LAUSD: September 2008 Archives

Even as Los Angeles Unified keeps hiring more bureaucrats and fewer teachers -- and the disparity in their pay keeps widening -- the massive school district is disintegrating under an assault from the charter school movement.

On Wednesday, ICEF Public Schools, which operates 13 charters with 3,000 students in South Los Angeles, will announce it's adding 22 new campuses in what it calls the "Education Corridor" - the 45-square-mile region bound by the 110, 105, 405 and 10 freeways.

It should more aptly be called the "Dropout Zone" with half the students quitting school witihout a diploma. With Green Dot already running many schools in the area and having taken over troubled Locke High School, the area will be getting free of LAUSD's stifling bureaucracy, its can't do culture and its 30-year record of failure.

Mostly serving African-American students in one of the city's poorest areas, the Inner City Education Foundation boasts that all its graduates go to college, two- or four-year.

Hard as this may be to believe, given all the lip service paid to fixing our failing schools, LAUSD's "bureaucracy ballooned by nearly 20 percent from 2001 to 2007. Over the same period, 500 teaching positions were cut and enrollment dropped by 6 percent."

Got that? $20 billion invested in new school buildings and millions more to pay the salaries of a bloated bureaucracy and there's fewer teachers than six years ago to educate 650,000 children who still are almost as likely to drop out as get a diploma, whose test scores still remain abysmally low.

That's from Sunday's Daily News in a story by Beth Barrett, her final story at the paper after more than 20 years of exposing the sins and crimes of L.A.'s political and civic leadership.

It's accompanied by a searchable database that provides the name, salary and job of every LAUSD employee. What it shows is that the average salary of the district's 4,000 administrators. managers and other nonschool-based employees is $95,000 -- more than administrators are paid elsewhere. The average teacher salary: $63,000 -- less than teachers are paid elsewhere.

What teachers have been saying for decades is now a demonstrable fact: Classrooms have been robbed of resources to pay six-figure salaries to bureaucrats whose main function in life is to stifle the creativity and energy of the people who hold the future of our children, of our city, in their hands -- the teachers.

"(The bureaucracy) grows whether it's fat or lean times," said United Teachers Los Angeles union leader A.J. Duffy. "It's iindicative of an upper echelon, of a leadership cadre that doesn't want to use its authority to clean house."

Get rid of 1,000 of the bureaucrats and $95 million plus a third more for benefits is freed up for  classroom resources and to reward thousands of the best teachers with the salaries befitting the value of their contribution. Get rid of 2,000 and you might actually have a district that starts to work.

After 30 years of decline and failure, somebody should have figured out what the problem was and done something about it.

For all those years, we've heard repeatedly that it's the children's fault because there's too many that come from poor or immigrant families. And it turns out the biggest problem is too many bureaucrats and leadership that is too feeble to face the truth.

They point fingers at everybody else but the truth is the city's leadership lacks the political will to do anything about the LAUSD's most glaring problem or any of L.A.'s other glaring problems for that matter.

And when you see what LAUSD's board members and bureaucrats have to say in Barrett's story you can see that the mentality exposed by then Inspector General Don Mullinax years ago -- Deny, Defend, Deflect -- remain at the core of the culture of failure within the district.

What does it take to get real reform?

Breakup of the district was squelched. Dick Riordan's takeover of the school board got shanghaied. Charter schools have faced resistance every inch of the way. One superintendent after another has proven unable to act decisively. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's school czar plan amounts to indirect control of less than a dozen schools and the insertion of Ray Cortines into LAUSD's No. 2 job, a role that has created more confusion than clarity of purpose.

Maybe Duffy and the teachers union is right that a strike's needed. But it's going to take a strike by parents, students and the teachers backed by the community as a whole to change the culture of LAUSD once and for all and put the district's resources to work where it counts: In the classroom.

Frankly, they can take this $7 billion bond issue on the November ballot and shove it. Let's see them dismantle this system first before they stick their hands in our pockets again.

Lucille Saunders discusses LaBrea-Willoughby Coalition's infrastructure lawsuit

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Editor's Note: The Saving L.A. Project will hold another Town Hall meeting on Saturday Oct. 4 at the Charo Community Development Center at 4301 E. Valley Blvd. in the El Sereno neighborhood. The time will be announced soon.

 
 
During a town hall meeting Saturday in East L.A., Saving L.A. Project (SLAP) members voted to take positions on eight hot topic issues and is now looking for volunteers to mobilize the community activists across the city to help make a difference: 

SLAP OPPOSES THE TAKEOVER OF THE SOUTHWEST MUSEUM BY THE AUTRY NATIONAL CENTER

City Hall is rushing to shut off public debate and close the deal to loot the Southwest Museum of its valuable collection and turn this historic facility -- the city's oldest museum -- into community college classrooms using bond money from the November ballot measure put up by the LACCD.The Autry National Center in Griffith Park is lookiing to rebuild and expand its lackluster museum dramatically and has cut a back room deals with LACCD to get $12 million to convert the Southwest into class space -- an action that will rob the Mt. Washiington-Highland Park area of its most notable landmark. The deal betrays the commitment made by Jackie Autry, widow of the western movie star Gene Autry, to maintain the Southwest as a museum.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has broken his promise to protect the Southwest as a museum. Councilman Jose Huizar has done nothing to stand up for his constituents. Councilman Tom LaBonge has spearheaded the Autry's campaign which has spent large sums of money to get heavyweight lobbying support from City Hall insiders Bill Delvac and George Mihlsten of Latham & Watkins and PR man Steve Sugerman, the admitted felon. Please contact Heinrich Keifer <hkeifer101@sbcglobal.net> who is helping to put together a team that will drum up support from community groups, conduct email and phone campaigns and develop other strategies to force the Autry to live up to its commitments. 

