How Could Voting Be A Bad Thing?

I was at the LAUSD board meeting last month when Mark Ridley-Thomas demanded that the board respect his right to vote on a replacement for the recently deceased Marguerite LaMotte. It was moving to me personally as a child of poverty and as a teacher who has fought alongside many students as they scramble up out of the morass that is inequality. 

I’m honored to have an advocate like Mr. Ridley-Thomas as my supervisor. His steadfast efforts to protect our most basic right, that is the right to vote, are inspiring and his earnestness illustrates that he is not just our elected representative. He is a champion for us. More than that, it’s crystal clear to me that he genuinely loves our community. 

I'm concerned, however. I'm concerned because our governor, Jerry Brown, just changed the way schools get money from the state. In the new formula, districts with higher poverty rates and histories of lower performance, like the first district that Marguerite LaMotte represented in LAUSD, will receive much more money than they used to. A lot of money… in some cases double. And that could be a really good thing. 

Here’s what’s so great about this new formula. The state doesn’t dictate how money is spent in every district any longer. Instead, local school districts are given the flexibility to spend the money how they see fit. That’s an important distinction because just having more money is ok, but spending that money in a way that reflects the community’s needs is what makes this potentially a major game changer. 

How does it work? A critical component of local control is parent involvement. You see, Governor Brown recognized that a school is a microcosm, almost an organism, and for it to function properly, it needs teachers who are well trained and well compensated. It needs administrators who are dedicated to nurturing the growth of the school’s teachers and students. It also needs a social safety network of guidance counselors and nurses to care for the kids who struggle. 

And it desperately needs parents who are invested in the way their school works. Investment requires a sense of personal responsibility and accountability. When parents feel their voice is heard and their demands are acknowledged, they feel beholden to participate in the everyday life of a school. 

With that in mind, Governor Brown demanded that parents participate in the decisions of how all this new money is spent because just throwing that money at the schools has not worked in the past. We need buy-in from everyone on campus in order to create unity. 

All this is very good. I believe that giving our parents a voice in the way their schools spend money makes them feel a sense of ownership over those choices and that will translate into a feeling that they are accountable to make sure that these spending choices are successful in the long run. 

So… what’s the problem? How does this relate to a special election? Can’t we hold a special election, let everybody vote, and then have that elected official execute Governor Brown’s new formula for funding our schools? 

No. The parents of district one need a leader to organize and guide them through the process of discussing and debating the priorities of their schools. They need the stewardship of that leader to help negotiate this challenging, brand new, and exhilarating opportunity for real people to make meaningful decisions on how money is spent in their kids’ classrooms. 

Working around the clock, this would have taken Marguerite LaMotte months. The critical time for this organizing to happen is now. A special election won’t have a winner in office until June. Organizing parents to participate in these spending choices has to happen before June in order to execute budget decisions for August. 

We have come back to my original question. How could voting be a bad thing? It can’t. But, just because it’s not a bad thing doesn’t make it a good thing in every case. 

Personally, I'd prefer to have a special election because it satisfies my desire to fight for equality and feel good about myself because I could say I stood up for equal rights. 

But, this is more than just our own satisfaction. The families in district one have been disenfranchised by a system designed to promote social inequality for hundreds of years. 

How sadly ironic it would be for us to advocate for the people’s voice to be heard on one election day when in reality that special election would be the one thing keeping them from participating in the most important decisions made: how to spend the money in their children’s classroom? 

This isn’t about satisfying our personal need to protect the right to vote. This is about promoting some badly needed economic justice, reversing the disenfranchisement of South LA, and promoting the success of our children. In this case, a special election fails to do that. All it does is quench our insatiable thirst for the theory of social justice.   

If we really want to see social justice enacted, we should swallow our desire for self-satisfaction and do what is best for the children. The children badly need an advocate to manage the new system of local control funding. They need someone in that office today organizing parents to build consensus on how our community wants to spend the millions of new dollars that will flow into our schools. 

If we just go with the easy path of a special election, all of the decisions on how to spend those millions of dollars that were meant for our children will be in the hands of educational and political consultants. Parents will remain, sadly, disenfranchised. And we will be perpetuating the false promise of social equity. 

That is why I swallow my own pride and say today: appoint. 

(Odysseus Bostick is a Los Angeles teacher and former candidate for the Los Angeles City Council. He writes The Bostick Report for CityWatch.)

-cw

CityWatch

Vol 12 Issue 2

Pub: Jan 7, 2014