I hope you will read the opinion piece that I wrote for today’s Los Angeles Times about what priorities the next superintendent should have.

For those of you who have frequently criticized the LA Times as a tool of the charter industry, please note that I was invited to write the article.

The article is a strong plea for a leader who will restore public confidence in public education. Given that Los Angeles has a very rich, very powerful lobby for privately managed charters, it was written to counter their pressure to convert more public schools to private management. They heavily invest in school board candidates who follow their agenda. In the last election, the charter lobby managed to place a charter school operator on the district school board. Only an awakened public can defend the public sector from raids by the corporate sector on what rightly belongs to the…