School Post Campaign a Preview of the Job

The race to become superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District will look like a political campaign this week in many ways: intense lobbying, relentless speeches and countless media interviews.

During a grueling six-day schedule, three chosen finalists--two educators and a banker--will get a crash course in the raw and fractured politics of running the nation’s second-largest school system. Each faction of the district will jockey for the candidates’ attention, looking for promises that its causes will be addressed.

But within a month, this heated campaign will look very different from most elections: Only seven people--the members of the Board of Education--will get to vote. That stuffs some rather thick insulation between the electorate and the actual decision on who should replace retiring Supt. Sid Thompson: L.A. Unified Deputy Supt. Ruben Zacarias, banker William E. B. Siart or Daniel Domenech, a New York regional school superintendent.

In an unprecedented process intended to make the selection less insular, each candidate will be subjected this week to eight sessions of private grilling by audiences representing constituencies ranging from teachers to community organizations to parent groups to local elected officials. The sessions, beginning Tuesday, will be held in the Central City Crown Plaza Hotel.

Even this carefully constructed plan has a hitch, though: School board members are not required to attend the invitation-only events. And despite repeated board assurances that all of these sessions would be essentially public meetings, the general public and the news media will be barred from attending.

“The concern is about grandstanding, as opposed to having a meeting that is more civil,” said district spokesman Brad Sales.

The board has planned separate 2 1/2-hour private interviews with each of the candidates before any of the other sessions begin.

The only truly open events will be three large-scale forums planned for the weekend. The first will be held at 11 a.m. Saturday at Birmingham High in Van Nuys, followed by the second at 3 that afternoon at Dorsey High in South Los Angeles. On Sunday, the third forum is scheduled for 2 p.m. at Roosevelt High in East Los Angeles.

Day Higuchi, president of the 28,000-member teachers union, warns that the abundance of meetings will fail to influence the selection process if board members approach this pivotal moment “with ear muffs on.”

“I don’t have huge faith that any of this is going to have an effect on who gets picked,” Higuchi said.

Others are also raising the question of whether the meetings matter, suggesting that the board’s elaborate search process was merely a public relations charade to hide its ongoing intent to hand Zacarias the job. Three of the seven board members have made clear their support for Zacarias all along and one other has consistently leaned in his direction.

Even at Thursday’s closed-door meeting in which the district’s search committee turned over the list of three finalists to the school board, brows were furrowed about the many candidates who had bowed out. Some who decided not to seek the job believed Zacarias was a shoo-in and did not want to risk estranging their current school boards or bosses.

Nevertheless, Higuchi and others are eager to have direct access to the finalists. They believe the process will allow them to pin down the future superintendent on specifics which they can use to hold him accountable later.

The teachers union will be pushing for a plan to create apprenticeships for non-credentialed teachers; the school police will be looking for solutions to the vacation squabble fueling their current sickout; the education reformers will want the candidates to outline their plans for divesting power from downtown to the campuses; Latino activists will strive for a vision of how their children, who comprise two-thirds of the district’s students, could gain under the new leader.

Patrice Springer, who will question each candidate in a separate private session as chairwoman of the Mexican American Education Commission, said she wants to draw out their views on bilingual education and a new aptitude test intended to evaluate Spanish-speaking students. But most of all, she wants to force the candidates to prove they understand Los Angeles’ Latinos.

“We’re all over this district now . . . not just in East L.A. like when I went to school,” Springer said.

In addition to those sessions come other demands on the finalists’ time. The School of Education at USC would like to invite the trio to an on-campus forum. Higuchi’s union, United Teachers-Los Angeles, hopes to host a teachers’ reception for them. Newspapers and television stations are trying to secure separate interviews.

In this fashion, the finalists will receive a clear picture of what would greet them in the job--a super-condensed version of the competing interests the Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent faces day in and day out.

Buried deep in this overnight education ticks a time bomb: the growing friction between Latino activists and the district’s largest reform plan, the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now.

The long-standing suspicion of one group toward the other deepened toward the end of the yearlong superintendent selection process, when LEARN President Mike Roos advocated holding public forums with the candidates. A former state assemblyman who was once a lieutenant to then-Speaker Willie Brown, Roos now plans to mail notices about the forums to his constituency: 12,000 parents at LEARN schools.

The activists have begun portraying Roos as the perpetrator of an elitist vision for the schools, which they say seeks to shore up the dominance of white teachers at inner-city schools and, more pointedly, is a thinly veiled attempt to undermine their candidate, Zacarias.

Roos portrays the activists as terrified of any school reform that could shift some of their power to parents as well as to teachers.

“It’s a sign that we are having some impact, because people are feeling uncomfortable with us,” he said.

A hint of how the standoff may play out this week was witnessed at a school board meeting last week, where Roos was booed by the audience. Later, a coalition of Latinos stood holding hands before the podium, mimicking a phalanx of Roos supporters who had adopted a similar stance the week before.

The three candidates will not be caught unaware. All have been reading the newspapers for months, digging for details on who’s saying what about whom. All say they are braced for the scrutiny they will face this week.

One of Siart’s first concerns when he began looking into the post earlier this year was whether political divisions would dominate the selection process. Would the school community see him only as a corporate white male?

For Domenech, a greater concern dominated his decision about whether to pursue the job: Did Mayor Richard Riordan really have designs on the district? Domenech’s worry was based on experience. In 1995, he was removed from the job of chancellor of the New York City public schools by that city’s mayor just one day after the school board appointed him. (He was relieved to learn that Riordan would need to change state law to exercise any control over L.A. Unified.)

Zacarias, who has spent 31 years in this school district watching the politics and rivalries develop, insists he takes it all in stride.

They may still be surprised. “We’re seeing a very serious racial polarization,” said one parent and Zacarias supporter. “Ruben may learn to regret being named the superintendent. . . . This may be an impossible job.”

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Three public forums with the school superintendent candidates have been scheduled at high school auditoriums this weekend, to be televised at 7 p.m. both days on the district’s station, KLCS Channel 58. For more information call (213) 625-6766.

Saturday, April 19

* 11 a.m.-1 p.m.: Birmingham High School, 17000 Haynes St., Van Nuys

* 3-5 p.m.: Dorsey High School, 3537 Farmdale Ave., South Los Angeles

Sunday, April 20

* 2-4 p.m.: Roosevelt High School, 456 S. Mathews St., East Los Angeles

Source: L.A. Unified School District