Villaraigosa still isn’t at head of the class

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa accomplished a key goal in this week’s election -- winning a majority of allies on the Los Angeles Board of Education. It’s not the outright control of local schools he once sought, but it’s the kick that could open the door to his grand ambitions.

Villaraigosa intends to raise student achievement sharply, even more than mayors elsewhere who’ve had full authority over their schools. The formula? Move power to schools, giving them more latitude in how and what they teach.

It would qualify as both revolution and revelation -- if he can pull it off.

His three new allies are Deputy City Atty. Tamar Galatzan, 37, and Richard A. Vladovic, 62, who were elected Tuesday, along with Yolie Flores Aguilar, elected in March. They take office July 1. A fourth ally, Monica Garcia, joined the seven-member board last year.

Tuesday’s elections were a setback for the teachers union, United Teachers Los Angeles, which lost its own closest ally, incumbent Jon M. Lauritzen. Union leaders immediately spoke of cementing relations with the winners, who have insisted they are not anti-teacher.

Now begins the hard work.

In other cities where mayors have intervened, “if you’re looking at it in terms of big, big rises in achievement scores, it isn’t there,” said Stanford University education professor Michael Kirst. But if the goal is taking a really bad status quo and making things noticeably, incrementally better, mayors have “improved the situation.”

By a really bad status quo, Kirst means school systems beset by utter collapse, organizational chaos or corruption as well as by low academic achievement.

“In Oakland,” said Kirst, “the first demand of students? They wanted water in the schools.”

It’s not obvious how well L.A. Unified fits this paradigm. The district manages the nation’s largest school construction program, for example, and has seen test scores rise faster than the state average, even though they’re still low.

It’s this ongoing incremental improvement -- with a persisting high dropout rate -- that has frustrated Villaraigosa, who’s said that every student needs to be academically proficient. That means performing at grade level at the very least, and this improvement needs to happen nearly right away, he has said.

The new board majority took part Wednesday in a tour, arranged by Garcia, of 9th Street Elementary School, south of downtown. They all echoed the mayor’s desired sense of urgency, and like Villaraigosa, declined to offer details on an immediate agenda.

“We’ve got a fire raging,” said Vladovic. “A four-alarm fire, with half our kids dropping out, failures, the gang problem and everybody is so worried about who’s holding the hose to put out the fire. Let’s just put out the doggone fire!”

He added, “We’ve got some ideas: smaller schools, safety issues, more local control. We’ve got to support the teachers.”

Such goals meet with broad general agreement in the business community, the teachers union and even among Villaraigosa’s critics.

But local control, in particular, is not the direction of mayors in other cities. Before Mayor Richard M. Daley took charge in Chicago, “the power had been pushed down to school-site councils, which was the reform of the ‘80s,” said Stanford’s Kirst. “And Mayor Daley came in and he brought more power ... back up to the center. What we have seen in the research, the more divided the power is ... the riskier it gets.”

At the same time, he added, every city is different and Villaraigosa doesn’t have the option of dominant authority, like mayors in New York City, Cleveland, Chicago, Boston and Washington, D.C. Instead, he’ll travel the path of former Mayor Richard Riordan, who also elected a school-board majority, and late Sacramento Mayor Joe Serna.

Serna was largely content to, in his view, upgrade the quality of the school board and then get out of the way. To some degree, that paradigm also applied to Riordan.

Villaraigosa has a more ambitious agenda.

The mayor is “going to have to build some consensus,” said David Fleming, chair of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, which spent, he said, 10 times more on these elections than on past ones. The business community allied with Villaraigosa, Fleming said, to limit the domination of employee unions, who’ve been the major players in past elections.

“He doesn’t have four votes in his pocket, but he has four votes who are going to listen to him rather than only to the administrators union or the teachers union,” Fleming said.

But the union can’t be left out either, said Marshall Tuck, one of the mayor’s top education advisors. “Any plan to improve the school district has got to bring the teachers along,” he said. “It has to include labor. You can’t just jam the unions. And it doesn’t make sense to.”

Another major player will be L.A. Unified Supt. David L. Brewer, who was hired late last year by the board. So far, he’s maintained good relations with the mayor and his allies.

For Villaraigosa, Tuesday’s election was a back-up plan. He originally sought full authority over the school system, then settled for a power-sharing arrangement set out in legislation. The courts have so far nullified that law as unconstitutional.

The mayor could now attempt to revive a key element of that law, the part that would have given him primary authority over three low-performing high schools and all their feeder elementary and middle schools through a vaguely defined “community partnership.” Such a group of schools, though a small percentage of the district, would still qualify as one of California’s larger school systems.

All of the mayor’s endorsed candidates said, during the campaign, that they favored giving the mayor at least one high school and its feeder schools.

“I have no problem with partnering with the mayor,” said Flores Aguilar when asked about it Wednesday.

By the timetable of the original legislation, that scenario is already a year behind schedule. And the community partnership has somewhat unraveled: Originally, the teachers union was on board; not anymore.

“The situation has changed,” said union vice president Joshua Pechthalt. The idea of handing over schools to the mayor “is pretty much dead in the water.”

Inevitable factionalism and the independence of the school board will limit what Villaraigosa can accomplish, said billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad, who has been active in education reform efforts across the country. He said the best hope for change is through the charter-school movement.

Charters are independent public schools given freedom from union contracts and many education code provisions in exchange for improving student achievement. L.A. Unified has 103, more than anywhere else in the country, and the number is growing.

The new board’s direction on charter schools is uncertain. Galatzan, for example, enthusiastically backs them. Flores Aguilar expressed concern about schools converting to charter status; this process was set in motion by teachers at Locke High last week. “I don’t see that as a sustainable solution,” she said. “What charters have done, which I appreciate tremendously, is that they have helped us see that innovation is possible and that if we don’t change, there is another solution.”

Villaraigosa’s view on charter schools has evolved. He’s spoken well of them, but left them out of his legislative reform plan. On election day, he touted them again.

Whatever his preferences, Villaraigosa shouldn’t push too hard, said former school board member Caprice Young, who was part of the Riordan majority and now heads the California Charter Schools Assn. For the mayor to consider the board “a rubber stamp would be a huge mistake,” Young said. “The mayor needs to ... back them up. I hope he sees himself as a partner as opposed to their boss.”

The political rumor mill posits that two members of the mayor’s majority -- Galatzan and Garcia -- have further possible political ambitions, which could make them especially amenable to Villaraigosa’s ongoing overtures, given that he’s become the city’s primary political kingmaker.

For the 62-year-old Vladovic, by contrast, joining the school board is more a crowning achievement to a career in education. Vladovic values his alliance with the mayor, but also has nurtured good labor relations. If he intends to serve more than one term, his links to the teachers union may prove of longer-term importance than ties to Villaraigosa, who is widely expected to run for governor in four years.

Albuquerque Mayor Martin J. Chavez recalls a rude awakening after helping to elect two school board members. “It’s actually a pretty funny story,” he said. At the swearing-in of one board member, “his first comment was ‘Notwithstanding the mayor’s rhetoric, this school’s in good shape.’ So much for that. So Antonio needs to watch out.”

*

howard.blume@latimes.com

joel.rubin@latimes.com