Way back when, a young math instructor from Louisiana named George McKenna got bumped from Gardena High School because his bosses said he couldn’t teach. Another recent graduate student, Jackie Goldberg, could not even get hired by the Los Angeles school district because of her criminal record.

Just two losers who wouldn’t amount to anything, right?

Not exactly.

Both McKenna, 84, and Goldberg, 80, would go on to forge landmark careers in education and politics. This month, they retired from the L.A. Board of Education.

McKenna told he was ‘subpar’

Sept. 2017 photo of LAUSD board member Dr. George McKenna at the L.A. Unified School District headquarters.

(Los Angeles Times)

McKenna, a light-skinned Black man, initially was doing just fine as a first-year teacher at nearly all-white Gardena High in 1962 — he recalled he also was the school’s only math instructor with an advanced degree in the subject. Then administrators realized he was not white — the issue of his race had not come up when he was hired, he said.

Some of McKenna’s white first-period students came into class early in the spring semester making offhand racist comments and using the N-word. It was soon after widespread press coverage of Martin Luther King Jr.’s arrest during a peaceful protest in Albany, N.Y.

He informed them that they’d been taught that year by a Black man — and the students initially had no idea whom he was talking about. Word got around fast, and McKenna spent the rest of the day answering students’ race-related questions.

Word also got around to the faculty and his department chair almost immediately wrote him up as subpar, he said. An observer from the central office disagreed, but McKenna was transferred to Jordan High School — a campus with a nearly all-Black student body.

McKenna spent eight years in the classroom, then was promoted step-by-step until he became the principal at Washington High School in 1979. His efforts to turn around that school became the subject of a 1986 TV movie starring Denzel Washington, “The George McKenna Story.”

Aug. 2014 photo of Los Angeles Unified School District board member George McKenna, left, taking a photo with Marco Flores, from United Teachers Los Angeles at a reception after he was sworn into office by Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr.

(Los Angeles Times)

In 1988, McKenna became the superintendent of the Inglewood Unified School District and later had senior school-district posts in Compton, Pasadena and L.A., before winning election to the L.A. school board in 2014.

Goldberg’s arrest record

Goldberg could not get a job in L.A. Unified — and other places — because she’d been convicted of a misdemeanor related to multiple arrests as a leader of the groundbreaking Free Speech Movement protests at UC Berkeley in 1964.

She was eventually hired by Compton Unified in 1967 and began an 17-year career as a social studies teacher in a school system that, at the time, had become nearly all-Black as a result of white flight.

July 2016 photo of then L.A. County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, left, with Jackie Goldberg.

(Los Angeles Times)

Goldberg took a mid-career turn into politics. She won election to the L.A. school board in 1984, followed by service on the L.A. City Council and in the state Assembly. Persuaded to come out of semiretirement, she rejoined the school board, winning election in 2019 and serving the last two years as board president — some 40 years after she first was board president.

In elected office, she became an effective, if sometimes polarizing, power broker and leading policymaker, including as recently as last month. That’s when she spearheaded the board‘s approval to establish L.A. Unified as a sanctuary district for immigrants and for staff and students who are LGBTQ+ in anticipation of the incoming Trump administration.

McKenna’s great expectations

When he arrived at Jordan High, the young McKenna saw a familiar sight from his boyhood in the South — an all-Black school. In Louisiana, he’d taken part in protests against segregation.

Still, his boyhood Catholic school had high academic expectations, and he would have nothing less for his students in Los Angeles, including John Moore, a 10th grader in general math.

McKenna pulled him aside and said he belonged in algebra.

“I had never even heard the word before,” Moore recalled. That conversation helped launch Moore on the path to college, Moore recalled during the recent school board meeting at which McKenna was honored.

The zenith of McKenna’s career was his 10-year tenure, starting in 1979, as principal of the South L.A. campus he renamed Washington Preparatory High School, to emphasize that students would be preparing for college and a profession.

George McKenna appears in Washington High School newspaper soon after becoming principal of the school in 1979.

(Collection of Allan Kakassy)

A searing early memory was when a Washington student was gunned down on campus in front of the gym after returning from a football game at another school. McKenna remembers holding the dying boy — although the boy did not die in his arms, as happened in the movie dramatization.

On another occasion, a mortally wounded Washington student climbed over the fence onto school grounds before collapsing.

Washington was 90% Black and 10% Latino and enrollment had plummeted in the wake of the Watts riots and the school system’s voluntary integration, which sent South L.A. students to campuses in the San Fernando Valley. McKenna took notice of the buses that ringed the campus in the morning, waiting to take most of the more ambitious students — more than 1,300 a day — to the Valley.

No students made the trip the other way.

“First thing I started doing was trying to get the kids off the busses,” he said recently.

McKenna steadily made change.

Students and their parents were required to sign contracts pledging that homework would be done. Boom boxes and street gang insignias and clothing motifs were banned. Parents were recruited to monitor bathrooms. Students began peer counseling. McKenna started a homeroom period, including 10 minutes of schoolwide silent reading.

Teachers had to assign homework, submit weekly reports on what they planned to teach and telephone parents about any unexcused absence. Of the 113 teachers he started with, 100 had voluntarily left the campus within three years.

In addition, “he created a mini college atmosphere on our campus,” with community-spirited fraternities and sororities as well as talent showcases as part of an energized arts program, said Dechele Byrd, a student at Washington Prep who later became the school’s principal.

He also drew students into community activism, to take part in peace marches “encouraging families to put down the guns and be peaceful individuals,” Byrd said.

And he tirelessly painted over the gang graffiti, including on fences across from campus — shaming the football team into helping him — until it went away.

The school became “a safe haven… He ensured that they cared for each and every one of us,” Byrd said.

Principal George McKenna, center, is honored by county officials for his work at Washington Preparatory High School in this undated photo. County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn is at the far left. Also in the picture are two student leaders and teacher Allan Kakassy.

(L.A. County Board of Supervisors official photo)

McKenna said of his work: “I saw wonderful children, and I said, ‘I can do something with them and change the world.’ And they can change the world. I can’t — but through them.”

Test scores did not rise during his tenure — he was still working on that when he left to lead the Inglewood district. But nearly twice as many seniors were taking the SAT. The percentage of Black students taking chemistry, physics and advanced math surged above the statewide average for Black students. The attendance rate exceeded all other district high schools. The graduating class doubled in size. The percentage of students pursuing higher education soared.

And there was a waiting list to get in.

McKenna’s tenure as superintendent in Inglewood was rocky; the politically divided board proved tougher for him to deal with than students.

But McKenna moved forward — and in later roles was willing to challenge bureaucracy and mediocrity within the system.

Then-LAUSD board candidate George McKenna greeting supporters in 2014, including future L.A. mayor Karen Bass, right, at an election night party in the Crenshaw District.

(Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times)

As an L.A. school board member, he advocated for high standards, but also for support for struggling students. He tirelessly pushed for more services to Black students — the lowest performing racial or ethnic group — and in recent years has pushed against an activist tide seeking the elimination of school police by insisting that the officers play a valuable role.

McKenna spoke his mind in public and private with elegiac and sometimes lengthy eloquence, but was frustrated at his lack of success in behind-the-scenes political maneuvering to advance his favored policies.

Goldberg, a political force

L.A. City Councilmember Jackie Goldberg advocates for a living wage ordinance outside of L.A. City Hall in 1997 in front of supporters.

(Courtesy of Jackie Goldberg)

Goldberg honed her political skills starting as a teenager, learning from civil rights and women’s rights protest leaders.

In her first stint on the school board, from 1983 to 1991, she worked to end corporal punishment and spearheaded the first campus health clinics, which included contraceptive services. She also oversaw the development of bilingual education — a complicated effort that never bore fruit as hoped. She left office in despair, as she watched Proposition 13, which slashed property taxes, lead to sweeping job, program and salary cuts across the system. She also saw a three-year, 24% raise for teachers prove to be more than the district could afford.

Her political career resumed with her 1993 election to the City Council. Her city initiatives included securing a living wage ordinance, domestic partner benefits for city employees and tenant protections.

She also could manage a crisis, as recounted by Steve Zimmer, a teacher who volunteered to help when Goldberg quickly mustered a response in her City Council District to the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

LAUSD school board member Jackie Goldberg thanks workers at Ellen Ochoa Learning Center in Cudahy for distributing food during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in April of 2020.

(Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

Goldberg quickly sized up Zimmer and deputized him to red-tag dangerous properties, take meals from closed schools to deliver to families and find shelter for a couple with a newborn who had lost their residence to the quake — as she seamlessly gave marching orders to a small army of volunteers.

