Confusion Plagues Mayor’s Education Plan

Less than a week old, Mayor Richard Riordan’s effort to remake the Los Angeles school board is already in trouble, with members of his task force complaining that he misrepresented their work and mishandled the announcement of their mission.

In interviews with The Times, several task force members and sources close to the mayor said Riordan announced his plans to run candidates against four incumbents next year without consulting or even informing members of the task force.

“I’m really disappointed. It’s made it come off looking like a half-baked idea,” said Virgil Roberts, a prominent Los Angeles attorney and education activist. “It’s not even clear that with a little more thought and discussion Riordan would have been the [task force] chairperson. The idea was to have more debate and conversation about the mayor putting together a slate.”

Instead, Riordan told reporters last week that the task force had met and asked him to find candidates to run against all four incumbents who face reelection in April. That prompted a predictable backlash from the incumbents, who vowed to contest whatever slate the task force might pick.

Members said it may be months before they are ready to name candidates to challenge the incumbents.

Angrily dismissing the criticism Thursday, Riordan called the flap “irrelevant” and blamed a combination of misunderstanding and caution for the concerns voiced by various task force members.

“Could it have been better than this? I don’t know, probably,” he said. “But if you have to have a perfect process, you never get to the goal.”

The goal, he added forcefully, is “getting kids an education.” Failing to do that is “intolerable,” Riordan said. He also repeated his commitment to forcing an education revolution, adding that revolutions by definition are sometimes disorganized.

Although the criticism from targeted candidates was expected, more surprising is the degree of unhappiness that Riordan’s handling of the matter sparked within his own group. Indeed, some of the task force members said they never even knew they were serving on a formally designated task force; they said they had merely agreed to discuss the issue with Riordan and concurred with the need to make dramatic changes in the school board.

“There is no task force,” said Loyola-Marymount University professor Fernando Guerra. “What the mayor said is that this would become a task force. But the mayor was also clear . . . [that] there is a consensus. The consensus was to go out and identify potential candidates people thought would do a good job for Los Angeles.”

According to Guerra, that sentiment was reiterated at a task force meeting by the mayor’s special advisor on education, Ted Mitchell, a highly regarded UCLA professor and Getty Center official who helped guide Riordan’s thinking on bilingual education and other issues.

And yet, despite his close ties to Riordan, Mitchell was among those distressed by the mayor’s comments last week and by what he felt was miscommunication within the group and among Riordan’s staff.

“This is a clumsy start,” he said. “I left Friday’s meeting uncertain where the whole group would come down about whether all four incumbents should be out. . . . All of us involved in this conversation need to work to heal this and reach out to encourage people to become part of the conversation.”

People close to Riordan offered several explanations for the mayor’s actions.

Although his interviews with reporters on the topic last Friday had been scheduled early that week, one source said the mayor went further in them than originally intended because media inquiries in the interim had forced his hand. Another suggested that aides had simply overlooked the need to consult with task force members before making the group’s intentions public.

For his part, Riordan said members of the group should have expected a public announcement because the idea was mentioned during a meeting and members were queried directly on whether they had reservations.

“We asked if anybody had any doubts,” Riordan said. “Nobody came forward.”

So confused was the internal handling of the matter that recently departed mayoral chief of staff Robin Kramer weighed in from home after she learned of the muddle, urging Riordan’s office to quickly notify task force members before his comments appeared in the next day’s newspapers.

Kramer was not available for comment Thursday.

In the short term, the issue that most seriously troubles some task force members is that Riordan’s comments could damage the group’s prospects for success.

“There is a possibility all this could kill a good idea,” Roberts said. “It has made the task force look like a negative effort to dump school board members. Now it may be more difficult to attract strong candidates committed to school reform but who do not want to create enemies by raising the question: Are you with the task force or not? Now it will require more courage.”

In fact, the one possible candidate identified by the mayor, Genethia Hayes, was herself critical of Riordan’s role in the matter, saying she believes it has distracted from her effort to unseat incumbent Barbara Boudreaux. Hayes said that she decided about a month ago to run against Boudreaux and that she shared her plans with Riordan on Sept. 8.

On Sept. 11, she attended a breakfast meeting with Riordan and other members of the group invited to help him on his education plans.

“I understood it to be an opening conversation in its infancy stages,” she said. “At no time did I have the impression that any kind of handpicking would be going on. We didn’t talk about bumping people off, or going after anybody. We did talk about the odd seats coming up for election.”

According to Hayes, she learned of the mayor’s comments--and her possible endorsement by the task force--only when she read them in the newspaper.

“At no time was I given any indication I’d wake up Saturday morning to discover I’d be part of a slate,” she said. “Yet someone called me Saturday at 8:30 a.m. and asked, ‘Have you read the newspaper?’ I went out to my lawn, got my newspaper and discovered I’d been named the District 1 candidate on this slate. I wasn’t appalled; I was confounded.”

In the days since the initial story broke, Riordan has continued to send out mixed signals about the group’s ultimate intentions. In one briefing, he stressed that not all incumbents would necessarily be targeted, expressing in particular his personal admiration for David Tokofsky. Then, on the Larry Elder radio show this week, Riordan responded to a question about Tokofsky by saying that although he likes the board member, he worries about his management style, implying that Tokofsky, in fact, would be targeted.

Although the initial confusion has caused the mayor and his task force to come out of the blocks stumbling, some members of the group said that, too, is a consequence of Riordan’s passionate commitment to education, which in the long run will help, not hurt.

“Some people will say that the way the mayor very frankly and openly put the issue out there created problems,” task force member and former mayoral chief of staff Bill Ouchi said, adding that he disagreed with that conclusion. “What you’re seeing is a mayor speaking and acting from the heart. . . . He’s going to be attacked and faulted for speaking out, but he’ll be there for the whole effort.”