But we should keep them open anyway.

That’s because, in California, we are closing schools so routinely that we’re harming children who are already in crisis. We’re also further diminishing trust in public education and reinforcing low expectations and encouraging continuing disinvestment in the state’s future.

The closures aren’t just a hangover from the pandemic, when our communities, backed by state government and unions, kept schools closed far longer than most other American states. The closures reflect deeper problems in the state and our society.

Indeed, school closures began surging before the pandemic. An indispensable CalMatters database of school closures, published in 2019, found big increases in the first two decades of this century. Most of the closures were in response to wildfires or dirty air, and those closures were growing longer with the size of the fires. CalMatters found that dozens of schools lost 15 days or more in a single year to wildfires. (California mandates a 180-day school year.)

Hundreds of closures were the results of threats of violence to schools, with parent fears sometimes forcing closures in response to threats not deemed credible. And CalMatters identified more than 370 closures because of disrepair or campus maintenance failures—often involving plumbing. All told, in recent years as many as one in five California students lost school days to emergency closures.

More recently, school closures have been occasioned by this winter’s wet weather, and by shortages and conflicts involving the pandemic-ravaged ranks of teachers and school staff. The recent three-day closure of Los Angeles Unified schools, occasioned by a strike by the district’s lowest-paid employees, is only one example.

The only thing worse than all the closures is the way we’ve begun to accept these shutdowns. Indeed, media coverage celebrated the L.A. schools strike as a demonstration of worker power. And the resulting closures were mentioned mostly for their impact on families, as if the main role of schools is to provide child care for parents.

But schools are for children and the essential work of education. And our kids badly need schools that are reliably open, with teachers and staff reliably present, every single day.

No matter what.

You may think that’s an extreme position, but it’s less extreme than the problems kids are facing. These include an epidemic of loneliness, a mental health crisis, and substantial declines in student learning.

Twin facts exacerbate all of these crises: Schools are too often closed, and when they are open, too few students are present. Chronic absenteeism—when a student misses at least 10% of school days—has become commonplace in California and around the country, doubling during the pandemic. For the 2021–22 school year, chronic absenteeism hit 30% statewide. For Black students, the rate was 42.5%. A new PACE analysis projects such attendance problems persisting into the future.

The absenteeism has been accompanied by big drops in student enrollment. California public schools lost 110,000 students last school year, and the state Department of Finance has projected the loss of another 500,000-plus students by 2030–1. The drop in enrollments is already forcing the permanent closure of campuses in every region. Those projections make clear that the future of public education itself is in doubt.

And the strongest possible response is to make it the law that, in California, schools will always be open, because they are that important.

That is easier said than done, but setting a clear rule is the crucial first step in driving the investment necessary to make schools so resilient they never have to close.

Keeping schools consistently open will involve far more than just schools themselves, because closures are related to huge problems—climate change that produces bigger fires and crazy weather, digital media that make it easier to convey threats, the violence and omnipresence of guns in our society, and our failure to build and maintain infrastructure.

Right now, and without delay, the state and all its communities need to harden their campuses for this apocalyptic age. And we need not just better pay for school staff—the point of the L.A. Unified strike—but comprehensive support and services (like child and elder care) for the families of teachers and employees, so that they have no reason not to go to work.

Ending school closures is not just the work of school administrators. Californians, especially parents, need to stop pressing for school closures and start getting their children to school every day. And the state needs to increase funding and apply fiscal pressure and oversight to prevent closures. I’d suggest a new two-to-one rule; for every day a local school or district closes, it has to add two additional school days to the calendar, which come out of its own budget.

Most of all, keeping schools open requires a shift in mindset. The fires and storms and threats we think of as emergencies are no longer emergencies—they are the new normal, and they may well be with us for the rest of our lives. Instead, we must recognize that school closures—and the attendant damage to children and education—are the real emergencies.

And they are emergencies we have the power to prevent.

