Jackie Goldberg reflects on decades in LAUSD education and public service

Jackie Goldberg, holding hands with wife Sharon Stricker, is sworn in as L.A. school board member on May 21, 2019, by retired Judge Teresa Sanchez-Gordon.

Credit: Michael Burke/EdSource

Jackie Goldberg, the president of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s school board, announced earlier this month that she will retire in December 2024 after completing her current term. 

Goldberg has worked in public service for more than four decades, starting as a teacher in the 1960s, and won her first LAUSD school board election in 1983. In 1994, she was elected to the Los Angeles City Council, and she represented District 45 in the California Assembly from 2000 to 2006. She returned to the school board in 2019.

Through it all, Goldberg says she has remained an educator at heart and that she has learned new things from her students, whom she also credits with expanding her taste in music. 

“LAUSD is filled with the most astounding, remarkable, inspiring kids, and they are taught and supported by teachers and staff who fight hard every day for them,” Goldberg stated in a statement announcing her retirement. 

“It’s been the honor of my life to advocate for children. I got into this work, starting with teaching, because I wanted the best educational experience for teachers and students everywhere.” 

The following conversation with Goldberg about legacy and hopes for the future has been edited for length and clarity. 

First, talk about a teacher/educator who inspired you as a child.

Well, I think it would probably be my mother. 

In those days, (kindergarten, first and second grade classes) got out about an hour and a half earlier than (grades) three through six. And so at the end of my school day in kindergarten, I would go sit in the back of the room (her mother’s classroom) and watch her teach. And I fell in love with teaching. She was a wonderful teacher. … For a long time, I thought I was going to do elementary just like her, but then I realized I’m a history teacher.

What do you consider your greatest accomplishment and why? 

 (In the Assembly) I passed, with the help of the speaker of the Assembly, a way to get a bond issue that would (help) LA Unified, Anaheim, parts of North San Diego County and a couple (districts) in Fresno … that were extremely overcrowded.

They never got any money for bond issues because you had to own all the property that you needed. And so, what would happen at the time that LA Unified was the most overcrowded — 650,000 students and seat spaces for about 425,000 — we were busing 100,000 to 150,000 kids a day to faraway places. We never got any money to build any schools. 

Why? Because we had to acquire the property, one parcel at a time, and often use eminent domain, and often through trials and lawsuits. So that was a big problem. So then, I was able to get … on the joint committee between the Senate and the Assembly, what the bond issues would be, and I got a carve-out and a definition of extremely overcrowded districts. 

And they all were the same. They all were urban. And so, we’ve set aside several billion dollars for building schools and those very, very most impacted school districts who never seem to get to the front of the line.

The irony … is that people in urban areas voted for it, and all the people who are getting all the money, they voted no on the bond issues. But that was very important because that led to the building that got us out of the multitrack, year-round disaster, and long, long, bus rides in each direction for many, many, many children, their whole school careers. So I’m very proud of that. 

LAUSD, of course, has many challenges, many of which you’ve tried to address. What do you feel is the greatest challenge facing the district now, and what does LAUSD need to do in order to overcome it? 

One big problem is general funding. California is still 33rd in what it spends on its kids’ K-12. OK, that’s ridiculous. We’re the fourth-richest economy in the world — not in the country — in the world. And yet we’re 33rd? Really? Why is that? 

Well, it’s because you can’t tax rich people; you can’t tax property owners; you can’t really talk to anybody unless they vote that they like to be taxed. Well, what are the odds of that? We haven’t been able to do very well, have we?

So, as long as the state of California refuses to increase its tax base, our urban school districts that are 75% to 100% low-income kids … are going to never be able to succeed, because the class sizes need to be dramatically reduced, because those kids have challenges of sleeping in bathtubs to not get shot by gangs at night, to not have food security, not knowing where the next meal will come from and for being evicted from their housing, maybe two or three times a year and therefore changing schools two or three times a year. 

We’re never going to overcome those obstacles completely, no matter what we do, without reducing class size and increasing the number of social-emotional folks that help our kids. But we’ll never be able to do that because our federal elementary and secondary school emergency relief funding expires in a year and a month. And then we’re back to being 33rd, and having no money, and doing the best we can with what we’ve got.

I’m thinking that unless there is some initiative, a campaign again, to separate from Prop. 13 tax savings for senior citizens and homeowners, to finally get rid of the exemption for the wealthiest property and corporate owners in the state … all that is profit off the backs of the children and youth of California.

(Corporations) may refuse to agree to be taxed and (they spent) $800 million defeating an initiative that said, “Oh, guess what. It’s time for you to pay your share. You made your wealth in California. Give some of it back to the children and stop being such greedy, soulless suckers.”

But we will take that on again. And when we win, you will begin to see real changes in low-income urban districts because there is only so much you can do with the class sizes we have. There’s only so much you can do with school sharing one psychiatric social worker two or three days a week when kids need to have access to them every day. There’s only so much you can do when you don’t have enough ways to reach families to help them stay in their housing. 

I’m proud of the fact that I helped promote the idea of community schools and that there are now more community schools, and I helped get the governor to fund it. That’s good, but basically, there’s a limit to what you can accomplish on the school board when you’re 33rd in the country. 

You’ve done a lot to help uplift the LGBTQ+ community over the years. Where do you feel the district is in terms of supporting these students and their families? What do you feel needs to happen next? 

