Goldberg Won’t Seek Reelection to School Board

Jackie Goldberg, the outspoken, liberal activist who has presided over the Los Angeles Board of Education during a pivotal period, will not seek a third term on the board this spring, deciding instead to resume her career as a high school teacher.

Goldberg, 45, will announce her decision at a news conference Monday. She also is expected to endorse her longtime friend and former staff member, teacher Jeff Horton, to succeed her in the 3rd District, which includes Hollywood, downtown Los Angeles and the mid-Wilshire area.

Although her announcement will come just days after the board was forced to table its bid for a pay raise, Goldberg said she had decided not to run before the board voted to seek the state’s permission to increase its $24,000 annual compensation. She had told a few people of her decision several weeks ago but said she wanted to wait until after last week’s elections to make it public.

Recently, Goldberg said she has been increasingly frustrated with many aspects of the school board job--the slow pace of progress, the loss of privacy that comes with public office, the “overwhelming negativity” of public attitudes toward the schools, the seven-day workweeks and the need to spend time and energy on tangential--though important--issues.

“So much of it is about housing and buses and so little of it is about reading and math and learning,”’ Goldberg said.

Nonetheless, she said much has been achieved during her 7 1/2 years on the board. She cited the development of an AIDS education program; the founding of Project 10, a support group for gay students; establishment of health clinics at some schools; formulation of a plan for teaching students not yet fluent in English, and the raising of teachers’ salaries.

Elected in 1983 with the backing of a coalition of teachers and community activists, Goldberg headed the board for nearly 18 months during a watershed period in the embattled school district.

In the midst of a record budget squeeze and explosive growth in the nation’s second-largest school district, the seven-member board changed superintendents and adopted a highly controversial plan to relieve overcrowding by operating all of its more than 600 schools year-round. It embarked on a potentially far-reaching program of cutting its central bureaucracy and shifting more money and authority to the schools, where decisions are to be shared among principals, teachers, parents and other community members.

Before running for her school board seat, Goldberg taught high school history in Compton and worked with the Integration Project, an organization pushing to desegregate Los Angeles schools during the 1970s.

When first on the board, many of her proposals--and sometimes-strident methods of pushing them--angered other board members. Some called her “devious” and “manipulative.” But most of her current colleagues--who have elected her president two years in a row--say she has helped provide badly needed leadership and cohesiveness.

While acknowledging that she may run for another office some day, Goldberg said her primary reason for leaving the board is to get back to teaching--something she has often said she would do. Her first choice is one of the district’s inner-city high schools.

Horton, 43, has taught high school in the district for about 15 years. After a one-year leave of absence last year to work as Goldberg’s district representative, he began working in the district’s special high school program for young mothers. If elected, he would be required to resign from his district teaching job and from the United Teachers-Los Angeles union, in which he is active.

He said increasing parent and community involvement in the schools as a way to improve student achievement would be a top priority for him.

“Because we have such a racially and ethnically diverse population and because the teaching force is still mostly white and middle class, lots more attention has to be paid to group relations,” Horton said. “We need a multicultural approach to everything, and we can break some of the barriers (to success in school) only by doing a better job of involving all our parents and others in the community.”