LAUSD Board of Education President Steve Zimmer on the winner-take-all attitudes that are hurting public schools
The new Common Core state standardized test results are in, and they don’t look great for LAUSD.
Nearly a year after the departure of Supt. John Deasy, the school district still awaits new permanent executive leadership.
Traditional public school enrollment is declining as charter schools pick up more students and move into empty LAUSD classrooms, while specialized education programs designed to keep families from leaving the district are encountering resistance from neighborhood schools.
Steve Zimmer, the longtime Westside LAUSD board member who became president of the board in July, has a lot on his plate.
A former high school teacher and counselor, Zimmer says he hopes to chart a different course than past LAUSD board presidents — one less-defined by political friction and internal division. But he does not mince words about his dislike of the California Charter Schools Association, whose independent expenditure committee spent heavily against him during his 2013 reelection bid, a race that drew national attention due to the involvement of billionaire Eli Broad and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Zimmer takes personal responsibility for the failure in June of his plan to transfer the popular Mandarin Chinese dual language immersion program from Broadway Elementary School in Venice to a new, $30-million facility on the Mark Twain Middle School campus in Mar Vista. Believing that most stakeholders would accept the program as part of a larger vision for a Westside language education pipeline was a critical mistake, he says.
“I was broadcasting a perspective that was shared by a very few,” Zimmer says. “I vastly overestimated the reservoir of goodwill, which is completely dry on the Westside. And there is not a first assumption of goodwill.”
— Gary Walker
What went wrong with your plan to move the Mandarin immersion students to Mark Twain?
Change is very hard for people. I don’t think, theoretically, that it was the wrong strategy, and three years ago it had a lot of support at many levels. What I should have understood was how difficult the fight would be to support a program but ensure the support for that program did not cause collateral damage to children in other programs.
I don’t think there will be a revisiting of a large construction project at Mark Twain, at least not in the immediate future. The pain is just too extreme, and without a willingness to do the kind of work that would be necessary to use this space in a different way and not create a major disruption in people’s lives, it cannot work. You have to have an absolute commitment to it at every level. And to force it down people’s throats at this point would have very negative reverberations.
Does this jeopardize your plans for the dual-language immersion pipeline?
I don’t think it will because I think it’s too strong. The challenge for LAUSD is to balance all of these things and approach our role as a district that can embrace, build and promote programs that will grow enrollment. The multi-language future of Venice is not just about Mandarin immersion. We have excellent programs in Spanish immersion at Grand View [Boulevard Elementary School] and an emerging program at Broadway that are also integral components.
Given that they’re back to sharing space at Broadway, what’s the future for the Mandarin program?
It is an outstanding instructional program and it is capable of adjusting. I have mad respect for the families who have endured the struggle with the Mandarin immersion program and who continue to believe that this can be done through the public school system. To say that we would lose the program if it was divided Interview: Schoolyard Scuffles | The Argonaut Newspaper: