Court Swings At Antonio, Slugs Kids Instead

Yesterday, California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal handed down a decision that is likely the last act in a drama that’s been playing out loudly and expensively in public since November of 2005, when Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced that he intended to take over control—some kind of control anyway—of LA’s ailing, failing school system with the idea of reforming it.

The court’s decision was 44-pages in length, yet can be summed up in one word: Fuggedaboudit.

But before we get to the greater meaning of the decision, let’s review a little recent Los Angeles education history:

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Even before Antonio announced his schools takeover plans, 2005 wasn’t a terribly good year for the nation’s second largest school district. For instance, in March of that year, Harvard University and UCLA released a joint study that basically said that the Los Angeles Unified School District was lying through its collective teeth in claiming that its schools had an average graduation rate of 70 percent (which was not great, but at least not hideous.)

The Harvard/UCLA folks said the real number was around 45 percent. And, in the district’s big, low-performing urban schools—which the researchers referred to as ‘drop out factories”—the odds of graduating were one-in-three.

Within a few months of the study’s release, as if to underscore he researchers’ points, two of the purported drop out factories—Jefferson and Crenshaw High Schools—were each in some kind of meltdown.

First, Jefferson had three huge riots on campus that were clearly racial in nature. The brawls frightened kids and parents, and drew local and national press attention, none of it complimentary.

A few months later still, the news broke that Crenshaw was doing so poorly academically that the Western Association of Schools and Colleges was yanking the school’s accreditation, meaning the precious few kids who did manage to graduate might suddenly be holding worthless diplomas.

Yet, the school board, and then-school superintendent Roy Romer, maintained their traditional mantra: “We’re making progress”. The fact that general educational conditions at 25 of the city’s biggest high schools were so head-bangingly dysfunctional, that year after year tens of thousands of inner city kids were slipping through the educational cracks, seemed to stir little sense of real urgency.

Enter Antonio Villaraigosa.

In the middle of his campaign for mayor the previous spring, AV had announced that he would likely go for mayoral control of LA’s schools. After he was elected he appeared to back-pedal for a while, but in November of 2005, he relaunched his mayoral control initiative in earnest.

Many of even his most ardent supporters wondered if Villaraigosa would know what to do with the schools if he got them. “But anything’s gotta better than what we’ve got!” was the phrase heard over and over among the parent groups that backed the mayor’s takeover plan.

Ten months later, on August 28, 2006, after lots of public acrimony and name calling, AB 1381 passed through the state legislature and was later signed into law by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Four days after the vote, the the State of California released its 2006 Academic Performance Index scores—the numbers that measure how public schools are doing. LAUSD scored 62 points below the state’s already discouragingly low average.

Low scores be damned, the district still wasn’t about to give over any kind of power to some upstart mayor, so the LA Board of Education filed suit to block the law from taking affect, claiming that it violated the state constitution by allowing a local government to take over an educational agency.

“It is unabashed that [the legislature’s] purpose is to take away power and to give it to somebody else they think would do a better job at it,” harrumphed Fredric D. Woocher, one of the attorneys representing the LAUSD board.

(Well yes, that was the point, actually.)

In December of 2006, AB 1381 was indeed declared unconstitutional. The mayor’s lawyers appealed, which brings us to what happened yesterday.

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Justice H. Walter Croskey, who wrote the 44-page opinion, said that with AB1381, the legislature would disenfranchise LA voters if it was allowed “to bypass the will of the citizens of Los Angeles and effectively transfer many powers of the board to the mayor, based on its belief, hope, or assumption that he could do a better job.”

While no doubt legally quite sound (AB 1381 was never all that tightly wrapped, Constitutionally speaking.), the court’s decision leaves a great deal to be desired when viewed from the perspective of common sense and what might actually be best for LA’s kids:

Yes, LA voters elect the school board. AB 1381 didn’t take that away from them. What it did do is gently remove a good portion of the power from that school board, and give it to the mayor, whom the voters have also elected.

Furthermore, let’s be honest, only 7.7 percent of LA voters actually made it to the ballot box to vote for the school board.. And since one can only vote for the candidate in one’s own district, the means a still smaller sliver of the population voted for each the seven people who have charge of a budget that’s larger than that of the entire city of Los Angeles.

Whereas, three times that many people show up to vote for mayor.

And they know who the mayor is, for God’s sake. (Quick, name any three of the seven LAUSD board members. Can’t do it? Neither could I before I started reporting on the friggin’ subject.)

So, where exactly is the huge “disenfranchisement” in transferring some of the power to govern LA’s schools from one group of (barely) elected officials to another elected official whom, incidentally, we can vote out of office when and if he annoys us.

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The mayor and his group can appeal to the State Supreme Court, but the high court is considered unlikely to take the case.

In other words, that’s pretty much the ball game. We’re back to business as usual.

After the decision was announced, school board president Marlene Cantor told reporters that the decision clears the way for her board and the mayor to “keep working on improving the schools.” The most ironic three words in that sentence are “keep working” and “improving”-—since in any reality-based universe there has been little if anything in the way of collaborative work or progress when it comes to the district’s most troubled schools.

On the other hand, do we really believe that, had Antonio prevailed, he would have been some kind of glorious schools savior? Of course not. But both his ambition and the pressure of the public spotlight would have necessitated that he make some bold and decisive moves— even if it was just within those three school clusters. That, at the very least, could have created a model for reform that might have, in turn, shamed the district into making a few sane moves of its own.

But he didn’t prevail. And for anyone who believes the board is going to throw aside decades of bureaucratic torpor to become born-again reformers eager to power-share with the mayor for the sake of LA’s precious, wonderful, deserving kids, I have three words for you: Green Dot Charters.

[NOTE: For that sorry story click here and here.]

Yesterday at his press conference, Antonio pledged that his push for school reform is far from over. yet he offered no specifics.

In the meantime, the activist parents and the charter schools will push however they can from the fringes.

Hell, anything’s better than this.