Endorsement: Re-elect Nick Melvoin to the LAUSD Board of Education

School board member Nick Melvoin gets our strong endorsement in the June 2 election for a third and final term on the Los Angeles Unified School District board for the Fourth District, which includes Bel Air, Brentwood and Venice and parts of the southwestern San Fernando Valley.

Elected as a moderate supporting opening charter schools, with student interests and better educational outcomes as his central focus, Melvoin has served as a thoughtful reformer for eight years. As he told our editorial board in a recent interview, “When I got elected I was part of a reform majority that disappeared. But we balanced the budget, dealt with COVID, had a superintendent transition, stabilized enrollment. And now sometimes I feel like I’m banging my head against the wall.”

That’s because “we have a superintendent on leave,” and threatened teacher union “strikes that are not being seen as a last resort but as a first resort, statewide. We gave them raises” of over 20% “over the last four years, so it’s pretty insane how they are on the brink of striking.”

Melvoin, who grew up in L.A., returned after graduating from Harvard College to teach at an LAUSD local middle school. He attended law school and then worked with the ACLU to challenge LAUSD’s seniority-based teacher layoff policies, which absurdly don’t allow teachers of quality rather than length of service to serve students. In 2017, he defeated a teacher-union backed incumbent in what became known as the most expensive school board race in the nation’s history.

In his last term, Melvoin says his top priority will be “increasing face-to-face engagement” for students: “I recently introduced a resolution to limit screen time in the classroom, expanding on my successful effort to pass the nation's largest school cell phone ban.” He also intends to “work to continue expansion of preschool by reopening shuttered Early Education Centers (as we already have with two new centers in my district), increasing enrollment in universal pre-K, expanding access to high-quality childcare programs and strengthening the district's early literacy efforts.”

Of the district’s on-average miserable standardized test scores, Melvoin says: “We know our children are more than numbers, and that test scores do not fully reflect the learning and growth of children in classrooms, but we also can't ignore what they're telling us.” He supports “teacher training and targeted investments in tutoring or intervention” to bring scores up.

The district would be better off if Melvoin had a majority able to go along with him more often.

Backed by local progressive groups, Patel responded to a question about what to do about LAUSD’s low test scores by arguing, “Instead of focusing on the results of standardized tests, we need to teach our students how to think critically and learn how to learn.” He’s certainly right about the latter part, but our available means of measuring whether that’s actually happening indicates it isn’t going so well.

Patel cites among his top priorities, “defending public education from privatization and corporatization,” which might be red meat for progressive teachers union activists, but is a total mismatch with the reality on the ground.

Accordingly, it’s a no-brainer. Nick Melvoin deserves re-election.

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This story was originally published April 15, 2026 at 1:35 PM.