School Board Candidates

Caprice Young, District No. 3

1) Yes. I think the No. 1 reason why the district is in the mess that it’s in is that, for the last 15 years, parents and businesses, then significant numbers of people who ought to be stakeholders in the district, have given up and not participated. I think that has meant that the unions and the people who are impacted every day--teachers, predominately, and the different employee unions--have really run the district. So the main reason why I’m running is to give voice to parents and kids who for so long have not taken a voice in the school district. I think that if parents and kids and our businesses had taken a larger role in the school district over the last 15 years, we wouldn’t be so much in the mess that we’re in right now. . . .

I don’t think people on the board really, fully comprehend the depth of the crisis that we have in getting enough qualified teachers into the schools. When 25% of our teachers are on emergency credentials, and when the outlook for hiring more teachers--and qualified teachers--is so bad, I think that’s a major crisis. I think that the board needs to have a strategy for finding and hiring good, credentialed teachers.

2) When you’re putting together a board of directors for, let’s say, a nonprofit corporation, you don’t want all lawyers. You don’t want all accountants. You don’t want all doctors. I think the same applies to the school board. You don’t want all educators, because in order to run a successful organization, you need to have a multitude of different kinds of talents. I don’t come to this as an educator. I come to this with a finance background and as a parent. And that’s one of the key differences between us. I’d bring a perspective to the board that they are sorely lacking: the ability to handle and manage and understand multibillion-dollar corporate budgets. That’s a key difference.

I also think that that after eight years we should have seen more progress. When [Jeff Horton] says he’s excited because our kids have increased two percentile or what he calls 7% and says that that’s tremendous reform, I think that’s not good enough, and I think a lot of parents don’t think it’s good enough either. . . . So those are some of the differences that have been resonating with the public.

“I don’t think people on the board really, fully comprehend the depth of the crisis.”

Genethia Hayes, Disrict No. 1

1) Absolutely. And it needs triage work. . . . Those of us who are looking for seats on the board have to hit the ground running in being able to say that the district is in crisis. I don’t think it’s dead, but, yes, I think there is a crisis. Not just in the public’s perception of the district, but when you look at those numbers . . . we can see where we are, in terms of academic achievement. The only product that we have are children . . . who should be literate, competent, capable people. So, yes, I think that it is crisis.

2) I tell them in 8 years, [Barbara Boudreaux has] had 69 motions, 55 of which have been frivolous. I tell them that the only program that I know of that she’s put forward is the teaching of ebonics . . . . It’s not about ebonics, it is about language acquisition. It’s about the acquisition of standard English and how you transition kids into the acquisition of standard English. . . .

I’m not a linguist. . . . This is what I do know: I know that youngsters who speak nonstandard English, which is what I call it . . . must be transitioned into speaking standard English so they can access the curriculum. I am not in favor of teaching young people nonstandard English in order to transition them into anything.

I think we have to make sure that young people, whether they are African American or Latinos who speak Spanglish . . . we’ve got to move all young people into understanding, reading, writing, speaking and thinking in standard English, because that is how they’re going to access the curriculum. I don’t believe that we should ask young people to lose a home language at all, and there is a need to sensitize people that youngsters who speak nonstandard English are not thick of tongue or slow of brain. . . . Everybody coming out of 12th grade should be able to speak two languages.

I tell them that she is a person who is a divisive factor in terms of race relations in the district. . . . I don’t believe she’s a person who is thoughtful. I don’t believe that she is critical. I don’t believe that she is reflective. I do not believe that she is trying to find a stable coalition on the board to do the work with children. . . . The people I’m talking to [are] beginning to understand that you need--these are serious times--you need people who have the ability to understand the complexities of educating youngsters in Los Angeles.

“It’s not about ebonics, it is about . . . the acquisition of standard English.”

Mike Lansing, District No. 7

1) Yes, I think it’s in crisis for a number of reasons. When you have three communities trying to pull out of the 7th District of the whole, when there are three communities trying to secede, there has to be a reason. There has to be a feeling . . . that this is not adequate for my child. They’re saying, “Please, do something differently.” You look at the test scores, you look at the lack of being able to attract the right people into the profession, look at the inability to attract more people from Los Angeles. That’s a crisis situation because, if that’s a problem now, what’s it going to be in five years?

2. I worked in the Catholic school system. If you ever looked at the archdiocese downtown bureaucracy, it’s minute in comparison to what you have in the L.A. Unified School District. The emphasis there was on the individual school and prioritizing the needs of how we’re gonna help each individual school, help their students to succeed. . . . I definitely don’t think that’s the mantra of the public-school system.

I’m part of a project called, Project Inspire. We’re the only boys’ and girls’ clubs in this program. Project Inspire is bringing technology to each school site when all the classrooms are wired for networking. . . . Eighteen months they’ve been waiting to get this through. I’m told they’re waiting for a second bid. My question is: Well, either they’ll get the second bid, or research it, and see if the bid you have is reasonable, and move on. Why wait 18 months? Now that’s to me, from the Catholic background, that’s a mortal sin. . . .

