Valley Interview : School Board’s Slavkin Advocates Decentralization, Reforms

Now representing a district stretching from the western San Fernando Valley through the Westside, Mark Slavkin just began his second term on the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education. Slavkin, 31, is the youngest member on the board and is an ardent advocate of decentralization and the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now reforms. He spoke with staff writer Henry Chu.

Question: This is a time of low confidence in the district. How do you hope to combat that?

Answer: Too much of the discussion about education has focused on district politics rather than what’s actually happening on our school sites. It’s certainly more convenient for reporters to talk to the school board about politics than get out to the schools and see what’s going on.

Q: So is it the media’s fault?

A: With the size of the school system it’s inconvenient, if not difficult, for reporters to get into the schools and cover the story at the ground level and much easier to talk about politics.

Q: But in terms of performance, can the district’s poor test scores, such as on the CAP tests and the SAT, inspire confidence?

A: It may or may not increase confidence, but it focuses the debate on the right issues. The right issues in many of these communities are how you serve children from low-income families who are often new immigrants.

Test scores are inadequate measures of what’s happening in the schools. A lot of these schools are restructuring themselves to meet the needs of a very different student population than what they were originally designed to serve. Many of the principles upon which our schools are built assume we’re dealing with middle-class kids ready to learn, ready to roll, who went to preschool and know their colors and letters. That’s become the exception rather than the rule in most of the schools in Los Angeles, and we have to fundamentally revamp how we operate.

Q: How do you focus on education when budget and labor strife wrack the district?

A: There are a couple of advantages this year. One, we have a two-year contract with teachers so we’re not having negotiations now. I don’t think we’ll have pronounced labor conflict this year.

Also, the state adopted a budget earlier this year so we were able to balance our budget earlier. Unless the state pulls money out from under us, we don’t expect to have to reopen the budget and cut and cut and cut. So the budget is more stabilized, the labor is more stabilized.

Q: Don’t the voucher initiative and the district breakup movement also focus the debate away from education?

A: On the one hand, they distract a lot of energy. On the other hand, they are important warning signals that the school system has a long way to go to capture the public support that we need. In an ironic kind of way, there’s a benefit. The voucher initiative and the breakup campaign are prodding the district to see the failings of the past and improve. They have shaken loose any complacency and arrogance that may have been here.

Q: This has been cast as a crucial, make-or-break year for the district. Is it?

A: I think that could be exaggerated a little bit. It’s clearly an important year: Our agenda is the successful implementation of LEARN and the Andersen management review and the decentralization that will come with that. Those things are very visible, very important.

But then, all the kids will be back in the classrooms next year even if the voucher initiative passes, so to portray it as a make-or-break year is a little exaggerated.

The voucher initiative is of historic importance statewide, not just for L. A. Unified, in terms of the direction of education.

Q: Is LEARN the last, best hope for the district?

A: Certainly the best hope. If over the course of the next couple years there is no measurable improvement, then it will force a radical rethinking of the whole enterprise. All the external attacks that have been stymied in the short term would gain enormous strength and would probably come to fruition--some kind of Draconian attack by the Legislature or an initiative.

We’re talking about a window of three to five years, perhaps. Either we’ll be clearly improving, or we’ll be at a dramatic and perhaps frightening crossroads for education.

Q: Is the district’s central bureaucracy too big?

A: It’s a gross simplification to say it’s too big. I don’t think that size is the issue. It’s the culture of the organization that needs to be changed and improved.

The central system for so many years has acted as controller and regulator of schools, and it’s focused on enforcing the rule book and making sure everything’s done and in compliance with all the regulations.

Part of LEARN and other things we’re doing is shifting the focus to being a service organization whose mission is to provide services to local schools and to see those schools as customers.

That’s in some ways more difficult to achieve than cutting 20 positions. That you can do in a day. But changing attitudes is going to take longer.

Q: Can parents wait for this, though?

A: I don’t think any parents ought to wait at all. It’s going to have to happen with the involvement of everybody. Schools are going to have to be proactive and take the initiative to make changes when they don’t see the district is responsive to local needs. And that’s already happening.

Q: How do you meet the greater social needs of the children?

A: That’s a question that hasn’t been answered yet in the world on a grand scale. Nobody has been asked the same questions L. A. has.

Urban systems throughout the country that have these issues of poverty and diversity have to struggle and rethink assumptions to meet the needs of these kids. We still have to change attitudes of some people in the district who think the system isn’t broken, there’s something wrong with the kids who are in the system.

A lot of teachers were trained a long time ago and are frustrated that the way they were trained doesn’t seem to connect with the conditions they’re facing. We need to work with them to address those issues. Otherwise we’ll be stuck with the sense that with these kids we have a round hole and a square peg.

There’s always the sense that you can’t have it both ways, that if you restructure the schools to meet the needs of one set of kids, another set will lose. I hear that a lot.

I don’t believe it has to be that way. We have to understand the benefits that can come to both by better integrating our schools and rethinking how to organize schools, how we group kids.

Q: So there is a way to reconcile the needs of both groups?

A: There absolutely is, but you have to disavow the ancient belief that kids must be grouped by ability. That is embedded in the American consciousness--that you have the smart kids, the average kids and the slow kids, and they have to be separated accordingly.

As long as you think that way, the problem will be intractable. I don’t think that way. There are enormous advantages that come to all kids by grouping them heterogeneously and allowing them to learn from each other.

Q: Do you support public school choice?

A: Absolutely. I have supported open enrollment since before I was elected, and long before it became politically correct. Based on experience, where really sophisticated parents exercise choice now under the table, it doesn’t make sense that we deny that to other parents who are buried under a mountain of regulations.

We should allow parents to choose what is the best school for their child no matter where they live. There are issues in terms of preference to neighborhood and ethnic ratios, but it’s a positive thing and can give them a sense of empowerment.

Q: Many teachers have left the district. How do you attract and retain top-flight teachers?

It’s a very important challenge. The way you do that is to enhance the professional status of teachers.

There are a couple pieces to that. One is pay--it’s important that you pay teachers competitive salaries. The pay cuts of last year set us back enormously.

The second issue, which is beyond pay, is work conditions and the way teachers are treated and the roles they play in the school. We have to continue to enhance that professional status. They ought to be treated as professionals so they can perform as professionals, and in a lot of places that’s not true now--there are so many petty rules and regulations.

Most professionals I know have phones on their desk. Many teachers are without a phone. That may sound small, but it’s symbolic of this lack of professional status that grinds people down.

‘The voucher initiative and the breakup campaign are prodding the district to see the failings of the past and improve. They have shaken loose any complacency and arrogance that may have been here.’