New School Year Poses Challenges for Revamped Board

After one of the most divisive periods since busing for integration ended in the early 1980s, the Los Angeles Board of Education heads into a new year today facing several challenges, not the least of which will be to heal the wounds of a teachers’ strike that turned the school district into a battleground.

This morning, the board will elect a new president to succeed Roberta Weintraub, the veteran east San Fernando Valley representative who presided over a year dominated by labor troubles. It also will swear in new member Mark Slavkin, a 27-year-old political aide who was elected with heavy teachers’ union backing and who is expected to make the board more pro-teacher.

Also high on the board’s list of priorities is overseeing the district’s move into “shared decision-making” with teachers and parents, which many educators have hailed as a bold step into a new era of school reform. The board must search for ways to pay for badly needed programs to curb the district’s high dropout rate, raise overall academic achievement and build and repair schools. The board members also must mend relations among themselves.

“This was the most contentious year I have had on the board since the anti-busing movement,” Weintraub said recently. “Relations are very much frayed between some members.”

Weintraub, who has served as president twice before, said she accepted the job last year with the understanding that she would serve only one term. Board members say her successor likely will be Jackie Goldberg, who represents Hollywood, downtown and the Wilshire corridor area. Goldberg has the most seniority on the board after Weintraub and South-Central Los Angeles member Rita Walters, who served three times as president.

Even though Goldberg often has disagreed with the teachers’ union, she is one of the four members forming what many observers perceive as a new pro-union, pro-teacher board majority. The others are Slavkin, Julie Korenstein and Warren Furutani.

United Teachers-Los Angeles President Wayne Johnson calls the new configuration “the best board majority I have seen in my 20 years in the district. They understand the problems . . . and are really concerned about the kids. I know the union has total confidence in this board.”

Johnson said he hopes the board makes as its top priority in the coming year the implementation of “school-based management,” a broad term covering an array of efforts to decentralize school systems and improve student achievement.

In the teachers’ contract ratified last month, the board agreed to establish a governance system that will shift some of the principal’s authority in certain areas, such as spending and scheduling at individual schools, to new neighborhood school councils. Half the members of those councils will be teachers. The contract also provides for creation of a central district committee to oversee the councils and to approve more sweeping changes.

“It will be a major challenge to see if we can make the shared decision-making councils actually work,” said Goldberg. “The question is, can we overcome the hostility and distrust and work toward consensus and really change how schools work? This will depend on the good will of people at the schools themselves. It will take people trying to look at their work with new eyes instead of bringing old concerns into a new process.”

The councils are expected to swing into action at all of the district’s more than 600 schools after classes start in the fall, and selection of central committee members is scheduled to be completed by the end of this month. Councils in year-round schools, which already have begun a new school year, will begin operating this summer.

But Goldberg and other board members say their most important job is to raise the low achievement of most students in the district. According to recent state figures, the district has a 39% dropout rate, the highest among the state’s large urban school districts. Moreover, 56% of the district’s elementary school pupils score below the national average on tests of basic reading, writing and math skills, district figures show.

10-Year Plan

In particular, the board members say the challenge will be to find enough money to begin phasing in some of the improvements outlined in a sweeping, 10-year, $430-million plan they approved earlier this year. The plan calls for such changes as smaller classes and more pre-kindergarten programs. The board had hoped to allocate $6.5 million to begin the work this year. But now Goldberg said the board may have no more than $2 million this year to spend on the goals.

The district budget was squeezed by the need to pay for employee raises, including 24% over three years for teachers and principals. But with a new contract that locks in wage increases for teachers through the 1990-91 school year, several board members noted that the district can look forward to a period of labor peace in which to concentrate on making the district better. “We have a year and a half of breathing space . . . to start building real solid bridges of communication and trust,” Furutani said.

At the same time, a few board members say they are wary of the direction the board could take as union ally Slavkin comes aboard. “Philosophically, (the addition of Slavkin) changes the whole direction of the board,” said Weintraub, who has accused the teachers’ union of trying to run the board.

Bureaucrats Targeted

Slavkin, who unseated Westside incumbent Alan Gershman in a June runoff election, attacked the district’s “fat-cat bureaucrats” throughout his campaign. He said that had he been on the board during teacher contract negotiations, he would have provided the swing vote to deny top administrators a 16%, two-year raise. He said part of his role on the board will be to “challenge rather than accommodate the bureaucracy.”

The issues of pay raises for teachers and administrators caused deep divisions on the board, with Gershman, Walters and Leticia Quezada opposing the teachers’ raise during negotiations. Along with Weintraub, they provided the four votes needed to give top administrators the same 8%-a-year increase as teachers.

Quezada, who represents East Los Angeles, said the complex politics of the school district will make it difficult for the board to put aside differences and work together on common goals.

“I am always pulled by the fact that most parents on the Eastside feel very shortchanged and unserved by the L.A. school district,” she said. “When each of the board members has a constituency that says the district is not serving them well, that tends to polarize us. It is a constant effort to pull together for the entire school district.”

Other Priorities

Other priorities cited by the board include continuing to expand bilingual education through intensive training and recruitment of qualified teachers.

Another pressing need is the repair of school buildings. According to Weintraub, the district has a $500-million backlog of requests to fix leaky roofs, replace electrical wiring and paint schools. “The old joke around here is that a school gets painted every 100 years whether it needs it or not,” she said.