By Michael Finn and Michael Jones.

As the dust settles on the 6-day UTLA strike, we can see education policy in the City of Los Angeles with fresh perspectives and fresh options. The demands of Los Angeles teachers were supported by an overwhelming majority of parents, students, and community members. Lower class sizes, as well as more counselors and nurses, are appealing to these groups: the LAUSD stakeholders.

The strike brought national attention to the leadership of both LAUSD and UTLA. As LAUSD teachers at John Marshall High School we joined picket lines and marched in rallies 50,000 strong. Our strike, and the support our strike enjoyed throughout Los Angeles, won us the best contract of our careers. It is a contract that will benefit students from this point forward. The strike is also paying dividends beyond Los Angeles. Nationwide, Democrats who may have previously supported charter schools are now rethinking their position. And teachers in other unions across the state and the nation are considering their own job actions. So our faith in the leadership of UTLA is strong.

However, we have a few remarks on the leadership and job performance of Austin Beutner, the Superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

A school superintendent is expected to support the needs of a district’s stakeholders: the students, the parents, the district’s employees, and the larger community. Successful superintendents are attuned to their stakeholders. Austin Beutner’s pre-strike dismissal of UTLA’s classroom-based demands may have seemed out of character for a school superintendent, but less so when viewed through the lens of the man’s pre-LAUSD career. That is a career that catered to a different group: the shareholder. Beutner’s inability to read the pulse of Los Angeles came because he has never answered to its stakeholders. His inability to discern between the perspective of stakeholders and the perspective of shareholders is what brought on the strike. It is what has made Austin Beutner’s 9-month reign over LAUSD the failure it has been. And it is Exhibit A in the case for his immediate dismissal.

The majority of school district superintendents follow a career arc something like this: first teacher, then administrator, then district assistant-of-something, and finally superintendent. Along the way, this path instills in the individual deep desire for buy-in.  From the classroom to the boardroom, nothing happens without a leader who values people trusting their vision and who is skilled enough to earn that trust. Being able to read a room full of stakeholders, whether they are students, parents, teachers, community, or school board members, is the first requirement of any job along that career arc. In a public service career, the stakeholder holds the power.

Enter Austin Beutner.  Beutner graduated from Dartmouth with a degree in economics, went to work on Wall Street, and became a founding member of Evercore Inc. Evercore is the king of restructuring, as Evercore partner Bill Repko describes:  “the dark side” of investment banking.The investment banker’s credo is increasing shareholder value above all else. The business model is taking bankrupt clients, spinning off low quality assets, and postponing the inevitable liquidation. A quick read through of Evercore’s history shows these people are masters of creative financing, debt restructuring, and value creation.  In this highly lucrative career, Mr. Beutner only needed buy-in from shareholders. In fact, his actions were usually to the detriment of most of his stakeholders: the customers, the suppliers, and the employees. In his Wall Street career, the shareholder held the power.

After cashing out on this career, Beutner turned to the public sector. It has not been a turn filled with success. First he parlayed his Wall Street experience into a stint working for the Clinton administration, and then he moved west. Mayor Villaraigosa gave him a try-out as interim manager of the DWP, where he went to his Wall Street playbook and suggested selling off its assets. That idea went nowhere. He then toyed with a Mayoral bid but pulled out for lack of support. In 2013 he was chosen to co-chair an “LA2020” commission, which produced a dire report predicting that LA would become the next Detroit. The report demanded austerity measures. One is reminded of Noam Chomsky:  “That’s the standard technique of privatization: defund, make sure things don’t work, people get angry, you hand it over to private capital.” Newly elected Mayor Garcetti was not amused with LA2020’s written product. It was another Beutner idea, DOA. In his final pre-LAUSD employment, Beutner spent about a year as publisher of the LA Times. When some corporate shenanigans that he and Eli Broad had dreamed up were discovered, it became a job which ended with a human resources officer asking Beutner to surrender his company badge and quickly vacate his office. Once again, Beutner was in the wrong job.

Next comes his current job: superintendent of the nation’s second largest school district. It is a job he is utterly unprepared for. Having never spent a day in a classroom, he had to apply for a waiver from the state due to his lack of any education credential. It is a job that was offered without a public hearing. The public part of the process of hiring a new superintendent happenedafterhe had already been offered a contract on a closed-door 4-3 vote. The deciding vote was cast by Ref Rodriguez, a board member who would, six weeks later, plead guilty to felony campaign money laundering charges and resign.

Why would four members of the LAUSD School Board vote, behind closed doors, to hire a superintendent with a resume like Beutner’s and no education experience? Because their shareholders told them to: a majority of our school board was elected with massive support from wealthy individuals and organizations that seek to privatize our school system. In essence, those donors—Eli Broad, Reed Hastings, the Walton Family Foundation, Michael Bloomberg—are the shareholders here. Their campaign donations were made with expectations. Those expectations included a weakened UTLA. They included a school district that is even more receptive to unregulated charter school expansion. And they included a lack of fiscal transparency for the public funding that feeds that charter growth.  That dark money got the school board members elected, and then they did as they were told and got Beutner hired.

With that 4-3 vote, Beutner’s shareholders had spoken.

Most of all, Beutner is utterly unprepared for his current job because the job requires attention to the stakeholders. It is a job that requires a leader who can read the room. The students of our city, marching with their teachers, have made it clear that that Mr. Beutner failed to read the room. The teachers we picketed with, from Marshall High and across the city, have made it clear that Mr. Beutner failed to read the room. The people of the City of Los Angeles, with their support for teacher demands over the demands of the wealthy who placed him in his job, have made it clear that Mr. Beutner has failed to read the room.

Through the UTLA strike, LAUSD’s stakeholders have spoken.

So, Austin Beutner is stuck between two masters. One master is the stakeholder. In failing to meet the needs of the classroom he swore to serve, we see that he has failed the City of Los Angeles– its students, its parents, and its community members.  The other master is the shareholder. In failing to discredit the city’s teachers and their union and instead adding voices to the chorus calling for increased charter school accountability, we see that he has also failed his wealthy shareholders–the privatizers who engineered his placement in the job.

The odds were long that two veteran teachers and an assortment of billionaire school-privatizers could ever agree on anything, but stakeholder and shareholder alike: what choice do we have but to demand Austin Beutner’s resignation?