Red Queen in L.A. reflects on the debacle in Los Angeles. Turnout for a consequential school board election was abysmal.
She notes that Los Angelenos have participated in rallies in great numbers in recent months, but when it came time to vote, they were missing in action.
In the school board election on Tuesday, only 9.3% of eligible voters bothered to vote.
From a school district that is approximately 75% Hispanic and 80% eligible for free-or-reduced-price-meals, comes an election of national significance, decided by a preponderance of very narrow, special interests including relatively affluent silicon-beach-millenials, attorneys, entertainment executives, and real estate investors from the coastal plain to the palisades of LA’s westside. For it to happen in the face of the last six month’s electoral imbroglio is at once mystifying and maddening. After all we’ve been through, here we are all over again witnessing the triumph of alternative facts, propaganda, Big Lies and even bigger money.
What is the cause of this apathy when so much is at stake?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
People feel disconnected and tired. But we still need to make our voices heard and fight against those who promote this crawling DISEASE of charters and vouchers.
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If they’re not too disconnected & tired to make their way to a protest & stand on the street for hours, how can they justify failing to participate in an election, particularly one with a relatively light overall turnout that would probably require little or no waiting?
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Great question. Advocates for various candidates spent lots of money. There were many people making phone calls on behalf of one or more candidates. So while I’m happier than either Diane Ravich or the Red Queen about the results, I think the question about why so few people voted is a very important one to consider.
I also think it would be useful for all involved to know what results, if any, were obtained from surveys of people who did vote. What were the reasons they decided to vote for the candidates they did?
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“The opposite of civilization is indifference” – Elie Wiesel , holocaust survivor, nobel prize-winner.
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If my experience is any indication, school board races are generally ignored. People take their public schools for granted. I’m always astounded how little the public–including most teachers–knows about the existential threat to public education. Everyone just thinks their community schools will be there forever.
And the poor, working multiple jobs just to feed and shelter their families, don’t always have the time to vote. I’m assuming there were no early or weekend voting times for this one.
Also, who in their right mind schedules a school board election in May? It should be part of the regularly-scheduled primary or general elections. A vote at a weird time of year easily gets forgotten.
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THIS is so frighteningly true in days of ever-more-powerful privatizers: “If my experience is any indication, school board races are generally ignored. People take their public schools for granted….” This CRUCIAL election had a less than 9% turnout. Maybe much of our concern about DeVos and her Dept. of Education predecessors has been spent weakly; we should have been, and should now absolutely be, focused unwaveringly upon school board elections across the nation.
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Great question – why did the LA School board schedule an election in May?
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Not meant to be facetious, but to get the result that they got. I’ve seen/heard many school boards and district admins doing their best to put any kind of vote/election out on what they consider the most favorable time. Low turnout can be good as far as they are concerned as they generally have done enough polling to know/have a feel for how the election may go. If the “time isn’t right” the boards will delay putting an item up for a vote until they believe the “winds are blowing right”. More likely than not the LA school board felt the winds were right at this time to get the results they got.
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Interesting. Thanks, Duane.
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Scheduling elections in November when the general elections take place could be dangerous. After working the phones for “get out to vote” last year, I learned that most people focus on the presidential election. Many did not want or care about voting in the local races so I took the opportunity to educate and encourage. Our Founding Fathers designed vertical and horizontal separation of government for a reason. Move everything to November and we may get thousands of uninformed sheeple voting. Move everything to November and the local races may get even more lost in the hubbub over federal races. That and it can discourage citizens who want to serve….how can one compete with the mailers and bombardment of messages in November. Me? I’ll continue to push for May school board elections.
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You have a good point. It’s going to be hard to EVER get the public to pay attention to school board races, until it’s too late.
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I so agree! Teachers (actively involved ones) follow this stuff, and know what’s at stake, but I am often amazed at how my political friends don’t have a clue about school boards and politics. I hate the way LA has frequent, seemingly small elections. People just don’t show up, and the mischief is done.
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“…affluent silicon-beach-millennials, attorneys, entertainment executives, and real estate investors from the coastal plain to the palisades of LA’s west side.” This makes up those who live and vote in Zimmer’s district. It isn’t choice as much as it is neighborhood school. Real estate agencies in particular will support charters as it gives the middle class with money a “choice” that sidesteps the less economically fortunate, gangs, and problematic behavior-wise.
My own child was problematic, so I kept him from a school one block from my home to avoid his taking up with the misbehaved.. I was able to enroll him in a Santa Monica magnet program. He still hung out with others like him, but it was not convenient for him to do so.
No one wants to deal with the issue of discipline. That is the primary reason school parents choose a charter for school enrollment. And discipline has to do with administration, not teachers. If you can manage a mixed group of students on your own, including the criminally inclined, you can teach. If not, forget about it. There is never real support because of codes, policies, laws, rulings, etc.
One of my middle-school students performed a fake rape of a fellow student during a P. E. class. The principal would not allow the A. P. to go for expulsion, only suspension and transfer. The child was mentally ill and it would take forever to get him into a non-public school. He was transferred and did the same thing at his new school. I can tell you many more stories but anecdotes aren’t scientific. They are only reasons. When I called parents of parents of children with special needs to find out why they had not enrolled in the neighborhood school, one parent asked, Isn’t that the school that enrolls kids from the projects? Another parent withdrew her child when she was harassed for supporting the Republican candidate in an election. I have a young doctor who tells of his attending JFK high in the Bronx. He said there was a minority group of students he huddled with, the kids with good grades, etc. and they got through the experience.
I can tell you many more stories but anecdotes aren’t scientific. They are only reasons.
Taken together they provide the lack of support for public school. As one Trump supporter put it, It’s time I get something.
I personally support public education and magnets and self-tracking. I also support well-run school districts. However, we are talking about a fifty year-old issue and people just aren’t seeing it as being resolved.
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WCT – parents report they choose schools for a variety of reasons. I’m glad you had an option.
There are many low income families and families of color selecting charters because they feel their youngsters are not being well treated or respected in traditional districts. It’s also true that some families are not satisfied with chartered public schools.
There are many charters around the country dealing with youngsters who have been pushed out of traditional schools. There also are some great district alternative schools dealing with the same group of youngsters.
Over 40 years I’ve worked with and met alternative school teachers all over the country. One of the things that’s encouraging is that a number of them are working across the district/charter line to help more students succeed. Here’s a great example. District & charter alternative school educators have a yearly program that recognizes and honors young people with whom traditional schools have not succeeded.
http://hometownsource.com/2017/04/05/joe-nathan-column-one-day-one-great-way-to-help-students-and-yourself/
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typo…I did not call grandparents.
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Any idea what was the demographics and participation in Zimmer’s district?
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Over saturation – too many choices dull us to the importance of key decisions.
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The public schools in California are a train wreck. The schools are failing the children, and the state. According to a recent non-partisan report, one-third (1/3) of college students at state universities are “ill-prepared” for college level math and English.
see
http://www.scpr.org/blogs/education/2014/02/19/15882/more-than-a-third-of-cal-state-freshman-ill-prepar/
The public schools in the Golden State, are especially failing African-American and Hispanic children.
Sad.
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Low turnout elections are a different animal. One must identify one’s voters and turn them out. General pr is pretty much wasted. If the other side has unlimited money, it’s hard to overcome with people power alone. Steve Z is a great guy, a thoughtful school board member, but not a scintillating candidate. Plus, defending LAUSD is a pretty much impossible task. Clearly UTLA made a mistake in not challenging Monica Garcia, which would have forced the charter folks to spread their money around.
On the other hand, it was amusing to see the LA Times echo Robert Redford’s closing line from the movie The Candidate, “What do we do now?” Being pro-charter doesn’t solve the problem of how to improve LAUSD as a whole. Good luck to the new pro-charter majority. Teachers will do what we’ve always done–educate our students the best we can, in spite of stupid mandates from above.
