Dear Culver City: We Have a Conflict of Visions in CCUSD

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By Pedro Frigola

At the recent Culver City Unified School District (CCUSD) candidate forum put on by the Culver City Federation of Teachers (CCFT), the very first question revealed a deeper divide beneath many of our district’s ongoing debates.

An English teacher asked the candidates how they would respond to a growing trend in which “parent voices tend to supersede teacher expertise and educational best practices,” adding that many educators feel “voiceless and demoralized.”

There is nothing unreasonable about valuing expertise. Teachers are, or should be, experts in pedagogy and curriculum. But not all expertise is the same.

In science and engineering, expertise earns authority because reality continuously tests it. Aircraft fly or fail. Bridges stand or collapse. Durable knowledge accumulates because models are constrained by the external world.

Science is not trustworthy because experts say so. Experts become trustworthy when their methods repeatedly produce knowledge that survives contact with reality.

Educational policy is different.

Many of the district’s most contentious debates are not narrow technical questions with objectively correct answers. They are conflicts over values, tradeoffs, and competing visions of education itself.

A chemistry teacher’s expertise should carry enormous weight in transmitting durable scientific knowledge to students. But questions like whether Honors English should exist, how much academic differentiation is appropriate, or whether unequal outcomes are inherently unjust are not purely technical questions. They are philosophical and civic ones.

That became clear later in the forum when candidates were asked whether they supported restoring Honors 9 English and honors courses at Culver City Middle School (CCMS).

These debates are often framed as matters of “equity,” but in practice, the disagreement runs deeper. It concerns whether schools should primarily pursue equalized outcomes or maximize opportunity, even when outcomes differ.

Reasonable people can disagree. But increasingly, disagreement itself is treated as suspect.

One question asked candidates whether they would “publicly denounce” community members accused of “attacking and scapegoating students on permit.”

Of course, students should not be attacked. Every candidate agreed.

But notice the shift in framing. Previous policy discussions about permits and district rules is subtly merged with a moral category: harm to students. Criticism of policy is conflated with hostility toward children themselves. I have personally experienced this pattern in CCUSD, and so have others. Questions about policy become questions about morality. Disagreement about institutional decisions becomes evidence of harm.

Unlike physics or engineering, educational institutions do not operate under the same hard external constraints. There is no equivalent signal, like a crashed aircraft, that definitively resolves disputes about honors classes, academic stress, or outcome-based equity policies.

Nevertheless, the data compiled by parents and by the district itself strongly suggest that eliminating English honors courses, both in middle school and in 9th and 10th grade, failed to achieve its stated goals.

Public education exists within a liberal society composed of parents, students, educators, and citizens with differing values and visions of human flourishing. In such a system, professional expertise is indispensable, but it cannot substitute for open debate about first principles.

The forum did not resolve these tensions. But it did help reveal them more clearly.

And that may have been the most useful thing it accomplished.

Pedro Frigola is a Culver City parent with a background in applied physics who also enjoys writing on education policy and institutional accountability.