenity" of trying to raise $500,000 to $1 million for what is ostensibly a part-time job.
Not that Folsom is some sort of political puritan who recoils at the idea of money dirtying up the democratic process. But I do think it's sad when a quintessential concerned parent gets bullied out of grass-roots do-goodism by Big Money.
Folsom's first encounter with public education LAUSD-style came many years ago, on the day he walked his daughter through the doors of Mount Washington Elementary School. "My initial experience wasn't a happy one," the semiretired producer says.
It wasn't the peeling paint that got to him, but rather an autocratic principal who, he says, acted as if parents were an inconvenience and met Folsom's efforts to find the appropriate class for his daughter by tossing up an impenetrable tangle of bureaucratic obstacles.
The neighbor standing on our doorstep pretended not to care how we smelled. He was gathering signatures to run for the Los Angeles Unified School District's Board of Education. Our children had gone to school with his daughter at the neighborhood elementary school. The moment felt all-American.
School board elections, education histories tell us, once reflected democracy at its cornpone purest. In Tuesday's contest for four seats, vested interests have shoveled well over $2 million into the coffers of candidates running for part-time jobs that pay less than a high school dropout might make as assistant manager at a fast-food joint.
To figure out how this makes sense, try this problem in basic school board math:
About the time that school board candidates began campaigning in earnest, those on the board were agreeing to hand the teachers union a 6% raise, plus benefits, retroactive to July, and worth perhaps $200 million.
If reelected, board members Marguerite Poindexter LaMotte and Jon Lauritzen, the only incumbents running, would immediately be drawn into the decision about how much to give the union next time. For its part, the union has given more than $450,000 to each of them.
Meanwhile, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's Partnership for Better Schools, a group created to advance the mayor's education agenda, had, at last glance, raised more than $1.6 million, much of it from builders and business types who usually don't have much to say about education. Prosecutor-turned-board candidate Tamar Galatzan alone received more than $800,000 of that largesse.
Galatzan is running against Lauritzen, who, like LaMotte, bucked the mayor on his takeover bid. Which helps explain why, as my colleague Howard Blume has noted, individuals sympathetic to the mayor are giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to LaMotte's opponent, charter school operator Johnathan Williams.
So: If X = a school board member's salary of about $25,000, and Y = the amount people are willing to spend to get their preferred candidate elected, what is the value of Z, the possible payoff?
Answers:
A) The future of the children, upon which no monetary value can be placed.
B) Many millions in slam-dunk salary and benefit increases and other concessions for the union.
C) A potentially massive piece of the district's $19-billion construction budget or some of the stray billions floating around for contracts on everything from algebra books to umpteen gallons of cafeteria teriyaki sauce.
D) All of the above.
Alas, like a once wonderful teacher who burned out because the union opposed the sort of merit pay that might have motivated him to keep working hard (and who now can't be fired because principals are hamstrung by contract restrictions), I don't really have an answer.
I do know that my neighbor, Scott Folsom, decided not to run for the school board seat in part because of the "obscenity" of trying to raise $500,000 to $1 million for what is ostensibly a part-time job.
Not that Folsom is some sort of political puritan who recoils at the idea of money dirtying up the democratic process. But I do think it's sad when a quintessential concerned parent gets bullied out of grass-roots do-goodism by Big Money.
Folsom's first encounter with public education LAUSD-style came many years ago, on the day he walked his daughter through the doors of Mount Washington Elementary School. "My initial experience wasn't a happy one," the semiretired producer says.
It wasn't the peeling paint that got to him, but rather an autocratic principal who, he says, acted as if parents were an inconvenience and met Folsom's efforts to find the appropriate class for his daughter by tossing up an impenetrable tangle of bureaucratic obstacles.
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