Is School Board Just a Political Springboard?

Rita Walters and Jackie Goldberg now serve on the Los Angeles City Council. Diane Watson is a state senator. Bobbie Fiedler made it to the U.S. House of Representatives. And then there’s state Treasurer Kathleen Brown . . .

“What ever happened to her?”

Mark Slavkin was joking. Humor is one way to soften the perception that the Los Angeles Board of Education is not merely an important body in itself but an excellent political launching pad. Slavkin, who has served on the board since 1989, hoped to join this unofficial alumni association, but last month he finished a dreary fourth in a state Assembly primary. This week, Slavkin rebounded with a consolation prize: His fellow school board members elected him to the board presidency.

The school board does important work. Still, it’s obvious that Slavkin and fellow board members Julie Korenstein, Warren Furutani and Leticia Quezada would rather be politicking elsewhere. Korenstein and Furutani lost races for City Council; Quezada fell short in a run for Congress.

The specter of a political steppingstone wasn’t the only topic when I visited Slavkin at district headquarters Wednesday. I also wanted to revisit a related issue that last year raged like a volcano but this year seems dormant--the campaign to break up the Los Angeles Unified School District.

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Getting there may not be worth the effort, but I’ve long felt sympathetic toward the notion of busting up gargantuan L.A. Unified, the nation’s second-largest school district. Call me sentimental, but there is something very appealing about the Norman Rockwell portrait of a school board composed of civic-minded folks whose interests are very close to home. Instead of gearing up to run for higher office, they are busy practicing medicine or law, owning a store or selling real estate. They aren’t going anywhere--and that’s why they care enough to get involved and assume the headaches. Chances are, you’d bump into a board member or two at every high school football game.

I think of a friend’s father, a real estate man who served on the school board in my hometown, and of my dentist, a former board president in Burbank. I also think of an Arleta activist, a Latino, who complains that Quezada, though a Latina, doesn’t represent his views. How can someone from that other Eastside, he complains, adequately represent the East Valley?

Now, contrast that with the reality that Slavkin faces. He represents an elective district that stretches from Chatsworth to Los Angeles International Airport, essentially covering most of the Westside and the West Valley. He represents more than 600,000 residents--more than a typical member of Congress. Parents are interested in nothing so much as the care and education of their children, but in the Los Angeles schools, their elected representative is a distant figure whose attention can’t help but be spread thin.

Slavkin, however, doesn’t think L.A. Unified is too large. If the San Fernando Valley went its separate way, he points out, it would still be the seventh-largest district in the nation. “Think of all the trouble and heartache to move the school district headquarters to Van Nuys. You would achieve nothing in my view,” Slavkin says.

Actually, the Rockwell portrait assumes much smaller districts, such as Glendale, Santa Clarita, Las Virgenes and Santa Monica. Wouldn’t smaller political units help restore the sense of community?

Slavkin’s answer is yes, but he disputes that creating smaller districts is the answer. It’s the schools themselves, he argues, and not school boards, that should be the focus of community involvement. Establishing greater control and accountability at school sites, he points out, is the primary goal of LEARN reforms. The progress of the district’s charter schools in managing their own affairs, he says, is another heartening sign.

Instead of my Rockwellian utopia, Slavkin envisions the worst of small-town America. The politics would be petty. Small-town boards would wonder “about who’ll be the football coach, what teacher is sleeping with what other teacher,” he warns. “That’s not the kind of local control I’m interested in.”

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Slavkin is most convincing when he describes what ails Los Angeles’ schools--the public’s sense that the public schools no longer are the foundation of a sound community, but a kind of charitable obligation. When Slavkin and I were in school, California was among the nation’s leaders in spending per student, and in student achievement. Now the state is near the bottom, and so are the test scores. In a more perfect world, Slavkin suggests, people would understand that their neighborhood schools represent the future of their communities, their nation, their world. And if he ran for Assembly in my district, he’d get my vote.

But you’ve still got to wonder. In a more perfect world, would school board members really be so eager to move on?