Dive Brief:
- With Los Angeles school board elections coming up, both charter school advocates and the city's teacher union are spending big bucks to oust various incumbents they believe should be held accountable for the failed iPad roll out.
- The winners of the election will serve six-year terms, have a significant impact in selecting Los Angeles Unified School Districts' next superintendent, and influence decisions around teacher evaluations and charter growth in the district. While the union and charters have different visions for many of these topics, both see the iPad incident as an advantage that can help them elect the board member that will best serve their interests.
- A group called California Charter Schools Association Advocates pegs incumbent board member Bennett Kayser as responsible for the iPad incident and has spent nearly $2 million to unseat him, though the union has spent over $1 million supporting Kayser and says blame should be placed on incumbent Tamar Galatzan.
Dive Insight:
The iPad rollout was so disastrous that many want to hold someone accountable aside from former superintendent John Deasy. So while the bigger issues for the charter group and the union include differing views on charter expansion, both have latched onto the iPad debate as a more intriguing way to get voters interested in next week's election.
"On Kayser's watch: The LAUSD wasted $1.3 billion on a controversial iPad program that is now the subject of an FBI criminal probe," one California Charter Schools Association Advocates flier says.
A union flier, on the other hand, proclaims, "We had the opportunity to give our kids state of the art facilities and a bright future. But Tamar Galatzan spent that money on an inside deal so bad that the FBI is investigating and the iPads don't even work right."
Ultimately, both incumbents could end up being held responsible for the incident by voters depending on how the messages are received. The Los Angeles Times points out, however, that Kayser was generally pretty critical of Deasy and had limited support for the iPad rollout, which may give him some extra points.
