CommentsFIRST PERSON-The problem with passing Proposition EE to again bailout the long-troubled Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is that it does nothing to address the endemic dysfunction and corruption that over decades has enabled LAUSD administration and "agreed corporate vendors" to put bureaucratic interests and profit above what should be the LAUSD's primary function: educating students with enough teachers who are fairly compensated.
While there is a justifiable stigma for any entity to go bankrupt, there are other problems with that decision as well. Restructuring an entity to move out of the red and into the black requires independent, objective analysis. Too often the effect on the organization’s functioning during the process is ignored and underestimated.
If done correctly by an agency without a preconceived agenda, reorganization of LAUSD through the bankruptcy process could help establish a hierarchy of functions, eliminating non-essential expenditures and waste – problems that are behind the need for bankruptcy in the first place.
Proposition EE would help LAUSD avoid such positive restructuring.
The following are some of the presently entrenched dysfunctional factors that have caused LAUSD to fail in its primary function of educating students:
- Career advancement and upward mobility at LAUSD occures when teachers leave the classroom to become administrators. Teachers’ salaries top out at around $80,000; administrators can start making six figures in a very short period of time. This reality offers good teachers no incentive to stay in the classroom and has helped create the present situation in which 50% of LAUSD’s teachers quit within three years of being hired, causing the unnecessary and expensive process of constantly replacing teachers.
- The upward mobility at LAUSD – teachers moving into administration – has, counterintuitively, caused in the last few years, a 20% increase in administrators, while teacher and student populations have continued to drop precipitously.
- Charter schools, that do no better than LAUSD, have syphoned off significant numbers of students from LAUSD. But this has done nothing to lower LAUSD’s class sizes. Yet, we’ve seen unnecessary building undertaken like the Belmont school complex on a toxic waste site and a school at the old Ambassador Hotel site for 3 times contract and market value.
- What we now have is a massive, centralized, redundant, and dysfunctional LAUSD bureaucracy. What we need is a local school centered administration, where parents and teachers act in concert to determine the school’s principal; we need an administration focused exclusively on the academic success of that school’s student body. The current LAUSD Beaudry bureaucracy must be drastically reduced and deal only with the few tasks that cannot be handled by local schools run by a congress of teachers, students, and parents. A much reduced LAUSD administration should only act as a monitor for local schools that are run by parents, teachers, and students.
- How much of school site maintenance costs could be saved by requiring shop students (who choose the course as an elective) to take over the functions of gardening, trash collection, and minor school maintenance? What better way is there to teach students the costs of littering and vandalism?
- The present administrations of LAUSD certificated and classified unions has more in common with the interests of LAUSD administration than they do with their own rank-and-file. The proof of this is that they’ve done nothing to address the undeclared war LAUSD has been waging to get rid of high seniority teachers and staff at the top of their respective salary scales.
- It is expensive to deal with the predictable behavior issues of students who continue to be socially promoted and under-educated. Chronic truancy has caused LAUSD hundreds of millions of dollars in Average Daily Attendance (ADA) funding from the State and federal government. Predictably this leads to disproportionate and super expensive incarceration of predominantly minority students who "graduate" or drop out of school without the basic educational skills and formation they need to be gainfully employed. The amount of money spent on prisons, if it were used to properly educate these youth, is greater than what LAUSD now seeks under Proposition EE.
Given what I have said here about the pervasive corruption in public education, one might ask why Mayor Eric Garcetti, Governor Gavin Newsom, Senator Kamala Harris and others support Proposition EE.
Feel free to comment on any other factors that make Proposition EE the least likely "solution" to LAUSD's avoidable problems.
(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles, observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He was a second- generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at [email protected].) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
