Stand Up for Public Education in LA’s Superintendent Search Process

Los Angeles Superintendent Search:

Stand Up for Public Education in LA’s Superintendent Search Process

This evening I received an email from my friend and fellow education activist Roberta Eidman. It started like this:

We can’t continue to sit back and watch LAUSD get swallowed up—school by school—by privatizers and charter CEOs. Finally, incompetent John Deasy was ousted; interim head Ramon Cortines wants to be out by year end. A search firm has been engaged.

Local education activists pushed long and hard to get the Board to incorporate community input into its criteria. It worked. Recruiters Hazard, Young & Attea released an online surveyfor anyone in the community to complete. It asks several straightforward questions about characteristics and so forth. But the most valuable section is the free form comments at the end.

Inspired, I filled out the survey and wrote the following in the comments section:

“I think the next superintendent should have a lot of experience as a teacher and an administrator. I would not want this person to be a business person or someone who has been trained at the Broad Superintendent Academy.

Education is not a business. It is a public institution which must not be privatized like so many other public institutions, services and resources have been in the neoliberal society we live in today.

I am very concerned about the billionaire- and corporate-funded “education reform” movement embraced by Republicans and Democrats alike. Race to the Top is no better than No Child Left Behind. This has created an emphasis on standardized testing to the detriment of any other type of instruction. This has also led to the proliferation of publicly funded, privately run charter schools that all the meta-analyses show do not perform any better than public schools.

There is nothing wrong with public schools and unionized teachers. In wealthy neighborhoods, the students perform excellently on standardized tests. Poor tests scores are a result of poverty not bad teachers. When kids do not have prenatal care, when they do not have good nutrition, when their parents don’t read to them at night, when they have to walk through gang infested neighborhoods—these factors are what makes it hard for kids to learn and perform well on tests.

I see nothing wrong with certain reforms like breaking up the school district into smaller districts. Often, it is large bureaucracies that create problems. I see nothing wrong with LAUSD affiliated charters, where the teachers are unionized and credentialed. My own son went to one of them. I see nothing wrong with pilot schools.

I do see something wrong with letting billionaires—who can get a 39% tax credit for investing in charter schools in a low income neighborhood thus doubling their money in seven years—have an outsized influence over education policy in this city. I think Eli Broad’s plan to turn Los Angeles Superintendent Search: