[BobbyB]

Charter school backer says he plans to work as long as he's able
By Helen Gao
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

May 7, 2007



NANCEE E. LEWIS / Union-Tribune

Longtime educator Brian Bennett, with wife Jeanine, was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease last May.


Brian Bennett jokes that he sometimes feels like Forrest Gump – having been at the right place at the right time at some pivotal moments of history.
The longtime San Diegan has left his mark on the civil rights struggle, Catholic education, voucher initiatives, and now the charter school movement.

In Bennett's four decades in San Diego, he has touched countless lives as principal of Blessed Sacrament School, as chairman of the city's Human Relations Commission, and as a force behind the birth of more than a dozen public charter schools in the United States.

His zeal for vouchers, public subsidies for private education, and charter schools, which are public campuses free of many constraints, has drawn controversy. At the same time, his lifelong work in education has made him a hero to many.

Now time is running out for him.

Bennett, 58, was diagnosed last May with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease or ALS. New York Yankees great Lou Gehrig brought attention to the neurodegenerative disease in 1939 when he was diagnosed and retired from baseball. ALS has paralyzed famed physicist Stephen Hawking, who has lived with the disease for decades.

Bennett is frail, his frame skeletal, and he is mostly homebound. Speaking is a struggle. He no longer answers the phone or drives his beloved 1968 Mustang.


But he remains active in the charter school movement. Bennett believes that such schools give parents stuck in poor neighborhoods with failing schools a chance at getting a quality education for their children.

Bennett, the former head of school choice for the San Diego Unified School District, now works for the National Association of Charter School Authorizers as director of its western region.

He has been active for years in shaping statewide policies on charter schools. Currently, he is working on a model document that would guide districts on oversight and evaluation of charter schools.

His tenure as San Diego's director of school choice saw the number of charter schools in the district increase from 15 to 34, a few of which later failed. Bennett and former Superintendent Alan Bersin were seen as selling out public education by backing the conversion of poor-performing schools into charters.

Frank Caso, a spokesman with the California Teachers Association, disagrees with Bennett's free-market approach to reforming education.


“The argument was it would make it a competitive place where public schools have to get better or they would go out of business,” Caso said.

He has debated Bennett on vouchers and describes him as a “very decent person.”

“The fact is, it isn't a business,” Caso said. “It's dealing with people with incredibly different needs.”

Bennett is unshakable in his mission.

“I really believe I am here for a reason,” he said in an interview at his College Area home with his wife of 35 years, Jeanine, by his side.

“I will do what I am doing until I have no energy left. That's the way it's supposed to be.”

The Bennetts live just blocks from Blessed Sacrament, where his wife still teaches and where they attend church.

Jeanine Bennett understands most of what her husband says and helps to translate. Brian Bennett doesn't use assistive technology like physicist Hawking, who speaks through a computerized speech synthesizer.

“That wit is so quick, so spontaneous, so the opportunity for the joke is gone by the time it's typed,” Jeanine Bennett said.

Brian Bennett quipped that Lou Gehrig's disease is probably “God's way of saying I've talked enough.”



One of five children born to an Irish Catholic family that moved to San Diego from New York in 1961, Bennett is a product of Catholic schools.

He recalled being ordered off a public bus in elementary school for wearing an Adlai Stevenson button and a Catholic school uniform. His liberal-leaning family loved talking politics at the dinner table.

In 1965, while working at a summer camp to earn money for college, he got to know a black student from Los Angeles and accompanied him home. He found himself in the midst of the Watts riots.

“I sometimes feel like Forrest Gump,” Bennett joked, referring to the fictional character's habit of landing in the middle of historic events.



JOE FLYNN / Union-Tribune
Brian Bennett is credited with turning around Blessed Sacrament School, where he was honored by students in this 1985 photo, during his time there as principal from 1979 to 1997.
Near Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where he earned a bachelor's degree in English and later a law degree, Bennett was arrested for trying to desegregate the Westchester Recreation Center.

He campaigned for Robert F. Kennedy and was at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when the 1968 presidential candidate was shot.

“If you have those experiences, like with Bobby Kennedy, how can you not be involved with solving the problems,” he said.

Bennett set out to become a lawyer, which would have fulfilled a dream his father had that was thwarted by World War II. Instead, he has devoted himself to education.

While working toward his law degree, Bennett taught at a Catholic school in Watts, and later, Catholic schools in Torrance, Inglewood and Pomona before being recruited to Blessed Sacrament.

Then, as now, he saw a quality education as a matter of civil rights.

Monsignor Dennis Mikulanis, who was at Blessed Sacrament during Bennett's early years as principal, credited him with turning around a school in shambles.

“It's his love not just for education, but his love for Catholic education, his love for the church and his love for Christ,” said Mikulanis, a contemporary of Bennett's – both graduates of University of San Diego High School.



Advertisement With Bennett at the helm from 1979 to 1997, Blessed Sacrament School flourished, and he flourished along with it. Enrollment grew. Academic achievement improved. Bennett became a community activist.
He campaigned against prostitution, drug and gang problems on El Cajon Boulevard near Blessed Sacrament.

Bennett battled skinheads who threatened him because of his support of a Jewish school's expansion. His school became a target of harassment, and police increased patrols around his home and the campus.

“Brian did not take well to bigots or racists of any kind,” said Morris Casuto, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League in San Diego. “Unlike most people, he was totally unafraid to stand up to these individuals.”

Bennett supported placing a community health clinic at Hoover High School to serve the poor, even though the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego initially opposed it for fear it would provide contraceptives and abortion referrals.

In 1994, he opposed Proposition 187, which would have denied most social services and education to undocumented immigrants. While serving on the San Diego Human Relations Commission, he questioned the appointment of a commissioner with anti-gay views.



Bennett, a Democrat, campaigned for Proposition 174 in 1993 and Proposition 38 in 2000, voucher measures that were resoundingly defeated by California voters.

Bennett considers the California Teachers Association, a leading opponent of vouchers, an obstacle to education reform.

“Organized labor has no business of being in the classroom because they are interested in the interests of adults, not children,” he said.

Caso, the CTA spokesman, said his organization is a major advocate for children, promoting measures such as class-size reduction, increased education funding and racial integration.

Bennett was viewed with distrust when he was hired to head San Diego Unified's first umbrella office for charter schools and other choice programs.

“My attitude was, you got a voucher person, why are you hiring him for public education,” said school board member John de Beck. “It's obvious his goals are not for public education. The only reason he went to charters is vouchers were failing every time they were put on the ballot.”

Bennett was involved in launching some of the earliest charter schools in California, after the Legislature authorized them in 1992.

He traveled the United States helping to organize inner-city charter schools while working for the now-defunct School Futures Research Foundation, backed by John Walton of the Wal-Mart empire, and later while running his own consulting business.

For his work in education, Bennett was honored recently by the state Board of Education and by the California Charter Schools Association.

He holds firm to the belief that education is the key to a better world.

“We will never have equality of opportunity unless everybody can start from the same first step,” Bennett said. “Right now, if you are poor and non-white, you are definitely at least four steps behind.”


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Helen Gao: (619) 718-5181; helen.gao@uniontrib.com