Wake-Up Call for LAUSD

The United Teachers-Los Angeles union seems not to have noticed that the district in which its members work is a sprawling brick monolith tottering on a web of earthquake faults. Instead of scrambling to rebuild, retrofit and brainstorm ways to avoid the impending catastrophe, the union remains transfixed by salaries and teachers’ entitlement to handpick their classroom assignments.

The election of Marlene Canter to the Los Angeles Board of Education may be the bucket of ice-water that snaps the union leaders out of their delusional trance. The district’s 723,000 students, their parents, many hard-working, disaffected teachers and the businesses that will someday employ the schools’ children would sincerely appreciate this belated awakening.

UTLA counted on cementing a board majority with huge campaign contributions and legions of precinct walkers who also made phone calls and delivered friends to the polls.

Not this time.

Canter, a former educator and businesswoman, beat the union-backed incumbent Valerie Fields in Tuesday’s runoff.

Fields’ loss is significant because she provided the fourth vote for a lucrative contract that gave teachers an average 11% pay raise this year while demanding much too little in return. For that kind of money, teachers should have been required to accept merit pay and give up classroom assignments based on seniority, among other student-oriented concessions.

Canter’s victory in the election wasn’t pretty. She ran an exceptionally negative campaign funded in part by more than $1 million in loans of her own money. She proved what she was willing to do to win. Now she must show she is willing to lead. Thousands of her opponent’s supporters are still in the classroom. Canter must reach out to teachers and make them realize that everyone in the district should be on the same team with a single goal. She must show them that their own well-being is inextricably linked to ongoing proof that students are getting a better education.

From now on, concern about instruction should dominate school board meetings and determine budget priorities. The three reform board members, Genethia Hudley Hayes, Caprice Young and Mike Lansing, got it right when they voted for more money for reading, libraries and remedial intervention during the debate over bigger pay raises. They needed a fourth vote. They just got it.