Opinion: In the mayor’s words
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Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa stopped by the office yesterday to sell his new school partnership that, according to the news department:
will provide the mayor with a scaled-back version of the authority he has sought over city schools. Villaraigosa and his senior education aides will play a major role in overseeing two of the city’s lowest-achieving high schools and the middle and elementary schools that feed them under an agreement with the Board of Education and schools Supt. David L. Brewer.
In his back-and-forth with Opinion and News staffers from The Times, the mayor stressed metrics:
We will have on the Internet what our goals are, what outcomes we expect. We’ll have an annual report card, it’ll be on the Internet, it’ll be on the wall -- on probably more than one wall in the school -- to remind everybody this is where we’ve got to go. I don’t know if it’s going to have a thermometer by it or whatever. [...] Not just the API scores: We’re going to look at safety, we’re going look at the dropout rate, especially in high schools and middle schools, we’re going be looking at a number of, you know, parent satisfaction, you know, whatever happened to the consumer here? [...] When you look at [Chief] Bratton -- and you know I’m a big Bratton fan -- and he’ll tell you all, I mean, the city’s safer than at any time since 1956 on a per capita basis. But you look at what Bratton’s done and he’s used the numbers, you know, this whole CompStat process. We’re going to be data-driven.
The mayor’s schools will also likely have uniforms:
I’m passionate about it. [...] I hated, when I was in Catholic school, the once-Friday-a-month when we had, you know, free dress, because I didn’t have the clothes, and I hated it. And it was embarrassing. And I think that’s true for a lot of kids. And you know I’m a big believer in uniforms, and obviously we’re going to get our stakeholders excited about that effort as we are about parent and student compacts and a lot of the other initiatives.
Only once did his personal life come up, in passing, in a question from Editorial Page Editor Jim Newton:
Q: Change the subject a little bit -- you twisted a lot of arms in Sacramento to get the bill, obviously got the bill but didn’t produce what you wanted. You had a summer when there’s been a lot attention to your personal life, your marriage. Do you enter this process in your third year now with the same kind of political or public clout that you had in the first year or two? A: I can’t speculate on that, I couldn’t tell you if I have clout or not; I’ll tell you I have the energy and the passion. I walk in here and I see all of you, some of you have written, some of you haven’t, on things about me including my personal life, and you see me look you in the eyeball, and move ahead. I an very committed to this process, I’m passionate about these schools. And you’re going to see me apply the same passion, the commitment that I have done to everything I’ve done in my public life. I can’t tell you though that I have X amount of, you know, capital or not, I can only tell you I intend to move ahead as if I did.