The post California, Keep Your Schools Open. No Matter What appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Haven’t heard of this Los Angeles investment banker? Your loss. Because following his example could change your life.

Beutner’s recent career exposes the lies we Californians tell ourselves about our limits. Sure, we want our children to believe they can grow up to be anything they want. But we believe that rising to the top in a field requires years of preparation, not to mention knowledge, and experience.

Austin Beutner shows us we’re wrong.

In this decade alone, Beutner has gone straight to the top in no fewer than four fields in the City of Angels—without having to pay his dues in any of them.

It started back in late 2009, when Beutner convinced Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to appoint him to be first deputy mayor of the city of L.A. Without any prior experience in local government, he helped manage 13 city agencies. During that stint, he was named interim general manager of L.A.’s most fearsome government agency—the Department of Water and Power—without experience in utilities.

After leaving city government, Beutner, without experience in journalism, took over as publisher of the Los Angeles Times, and the San Diego Union-Tribune.

But all those were a mere appetizer for his latest job. Last week, Beutner became superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District. With 600,000 students, it’s the largest school district in California and the second largest in the nation.

And if you think that earning such a position would require Beutner to have experience in school districts, you’re not thinking the right way.

What’s most impressive about Beutner is that he has had all these jobs in less than a decade. His stays in all of them were brief, about a year or so. Indeed, he also has managed to squeeze the building of a nonprofit called Vision to Learn, which provides free eye exams and glasses to children, into his sprint through L.A.’s major institutions.

Now, I admit that cynics might look at Beutner’s conquest of Los Angeles—the fastest takeover of a global city since the Visigoths sacked Rome—and suggest that there is something wrong in Southern California.

Austin Beutner, the new superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, in a 2013 photo. Photo courtesy of Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press.

They might say that L.A.’s institutions must be awfully weak to keep seeking services of the same finance guy, no matter how shiny his Dartmouth diploma is. They might find it weird that he keeps getting jobs without producing sustained success at any of his stops.

To such critics, I say, you are prisoners of your small minds and narrow horizons. My fellow Californians, Austin Beutner is a model for us all.

His inspiring lesson for this state is that you can be anything that you want to be, with one enormous caveat. You have to want to be the leader of big, complicated institutions that Californians suspect are destined to fail, no matter who leads them.

Beutner’s method is not for just anyone. In the 21st century, to be able to pick any job you want, you need a background in high finance, which dominates the American economy. Beutner fits the bill: He worked at Smith Barney and the Blackstone Group, and then, after a stint at the U.S. State Department, co-founded the investment banking group Evercore Partners. After suffering serious injuries in a bicycle accident a decade ago, he decided to devote himself to public service—indeed, all public services.

But Beutner’s number one qualification is that he understands that most Californians have given up on governance. This state’s public institutions are so complex and dysfunctional that we feel utterly powerless to fix them.

Beutner’s rise has rested on exploiting this reality. He portrays himself as the rare Angeleno who hasn’t lost all hope in legacy institutions. So he studies up on a particular entity, and maybe forms a task force to produce a report. Then he tells all the rich people who matter in L.A. that he thinks there might be a way to fix it. Those rich people call their friends and the elected officials whose campaigns they fund, and pretty soon Beutner is running said institution.

It’s a double public service—since Beutner the public servant relieves the elites, and all of us really, of the responsibility of thinking about how to improve the city or the schools or the newspaper. No need to feel guilty about our lack of involvement. We’ve got Austin on the case.

In these jobs, Beutner works hard and advances intriguing ideas that might make sense. But nothing ever takes hold permanently because, before very long, Beutner is off to the next hornet’s nest.

And that can’t be blamed on Beutner. By definition these are short-term, no-hope gigs. And the people who fill them are sacrificial lambs (or, in Beutner’s case, sacrificial sharks). At DWP, Beutner was the ninth general manager in 10 years. At the L.A. Times, he was just one of multiple publishers fired by out-of-town ownership. And at L.A. Unified, he’s the latest in the series of superintendents: a district insider, a D.C.-area import, a Colorado governor, a Navy admiral, none considered a success.

