School board member Nick Melvoin gets our strong endorsement in the June 2 election for a third and final term on the Los Angeles Unified School District board for the Fourth District, which includes Bel Air, Brentwood and Venice and parts of the southwestern San Fernando Valley.<\/p>\n
Elected as a moderate supporting opening charter schools, with student interests and better educational outcomes as his central focus, Melvoin has served as a thoughtful reformer for eight years. As he told our editorial board in a recent interview, \u201cWhen I got elected I was part of a reform majority that disappeared. But we balanced the budget, dealt with COVID, had a superintendent transition, stabilized enrollment. And now sometimes I feel like I\u2019m banging my head against the wall.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s because \u201cwe have a superintendent on leave,\u201d and threatened teacher union \u201cstrikes that are not being seen as a last resort but as a first resort, statewide. We gave them raises\u201d of over 20%\u00a0 \u201cover the last four years, so it\u2019s pretty insane how they are on the brink of striking.\u201d<\/p>\n
Melvoin, who grew up in L.A., returned after graduating from Harvard College to teach at an LAUSD local middle school. He attended law school and then worked with the \u00a0ACLU to challenge LAUSD\u2019s seniority-based teacher layoff policies, which absurdly don\u2019t allow teachers of quality rather than length of service to serve students. In 2017, he defeated a teacher-union backed incumbent in what became known as the most expensive school board race in the nation\u2019s history.<\/p>\n
In his last term, Melvoin says his top priority will be \u201cincreasing face-to-face engagement\u201d for students: \u201cI recently introduced a resolution to limit screen time in the classroom, expanding on my successful effort to pass the nation\u2019s largest school cell phone ban.\u201d He also intends to \u201cwork to continue expansion of preschool by reopening shuttered Early Education Centers (as we already have with two new centers in my district), increasing enrollment in universal pre-K, expanding access to high-quality childcare programs and strengthening the district\u2019s early literacy efforts.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of the district\u2019s on-average miserable standardized test scores, Melvoin says: \u201cWe know our children are more than numbers, and that test scores do not fully reflect the learning and growth of children in classrooms, but we also can\u2019t ignore what they\u2019re telling us.\u201d He supports \u201cteacher training and targeted investments in tutoring or intervention\u201d to bring scores up.<\/p>\n
The district would be better off if Melvoin had a majority able to go along with him more often.<\/p>\n
His challenger, Ankur Patel, worked as a substitute teacher in the district and is now director of outreach at the Hindu University of America.\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
Backed by local progressive groups, Patel responded to a question about what to do about LAUSD\u2019s low test scores by arguing, \u201cInstead of focusing on the results of standardized tests, we need to teach our students how to think critically and learn how to learn.\u201d He\u2019s certainly right about the latter part, but our available means of measuring whether that\u2019s actually happening indicates it isn\u2019t going so well.<\/p>\n
Patel cites among his top priorities, \u201cdefending public education from privatization and corporatization,\u201d which might be red meat for progressive teachers union activists, but is a total mismatch with the reality on the ground.<\/p>\n
Accordingly, it\u2019s a no-brainer. Nick Melvoin deserves re-election.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"School board member Nick Melvoin gets our strong endorsement in the June 2 election for a third and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":269639,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[9198,48,52,51,47,50,49,975],"class_list":{"0":"post-269638","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-endorsements","9":"tag-la","10":"tag-la-headlines","11":"tag-la-news","12":"tag-los-angeles","13":"tag-los-angeles-headlines","14":"tag-los-angeles-news","15":"tag-opinion"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269638"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269638\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}