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Public schools are not “failing” when they can’t parent kids into behaving differently than they are encouraged to at home, change gang violence and poverty, and get children with learning disabilities to pass a test that is designed for someone who does not have one. Nor can they accelerate language acquisition so that someone is fluent in a year.
What is failing is a society that encourages mass poverty, parents that are disengaged, and a world where people who don’t do any part of the hands-on education process blame schools.
Get out of the arm chair, and on the football field.
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You should read “Wealth and Poverty” by George Gilder. This classic economics text, addresses some of the points you raise.
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The headline is “charter backers win”:
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-charter-analysis-20170517-htmlstory.html
The entire piece is about plans to expand charters- in a district where 16% of studnets attend charters.
I really don’t mind “charter backers” promoting charters over public schools- it’s an opinion and it’s fine to promote your opinions- but I think they should run on that instead of denying it.
This is about opening more and more charter schools which is exactly what the “charter backers” opponents said it was about, and what the charter backers denied.
This idea that they can spend 100% of their time and funding promoting charter schools and still run these campaigns where they insist they’re “agnostics” is just disrespectful to voters. What they plan to do is close public schools and open charter schools. That’s why they got 5 million from Reed Hastings. That’s his stated goal. Hastings doesn’t give 5 million dollars to politicians who support public schools because Hastings doesn’t support public schools.
Why not just come clean with voters and tell them this “movement” is ABOUT charters and vouchers? It’s never been about anything else. Continuing to tell voters that electing ed reformers will “improve” public schools neglects to tell them it’s about replacing public schools. That’s a huge omission! It’s deceptive. They deserve to know the public schools they now own and operate will be replaced.
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Read this piece on the winners of this race and find me a SINGLE improvement or benefit for any kid in any public school in that district. Keep in mind 84% of those kids currently attend public schools:
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-charter-analysis-20170517-htmlstory.html
There is no benefit for those kids. Their schools will be sacrificed for the good of the larger “movement” to privatize. They’re the collateral damage.
Their parents should have been told that.
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Do you think LA will end up with Reed Hastings vision of 5% public schools or Eli Broads vision of 50% charter schools?
When these wealthy donors set targets ahead of the charters opening, that isn’t a “market”. They’re deliberately engineering “the market” . That’s why they announce the goal. They will manipulate this market until X number of students leave public schools and enter charter schools.
They don’t deny this. Hastings announced his goal at a charter schools conference. He will promote and fund charter schools until all but 5% are charter schools. Has nothing whatever to do with “better” schools. As long as they are charter schools his goal is met.
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This was always one of the main supporting points for the argument against direct elections of school boards. That the turnout is so low that the elections are very susceptible to capture by special interests.
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Re elections scheduling: that’s been in the pipeline forever, essentially. There was a primary in March and a runoff in May. It was the same schedule two years and four years ago extending back I don’t know how long … in any even there was no ulterior selection of likelihood to vote for or against or turnout or not. In fact the city has recently decided to align the start of these offices and collapse the number of elections, hence this particular in term in question is not for the usual 4 years but 5 1/2. God help us.
I simply cannot understand the excuse of “disconnected”, “tired”, “depressed”, “disspirited”, “feeling marginalized/unimportant”, etc.
Democracy is a concept; it depends on the participation of its particulate voters. Yes, your vote matters not one whit. And yes, simultaneously, in aggregate, it not only matters, but it is the only way to matter. Not voting empowers oligarchs and all that money. An overwhelming amount of it was spent, and “they” won because the vote was smashed down. People actually had the temerity, in overwhelming numbers, to claim their vote didn’t matter. And hence, they built it: it came. Yup, we don’t matter, any of us.
So stupid we all are, I just can’t even, as the next generation would have it.
Someone asked above about the demographics of the turnout and spread of those elected — can I post a graph here? I’ll try in a moment but if not I’ll ask Dr Ravitch to post it separately. I’m not sure it’s appropriate for my blog. It’s kinda too depressing…
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