In recent years San Diego progressives have successfully worked to elect a majority on the local school board. We’ve recently learned that the losers in those elections have a new trick up their sleeves. Since they can’t win school board races, they’re preparing a ballot initiative to expand the local school board by appointing additional members.
I returned to San Diego after thirty five years in 2008. Because I have a school aged daughter, I’ve become involved with local groups that are concerned about education issues. For most of the past year that concern has been forced on the draconian budget cuts that are being imposed on public schools by the Governor and Legislature. I’ve been faithfully attending school board meetings and working with a group called Educate for the Future that’s planning a rally in support of education funding later this spring (May 8th, if you’re in the area).
Now it seems as though we’ve got an even bigger issue on the horizon. In recent years San Diego progressives have successfully worked to elect a majority on the local school board. We’ve recently learned that the losers in those elections have a new trick up their sleeves. Since they can’t win school board races, they’re preparing a ballot initiative to expand the local school board by appointing additional members.
A by-invitation-only committee has been holding closed door meetings in recent months at the (Private) University of San Diego campus to discuss concerns with the future of the San Diego Unified School District. Attempts by the news media to report on the meetings have been blocked. According to a spokesperson with the District, sitting Board of Education members have also been excluded from these discussions. In other words, it’s hush-hush.
A crack in the veil of secrecy emerged last week by way of a report in Voice of San Diego:
“A private group of educators, philanthropists, business leaders and others are polling San Diegans about whether they want to see appointed members added to the San Diego Unified school board, according to parents who have gotten phone calls about the new proposal.
The survey asks parents whether they would want to see four appointed members join the five existing elected trustees to make up a bigger school board with nine trustees. The new members would be appointed by a community committee that could include university leaders, labor union representatives and other local leaders. Phone pollers asked parents about who they'd want on the committee.”
The group has hired a GOP political consultant and is seeking to place a measure on an upcoming ballot. And it would seem that good old fashioned democracy isn’t the best path towards overseeing the operations of our public local school system, in this group’s eyes. There are lots of potential legal issues at play here, because any such measure will involve amending the San Diego City Charter—and the local school district boundaries are actually not the same as the city’s. I think they’re hoping that nobody will notice; that since it’s a mid-term election, voters will stay home.
Most of the names that have been publicly identified with this effort have two things in common: a) they are of the Republican persuasion and b) they were formerly associated with the Chamber of Commerce’s Business Round Table group.
The Why? Explained
This group has its origins back in the reign of former Superintendent Alan Bersin, whose tenure at the helm of San Diego Unified (1998-2004) still provokes heated discussions in local circles. Suffice it to say that his ‘top down’ style of management didn’t endear him to many. As former principal Ernie McCray says:
“...whales will be dancing at the Apollo before Alan Bersin works in collaboration with anyone, before he listens to anybody, before he treats anybody with the human respect and understanding they need to feel satisfied that they’re contributing to the creation of a better world... ...He took us principals on a yacht cruise around the harbor and before we had barely sailed he made it clear that parents would have very little to say regarding what happened in our schools. Wasn’t long before that was old news.”
On the other hand, there were people around town who thought very highly of Bersin’s style. Like the Chamber of Commerce types listed above in this dairy. And the non-chamber types who are enthralled with top-down, authoritarian styles of management.
So perhaps it’s not surprising that this little ‘education cabal’ is looking towards a non-democratic route of ‘modernizing’ (that’s a marketing word under consideration) the local school board. The fact is that the candidates they backed in the last couple of school board elections have lost. So democracy is now an inconvenient institution and they’re looking for another way.
You can bet that other right wingers around the country will be watching.