4 Vie for Rare Opening on School Board

The imminent departure of longtime Los Angeles Board of Education member Mark Slavkin clears the path for the first open race in a decade for the school board seat covering the western San Fernando Valley and West Los Angeles.

Four hopefuls have cast their bids to succeed Slavkin in next month’s primary election. With two of those contenders living in the Valley, the race also opens the door for a second Valley voice to join the seven-member board and represent the area’s specific concerns, particularly at a time when the breakup of the district is a paramount issue.

Slavkin, an eight-year incumbent and breakup opponent from West Los Angeles, is leaving the board to work full time at the Getty Education Institute for the Arts.

His district, which stretches from Porter Ranch in Northridge to Los Angeles International Airport, is one of three school board seats to be decided in the April 8 election. Julie Korenstein, a Tarzana resident whose district represents the mid-Valley, faces three opponents in her bid for reelection, and incumbent Victoria Castro, from East Los Angeles, is running unopposed.

But it is the race for Slavkin’s District 4 seat that will ensure the board a new member. Korenstein, a 10-year board veteran, is expected to win reelection.

Although the District 4 contenders support Slavkin’s long-standing push for more local control at schools, they differ markedly in how to achieve that goal. The candidates are Chatsworth resident Diana Dixon-Davis, a homemaker who for years has been a leader in the effort to break up the 670,000-student district; former mayoral aide Valerie Fields; conservative business owner and parent-activist Debra Greenfield of West Hills, and Westside labor attorney and parent volunteer Kenneth Sackman.

Fields, one of two apparent front-runners, is supported by a $130,000 bankroll and numerous endorsements, including from United Teachers-Los Angeles, the district’s largest union and one that has a reputation for propelling its favored candidates into office. The union announced its support for Fields in October, long before anyone else entered the race, and has given $50,000 to her campaign.

At 70, Fields boasts the longest resume, including teaching elementary school in the 1950s and ‘60s in New Jersey and Los Angeles, and spending two decades as an aide to former Mayor Tom Bradley, whom she served as a liaison to the Westside Jewish communities and to education leaders.

She came out of retirement to run for the school board “to restore excellence in the schools,” with a big emphasis on restoring art programs dropped because of budget cuts.

“I understand the education system,” Fields said. “I have had the experience of taking children who couldn’t even hold a pencil and by the end of the year knew everything because I taught them.”

Fields said her political contacts will be a help in getting legislators to secure more funding and other resources for the nation’s second-largest school district. Her endorsement list reads like a who’s who of state and local politicians, including Mayor Richard Riordan, Los Angeles County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, and school board members Castro, David Tokofsky and George Kiriyama.

Fields at times seems long on rhetoric and short on specifics. In explaining how she would bring back excellence, she said she wanted to “bring insight on adopting educational philosophies in pilot programs that bring results.” Asked to identify the philosophies or pilot programs, Fields was at a loss.

“I don’t know which pilot programs are there, maybe there are new pilot programs that need to be established,” she said in an interview. “One can’t come from outside and know everything that’s going on in the district.”

What Fields said she does know without question--from her days at City Hall--is how to cut through red tape, lobby political power-brokers and try to bring divisive groups together.

“I am very adept at bringing people together,” she said. “I think that’s something the board needs very badly.”

Labor attorney Sackman--the other front-runner in the race--believes the school board needs a business-savvy member able to better manage the $5-billion budget district and make sure more money goes into the classrooms.

“There’s nobody else in the race who’s handled a payroll, who’s handled a budget,” Sackman said in an interview. “I do this every day with my clients by representing unions and management.”

Since announcing his candidacy in November, Sackman has raised $70,000 and has secured the endorsements of at least two dozen unions, including the California School Employees Assn. and the district’s Police Officers Assn.

Sackman, 45, also touts his involvement as a parent volunteer since his two daughters were in elementary school in West Los Angeles. His daughters are now enrolled at Venice High School’s Foreign Language Magnet.

Sackman is quick to criticize Fields as being out of touch with education and a potential mouthpiece of the teachers union. He is even quicker to point out that he is beholden to no one, except the parents and teachers who urged him to run for the school board seat.

“We have three retired teachers and three retired principals running a $5-billion business and I don’t think we need another one,” Sackman said. “My focus is the fact that I’m trying to become the first person with a finance and business background to serve on the school board.”

Contender Dixon-Davis doesn’t see the school district as a business.

“Education doesn’t work like a business,” she said. “You have to do cost-benefit analysis, but you have to look at the interest of the children to do that.”

The 51-year-old mother of three has been an active volunteer in schools for more than a dozen years, from helping at her sons’ schools and serving on the local PTA to volunteering in past school board races.

“I’m a problem solver,” Dixon-Davis said. “I’m not afraid to go before people with a relevant issue.”

Dixon-Davis’ biggest issue in recent years has been her effort to create at least one new school district in the Valley. She concedes that the cause has worked against her in the campaign by alienating the powerful teachers union. But she’s not worried.

“I’ve been supportive of breakup now for the last 15 years,” said Dixon-Davis, who has collected only $2,000 for her campaign. “But it hasn’t stopped me from making whatever I’m involved in better.”

Dixon-Davis’ main goal is to make the school district more accessible to parents and direct more attention to Valley needs, such as the distance Valley residents must travel to attend board meetings and the severe heat in Valley schools during the summer.

Dixon-Davis suggested placing all school board agendas and budgets on the Internet and holding board meetings throughout the district rather than at its headquarters in downtown Los Angeles. She also wants to increase academic excellence by assuring that no elementary school student graduates without knowing the basics: reading, writing and arithmetic.

“Right now it’s the reverse with social promotion going on and instructors hoping the students will pass at some point,” she said. “Instead they’re getting to high school and are failing and have to go to summer school and then consider dropping out.”

Parent-activist Greenfield also espouses a back-to-basics approach. Greenfield, 49, is a staunch opponent of the California Learning Assessment Systems test and filed a lawsuit in 1994 against the exam, which she said denigrated family values. Although her lawsuit failed to stop administration of the test, she succeeded in stopping her own children from taking it.

Greenfield, a politically conservative mother of three, opposes condom distribution and counseling to homosexual children, and favors voluntary prayer in schools.

“There’s a whole paradigm shift in education,” the West Hills resident said. “I want to switch education back to academics.”

Greenfield cited cooperative learning, whole language and integrated math as a few problems holding children back from learning. She suggested improving teacher retention rates and returning to basic phonics and mathematics as solutions.

Parents “want broad-based, high-quality academic education in a safe environment, and that is what’s best for children,” Greenfield said. “I think it’s important for a board member to fight for this because it’s what’s important to the parents.”

Though she lives in the Valley, Greenfield said she does not see much difference in Valley concerns and those in the rest of the district.

“It’s not necessarily the Valley that’s not getting heard, it’s the kids who aren’t getting heard,” Greenfield said. “That goes beyond the Valley to the entire district. And that’s what we’ve got to improve.”