School Reform Acts as Magnet for Mayor’s Race

Some days, the main event in this year’s Los Angeles elections looks more like a race for schools chief than for mayor.

Antonio Villaraigosa unveils an 11-point education agenda. James K. Hahn calls for a special agency to build schools. Steve Soboroff says there should be a board of education in every neighborhood. Kathleen Connell promises to open 60 charter schools. Xavier Becerra wants an education summit. Joel Wachs envisions an expanded arts curriculum.

The candidates’ shared ambition to be a major force in education is all the more remarkable because the winner will have absolutely no legal authority to implement school policy.

Not only does the giant Los Angeles Unified School District cover more territory than its namesake city, serving 27 other municipalities as well, but the two institutions are separate by charter and have a long history of mutual indifference.

“It’s very difficult realistically for a mayor to embrace school reform at the top of the political agenda,” said political analyst Sherry Bebitch Jeffe. “Whoever does that will be asked by the media, by parents, ‘How will you do it?’ ”

Nonetheless, the lack of any structural link between the city and school administrations has been brushed aside as a mere footnote in the 2001 campaign. Taking their cue from Mayor Richard Riordan’s active role in school matters and from polls consistently naming education as one of the public’s priorities, the six leading contenders are putting schools near the top of their agendas for the April 10 election.

“You can’t have a first-rate city with a second-rate educational system,” said City Councilman Wachs, capturing the sentiment of the entire field.

To a great extent, the education rhetoric is a reflection of how completely Riordan changed the nature of city-school relations. Riordan used the bully pulpit and his influence with some of the city’s wealthiest business figures to promote his school reform ideas. He appointed a task force to push primary center construction, struck behind-the-scenes land deals for new schools and led a campaign that ousted three board members. He is backing three more this spring.

“There’s a standard now,” said Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. “Clearly Mayor Riordan has shown that education needs to be on the mayor’s agenda and he has to be proactive and he can, in fact, impact the policy and politics.”

Those who wish to succeed Riordan now find themselves reading off his script on many issues. Candidates praise teachers and extol the neighborhood school. They support greater city investment in after-school programs. All say they will enlist city departments to help the district build 100 schools. They all promise cooperation that will forge those schools into community centers alongside libraries, parks and senior citizens centers.

Their differences on these points often come down to little more than nuance and style.

But, as the candidates maneuver to construct a winning alliance of the city’s diverse geographic, ethnic and economic splinters, several have staked out positions that resonate with the constituencies they hold most dear.

Businessman Steve Soboroff and Wachs, who both count the secession-minded San Fernando Valley as political home base, are clamoring to be seen as first among champions of school district breakup.

Soboroff rolled out his breakup plan nearly a year ago, calling for the formation of 25 to 50 smaller districts.

“I proposed that eight years ago,” Wachs said. “I have long believed the school district is too big and dysfunctional.”

The interests of teachers and low-income parents are prominent in the campaigns of former Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa and Rep. Xavier Becerra, both Democrats who count on support from unions and the crowded and school-poor neighborhoods in L.A.’s core. They advocate more training for teachers and measures to increase parental involvement.

Villaraigosa says he wants every school to have top-flight programs, not just the district’s well-regarded magnet schools. He also says he’d send out city inspectors, at the district’s expense, to make sure bathrooms are working and clean.

Becerra would offer utility discounts and grants to teachers who live near their schools, while extending after-school programs to libraries. He would also seek money from developers to pay for new schools.

Connell shapes her campaign to the perspective of the working parent. She would start a preschool program for 4-year-olds and expand after-school programs to take pressure off the parents’ duty to oversee homework, Connell says.

“Given the nature of the urban lifestyles now, it’s a recognition that a school that is limited to six or seven hours is inadequate at providing the kind of support you need for the neighborhood and the family,” Connell said.

Wachs and Hahn have both seized on the new neighborhood council system--the fruit of Riordan’s charter reform drive--as the vehicle for coordinating city departments, schools and the public in school building.

“I think we’re missing an opportunity for involving community,” Hahn said. “The neighborhood council movement could be very helpful.”

In trying to define an expanding role for the mayor in education, some candidates are pushing their agendas beyond reasonable expectations.

All talk about expanding the highly lauded after-school program, L.A.’s Best, and several speak of putting such a program in every school. The director of L.A.’s Best, Carla Sanger, welcomes the attention, but has the more modest goal of adding 50 programs in the most needy schools.

