The Best Bets for L.A.’s Schools

The seven-member Los Angeles Board of Education oversees the nation’s second-largest school district, one in which too many of the nearly 670,000 students are not getting the quality education they need. Two board seats are being contested in the April 8 election; the winners will have an important impact, not least because board members will soon choose the district’s fifth superintendent in a decade.

District No. 4: Four candidates are vying to replace Mark Slavkin, the vigorous incumbent who is stepping aside. The district ranges from the Westside to the northwest San Fernando Valley. This race is coming down to a tough choice between two well-financed opponents--Valerie Fields, a former schoolteacher who spent more than 15 years as then-Mayor Tom Bradley’s education advisor, and Kenneth Sackman, a business-minded labor lawyer and energetic parent activist. Both have major union support, Fields from the powerful teachers union and Sackman from at least two dozen other unions, including school employees and school police.

The Times supports Sackman, who is more candid, specific and informed than Fields. She has failed to detail her positions on issues as basic as how to accomplish classroom reform and as heated as whether the school district should be broken up.

Sackman supports rewarding excellent teachers and finding ways to help less successful ones save their jobs by improving their work. While Sackman believes that breaking up the school district is not feasible “in the near future,” he rightly says “the time has come to give individual schools the autonomy to develop and refine their curricula,” under tough periodic testing. Finally, Sackman’s skills as a businessman who has met payrolls and as a labor lawyer would be useful to a board now composed of retired teachers and principals.

District No. 6: Incumbent Julie Korenstein faces three underfinanced candidates in her west San Fernando Valley district. Though loyal to the teachers union, Korenstein has become increasingly independent during her decade on the board and asks probing fiscal questions of district officials and others. Her major goals include reducing the dropout rate and improving school safety. Although Korenstein opposes a “massive breakup” of the school district, she has spoken favorably of “a San Fernando Valley Unified School District” on the grounds that the LAUSD is getting too big.

The board manages a budget bigger than those of 12 states, and this election comes at a time when the superintendent search is already contentious. Sackman and Korenstein are the best bets for increased fiscal savvy and a more open selection process for the new schools chief.