The rest of us look at such jobs and ask ourselves, why would anyone bother? Beutner has discovered the answer: There is opportunity in California’s governing hopelessness. What, after all, is there to lose if you fail as school superintendent? Especially when even a modest effort can beat our low expectations?

“Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success,” said the late historian Christopher Lasch, who anticipated the Beutner Era in his classic book, The Revolt of the Elites: “Having given up the effort to raise the general level of competence—the old meaning of democracy—we are content to institutionalize competence in the caring class, which arrogates to itself the job of looking out for everybody else.”

Who are any of us to complain about Beutner’s short tenures, when we can’t be bothered to assist these institutions ourselves? Look at me. Back when Beutner was starting with the city, I was living in Los Angeles with young kids. But did I take over as L.A. Unified superintendent or offer to run DWP? No. To my shame, I surrendered to my own needs and bought a house in a good school district in the San Gabriel Valley.

Beutner is sacrificing so I don’t have to. And building a resume so that one day he might be U.S. senator or even president of the United States, a job for which he is already overqualified.

It’s high time we stopped whining about Beutner and other plutocrats running our institutions—and started emulating them.

I, for one, resolve to follow Beutner’s example.

Instead of writing this column for various California papers, I hereby offer myself as their publisher. (Would I really be any worse at running these legacy media businesses than their current operators?) Or maybe I should aim higher. Just as Beutner participated in reports on civic institutions before taking them over, I’ve reported on California water policy (I could chair the state water board), elections (I could be L.A. county registrar-recorder), and the arts (I could straighten out the war-torn MOCA in downtown L.A.). Heck, I wrote a well-reviewed book about Arnold Schwarzenegger. That means I probably could be governor or run a movie studio.

The magic of Austin Beutner is that he opens up new possibilities. He never sells himself short. Neither should you.

Yes, his L.A. Unified stay should be short—one board member whose vote he needed to get the job is under federal indictment. But don’t worry—the Los Angeles Opera, LAX, and the Dodgers all could use fresh leadership.

To follow Beutner is to follow the zeitgeist. Today, everyone knows that knowledge is power, and that power corrupts—so too much knowledge is corrupting. Yes, it’s a fallen world. But why not rise in it?

The post You, Too, Can Be Austin Beutner (No Prior Experience Necessary) appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Actually, that understates how suspiciously local King is. As a child, she attended L.A. Unified schools. Then she got degrees from UCLA and Pepperdine (and is even now working on a doctorate at USC). She has spent her 30-year career in the L.A. school system, as a science teacher, principal, and top deputy to the last two superintendents. Heck, she even sent three children to L.A. schools.

If she were any good, wouldn’t she have lived or worked someplace else?

Is that a ridiculous question? Yes, but it mirrors much of the reaction in Los Angeles to her appointment. While politicians and interest groups released official statements full of praise, everyone from education professors to newspaper editorialists whispered their disappointment that L.A. Unified had hired someone so achingly local and low profile. One mover-and-shaker lamented to me that while there is a Michelle King on Wikipedia, it’s the co-creator of the TV drama The Good Wife.

This is supposed to be the era when we celebrate the local—local produce, local bookstores, local governance. But in Southern California, we’re not so excited about locally grown leaders. It’s the dark side of being a globally connected and welcoming place. We have for so long been a city of stars from someplace else that we have little faith in those boring grinds who are actually from here, painstakingly pay their dues and then have the temerity to think they might run things.

And so King, who probably knows L.A. Unified better than any living being, was labeled a disappointing fallback choice. Los Angeles elites had been hoping for a star from the outside—a political figure like the Obama cabinet member Julian Castro or a member of Congress who could transition into schools; or some gilded creature from the billionaire-backed reform movement; or a high-profile superintendent from a city like Miami or St. Louis—both of which, it should be noted, have far fewer residents than L.A. Unified has students.