“I don’t think every school needs an L.A.’s Best,” Sanger said.

If they sometimes overreach, the six leading candidates can genuinely promote their long engagement with public education. Four of them--Soboroff, Wachs, Hahn and Villaraigosa--are products of L.A. Unified. Becerra also graduated from a public high school, while Connell attended a mix of public and parochial schools.

Connell, Becerra and Hahn have children attending Los Angeles public schools, though each is either in a magnet or on a small, suburban campus--just the type of school they say should anchor every L.A. neighborhood. Villaraigosa’s wife is a Montebello school teacher, and, although their two children attend Catholic school, his children from an earlier marriage graduated from Los Angeles public schools. Soboroff, by far the harshest critic of L.A. Unified, has five children in private school. Wachs has no children.

In diverse political careers, all have built credible records on public schools.

As legislators, Villaraigosa and Becerra were authors of school aid bills: Villaraigosa, the landmark $9.2-billion 1998 school construction bond measure, and Becerra, a law giving businesses tax breaks for donating computers to schools.

Connell, a former New York public school teacher and UCLA professor, has honed her knowledge of school finance through dozens of audits conducted by the controller’s office. Hahn created the City Attorney’s Kid Watch program, which trains volunteers to monitor the areas around schools. Wachs has sat at the table with school officials to find sites for two schools in his East Valley district.

During two years as chairman of the citizens oversight board for the Los Angeles school bond, Soboroff battled bureaucrats and visited more than 400 schools.

The central problem the candidates face in their quest to become the new education mayor is how to translate those diverse backgrounds into a prescription for getting results with limited powers. None of the candidates, for example, has a formula for the trade-offs needed to make schools serve as community centers.

Opening more schools for weekend recreation causes wear and tear. Pressed on who would pay for the added upkeep, the candidates uniformly offer a vague mixture of more city, state and philanthropic money.

“I think we need to figure out ways to keep those playgrounds open,” Hahn said. “If it means we have to figure out a way to maintain them and provide security, then we need to do that.”

All talk about the bully pulpit as one of their tools, but none plans to use it in the pugnacious way that Riordan did in backing challengers for the Board of Education.

For those civic analysts who have been fascinated by Riordan’s ventures into school politics, and judge his electoral maneuvers the most potent, this reluctance to wield direct political power may prove to be their greatest disappointment in a new administration.

“That is the Riordan legacy in terms of education,” Guerra said.

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Views on Education

All six leading candidates for mayor have put improving Los Angeles schools at the top of their agendas. While they share many common goals, each brings a unique perspective.

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Xavier Becerra, congressman

“When I was on the [House] Education and Labor Committee we analyzed all these different reform efforts and innovative ideas. There are a lot of great programs. It’s just bringing them home and getting them in place.”

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Kathleen Connell, state controller

“We should capitalize on who we are as a city. We always give our kids field trips to the museums, the wetlands, the zoo. That’s appropriate, but I think far more engaging, particularly for children in the early adolescent years, is this exploration of the city and allowing the city to become a workshop for their own career interests.”

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James K. Hahn, city attorney

“I don’t think Los Angeles has gotten its fair share of either federal or state funding for after-school programs. If they have the sense that this is something the mayor of Los Angeles is putting his full weight behind, I think we can get that funding that so far we haven’t gotten.”

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Steve Soboroff, businessman

“As you look at neighborhood school districts around the country, you will find 100 that work for every one that doesn’t. The 11 mini-districts were a step in the right direction. It doesn’t take it to its logical conclusion. Neighborhood school districts work and big bureaucratic school districts don’t. The bureaucracy just swallows everything up.”

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Antonio R. Villaraigosa, ex-Assembly speaker

“One of the successful things of L.A. Unified is our magnet schools. And yet, many of them are far away from the neighborhoods. A lot of them are in the Valley and on the Westside. I want to make every school a magnet for kids in that neighborhood, a school whose excellence is attrracting kids in that neighborhood.”

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Joel Wachs, city councilman

“Every neighborhood council should adopt the schools in their neighborhoods. The neighborhood councils I envision will have the resources to do things like that. I advocate the most power and resources for neighborhood councils. They are the key. They get really involved. They lobby school board members to hold the school board more accountable.”