Two weeks in a row, I saw the same two nice girls come up and complain that their restrooms weren’t open, and then the superintendent says, “Yes, we’re gonna look into this”--and this was about a 20-minute discussion on why these restrooms were being closed. . . . I asked myself, why is that being discussed at a school board meeting? That’s a cluster school-site agenda item. . . .

How do you get away from that concept of small detail and get a real board? . . . If, and when, elected, one of my first jobs will be to go in--and I don’t have all the answers--but my job is going to be to work with the board that’s existing, work with the infrastructure and work out a passage where we are dealing with the major items and getting away from these little things.

“I asked myself, why [are restrooms] being discussed at a school-board meeting?”

Yolie Flores Aguilar, District No. 5

1) Severely in a crisis. When two-thirds of our kids can’t read at grade level, it is crisis. When hundreds of thousands of our kids are dropping out, we’re in crisis. When many of our kids are graduating with a diploma and yet still are not prepared for the work force, that’s a serious crisis. When you have a school budget of $6 billion or more, and you have no idea how it’s being spent because you don’t see the outcomes that you should be seeing--that is a serious crisis.

2) I’m running because I care about children, because that was what I spent my entire life doing. And because I think I have something different to offer to the school board. It’s not about race. It’s about leadership. It’s not about language. It’s about solutions and results. It’s not about any of that. I think it adds value that I am Latina in a highly Latino district. But I didn’t just appear a year ago for this experience and this process. I’ve spent my life trying to be in the right place, at the right time, and make change for kids. And I’m not, I’m not interested in blaming and in shaming people or getting my name in the paper. Oftentimes, people say, “Well, nobody really knows you, Yolie.” I said, “Well, I’ve been busy. I’ve been doing my job on the L.A. County Board of Education.” And that’s what this is about for me.

People tell me it’s crazy to run against an incumbent who’s spent a lot of money and to see that in four years this, in my opinion, this person has been one of the greatest obstacles to change, and that in those four years, our kids continue to fail. There wasn’t a good enough reason for me not to. I care about kids. I know education reform, even though I have not been a teacher. I look at education from a much broader frame of thinking beyond K-12. What happens in the school room is critically important, but what happens outside is just as important. And my ability to think broader, to build coalitions, to have a commitment, first and foremost, for kids . . . it gives me an enormous advantage, I think, to represent kids and to make the kinds of change that can happen at L.A. Unified. I know that I can inspire that kind of hope for the community. I know I can work well with my colleagues to restore the kind of confidence in public education, and I know I can do a much better job.

It’s not about race. It’s about leadership. It’s not about language. It’s about solutions.

Jeff Horton, District No. 3 (incumbent)

1) Performance has not been that disastrous. I mean, our test scores went up 7%. We have a higher rate of college attendance for African American and Latino students than the statewide average. Our dropout rate has been going down, and school violence, which is not a direct student-outcome measurement, but it’s been dropping. I would say the results are not so disastrous and that reforms that were initiated several years ago are beginning to pay off.

2) I would argue that we have begun the cycle of improvement, and we need to continue it. One of the points . . . is to stick with the reform; and I think that in this case is absolutely crucial and absolutely right on. We are in the middle of reforming the district at its very heart in the instructional process, and if that is interrupted, if that is slowed down because people come aboard who have a commitment to start over . . . that will be terrible for the district. That really will stop us in our tracks. What we need to do is carry through the reforms. . . . I’m in a position to be able to carry these reforms on because I was one of the leaders of initiating them and getting them this far. I want to see them carried on and not abandoned just as they’re beginning to bear fruit. . . . What I have tried to do is to tap into a public climate that says that as an institution we have to be accountable for these children’s performance notwithstanding all the very serious conditions that these children face. . . . But they don’t excuse us from addressing those needs or from committing ourselves to doing something. It may be modest, but the thing is you commit to some achievement. . . .

It’s nowhere where it should be. . . . But you have to look at where we’re moving towards. This is exactly when it’s the hardest to proceed, because it’s always easier to say, “Oh, throw this all out, let’s start over, let’s have a new group, let’s come up with a new plan.” That would be the exact wrong thing to do. There is a plan. It needs to be followed through to the hard part. For example, the $140 million that it’s going to take to remediate children who aren’t ready to promote based on these standards. There’s a test that should be applied to the board in next year’s budget: Will you allocate money to do that? We need to carry on the reforms that are beginning to pay off.

“Performance has not been that disastrous. I mean, our test scores went up 7%.”

David Tokofsky, District No. 5 (incumbent)

1) Yes. My daughter’s 7 months old, and if I’m elected again, it’s during that term that I will decide whether she goes to kindergarten in L.A. Unified or not.

2) There’s a feeling that L.A. Unified is dysfunctional. . . . When I got hired in 1983, I had to take a test in history and Spanish in order to teach in the district. There was a shortage of teachers then, too. But it gave me some sense that I had to go through something before they gave me a teaching job, that there was some interview, beyond blowing on a mirror, before I got a job. Those kinds of things--a lot of the selectivity can happen right at the personnel office. You’re not gonna catch all the stuff that turns out to be bad, but I think you can do an awful lot at the personnel office before you get locked into these endless nightmare battles with the unions. . . .