Of course, Los Angeles’ contempt for its own is not new. Los Angeles’ locally grown police chief Charlie Beck, for all his progress in crime-fighting and diversifying his force, labors under the sense that he’s not in the same class of out-of-town predecessors. Once an internal candidate, always an internal candidate.

And no matter who you are, making the New York Times has always been a far bigger deal than getting written up in the Los Angeles Times—even before our local paper was downsized by out-of-town owners. And Hollywood has organized itself as an exclusive club that keeps regular Angelenos at a remove; even in 2016, the entertainment industry remains so distant from the diversity around it that it has turned the Academy Awards, with another slate of all-white acting nominees, into a national joke. When our movie stars do philanthropy, it’s more likely to be directed to South Sudan than South L.A.

Los Angeles also has a nasty habit of outsourcing thorny problems: When our big institutions get into trouble, we don’t knuckle down and fix them ourselves. We bring in outsiders to fix them. Over the past generation, our sheriff’s department, police department, the Dodgers, and elements of our transportation and school district have had to be taken over, or put under trustees. “Too much of the city has been taken into receivership,” the author D.J. Waldie has written of L.A.

I’ve experienced L.A. self-contempt personally. When a source or friend is introducing me to some powerful L.A. figure, I’m struck at how little access my years of journalistic work in Southern California buy—and at how many doors suddenly swing open when it’s mentioned that I went to college at Harvard.

In this context, the reaction to King’s appointment, while frustrating, is hardly surprising. You could argue that she’s the best prepared L.A. Unified leader in a long time—having been a success as teacher, principal, and administrator, most recently as a top aide to the past two superintendents. Her expertise ranges from science education, to instructional reform, to student discipline. And she’s hardly following giants; the district has had eight superintendents in 20 years, many of them outsiders, including a Navy admiral who had little idea what he was doing.

And while elites don’t know her well—she was presumably too busy working to write lots of op-eds and give speeches—regular people in L.A. schools do. As the L.A. School Report site pointed out, King was far and away the most frequently mentioned person in the district’s online survey of what kind of new superintendent parents, staff, and teachers would want.

This community support, however, counted as a strike against her in editorials by the Los Angeles Times and L.A. Daily News after her appointment. Both papers damned her credentials with faint praise (the Times editorial called her “obviously capable” twice) and advised her to pick fights and make enemies—the kind of tactics that backfired on her predecessor and former boss, John Deasy. The only thing more condescending than the editorials was a column in which the Times’ Steve Lopez said the school board “decided on someone who has been a good, low-profile soldier rather than a strong, independent voice, and for now at least, I find that disappointing.”

And I find Lopez’s notion that a good local can’t be strong and independent to be maddening. And out of touch.

The reality is that, with all our diversity and strange ways of governance (from ballot initiatives to our hundreds of regulatory commissions), California’s institutions are getting more complicated—making it harder for outsiders to step in. And with all of L.A. Unified’s challenges, from its hundreds of thousands of poor students to its big projected deficits, there may be no California government more complicated and important.

In other school districts, local leaders or those elevated from the ranks have succeeded. There may be no better big-city school district in the state than Long Beach, run for the last 14 years by Chris Steinhauser, who was both student and teacher in the schools he leads. In San Francisco, Richard Carranza, who was the top deputy of his predecessor, has done so well that L.A. Unified sought to recruit him before choosing King. At San Diego Unified, Cindy Marten, a local elementary school principal elevated to superintendent three years ago, has made some political mistakes but also has pleasantly surprised many with dramatic changes to culture, training, and personnel, including the replacement of more than 70 principals and vice principals.

Of course, L.A. Unified presents a bigger challenge. Which is precisely why a woman tough enough to negotiate the L.A. district as parent, teacher, and administrator for 30 years stands a better chance of succeeding than just about anyone else.

The post Why Don’t Angelenos Trust Homegrown Talent? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I know I’m lucky to have a full-time job as a facility attendant in the Los Angeles Unified School District. I’ve done that for 10 years, and some days are better than others, but I like the work, and my co-workers are a supportive second family. We don’t interact much with students, but those of us who do custodial work are eyes and ears for teachers and administrators. If I see a student needs help of any kind, I take pride in letting the right people know.

The one thing that hasn’t been good about the job is the pay. When I started 10 years ago, I made $8.65 per hour; now I make $9.85 per hour. But I just learned that’s going to change. SEIU Local 99, the union that represents me and more than 30,000 other LAUSD school workers, just negotiated a new contract that will raise my pay to $15 per hour by 2016. This is a big deal for the 20,000 of us who make LAUSD’s lowest wages and are covered by the raises. It might be an even bigger deal around the rest of the U.S., since $15 per hour is the goal of a movement in cities around the country to improve the lives of working people.

I’m not exactly sure how my life will be at $15 per hour. I’ve never made that much money, and I’ve been doing custodial work since I was 15. I started out while I was still going to school myself, as a part-time custodian at St. Nicholas, a parochial school in the San Fernando Valley. Back then, in 1997, I was making $7.25 an hour. After I graduated from San Fernando High School, the parochial school offered me a permanent position, and I worked there for four years, eventually making $8.50 per hour.

About a decade ago, a neighbor of mine in Pacoima, who works as a plant manager for LAUSD, told me the district was hiring and gave me an address and phone number for inquiries. I applied and was interviewed by three schools. San Fernando High offered me a job, but I worried that with so many friends and family in and around that school, I might get into trouble. (I’d been a bit of a troublemaker in high school there.) Instead I took an offer from Van Nuys High, and I haven’t regretted it.

My job is what’s called a “restricted” position—the California education code’s name for specially funded positions that can employ only people who meet certain conditions (they’re from impoverished areas or have disabilities, for example). Restricted workers have a set wage rate, which means I haven’t been able to ask for a raise, and I can’t earn overtime.

As every Angeleno knows, working 40 hours per week for less than $10 per hour is not enough to live on here. My main extra gig is working in the ballroom of St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, which is rented out for parties. When things are busy there, I work from 9 a.m. Saturday to 4:30 a.m. Sunday. I also have my own catering business on the side, mostly providing tacos for parties; my dad and I prepare everything ourselves. And I pick up hours at the parochial school whenever they have work for me to do.

To be honest, I have no idea where my extended family would be without St. Nicholas; they’ve given work to so many of my relatives, including my parents, that I can say we wouldn’t have survived without their support. We’ve also had to make sacrifices for one another. In 2009, when my parents were having financial troubles, my brother and I moved back into their home in Pacoima and started contributing to the mortgage so they wouldn’t lose the place.

We’re still here. My brother lives in a little guesthouse out back. My parents occupy the second floor. My fiancée (who used to be a dental assistant and is now going to school), my son, and I live on the first floor.

I feel fortunate for what I have. I also feel tired a lot, from all the work and from lack of sleep; sometimes I get as little as two hours a night. But what I miss most is time with my son. He’s always asking, “Daddy, where are you going?” Leaving breaks my heart every time.

I’d love to save enough money so that the three of us could get our own place, maybe in nice places like Fillmore or Northridge, which aren’t too far from Pacoima. But when I think about making $15 an hour, I think mostly of the time that money could buy with my son.

He’s going to start preschool in August—we’ve enrolled him in a public school pre-K, though the priest at St. Nicholas is lobbying us to send him there. I know that one of the best things about this raise is that so many of my fellow LAUSD school workers have kids in LAUSD schools. So a raise like this won’t just give LAUSD workers more—it will give LAUSD happier parents.

