Rarely have voters in the Los Angeles Unified School District had a chance to elect a school board candidate as qualified and potentially impactful as Dan Chang, and we heartily endorse his candidacy for Seat 3 in the San Fernando Valley on March 5.
Chang is currently an eighth-grade pre-algebra teacher at James Madison Middle School in North Hollywood — about which he jokes on his campaign website, “Dan brings his enthusiasm, passion and his real world experiences to help students conquer everyone’s favorite school subject … MATH!” A graduate of UC Berkeley and possessor of an MBA from UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, Chang began his career in education at its innovative cutting edge, the Green Dot charter schools. He helped to open 17 charter high schools in poorer communities throughout L.A., and oversaw the revitalization of LAUSD’s traditionally most troubled high school, Locke High in Watts. In 2011 he cofounded the L.A. Fund for Public Education with former Superintendent John Deasy.
Now that he’s teaching in the LAUSD, Chang has a bracing resistance to the district’s like for bureaucracy for bureuacracy’s sake instead of concentrating on students.
He described to the editorial board sitting through exruciating, 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 he’s truly angry about one district presentation on the evils of teachers “grooming” students for sexual abuse that used an unnamed teacher’s case as an example. “What happened to that teacher when caught?” they asked administrators. “Oh, he was transferred to another school.”
In the face of declining enrollment and budget woes, Chang has an excellent top three priorities to focus on if elected: “1. Raise academic performance by scaling success within LAUSD. 2. Reduce the bureaucracy to return more funding and autonomy to school sites. 3. Prioritize student safety and well-being by strengthening restorative justice practices.”
Chang described his mostly calm campus as one still often disrupted by up to a dozen habitual malcontents who refuse to go to class and wander the grounds intimidating other students with little or no discipline meted out. He wants to change that district attitude in his board service.
Two-term District 3 incumbent Scott Schmerelson, a favorite of the teachers’ union, claims that Chang is making up the scenarios of pointless campus meetings that should be focused on education and exaggerating student discipline problems. Chang replies: “These are the issues my colleagues and I deal with every single day. It’s very disheartening that our elected leadership is so completely out of touch with what’s happening in our schools. It is proof positive that we need new leadership now.”
Schmerelson should be retired from office and Chang should be elected to the LAUSD school board.