The key thing about the board that must be changed is a move away from an ideological focus to an empirical focus. The board approaches most issues with a strong bleeding heart as to what we should do and what we shouldn’t do. Granted, I grew up on the West Side as a liberal Jewish guy, so my heart can bleed as well as anybody else’s, but the time has come where we ought to be as good as the sports page in looking at every issue in an empirical way. . . . We could go in with test results, real, concrete, measurable things, then begin to compare and contrast.

Whether it’s the textbook issue that I thought was as fundamental as going to church and not finding Bibles in the pew to find so little going on in our school district, I think I have worked hard to raise the expectations, to restore the balance between excellence and equity in our goals at the school system. . . . After the four years that I’ve put into this school board, perhaps a little too obsessively at times, I would love to move back and be there again as the ship of state changes, as the culture is attacked and altered. There’s incredible civic involvement that I can read about in the governance report, in the accountability report, and that it doesn’t go away. I think I would passionately protect the the desires to improve this system in a way that perhaps more people would stop moving and come back to L.A. and develop a consensus that what we have is intolerable.

“The board . . . must . . . move away from an ideological focus to an empirical focus.”

Barbara Boudreaux, District No. 1 (incumbent)

1) Not really, not in crisis. I think it is working toward growing up, and when you begin to start growing up, and I’m willing to give that support along with others to make it grow up, I don’t think it’s in total crisis.

2) Because, while I’ve been there, I’ve been able to identify some of the indicators, and the test scores are going up--they’re still very low. But any time you have a system that’s moving up, then you need that support to keep, continue to move. We’re not at the bottom any more. . . . No, I’m not satisfied. I think we have to push very hard with all of our programs for our students, to get the test scores up, performance up.

My thinking was not supporting ebonics and not teaching ebonics in elementary or even teaching teachers how to teach our students ebonics. That was blown out of proportion. When I had that motion, my motion was to extend the language-development program that we have, and also the proficiency-in-English program. . . . The language-development program had been evaluated informally, which is good, because the students in the program had shown significant growth. . . . That was an informal evaluation. Informal means that you follow the students who’ve been in the program and how they perform in the school, along with the other students who are not in the program, and that, in itself, is growth, as far as I’m concerned. . . .

We have students--I had some from the Teton Mountains--who came into my classroom and I didn’t understand their language at all. They were speaking English. I thought I was speaking English, but they had a different dialect. . . . Across the country, in different cities, African Americans might speak a different dialect, and to be able to understand that, the Southern dialect, such as Mississippi, where I was born, Arkansas. . . . They spoke a different language--I still do it--the dropping of the “ings,” the “eds” and the “s’s,” in some cases, that’s to be recognized. So when you have a regional dialect coming to Los Angeles, we should be able to work with it. . . .

It might be an African American, it might be a white, it might be anyone--because if you take a white from Mississippi, they will speak quite different from a white up here, who was born up here. So, it has nothing to do with a racial pattern.

“When you have a regional dialect coming to Los Angeles, we should be able to work with it.”

George Kiriyama, District No. 7 (incumbent)

1) Well, I don’t know. I think we have turned it around the last two years, ever since (Supt. Ruben Zacarias) has been in. Ruben has been asking for--and I want to change the whole instructional area. So he asked for three superintendents. He got the three deputies, he got that, then he had the instruction as a total division by itself having assistant superintendent with the associate superintendent, with the clusters and all the way down and to the class administrators and to the principals. Now they are here strictly for instruction.Now, if you notice the instructional accomplishments in the last two years--I’m sure you have.

2) I have served my comunity and the district well. I’ve been focused. I have no agenda above being a board member. My whole goal in my whole life has been education. I would like to continue on with the programs I have brought to our district. Some examples: Wilmington never had a thing in their area; I brought the Wilmington skills center there. I had asked the board to provide the money for providing a welding shop, which is just now being under construction. It took me how long to do that? Things do not move fast enough. We have to speed up everything, and that’s one thing I ould like to change immediately. But like I say, you cannot change a whole culture overnight. . .

I think one of my greatest motions was bringing music back to the elementary schools. I was shocked when I first came on board that they did not have an elementary music teacher in every school at least once a week. I said, “How can you have a program of music if you don’t if you can’t get someone here at least once a week?” and so that motion went through, and they argued it’s gonna cost too much money. . . (We) know that so you have to put your money where it’s gonna do the most good. That’s one of my, I think, things thhat I feel I take pride in. . .

Another one is character education. . .We have an instructional program now in all of the elementary schools on truthfulness, on loyalty, on things that are, that are family values, and one thing is making a child a good citizen, I think is one of the finest ideas that we have. In order to do that, you have to give to give them a good education, and so that’s one of my favorite motions, and I think that’s done wonders. I wold like to continue that, to see that go through the middle schools and high schools.