Bennett Kayser

For the last 10 months, Los Angeles Board of Education member Bennett Kayser has been a bit of a thorn in Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's side. First, he beat the mayor's hand-picked candidate for his seat in District 5, an area drawn to favor Latino candidates. Kayser frequently criticizes charter schools, which the mayor strongly supports. And Kayser led the charge for the board to support Gov. Jerry Brown's dismantling of redevelopment agencies, an action vigorously opposed by the mayor.

Two popular Los Angeles charter schools have allowed some families to bypass a lottery for admission in exchange for providing special services or a substantial volunteer commitment. The practices of Larchmont Charter School and Los Feliz Charter School for the Arts have raised concerns that such preference policies, if allowed, could open the door to well-connected friends or wealthier families who promise to contribute. In effect, critics say, charters could end up functioning more like private schools than campuses almost entirely supported with tax dollars.

Under the Public School Choice program, applicants from within and outside the Los Angeles Unified School District — charter operators, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, teams of teachers — are allowed to submit proposals to run new and underperforming schools. Decisions are supposed to be made on the basis of which group has the most promising application, as well as whether it has a history of running successful schools. We never expected the process to be entirely pure, not in a district so rife with open and hidden political agendas.

L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy has cautioned school board members to avoid taking sides over who should control 15 new and 22 low-performing campuses next year. Deasy was responding to complaints that school board member Bennett Kayser is openly backing plans being developed by three groups of district teachers for academies at South Region High School No. 8, a campus set to open next year in Maywood. The school board is expected to choose the winning bidders early next year.

The Los Angeles school board agreed Tuesday to renew a deal with the district's dental insurance provider over the objections of a board member who had persuaded his colleagues to defeat an earlier version. Two weeks ago, Richard Vladovic complained that MetLife had tried to overcharge him for a mouth guard and then provided poor customer service, even though he acknowledged MetLife representatives eventually apologized. Vladovic won the support of three other board members to reject a three-year, multimillion-dollar contract renewal with the company, which provides insurance to nearly 100,000 current and former L.A. Unified School District employees.

The Los Angeles Board of Education made a major change in its controversial, 2-year-old policy allowing charter groups and other outsiders to take over new campuses. The board unanimously agreed Tuesday to give teachers and administrators first chance at those schools. If inside groups' plans are unacceptable, then charter operators, who mostly run schools that are nonunion, and others can apply. The rules remain the same, however, for existing, low-performing schools; any group can compete for those campuses.

Bennett Kayser, the candidate favored by the teachers union, won the last remaining open seat for the Los Angeles Board of Education on Thursday, beating Luis Sanchez, who was supported by the mayor. "Teachers and teachers unions have been scapegoated, and I think we're on the road to vindication right now," Kayser said. Kayser, a retired teacher, received about 10,700 votes, nearly 600 more than Sanchez, who is chief of staff for the current school board president, Monica Garcia.

The race between Bennett Kayser, the teachers union-backed candidate, and Luis Sanchez, the mayor's pick, for the Los Angeles Board of Education remained unclear Wednesday as Kayser claimed a thin lead and thousands of ballots still needed to be counted. Kayser, a retired educator, had received about 300 more votes than Sanchez, the chief of staff to the school board president, who was backed by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and several labor groups and other elected officials. But more than 13,000 ballots remained to be counted throughout the city, according to the city clerk's office, and many of them are for other races, not the runoff for the school board's 5th District, which stretches from Los Feliz to Maywood.

The race for the last available Los Angeles school board seat has turned both expensive, with almost $3 million spent in all, and nasty, with one candidate calling for an ethics investigation of his opponent, who in turn said the other's policies are bigoted. But even as he stuck to his earlier charge that some of his opponent's ideas "could be seen as racist," Bennett Kayser said he regretted the overall tone of the campaign. "I wish that things would have been more intellectual and about educational policy, not negative campaigning," he said.