SLAP  OPPOSES THE  LOS ANGELES COMMUNITY COLLEGE DISTRICT BOND ISSUE

Because of the LACCD's complicity in this back room deal, instigated by Community College Board member Mona Field, SLAP also decided to oppose the $3.5 billion bond issue, the district's third in recent years. 
 
SLAP  SUPPORTS THE CULTURAL HISTORICAL DISIGNATION OF GRIFFITH PARK

Kris Sabo won the full support of SLAP for a motion to support the efforts of Save Griffith Park and the heirs of Griffith Jenkins Griffith who donated the land for L.A.'s "Central Park" to get the city to declare the park a cultural-historical preservation zone which will give it badly needed protections from the city's intention to turn it into an amusement park and tourist trap. Councilmember LaBonge also took heavy criticism from SLAP activists for his role in pushing for other developments in Griffith Park even as he postures as its guardian. Contact ksabo@wildwildwest.org who will help coordinate with other groups. 
 
SLAP JOINS  THE LA BREA-WILLOUGHBY COALITION  

Headed by Lucille Saunders, the lawsuit  is aimed at forcing the city to carry out required studies of traffic and other infrastructure needs before approving new developments. Every neighborhood in the city is being negatively impacted by developments approved in ignorance -- the city hasn't made these required studies for a decade. Lucille Saunders  laid out the issues involved in the lawsuit and won support Saturday from the L.A. Neighborhood Council Coalition as well as SLAP. More than a dozen community groups have now joined the suit and the support of as many as possible will help strengthen the campaign to bring sanity and good information to the city's future development. Forms to join as Plaintiff's for the lawsuite are on the website.  They must be completed and faxed the September 11.   Contact Lucille Saunders and the website  at labreacoalition@gmail.com

Editor's Note: The Saving L.A. Project will hold a Town Hall meeting on Saturday Sept. 6 at 1:15 p.m. at the Charo Community Development Center, 4301 Valley Blvd., in the El Sereno neighborhood, following the 10 a.m. meeting of the L.A. Neighborhood Council Coalition. The goal is to form action teams to organize, research and advocate for community interests citywide. Get involved, make a difference.


We already know with certainty that Obama will win all 55 of California's electoral college votes in November, that the odds are 100 to 1 against any congressional or legislative seats changing hands and that the public will be deluged with tens of millions of dollars in campaign ads to support higher taxes.

What we don't know is if there will be a state budget by then and if there is, how disastrous will be the consequences to the quality of our lives and our future hopes.

But even the dark cloud of the state government's grotesque incompetence has a small bright side, it seems.

Mayors of California's nine biggest cities complained to the governor yesterday that the proposed cuts in funding the cities will "sweep away all money from redevelopment programs which would 'threaten to undermine one of the key tools that cities have to grow the economy,'" the Daily News reported.

Think about it, what community protests, lawsuits and common sense has been unable to achieve is being accomplished by the bunglers in the state legislature who have shattered all records with there inability to come up with a budget to deal with the $15.2 billion hole they somehow created during one of the state's greatest economic booms.

If Mayor Villaraigosa and his counterparts are to be believed -- and that's a big if -- cutting off billions of dollars to the cities, will stop or at least slow development.

I don't know about the other cities but when Antonio signs his name to a letter saying he's worried about economic growth, I have to laugh. Since when is growing the economy the goal of City Hall in L.A.?

If it really was the goal, wouldn't the city be taking steps to make it attractive to business and industry?

The truth is the city encourages retail projects with its low-paying jobs and housing construction because of the quick payoff in revenue to the city treasury -- the monster that eats the public's wealth to provide subsidies to billionaires and salaries and benefits to city workers that far exceed what's available in the private sector.

The goal of city government is city government itself -- not the improvement of the city or the lot of its residents. That's why rates, fees and taxes keep soaring and city services get worse. That's why there's a 75-year backlog in paving streets and sidewalks, why there aren't enough cops on the street, why the pipes and power grid are neglected, why good-paying jobs and the people who filled them have been making an exodus for a generation.

Not only is City Hall the safest building in L.A. in an earthquake thanks to a $350 million renovation, jobs at City Hall especially those of the politicians are the most secure as well.

They pander to the agenda of the unions and sell out to developers, contractors and consultants to get the campaign cash and support needed to keep the system from ever changing.

And it's not like Villaraigosa or Councilman Herb Wesson -- both former state Assembly speakers -- ever did anything about the long-term failure of state government which they now are so worried about impacting local government funding.