The post What LAUSD’s New Minimum Wage Means for My Family appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The post LAUSD Teacher Carlos Castillo appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

One local change is that the L.A. Unified School District (LAUSD) has become the first district in the state to stop suspending students for “willful defiance.” Turning to Carlos Castillo, a social studies teacher at Roosevelt High School in the Boyle Heights neighborhood who also coordinates the school’s Teen Court, Shuster asked how willful defiance plays out in his classroom.

Castillo said that willful defiance is entirely subjective. “Not only is it something that each teacher has a different definition of—it’s something each teacher has a different reaction to,” he said. If a teacher comes from a certain background, class, or ethnicity, he or she is going to see certain actions, like a student refusing to take off a hooded sweatshirt, in a different context. To Castillo, it was “ridiculous” that willful defiance was the number-one infraction behind LAUSD suspensions. “You’ll always have students testing the boundaries,” he said. “That’s what high school students do.”

Maisie Chin, co-founder of South L.A.’s CADRE parents’ organization, said that willful defiance can be especially difficult on parents. They might not know exactly why their children have gotten in trouble. And they also have to contend with their child getting a reputation for misbehavior. “It can lead to a spiraling negative perception,” she said—and teachers and administrators might extend that perception to the family rather than working together to figure out the root cause of a student’s behavioral problems.

Walt Buster, the founding director of the Central Valley Educational Leadership Institute and a longtime superintendent and teacher, said that deep, ongoing, collaborative conversations are needed to change the disciplinary culture in schools. While it’s true that policies are changing, principals need to communicate those changes to teachers and parents alike. Teachers might disagree with new discipline strategies, but if school leaders create a dialogue, teachers are more likely accept and adapt to the changes.

Castillo added that he’s frustrated by a disconnect between teacher innovation in the classroom and traditional, antiquated disciplinary methods, but he’s inspired by some of the creativity he’s seen. At his school’s Teen Court, students serve as jurors of their peers and have the opportunity to suggest alternative forms of discipline. One particularly successful program is called SHADES: Stopping Hate and Delinquency by Empowering Students. Students who bully with prejudice or bias are sent to a camp where they get instruction on building bridges and working to get along. A lot of adults would say that camp is a reward rather than a punishment. But Castillo said that we need to remember that these are young people who are still learning—who deserve opportunities to learn from their mistakes.

Parents, said Chin, should also not be locked out of the discipline process. It’s not just about getting a parent to comply with what a teacher needs, she said: “Even if you create a table to sit at, it’s usually a top-down, condescending experience.” Rather, there needs to be a long-term conversation about a child’s development—and some power-sharing on the part of teachers.

No teacher, said Buster, goes to school saying, “‘I’m going to hurt kids today.’” But the perception remains that schools need to be tough on kids, even though, under zero-tolerance policies, test scores went down and schools got less safe.

Shuster said that while working on a series of articles about school dropouts, she was struck by the number of students who said that no adult seemed to care whether they showed up or not. When you have teachers with huge classes and counselors who are swamped and overwhelmed, how do you forge relationships between adults and these kids?

Chin said that at its heart this is a human rights issue: Too many teachers, administrators, and schools don’t want to connect fully with their students and communities. And in our evidence-based education world, no one wants to talk about this crisis.

Castillo said that Roosevelt High and many other schools have instituted an extended homeroom—called “advisory”—where a teacher is assigned a group of students as ninth graders and works with the same class over four years. The teachers are meant to get to know these students deeply and to check in about grades and attendance as well as issues within and beyond school walls. Many teachers aren’t trained to do this in the classroom, so it hasn’t worked perfectly, but Castillo sees a great deal of potential.

The post Time to Suspend Zero-Tolerance School Discipline appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Marguerite was a lifelong educator who spent years as a classroom teacher, school site administrator, and, finally, as the longest serving current school board member in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest district in the country. Whether at a town hall meeting or sitting in her familiar first seat on the left side of the school board half circle, Marguerite always commanded attention. She was an imposing figure, tall, always immaculately dressed. She spoke with a slight Southern accent that revealed her Louisiana roots.

