School Battles Pit Parents against Teachers’-Union Bosses

Politics at the local level now often centers on races for school boards as parents infuriated by the “woke” politics of public schools clash with progressive teachers’ unions — which often elect the very school boards they then negotiate with on contracts for their members.

Perhaps the battle that puts those fights in sharpest relief will take place on March 5 in California’s Orange County, where three seats on the county’s five-member board of education are on the ballot.

During the Covid pandemic of 2020, the two largest school districts in California — Los Angeles and San Diego — extended their school closures indefinitely, a shameful act that was both anti-child and anti-science.

But sandwiched between those two districts was Orange County, which has 3.1 million people and still retains much of the resilient optimism that made it Ronald Reagan’s original political base.

In July 2020, the Orange County board of education voted 4 to 1 to allow schools to fully reopen the next month and without requiring masks.

The decision wasn’t binding on the county’s 28 school districts, each of which had individual authority to decide how and when to reopen. But the scientific white paper the board commissioned before its decision gave parents a powerful talking point that forced many districts to open.

Post-pandemic, Orange County has been plunged into new controversies familiar to many communities around the country — over charter schools and how race, gender, and sexuality are taught in schools.

Teachers’ unions are furious that the county’s board of education has authorized a majority of the county’s 43 charter schools and has denied appeals from local school districts that the charters be rejected.

Teachers’ unions have poured money into the March 5 races, both directly and indirectly. If they win all three seats that are up, they will be able to form a pro-union majority.

That would no doubt please Al Mijares, the current superintendent of the Orange County department of education. The county board approves his department’s budget, but it doesn’t hire the superintendent, who is separately elected and oversees a $350 million annual budget with some 1,500 employees.

Mijares is a clear ally of the teachers’ unions and has been known to clash with the county’s conservative board of education.

He bitterly criticized it for filing a lawsuit against Governor Gavin Newsom to block his order preventing schools from holding in-person classes.

But it turned out the board was right. Last September, Newsom told Chuck Todd of NBC’s Meet the Press that he wouldn’t defend his Covid policies, citing the limits of knowledge at the time. “We didn’t know what we didn’t know,” he said, adding, “We would have done everything differently.” As for criticism of his Covid lockdowns and closures: “All of it is legitimate.”

Mijares has argued that the elected board that supervises him lacks the power to propose changes in his budget, but has to either approve or reject it in total.  He also has criticized a board member who wanted to forbid any teaching that advocates abolishing the police or that America is a white-supremacist society or that the U.S. practices systemic racial oppression.

Mijares was so frustrated by his clashes with board members that he has done everything he can to get rid of them. He employed bureaucratic machinations to redraw the members into new districts, where his allies would be better placed to defeat them, but they wound up winning anyway. He then got two Orange County Democrats in the state senate to introduce S.B. 907, a bill that would expand the county board of education to seven members from five and move board elections from the primary ballot to the general-election ballot — when it is easier to turn out liberal voters.

That maneuver also failed, and now Mijares has mysteriously performed a vanishing act. Save for his attendance at a board meeting a month after he won his current term in November 2022, he has failed to appear for single board of education meeting — not even via Zoom. It’s almost as if he were a local version of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, who disappeared from public view in December, albeit for only two weeks.

Jon Fleishman, editor of the popular Flash Report political blog, wrote this month that there has been no public statement explaining what is going on. “Mijares’ absence, like Austin’s, has raised issues about why a leader with that kind of responsibility hasn’t shown up. Any other Department employee would have been fired,” Fleischman wrote in the Orange County Register. After all, Mijares is paid $330,000 a year, plus generous benefits — an amount higher than any statewide elected official, including Governor Newsom.

I made a phone call to the superintendent’s office with some questions about whether Mijares is still in charge or if some unelected bureaucrat is taking on the authority to make some decisions on their own. I haven’t heard back.

So voters in Orange County will go to the polls knowing there is a clear disagreement between the five-member board they have elected to oversee the county’s schools and a missing-in-action superintendent whom they elected to run the county schools bureaucracy on a day-to-day basis.

The battle lines are clearly drawn for next month’s election in Orange County, and the results may tell us not just how much parents care about school boards but also whether they want them to lurch toward or away from “woke” policies.

With over 475,000 students, Orange County has one of the nation’s largest public-school populations — about 1 percent of the nation’s total. So the election results there bear watching as a possible bellwether in the ongoing battle over public-school governance.