Schools of LAst Resort
The Network for Public Education Action is proud to endorse two candidates for the Los Angeles Board of Education District 2 primary election—Lisa Alva and Carl Petersen.
Although it is very unusual for us to endorse two for the same position, both are well qualified and are committed to the ideals of NPE Action.
The third candidate in the race, the incumbent Monica Garcia, has clearly demonstrated by her record that she is not aligned with the pro-public education agenda of the Network for Public Education Action.
We therefore urge our supporters to vote for either Lisa or Carl.
NPE Action endorses Lisa Alva for LAUSD School Board - NPE Action - https://npeaction.org/?p=7175
Could the only teacher in LA’s school board race pull off a surprise win?
LOS ANGELES TEACHER LISA ALVA
In this season of election surprises, could an upstart candidate win a spot on the Los Angeles school board, powered by little more than enthusiasm and word-of-mouth? *I think we might be surprised on March 7,* says teacher Lisa Alva, the upstart candidate herself. The school board election has attracted close to $5 million in outside spending, a not insignificant chunk of which has gone to Alva’s opponent, charter advocate Monica Garcia. Alva may not have glossy mailers or an army of paid canvassers going door to door, but she has something that all those independent expenditures can’t buy. She’s a voice of genuine resistance—to reform experiments gone wrong, to *choice* for the sake of choice, and to the kids, the parents and the teachers that are being left behind. Can you tell I have a bit of a crush?
I met Alva two years ago when I was in Los Angeles to talk to people about Eli Broad’s *bold* plan to move half of the city’s students into charter schools within six years. I did what I always do on one of these edu-reporting adventures: I asked anyone I knew with an LA connection to hook me up. Which is how I ended up spending an afternoon with Alva in her English classroom at Roosevelt High School in LA’s Boyle Heights neighborhood. A virtual edu-pal had introduced me to Alva; another contact, a documentary filmmaker, introduced me to Boyle Heights. Once the *Ellis Island* of LA, Boyle Heights was sliced apart in the 1960’s by the East LA Interchange. That would be the intersection of six freeways built to transport Los Angelenos to the new suburbs and the tract houses that were blooming across California, thanks to a young home builder named Eli Broad. But I digress…
In the endorsement that Alva scored from the LA Times, she’s described as espousing an *interesting mix of beliefs, including some that align with the school reform movement and others more in line with the positions of the teachers unions.* I’d put it a different way. Alva thinks teachers deserve to have more of a voice, in part to push back against misguided reform policies, like the botched experiment that played out at Roosevelt High School. In 2010, Roosevelt was broken up into seven small schools, each with its own principal and schedule, which created some, um, logistical Schools of LAst Resort – Have You Heard:
