In a close election, veteran educator George McKenna won a seat on the Los Angeles school board. His opponent, Alex Johnson, outspent him. McKenna supporters bit their nails for hours, waiting for the final tally, which was 53-47 in McKenna’s favor. It was a special election to fill the seat of the late Marguerite LaMotte. McKenna had 50 years experience in education. Johnson was a favorite of the charter industry.
According to the Los Angeles Times,
“The winner is likely to cast pivotal votes on such issues as how teachers are evaluated and how large a pay raise they will receive, and whether L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy has the board support to pursue his vision of reform on these and other matters.
“McKenna, 73, entered the contest with strong and generally positive name recognition based on five decades of experience in local school systems.
“He achieved national acclaim for his decade-long tenure as principal at Washington Preparatory High School in South L.A. before becoming superintendent of the nearby Inglewood Unified School District for six years. He then held senior posts in Compton Unified, Pasadena Unified and L.A. Unified. These districts made incremental progress, but nothing like the success he’d had as a school principal.
“Over the last four years, Johnson, 34, has been an aide to L.A. County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, focusing on education and safety.
“Before that, the L.A. native worked as an attorney in the New York public school system for two years. He also served as an entry-level prosecutor for three years in the Bronx.
“To offset McKenna’s advantage of experience and personal connections, Johnson forged key alliances.
“Several major political action committees backed Johnson, including one for charter schools; a second with ties to Ridley-Thomas; a third that drew on connections with civic leaders in support of Deasy; and a fourth funded by Local 99 of Services Employees International, which represents most low-wage, non-teaching district employees. Johnson had pledged unequivocal support of their salary demands in contract negotiations.”
GEORGE MCKENNA
14,940
53.18
ALEX JOHNSON
13,153
46.81
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It might seem so at times, but having wealthy backers is not a guarantee of an election.
Sometimes, enough voters see through the cash curtain.
Very happy for McKenna and for LA schools.
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Wait…what? Parents wanted an actual educator, with training and experience, to be on the school board? Imagine that.
This is the beginning of the end for “reformers.” It will take time, but the public is waking up.
McKenna won, Rhee is changing her name and a school board is trying to opt out of Pearson tests. This is all good news.
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Cupcake, this is not the beginning. Parents, educators and education advocates in Los Angeles have been shouting from the rooftops–and at public meetings and in blogs and voting booths–for over a year now and have repeatedly defeated corporate privatizers.
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Folks…McKenna squeaked in…it was a very close race with only an 8% turnout of voters. And the name of this game was to get, at very least, name recognition for Johnson, who not only was virtually unknown in LA, but was a prosecutor in NY and his job was to fire teachers. He is a charter supporter all the way. His current boss, Supervisor Mark Ridley Thomas, got his own 26 year old son elected to our state Assembly last year using these same tactics and he is known as a self proclaimed king maker. Surely Johnson will run again. His aim seems to be the State House and he is now in with the Broad, Bloomberg, bunch.
McKenna only fills La Motte’s seat (she passed away almost a year ago and was the most courageous BoE member) for the rest of her term, so the next general (not special) election will be a killer.
Johnson, through the repeated political shenanigans, raked in a huge amount of money, close to a million dollars spent on his race. This was poured into the race by an odd amalgam of donors, from Eli Broad and his fellow sharks including the non-Californians, to Villaraigosa and his sharks, to Connie Rice (cousin of Condi Rice) who is supposed to be a liberal civil rights lawyer and who sits on the LAUSD Construction Bond Oversight Committee which okayed the billion dollar iPad fiasco, to former mayor Richard Riordan who supports charters and particularly Catholic school charters and who was our current mayor’s wife’s boss some years back when she worked with him in favor of charters. I am writing an article about the convoluted LA politics that would have an unknown person so quickly thrust forward by unconscionalbe politicians and billionaires.
If Johnson had won, it would be pretty much all over for LAUSD. It would have meant more and more charters, even more teacher firings and use of TFA kids in classrooms, and Eli Broad’s boy, Deasy, would have been assured of a lifetime job.
Only a few years ago in LA, a person running for school board spent about $30,000. So if you think a few minor occurences means we have won the education war, you need to bone up on public policy and study the Art of War. Teachers nationwide have only started waking up since Diane started to educate us all, but the movers and shakers, ALEC, have been planning the takeover of public education for the last two decades. We have just begun to fight back.
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For clarification, Connie Rice was the LAUSD Bond Oversight Committee appointee of the LA City Controller until March of 2011. The next month, Stephen English took over that position and is now chairman of the BOC.
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All I said Educator, was that Rice donated to Johnson…and she had been on the Bond Committee, which was the committee that okayed the iPad deal.
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Scary.” fourth funded by Local 99 of Services Employees International, which represents most low-wage, non-teaching district employees. Johnson had pledged unequivocal support of their salary demands in contract negotiations.” So much for our union brethren sticking up for us. Seems everyone has a price nowadays
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And lo and behold, Mark, SEIU went with Ridley Thomas/Johnson and they concurrently got their $15 minimum wage. Could there be any connection?
Actually they deserved a living wage…but not by manipulation.
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I’m glad Mark Collins brought this up though. SEIU leadership in Los Angeles is consistently supporting the privatizers. I met one of their members who was very disappointed when SEIU Local 99 showed up in droves to pressure the school board to back down. He said “They never asked the membership what we thought.” My understanding is that a huge number of Local 99 members are parents in the district.
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Further clarification: Stephen English and his wife, billionaire Molly Munger,, and Connie Rice are all part of the Advancement Project and they’ve infiltrated the Bond Oversight Committee. They ran Prop 38 or 39 against Brown’s Prop 30 to raise tax money for schools with an emphasis on pre-K ed. The Munger prop was a stealth attempt at creating a network of pre-K charter schools. It mercifully failed.
Ellen is right: we won a battle last night but not the war.
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Munger’s initiative was Prop. 38 which would have given funding directly to schools. It was her brother’s Prop. 32 on the same ballot that was truly obscene and pro charter, and anti union.
Gov. Brown’s Prop. 30 carried the day, and both Mungers lost.
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First Zimmer, then Ratliff, now McKenna How long do we pretend LA voters are undecided about “Reform”?
This election was a nail biter for sure, but McKenna won by 6 points. That’s decisive. If the turnout had been higher and that percentage had continued, 6% would seem solid. Annie Gilbertson of NPR affiliate KPCC recognized that immediately.
This is the third consecutive time that LA voters have chosen public education professionals over corporate privatizers. Howard Blume did an excellent job covering the iPad scandal, but his article today begrudgingly announces that McKenna seems to have won. No doubt, the influence of editors, including Jim Newton and Karin Klein, who misinterpret all opposition to the top down, privatizing reforms as resistance from an entrenched union. This is a real disservice to readers.
This massive power shift on the school board has been happening for over a year and will play out in many ways. The public deserves an analysis of what that change means to policies in California’s largest school district (which everyone agrees impacts policy on smaller districts throughout the largest state), how those policies will be felt at school sites, what they will mean to tax assessments, or in terms of an educated citizenry and how the politics play out along the way. As all of us on this blog know, it’s a far more interesting debate than “change vs. status quo.”
The LA Times should help readers understand this power shift resulting from voters who repeatedly elect board members to soundly defeat former “education Mayor” Villaraigosa’s corporate reform policies and it isn’t doing that by pretending the teachers union and Deasy are the only ones in the room. Just like DeBlasio and Baraka and the excitement surrounding the possibility of Karen Lewis challenging Rahm Emanuel, #RUNKarenRUN!, this conflict makes for pretty interesting news. Thank goodness there are blogs like this one, and locally CityWatchLA, LAProgressive, 4LAKids, K12NewsNetwork and news sources like KPCC to help Los Angeles citizens understand the great public education debate.
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Hey fellow LA-observers …. don’t forget Kayser and his race against privateer-backed Sanchez I while toting up the string of Ed®eform (nod to Scott Folsom and his superb blog, 4LAKids) defeats. By my count, this is FOUR not even just three slap-downs of the corporate-privatizing, neoliberal agenda.
I agree with everyone above: this win of McKenna’s amounts to a significant, re-articulation of no-confidence in the big-money underwritten restructuring of our public schools.
What remains is to translate the public’s clear desire, into ***action from our elected board of representatives***. Our BOE now has a very crystal-clear, repeatedly voiced mandate to require some functional, actual “accountability” toward our _students actual needs_. Not corporate America’s, but our young learners’. All of them.
So speak up and out and support those board members in a renewed, vigorous effort to bring meaningful, not mendacious, School Reform. Pledge to hold their backs as they set out to take on very, very, very big and powerful financial interests. For our children. All of them. Go get em.
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Right you are redqueeninla! Four not three! And Kayser is up for re-election next year.
If this were the SAT, we might say: McKenna is to LA schools as spinal transplant is to standing up.
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Love the analogy, Karen.
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I hope all the glee over McKenna’s election will be fruitful for the community and public school education. Hands down he is the best candidate for the job but will it mean anything on a Deasy board that here to fore has supported every wrong policy he has come up with. It’s true that the community seems to be tired of money interest who don’t even live here, trying to direct their schools. The residents of District 1 chose right and in the well loved tradition of LaMotte. My wish is that this school board is reminded of its mandate which is to decide educational policy that is in the best interests of the community, not Deasy, not his corporate backers. I choose, as the folks in this column do, to welcome McKenna and hope for better days for teachers, students, parents and the Los Angeles pubic school community.
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Paula — yup; I agree. That was then, tomorrow is now; let’s just hope and trust that time-and-place matters. A new configuration is not trivial and there is a new political landscape all around, not just at Beaudry (City hall, in the neighborhoods, demographically, etc).
It’s easy to be cynical and/or fearful for more of the same, just because it always is. But it serves no (good) purpose. At the expense of sounding like a really bad movie, let’s remember that prophecies do have a self-fulfilling component. That’s why I suggest we personally, work hard to make support of the still-vulnerable Four, palpable. They need for our support to be very obvious if we wish for them to express our feelings about policy more fearlessly.
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Congratulations, LA! Many thanks to Diane, her blog & the N.P.E. for making this national news (you won’t see it on CNN or MSNBC!) & giving substance to other races in other states. Again, it bears repeating–yes, WE can…yes, we DID…and yes, we WILL!!!
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NPE is supporting candidates who support better public schools in states across the country.
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Thanks Diane, and we support your efforts.
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Unquestionably spending more $ does not always mean a candidate wins.
In Minnesota this week, a long time anti charter public wealthy person, former state legislator who challenged the state auditor in the Democratic/Farm/Labor (DFL) primary lost, despite the fact that he outspent her $4 or $5 to $1. DFL is what Minnesotans call what most of the country calls the Democratic party.
State Auditor Rebecca Otto won more than 80% of the vote against her anti-charter opponent.
http://www.minnpost.com/politics-policy/2014/08/otto-trounces-entenza-auditor-race
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