Dan Chang’s campaign for change in the LAUSD

I don’t usually get all that interested in, or involved in, Los Angeles Unified School District board races for seats in the San Fernando Valley, simply because typically there have been other members of the editorial board with more expertise.

And, yes, interest.

You have to be at least a little enthusiastic about a subject to want to write about it, her or him, or it’s going to show.

We talked with dozens of candidates all over Los Angeles County in the lead-up to this month’s primary elections, and I wrote a number of the endorsements, with, I’m sure, various degrees of enthusiasm for the candidates and issues.

But for some reason I took a real shine to a challenger in the race for District 3 on the LAUSD school board, Dan Chang, who’s a math teacher at Madison Middle School in Valley Glen, and happily volunteered to write our endorsement of him over nine-year incumbent Scott Schmerelson, a former middle school principal backed by the powerful UTLA union.

Well, not just for any old reason. The first anecdote about the teaching life that Chang told us in the interview really resonated with me, anti-bureaucracy-wise. This is how our editorial put it: “He described to the editorial board sitting through excruciating, mandatory weekly ‘professional development’ meetings — one week one hour, the next two hours — in which administrators gather teachers and read them memos or PowerPoint presentations filled with dull jargon ‘rather than let us talk about better ways of teaching math to students.’ … ‘Nothing,’ he told us, ‘kills joy more than having an administrator read a slide about creating joy’ in the classroom.”

And what really turned me off to incumbent Schmerelson was that, when I related to him the story about teachers being forced to sit in dull, pointless meetings when what they really wanted to do was gather together to figure out how to teach better, he didn’t get it. At all. Having been a long time administrator, I guess dull, pointless meetings had been his career, and he saw nothing wrong with them.

In the five-candidate race March 5, Schmerelson failed to get a majority of the vote, with just under 45%, and Chang came in second, with just under 30%, earning the right to face off against the incumbent Nov. 5 in the high-turnout general election. If he can keep the voters he got and get the rest of the challengers’, he wins.

Knowing this was spring break for the LAUSD, I checked in with Chang by phone on Tuesday to see how the campaign was going. It’s a long way from March to November.

“Yeah, it’s a lot of nights and weekends,” Chang said. “I seem to do that a lot in my life,” including when he took his MBA from UCLA’s Anderson School while fully employed at Green Dot Public Schools, the charter-school nonprofit.

His former association with charter schools is what makes his colleagues in the teachers union oppose him and favor the incumbent, even though Chang is the one opposed to boring administrator mandates and supportive of Valley schools’ local empowerment. The union can mobilize hundreds of teachers to go door-to-door for their establishment candidate.

“The fear spread by the union is based on job security,” Chang told me. “The narrative is that if charter schools grow, you will lose your job, so that’s very animating for the rank-and-file — even if most L.A. Unified teachers are not super-happy with their employer. If you want to work at another place that is not going to treat you as a number but as an individual … I think that’s a little bit lost on most teachers. Charter schools seem scary.”

But Chang doesn’t work with charters anymore. For years, he’s been teaching pre-algebra at an old-fashioned district school. He just wants to cut through Downtown red tape and let teachers teach. Plus, it’s voters who get you elected, not union members.

“That’s right,” says Dan. “I don’t think that charter schools vs. the union has a lot of resonance for the average voter. The union — that’s just a benign thing, right? You’re not going to win at that level. Where you win is with name ID and a positive association with that name. We just had a retreat yesterday with my campaign team, plotting out the contours of what we’re going to be doing, April to November. We have to re-energize the donor base. We have to win social media. It’s like a whole new election.”

One that is thankfully a ways off for most of us. Come November, if you are one of the 400,000 registered voters in District 3, remember to vote Dan Chang for positive change in the LAUSD.

Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com.