As the lone African-American school board member, she carried proudly the responsibility for representing her community. Her commitment to advocating for all students, but particularly for African-American youth, earned her the deep admiration of her community. It was not uncommon to see elected leaders who were political foes come together in unity during Marguerite’s election campaigns.

Meetings at her field office, which was not far from my house, were lively events with people streaming in and out. It was common at these meetings for local civil rights and community leaders to sit around a big table, discussing and strategizing on the latest education issues confronting the district. Of course, no meeting was complete without Marguerite insisting that you grab a plate and help yourself to lunch.

She connected with and inspired her supporters because they knew she understood their struggles. I remember election night a few years ago. Marguerite won handily, but no one took her victory for granted. The folks who came into the campaign office that night were tired from days of making calls and knocking on doors, but they were incredibly proud to be there with Marguerite. They were school janitors, bus drivers, clerical workers, teachers, and former students who saw Marguerite as their voice on the school board.

Later that evening, Marguerite introduced a young African-American volunteer who read a poem she had written. This young woman spoke about being homeless and the challenges she faced. Her words were eloquent and powerful and underscored the importance of educators and leaders like Marguerite, who inspired young people even as they faced the most difficult of circumstances.

While she was always an advocate for students, Marguerite’s relationship to teachers and the teachers’ union changed over the course of her tenure on the school board. In the last few years, she was greeted by thunderous applause and standing ovations anytime she appeared before teachers.

Because she had been in the trenches for decades, she understood the amount of work that teachers, administrators, and classified employees did every day to educate students—often in very difficult conditions and with fewer and fewer resources. In the last decade, the education reform movement began to blame teachers and administrators for the “education crisis” in our schools. Marguerite became increasingly unwilling to capitulate to these attacks, which often came from school board members who had no classroom experience.

When former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa declared his intention to take over the school district, Marguerite became one of his fiercest opponents. The former mayor raised millions of dollars to elect his candidates to the school board, including someone to oust Marguerite.

She fought back like a woman who had learned to survive and thrive growing up in the Jim Crow-era South. She coalesced the community around her reelection and proceeded to trounce the mayor’s candidate, in part by raising concerns about an outsider trying to tell the black community who should represent them.

While she was sometimes criticized for not building coalitions on the school board to move her agenda, Marguerite became an important voice, sometimes on her own, against the current tide of reform she saw as leading to greater disparity among students. She was not a political ideologue. She worked with educators her entire life and knew that the problems of education were grounded in poverty and racism, not in the failure of educators to work harder.

The students, educators, parents, and community of Los Angeles lost a real champion last week. It falls to those of us committed to quality public education to carry on her legacy.

The post An Old-School Champion of L.A.’s Schools appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My grandparents were ministers in a Pentecostal church, and I grew up in a very conservative household. I never went trick-or-treating. (I was told Halloween was for devil worshipers.) My grandparents reamed out my mom and dad for allowing me to read Harry Potter books. When it was time for college, I went to Pepperdine University, a Christian school in Southern California. So when a new-agey college friend invited me to a session of yoga, the very idea conjured up fearful images of drugged-out people chanting in a strange tongue and worshiping statues of deities with six arms.

But I was balancing a full load of classes, sorority drama, frat parties, a boyfriend, volunteering, interning, and waiting tables at nights to make rent, and I often found myself conflicted, scrambled, bloated, tired, and rushed. In short, I was desperate for any sort of tranquility. So I resolved to try yoga but to remain vigilant so as not to get suckered into joining a cult.

My first class was not what I’d expected. It was fast-paced, and a Rolling Stones playlist was on the stereo. As “Wild Horses” played, I slipped into a mild trance and felt light and happy. Then I felt apprehensive: maybe they were trying to lure me in. Instruction was mostly in English with a few Sanskrit terms tossed around, like “chaturanga dandasana,” which is basically a fancy push-up. I was captivated by the calmness that settled in me during class. I became a cautious regular.