She also led major economic revitalization efforts in Hollywood and elsewhere.

“Leadership matters,” said Zimmer, who later would serve two terms on the school board.

Outside of City Hall, with her life partner Sharon Stricker, she founded the L.A.C.E.R. after-school program, which offers academic help, sports, arts, music and other enrichment.

Goldberg then moved to the state Assembly in 2000 for six years, where she authored two state education bonds and domestic partner legislation that gave LGBTQ+ couples new rights.

Calif. Gov. Gray Davis, center, and state Assembly Member Jackie Goldberg, left, hold up a signed copy of Assembly Bill 205, which was signed into law in 2003 and gave new rights to LGBTQ+ couples.

(Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

The outspoken Goldberg could come across as dogmatic and inflexible, but proved strategic behind the scenes.

Goldberg has “an ability to punch up with a touch, a nerve, of anger,” said her nephew David Goldberg, the current president of the California Teachers Assn., “but what makes it even so much more powerful is [her] ability to do it out of love and really also connect.”

When school board member Ref Rodriguez resigned after pleading guilty to campaign finance violations, Goldberg agreed to run for office again.

Goldberg, McKenna: brand names in education

Both McKenna and Goldberg can pop out remarkable stories from their careers at virtually any moment.

At one board meeting, during a discussion about school safety, Goldberg recounted a gang attack on her Compton high school. A large group of assailants overwhelmed two campus police officers and took their weapons, leading to an announcement that everyone should lock their doors.

A student in Goldberg’s class alerted her that the intruders were after him. A fire extinguisher was thrown through her window and the classroom was pelted with rocks, with Goldberg keeping the targeted boy and other students huddled on the far side.

Eventually, the city police restored order, but “it seemed like forever,” she said later.

Goldberg concluded that it was bad idea for anyone — even police — to have weapons on a campus and that officers were better employed when stationed off campus to guard the perimeter from intruders.

In a discussion about whether to limit the use of standardized tests, McKenna recounted how —as a deputy superintendent in Compton — he once had to assess 35 students who passed the high school exit exam on their last try with near perfect scores after failing it repeatedly.

He tested them again and 32 students failed — leading to outrage directed against him. He then revealed he’d given the students exactly the same test, but with the multiple-choice answers in a different order. He wanted to help the students, but wasn’t going to let them get over a graduation hurdle by cheating.

George McKenna speaking with an advocate for charter schools at LAUSD headquarters in 2013.

(Los Angeles Times)

By the time they reached retirement age, both McKenna and Goldberg had become political brand names that the teachers union chose to get behind to recapture the school-board majority from a bloc elected through the financial muscle of advocates for privately managed charter schools.

And both veterans won office convincingly.

Once elected, Goldberg oversaw new restrictions on charters, which enroll more than 100,000 L.A. public school students, about 1 in 5. Goldberg was aligned ideologically with the teachers union, but did not take orders from anyone. She opposed a three-day strike in 2023.

A defining moment of Goldberg’s second board stint came in June 2023, after a group of parents and outside demonstrators led an aggressive protest outside Saticoy Elementary to protest Gay Pride Month activities.

At the protest, Goldberg, who walks haltingly with a cane, waded into a shouting, shoving crowd to stand with the school’s supporters and try to engage with the other side.

L.A. school board President Jackie Goldberg holds up “The Great Big Book of Families” and reads it from cover to cover during a board meeting in June 2023, daring critics to find anything offensive in its pages.

(Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times)

“I have never shied from controversy,” Goldberg said. “It was a big part of changing my life” that she and her allies and staff would “take on controversies that come up as they come up, and we’re not going to shy away from them or pretend something was different than it was.”

At a subsequent school board meeting, she read in entirety the children’s book about diverse families that protesters had objected to — which included the line that some families “have two moms or two dads.”

McKenna and Goldberg became so entrenched with their constituents that they were regarded as unbeatable on the ballot. Each was eligible to run again, but both have serious health challenges.

At a recent school board meeting, McKenna said of Goldberg: “I do know the importance of being aware of when you’re in the presence of greatness… I thank you for having passed this way. I’m glad I lived and served in the time of Jackie Goldberg.”

Goldberg responded in kind.

“The kind of legendary life this man has served gives him insight into what we are dealing with today in terms of problems facing us,” Goldberg said, “and that will always be an important contribution and legacy to this district.”