Kari Moran
February 19, 2009
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Kari Moran talks to Mark Haefele, Dean of the L.A. City Hall reporters, about the upcoming District 4 School Board elections in March.
Kari Moran: You're listening to 89.3 KPCC, Southern California Public Radio. And joining us on 89.3 is the dead of city hall reporters, Marc Haefele.
Marc, the L.A. municipal elections are coming up March the 3rd, and with the mayoral contest all but decided for the incumbent, the school board races have a couple of interesting contests. The most compelling appears to be in the 4th District, which includes the Westside and extends into East Hollywood. Can you tell us about that?
Marc Haefele: Well, this district is an open seat. As always in L.A. politics, something of a rarity. It's a seat that is being contested by two teachers, both with unusual backgrounds for the field.
It wants to be almost a shoe-in for a power player from the old Riordan office, a guy named Ben Austin, who kind of sewed up a lot of endorsements in advance of his even collecting his signatures.
In a mistake that is singular in all my 30 years of political reporting, I might say, Ben Austin's people, or whoever was involved with gathering these signatures, managed to gather them in the wrong district. I never heard of that happening before, I'm sure we'll never hear of it happening again.
But in any case, Ben was definitely not qualified to enter that race, and so we have these two interesting people, Steve Zimmer and Mike Stryer. Steve teaches at Marshall High, and Mike teaches at Fairfax.
Moran: OK. Now, you've got two teachers going up against each other. That makes it a tough choice for parents who are voters.
Haefele: You know, these guys are– I think what's interesting about them to me is, first of all, they both come from unusual backgrounds, like I said. First of all, Steve Zimmer is probably one of the senior graduates, and maybe a poster child for that program called Teach For America, which puts freshly minted college grades, usually from prestigious, elite liberal arts colleges, into the inner city classrooms.
It has supposedly a very high washout rate, but Steve's hung in there for 17 years. He's big on things like interventions and parental relations. He's a very enthusiastic guy. He still sounds like he's just out of college. I think a guy who, after 17 years in inner city L.A. classrooms, can sound that way, is special in his own way right there.
I wasn't able to talk to Mike Stryer, but he's got another story. He was a, he was a fairly successful businessman. He apparently made enough money to afford a house in Pacific Palisades. He's got academic backgrounds from Yale and Stanford.
And then somewhere, he sort of heard the call, became a born again teacher, and he is very highly rated as a teacher. He is the head of the history department of the school, and his claim to fame, he says, is he wants to, with his business background, try to bring some more fiscal reality to the LAUSD.
Moran: All right. Thanks very much. Marc Haefele, the dean of city hall reporters, joining us here on 89.3, KPCC.
