Dr. Jeff Cole, a distinguished education leader, special-ed teacher and former president of the Anaheim Elementary School District (AESD) board, is running for that board again, because he is seriously concerned about the fiscal health and future of the district (and other districts.) The main thing he wants to see is serious structural reform of these bloated bureaucracies… but we’ll get to that in good time.

What people first want to hear about Jeff Cole is, what happened back in the primary when he was supposed to be running against Dr. Stefan Bean for OC Superintendent of Education, and then suddenly wasn’t? We should start there.

OC Board of Education: Our MAGA Headmasters

There is no more stubbornly klepto-MAGA outfit in our County than the OC Board of Education. Dedicated to the sabotage of public schools and devoted to the Charter School industry, they dependably approve any Charter good or bad, after those have been rejected by their local districts; and they rile up the Rube Vote by, sincerely or not, going all in on every Culture War controversy. Elected in low-turnout June elections, the five-member Board keeps its far-right makeup with the lavish support of the Charter School industry and the OC Republican Party (currently co-chaired by education saboteur & Jan. 6 rioter Leandra Blades!)

But until his tragic death by cancer in Jan. 2025, the Board had to work (uncomfortably) with a very honest, competent and popular OC Superintendent of Schools named Al Mijares. The extremist Board made things as hard as possible for the pro-education Mijares, but he just kept getting re-elected and accomplishing great things in the district, ever since being appointed in 2012 by a more reasonable, Republican iteration of the Board.

In 2022 Mijares easily beat the extremist candidate Stefan Bean 55% to 45% despite all the Charter money and OC GOP backing Dr. Bean got. The Register, despite its conservative bent, couldn’t even get themselves to endorse Dr. Bean because of his unsubstantiated conspiracy-peddling. (OC schools teaching inappropriate sexual material to kindergarteners anyone?)

And then, in January 2025, Al Mijares died of cancer. And wasting no time, the Board appointed their extremist friend Dr. Bean to take his place as Superintendent. And when Bean came up for a real election last June, our friend Dr. Jeff Cole filed to run against him, and he could have won. The Bean / OCBOE crowd also feared he could win, and they pulled out all the stops to keep Jeff off the ballot.

Bean and Nothingness

That’s what we all saw on our ballots last June: Superintendent of Schools – Dr Stefan Bean … and no other choice. How did that happen?

The General in the fight to keep Dr. Cole off the ballot was old charter school bulldog Mark Bucher, board director of the California Policy Center, and with a team of high-powered Republican attorneys from Sacramento, Bucher sued our registrar of voters to take Jeff’s name off the ballot, using an ambiguously worded 2024 law to claim Jeff was unqualified for the post.

This is “in the weeds,” but the new, untested 2024 law updated the requirements for County Superintendent from an “administrative authorization” which Jeff definitely has to an “administrative credential” which he may or may not have, depending how you define it. Even the Republican lawyers opposing him said he’d probably have a 50-50 chance of prevailing in court, and so did Lee Fink, the hotshot OC Democrat attorney Jeff consulted. And it woulda been good to have that law ruled on and clarified. Except that if Jeff did NOT prevail, and had to pay the legal fees for both sides, it could have cost him $100k. Also, an unfavorable ruling would have impacted some other races adversely, e.g. in San Mateo.

The legal battle was not the only one waged by Bucher and Bean on Dr. Cole. One night Jeff received an anonymous phone call, from a man growling “Who do you think you are, running against Stefan Bean?” Someone working on Jeff’s house when he was out teaching reported a couple of guys who dropped by yelling his name, and saying “Tell him we’ll come back later.” The next day the process server came and served Jeff with Bucher’s paperwork, but said he knew nothing of anyone coming by the day before. (That’s when Jeff put up security cameras.) And menacingly, one of the Sacramento attorneys told Jeff, “All of this will go away if you just drop out.”

So all things considered, and not willing to risk $100k plus maybe his safety, Jeff asked a judge permission to withdraw from the race, which he got. The Register and other press reported or implied wrongly that he was removed by a court order brought on by Bucher – when the truth is he asked to withdraw. So Dr Bean got to run unopposed – your OC Republican Democracy at work! Bean and Nothingness.

Vultures Circling:

Could Bean’s OCDE take over our Local Districts?

A scenario we haven’t seen before in this County but is entirely possible, a scenario that nobody seems to have considered but which is probably the last thing any Anaheim education leader would like to see, is this: A local district that fails financially, that DEFAULTS (which is not hard to see happening to some of our Anaheim and Santa Ana districts) can be taken over by the backward, kleptocratic OC Department of Education, now led by Dr. Stefan Bean.

This would happen in stages. These are the duties of a county Board of Education, regarding the various local Boards in its jurisdiction:

• Provide fiscal oversight to the county’s 28 school districts.
• Review and approve districts’ Local Control and Accountability (LCAP) Plans — state-mandated plans that districts use to set goals and spending to improve student outcomes.
• Provide professional development and legal guidance for districts.

Clearly the OCDE has been negligent in fulfilling any of that fiscal oversight, or we wouldn’t be seeing the recent failures and unnecessary teacher firings. They shouldn’t have let Santa Ana and AUHSD fire teachers, shouldn’t have let things get so bad that they felt they had to. This is likely the “benign neglect” of a Department and Superintendent that, ideologically, don’t believe in public education and want to see it fail.

And when one of our beloved districts does fail, financially, when it defaults, Bean’s OCDE will be able to take it over. They will send in a “fiscal expert” and then a “financial adviser,” who will be able to tell us what we can and can’t spend our money on, what our priorities should be. None of us central-county liberals want to be dictated to like that by anti-education extremists. But it is something that could happen, if we don’t keep our fiscal house in order.

Go ahead and call Dr. Jeff Cole a “Cassandra.” But in this year that the Odyssey was remade as a blockbuster film, we should remember that Cassandra turned out to be right.

STRUCTURAL CHANGE: What the Dr. Ordered.

Enrollment and therefore state funding can be expected to decline until at least 2030, says Dr. Cole (and everyone else when they’re being serious.) Crises like the 2024 ones in Santa Ana and AUHSD can be expected to recur. Cole laments that the victims of these crises are ALWAYS the most vulnerable members of a district, those who have the most difficulty fighting back, and who also have the most impact on students – STAFF and TEACHERS.

Meanwhile, District Administration, like any bureaucracy with no brakes on it, just grows and grows, as do administrators’ salaries and benefits. This is where Dr Cole (and other reformist progressives like Germaine and Roberto) would like to see necessary cuts. NOT in teachers or staff. Jeff told the Anaheim Democrats Club that, if he became trustee again, he would resign before ever sending layoff notices to teachers as the AUHSD did in ’24.

I recently wrote about the “Community Schools” movement; everybody was celebrating the new permanent funding for Community Schools in Anaheim and across California. It all comes down to how the idea is implemented though. Everyone likes the idea of getting parents, students and teachers more involved in school decisions, and providing more services on campus. But to Dr. Cole, Community Schools are a model of putting Administration in its correct, SUPPORTIVE place; of “rightsizing” Administration and returning democracy and justice to education.

While simultaneously being fiscally sane.

Jeff Cole & Juan Alvarez at the Club

Dr. Cole was on the AESD Board years ago, and he is concerned for its survival now, so he is running to be on the Board again. Because of the “Area” he lives in, that means he’s running against Juan Alvarez, who was first elected (with a lot of our support) in 2018, has frequently been the Board President, and is running for his third term. So the Anaheim Democrats Club invited both of them to our September 3 meeting.

A lot of things were discussed in that hour, (including the three big Alvarez controversies of early 2025 – the removal of Mark Lopez, his replacement with Alvarez’ cousin, and the quadrupling of the Board’s stipend from $500 to $2000.) But those will have to be another story – I have this video cued up to where Jeff talks about his fiscal concerns with the AESD.

You hear how dismissively Juan reacts to Jeff’s concerns? Everything is fine. We project forward three years as required by the state (Jeff thinks it should be five years.) Even the OCDE says we are fine. (Sounding like rehab-resisting Amy Winehouse singing “If my daddy says I’m fine…”)

“Juan knows better,” says Jeff charitably. “But right now he’s focused on his re-election. He‘s boasting of his success in doing the bare minimum. But his District is dipping into its reserves, and once those are gone, there will be real hard choices – we’ll be insolvent, we’ll get a negative certification from OCDE, they could take over.”

Dipping into the reserves? As Calvin Candie said, “You had my curiosity, NOW you have my attention.” UPDATE Saturday: It’s true! Juan’s AESD has been deficit spending and “tapping into their reserves” since 22/23; their total reserves now are $56.6 million, $20.6 of that “unrestricted.” Can I use a whistling past the graveyard image now?

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I wish I could say Dr. Jeff Cole is running a spirited campaign (like Germaine is.) Or that he had a website I could link to, but I don’t think you want to see it. I would vote for him if I lived in Area 2 (the green area below.) And I think you should too if you live there.

But in the likely event that the incumbent Juan prevails, I at least hope that the Board takes some of Dr. Cole’s concerns, criticisms and ideas to heart. (I don’t think I even mentioned them all – it’ll save a lot to move all district employees’ health care coverage to the state employees’ plan. For example!)

MORE ON AESD TO COME!

With the author, at Germaine’s EL NOPAL fundraiser.
Bald old white & bespectacled is the new cool.