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The next round in the LAUSD takeover wars

Villaraigosa pitched his takeover plan to the teachers’ unions yesterday.  Predictably, they sounded, shall we say, less than enthusiastic:

"I don’t doubt his commitment, but I feel as a relatively new mayor that there are so many other things on his plate," said Mary Bergan, president of the California Federation of Teachers, which adopted a resolution earlier this year opposing mayoral control of schools. "I don’t know what kind of upheaval it would bring."

The California PTA has not taken a position on the takeover plan, but President-elect Pam Brady said she was impressed by Villaraigosa’s overture to her organization.

"I felt like we were listened to, like he was open to us taking any position, whether it was in opposition or not," Brady said. "He honestly laid his plan on the table and understood that some people will like it and some people won’t."

Meanwhile, back on the ranch…

In Los Angeles, the mayor’s takeover plan took a drubbing at a special hearing called by the Los Angeles Board of Education. The meeting was ostensibly held for the board to hear "case studies" of how other cities have managed mayoral control of schools, but, with one exception, no effort was made to present the mayors’ points of view.

The board had invited speakers from parent organizations in New York, Chicago and Detroit, all of which have experimented with mayoral control of education, and a mayoral aide from San Francisco, which has not. Either implicitly or explicitly, all of the speakers warned against a mayoral takeover in Los Angeles. School board members responded with some of their sharpest remarks about Villaraigosa’s effort.

Carmen Colon, a parent from Brooklyn who is president of the Assn. of New York City Education Councils, warned that the school takeover by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg had marginalized parents with a relatively trivial advisory role.

"All I can say to you is, it’s your city, it’s your school, it’s your child, and don’t let them forget that," she said.

Ismail Vargas, assistant director of a parent group in Chicago, said the school takeover in his city by Mayor Richard M. Daley had resulted in a more aloof, less responsive school system.

"This is the problem of mayors trying to take charge of the public education system," he said. "We call this the public education system — it’s for the public, not for the mayor."

Shanta Driver, a parent from Detroit, described the short-lived mayoral control of the schools there as "a complete disaster."

"Any time you have a proposal for improving the schools that you can’t get a majority of the school board to back, you know that proposal stinks," she said.

In light of these developments, School Me has broken out the Predict-O-Meter ^TM again.  Guess which way the needle turns?