Over time, I stopped fearing yoga. It taught me to be more mindful and aware of my self, to take better care of my body, to be slower and more intentional, to find stability, and to be grateful, graceful, and playful.

My once-or-twice-a-week, watered-down, Westernized yoga practice is an important part of my life. Maybe I’m brainwashed and addicted to the emotional adjustment and the endorphins from the killer workout. But it doesn’t seem like a harmful addiction. It is a part of the week when I can tune out the world and tune in to myself. I can turn off the constant to-do list that’s rattling in my head and rely on muscle memory to lead me through 90 minutes of aerobic bliss.

In 2009, when the state of California faced severe budget cuts, I heard that some elementary schools in my Los Angeles neighborhood might have to drop their physical education classes. I thought I could do something small to help fill the gap, so I connected with a teacher from a local school and started going in once a week to teach the kids yoga. A few of my friends told me they wanted to help. So we organized, partnered with experts, and trained about 20 volunteers to teach twice a week in several classrooms in Southern California. The process was formal: All of the volunteers were background-checked and fingerprinted. We sent the kids home with information sheets and permission slips.

We were careful from the beginning to steer clear of religious language, and we kept classes focused mainly on physical activity and healthy eating. Still, we delved a bit into emotional health; it was one of my favorite parts of the curriculum. We also shared our lessons with teachers, hoping they could incorporate some of them into their classes. For one class we brought in slate boards and paintbrushes and had the kids paint a few strokes on the board with water. The kids were told to be quiet and still and watch closely as the water evaporated and the picture disappeared, and then slowly raise a hand when it was completely gone. We taught them that the feelings produced by the exercise were calm and focus. That way, the next time a teacher or parent asked them to calm down or to focus, they would know exactly what to do.

The second year, people seemed even more pleased with the program, so much so that the kids asked for yoga homework assignments! We gave them handouts once a week to complete with their families. Topics covered were things like, “I move and breathe together, I move in different directions, I move from my center, I move with finesse, I rest when I need to and drink plenty of water, I eat fruit and vegetables.” There also were a few more emotion-heavy topics like, “I feel my feelings and let them go” and “I choose my actions.” The lessons were about listening to your body, making healthy choices, and learning to manage your emotions.

In time, these take-home lessons caused problems. Teachers told us that some parents were starting to complain about yoga in school. I suspect they were uncomfortable with some of the assignments that focused on yoga’s emphasis on emotional health.

To head off problems, we scheduled an information session for parents to talk about the concerns being relayed to us. We prepared about 50 family activity packets and brought an equal number of USDA-issued healthy eating booklets. We also equipped ourselves to field questions about the religious connotations of yoga. Then, after school let out, we waited outside the classroom for the parade of concerned parents. And waited. No one showed up. We were left to conclude they weren’t that upset.

Ultimately, we decided to tell parents their kids could opt out of the program. Some did, but most didn’t. A few who stayed in class got offended once in a while and complained, but we’d always try to address their concerns.

Is yoga a sly form of religion? I don’t think so. Even in its purest form, yoga is not really a religion; it is a practice that is prescribed by various religions as a means to achieve inner peace. But yoga does embody certain values. They include harmlessness (ashima), truthfulness (satya), and greedlessness (aparigraha). We never used Sanskrit terms in class (apart from “yoga”), but we incorporated these ideas into lessons in the form of kid-friendly ground rules: being nice, taking turns, telling the truth, and sharing. The yoga we brought to schools taught that emotional, physical, and mental health is deeply important. And it taught that being a good person is part of a healthy lifestyle. None of that seems very divisive to me, but schools are always a battleground for value wars.

Eventually, because of jobs and moves, I ran out of time to keep the program going. Now I’m just a student again. But I like to think our classes were good for the kids who took them. And, given the chance, I’m always happy to suggest an exercise to kids, like creating a pose inspired by your favorite vegetable and staying balanced for a minute or two. Is standing on one foot and acting like a carrot religious? I doubt it.

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