Why Does Every Candidate Mimic the Same Answer?

School Board candidates could admit they are going to burn down every elementary school in town.

They could confess to plotting to kidnap the Superintendent and hold her for $3 million ransom.

They could boast about mistreating their spouses and about caging their children until they are 21.

Nevertheless, they still would get elected to the Board as long as they pledge to support increases in teacher salaries and health benefits.

Missing an Opportunity

Roger Maxwell and Steve Gourley blew their chance to take a bold stand at this week’s Endorsement Meeting, to acknowledge that there are more important priorities than expanding teacher pay packages.

This is heretical thinking.

Which may show how much education has slipped, or perhaps plummeted.

Is There a Difference?

What separates this slender thread of dull thinking from, say, Freddie’s Fortuitous Firecracker Factory on the corner?

The blue collar workers at Freddie’s Factory lead single-channel lives. They arrive every morning at the same hour. They wear the same clothes. They generate the same conversations. They produce, they eat, they leave and they drive home at the same pace every day for 30 years. For them, there is no hierarchy or lower-archy. All they have to look forward to is the periodic pay raises the union promised when they were hired.

Teachers live in a larger, more imaginative, more challenging universe than blue collar workers.

Don’t they think more expansively about the creative, influential dimensions of their daily lives? Don’t parents?

Same Question, Same Answer

Every election cycle, the primary, or perhaps only, litmus test is:

Will you actively promote raises for teachers?

As a result of delivering safe answers to the de rigueur question, both Mr. Gourley and Mr. Maxwell won the club’s endorsement.

Both gentlemen are married to educators. Therefore, my expectation was unrealistic.

Who Will Brave a New Path?

With 60 days remaining until the Nov. 6 School Board election, it is left up to one of the 3 Republican candidates — Mike Eskridge, Scott Zeidman or Alan Elmont —to at least hedge the question.

Will one of them summon the strength to step out from the crowd and say maybe he will, maybe he won’t support teacher pay increases —that he must attend to more pressing matters first?

No. Worth Repeating

Of the 10 questions posed by the Democratic Club audience for Mr. Insider (Mr. Maxwell) and Mr. Outsider (Mr. Gourley), several were intriguing.

One was aimed to expose Mr. Gourley’s historic non-relationship with the School District while underscoring Mr. Maxwell’s daily relationship with all things educational in Culver City.

How many School Board meetings have you attended in the last year?

Everybody in the room knew the answers. Many or most for Mr. Maxwell. Zero for Mr. Gourley.

Being a wily politician — even if he denied it publicly — Mr. Gourley came prepared. Since he won endorsement by only one more vote than the minimum required, I will speculate that his sharp answer was pivotal. Before winning election to the City Council 20 years ago, Mr. Gourley said, he attended Council meetings for 3 consecutive years.

“It did not do any damned good,” he concluded. Witnessing meetings does not equal an apprenticeship for serving on the School Board, he suggested.

Merely observing from the audience provided no insights for the kind of maneuvering he would need to do during his two terms to achieve his agenda.

The dumbest, most uninformed question was:

What will you do to decrease class size?

It would have served the questioner right if both candidates had said that in the first month, they would single-handedly pass a regulation banning classes larger than 18 students. Then, in their first year, singlehandedly they would mandate construction of 4 new classroom buildings where kids of all ages would be sectioned off into groups of 18.

The niftiest question, wiggled back and forth under Mr. Maxwell’s nose, was like serving a sizzling steak to a hungry man:

What will you do about declining enrollment?

Feh, said one of the most knowledgeable men in Culver City.

Arch-researcher that he is, Mr. Maxwell provided a detailed answer that smashed the false claim into more pieces than a nervous liberal’s mind when he is forced to take a vow of honesty for one full day.

The Final Word

I came away from the evening convinced that if the voters choose Mr. Maxwell and Mr. Gourley in November, they can congratulate themselves.