We’re in a very good spot. I don’t think there’s a certain person on the board that wants to back away from our commitment to that, to those groups of communities. 

I think what we’re about to have is an assault by right-wing groups to try to convince low-income immigrants that are Catholic and Christian evangelists that their children are being sexualized in their schools, and so they should go after the school and go after the school board. That is going to be a growing issue because the right wing has a lot of money. And their view is: ‘We don’t know what to do with it, so we’re just going to go harass every school board in America.’ So we expect trouble, but we’re prepared. We’re not going to give in, and we’re going to let them know that we’re not going to give in, and we’re not going to let them harass anybody because if they harass a school, we’ll have them arrested. This is not going to be allowed. We’re just not going to let you stand outside and terrify people by lying to them. Nope, not going to be allowed here. 

If you had to teach your successor one thing about being a leader in the district, what would it be? 

The most important thing I tell everybody is: Always tell people the truth. 

You know, one of the things that people couldn’t believe is how much specialized housing, either for the mentally ill, or for LGBT or for AIDS folks, that we did in my City Council district, because everybody was afraid to take it on, and people will yell that they don’t want it. They’ll scream. But here’s what we did when we did that kind of specialized housing. We held community meetings. We had the architect of the proposed plan bring the drawings. We asked the community what things they wanted, so for example, in the area just south of Sunset and Alvarado, we built a school. We built a housing project for … families with AIDS. 

This was years ago, of course, but the parents were terrified because they still believed that AIDS traveled through the air, that you didn’t have to have contact. They weren’t sure how you got it. It was in the early days. 

And I said, well, what would make you feel more comfortable? What if they had a full-time person there who made sure that none of our children accidentally wandered over into the area or other people accidentally did? I took them on a bus to another housing in Silver Lake that we had done for this same community and asked them which of the housing on that street was the housing. They couldn’t pick it out, which made them feel a lot safer. I had parents from other school areas that had this housing near them come and talk to them and then made a list of things that we thought were legitimate concerns and things that come from having a terrible disease around. 

And the ones that were legitimate concerns: They wanted a few fewer housing units; they wanted a lot more services for the people in the housing because they didn’t want them wandering around looking for services. All those things, which made sense to us, was what we did, and we had no feedback that was negative once that project was done.

Your time as an educator goes back to the ’60s. A lot has happened and changed since then. What has kept you hopeful through it all? 

I’m hopeful that the young people that I see every day, when I visit classrooms and visit schools are there —they make me very hopeful. These are kids you’re not trying to dupe and fool too easily.

I am pushing very hard on us doing more about media literacy, however, because I don’t want them to get duped … or defrauded on a loan or something. 

When I was on City Council, I hired a high school kid as an aide … and she stayed with me all the way through that and through the Assembly. But she was in debt for 15 years because of credit cards that were sent to her when she was unemployed and had no income. It ought to be illegal to give a credit card to someone with no income, particularly if they’re under 25. 

I want to do more, to work more with schools on what media literacy is, and how to handle money, and when to take out a credit card, and when not to have a credit card and all of that, because kids are still getting ripped off way too much, particularly the lower-income kids, because their families don’t have credit cards and haven’t figured out the disasters that they represent. 

And I intend to be hanging around the school district. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not leaving. I’ll be at the speaker’s desk saying, “Hello, Mr. Superintendent, Madam President, Mr. President, members of the board. Let me tell you what I came to talk to you about today.”

Are there any final thoughts you’d like to share?

On the council, (we did things) around protecting city workers that are on contract with the city, for example, the airport food service workers, the airport parking people. And we did a lot of legislation that protected them when the contracts changed. 

And we also set up the first, I believe in the country, annual inspections of every housing unit, rental unit, in the city of Los Angeles each year for health and safety issues, like broken walls, like broken pipes, like no lighting on the outside, like steps that are broken and people falling all the time. 

And we got that done over everybody’s objections because basically, what we were finding out is that the slumlords were just ripping people off with high rents and not even keeping the buildings livable. So I’m very proud of that legislation, actually. If your building was built from 1979 or earlier, your unit will be inspected, and the owners will be held accountable for making the appropriate safety and cleanliness that’s now required by city law. 

I enjoyed Sacramento the least. I was there when the current speaker of the House (U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy) was there. Got to see him up close and personal and knew he was a disaster from the beginning. 

You know, I learned a lot about the difference between politics where you run on a party line — as you do in the Senate and the Assembly, and in the Congress — and those that are nonpartisan, like school board and City Council. And so, even though you may be a Democrat or a Republican, you don’t join into groups that vote based on your party. So, I think that if I had my way, I’d have all politics be nonpartisan — doesn’t mean you don’t join a party and have those party’s values, which help people know more about what you believe in. 

People should see it is their obligation to run for office with term limits. I don’t believe in term limits. I think term limits are what you do when you’re too lazy to get rid of bums out of office. … The Constitution says nothing about you being able to tell people that they can’t vote for somebody they want to vote for who’s qualified for them to be elected. You know, the qualifications to be a city council member are quite clear, and they don’t involve you having to stay 12 years or less. 

I think it’s just wrong because the government — particularly in big cities, and big states — is complicated. And the more you take people from learning the complications of it, who are in office, the more staff and lobbyists run them. That’s not a good system to have the lobbyists writing the legislation. I’m sorry. So…there are things I learned but that I can’t do much about.