L.A. mayor pushes education reform

That’s what you get called if, like Julie Korenstein, you’ve served on the school board of the Los Angeles Unified School District for 20 years. “They come in as the, quote, reformers,” Korenstein says. “We become the ‘establishment.’”

The Old Guard is in the minority now. Three new board members backed by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa were elected in May. Together, with incumbent Monica Garcia, a Villa­raigosa supporter who was recently named board president, the mayor’s “people,” as Korenstein calls them, have a 4-3 majority.

“It’s always difficult when you have major changes on the board of education,” Korenstein says.

Even more so when you’ve just fought the mayor in court over who would control your school district. In mid-April, the 2nd District Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling that deemed unconstitutional a state law handing considerable control of the district to the mayor.

Given the mayor’s defeat in the courts, the stakes in the school board elections in May were especially high. According to LA Weekly, Villaraigosa and his backers -- tapping local developers and other wealthy donors for contributions -- easily topped the $2.3 million in campaign contributions raised by former Mayor Richard Riordan when he successfully backed four “reformers” of his own in 1999.

In her acceptance speech as the new board president, the 39-year-old Garcia talked about a “new social compact” that would “represent the demand for academic achievement, educational equity, responsibility, accountability, and transparency,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

That sentiment was supported in the Times’ editorial pages. “Villaraigosa and the school board’s four newest members . . . have played valuable roles as high-profile critics of the district’s status quo,” the newspaper says. “Once inside the system, the natural inclination would be to turn cheerleader. That would be a mistake.”

The newspapers called for new benchmarks to measure student progress, a decline in the dropout rate “by at least 5 percent,” and an independent audit of the district’s $11 billion budget, “a murky affair to even the most erudite outsiders.”

The board moved quickly in early July to pass more than 30 performance measures -- on items from graduation rates to student and teacher attendance -- that Superintendent David L. Brewer was expected to address in the coming months. And it set a goal of a 100 percent graduation rate by 2015.

With more than 700,000 students, L.A. Unified is the second largest school district in the nation. It is also among the poorest in California, with 78 percent of its students below the poverty level.

Since the mid-1960s, the student population has more than doubled, fueled mainly by the tremendous growth in the number of low-income immigrant students, says former board member David Tokofsky.

He says the district has not received enough help from other government entities as it has struggled to build ever larger schools to accommodate the growing enrollment.

Education is a big issue in Los Angeles. “After traffic -- which I’m sitting in right now -- and crime, it’s probably fundamental to the quality of life in Los Angeles,” Tokofsky says.

And “since the mayor can’t fix traffic” or make a big dent in the crime rate, Tokofsky says, he’s focused his efforts on the schools.

“It has more to do with the ambitions of the mayor, mixed with the fact that people always want the schools to be better than they are,” he says.

Tokofsky defended the districts’ performance, both financially and academically. He noted that four of the past five multimillion-dollar bond issues have been approved by the public and that the fifth was defeated by the slimmest of margins.

Since 1997, voters have authorized more than $13.6 billion in general obligation bonds, according to The Bond Buyer, and those bonds maintain a solid AA-minus rating from Standard & Poors.

Elementary school test scores have risen for the past six years, outpacing statewide rates, the district reported. By 2005, 50 percent of third-graders were scoring at the proficient or advanced level in mathematics.

Middle school scores have also improved somewhat; however, results at the high school level remain disappointing. For example, just 26 percent of 11th-graders scored at the proficient or advanced levels on the state language arts test in 2006, a marginal improvement over the 21 percent rate in 2001.

Given the importance of education, the challenges faced by the high-poverty urban district, and the recent high-profile struggle for control of the schools, longtime board members like Korenstein are finding themselves in a sometimes-harsh spotlight.

“We’re a target a great deal in L.A. Unified,” Korenstein says. “We’re the great bull’s-eye.