Executive Director's note: Of straw men and manufactured crises… 

“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” —Abraham Lincoln

By the time you are reading this, we will have learned whether Lincoln was right. At this writing, the California Legislature is considering one of the most overt political assaults on representative government in a generation—legislation to allow the mayor of Los Angeles to assume a measure of control over the operation of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Over these past many months, it has been well chronicled as to how Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has attempted to fulfill a promise he made in his 2005 campaign, which was to take over the “troubled” school district. After months of fits and starts, Assembly Bill 1381 was hijacked in the state Senate and amended to provide for the implementation of the mayor’s scheme.

By the time you read this, one of three things (or a combination of them) will have occurred:

• The bill will have suffered a worthy death, and the LAUSD board of education will have moved on with its program of increasing student achievement in partnership with a new superintendent; or
• The truly awful version of the bill will have passed and been signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger—who pledged to do so far in advance of the bill coming into print, no matter what was in it; or
• Some watered-down version of the bill, designed as a face-saving measure for the mayor, will have passed, allowing everyone to declare victory.

It is regrettable that this drama has been played out in such an overtly political setting. The mayor and his supporters have slandered the district, using what lawyers call “bad facts”—information that is outdated, out of context, or both—to justify the need for the mayor to take over the district. On the crucial issue of student achievement, for example, the mayor and his people long ignored—and only grudgingly acknowledged, late in the debate—that the district has in fact shown excellent progress in test scores at the elementary level. Scores at the middle school and high school level continue to lag behind, but this is very much the same story for every major urban school district in the country. And it’s a well-known fact that it takes time for reforms that bear fruit at the elementary level to start to pay off in upper grades.

The improved test scores are the legacy that has been established by retiring Superintendent Roy Romer and the board of education with which he has worked over the last several years. Romer, the former governor of Colorado, a national leader in education reform and former chair of the Democratic National Committee, has established a pattern of success in LAUSD that should be emulated in other urban districts across the country, not vilified by municipal leaders who create “straw men” to knock down so they can come to the rescue in a classic example of a manufactured crisis.

No one is happy with the dropout rates that the mayor hammers the district about, but it is worth noting that most of the “facts” the mayor uses either rely on data that was collected with a flawed methodology, such as the Harvard dropout study that’s often cited as evidence of the district’s failure, or that are out-of-date; that recent story about U.S. dropout rates in Education Week, which was picked up by Villaraigosa and ballyhooed across the country, dealt with numbers from 2002!

In public hearings and legislative sessions to discuss the issue, Superintendent Romer and board President Marlene Canter have done a fabulous job of presenting the facts and refuting many of the arguments made by the mayor. The fact is, LAUSD does better across the board in almost every category in dispute compared to any other urban district in the nation—including those that are run by mayors.

Notwithstanding all of the happy talk about the policy or political imperative of mayors taking over school districts in this country, there are several reasons why this is a major problem in California:

There is no culture for this kind of top-down municipal management in our state. California’s system of government is driven by the concept of checks and balances, and Eastern-style mayoral control of city government is quite foreign. This kind of culture may work in one-party towns like Chicago and Cleveland, but the closest thing you’ll find to that kind of model in California is San Francisco, and Mayor Gavin Newsom has made it clear that he would rather partner with the school district there to address the conditions of children as opposed to running the school district. He appears to have the quaint idea that as mayor he already has plenty to do.

There is no analytical basis to conclude that mayors running school districts make any difference when it comes to improving student achievement. I have just completed a year of service on the Presidents’ Joint Commission on LAUSD Governance, created by the Los Angeles City Council and the LAUSD board, and I can tell you that aside from recommendations for some measure of decentralization to compensate for the district’s enormous size, there was not one recommendation adopted by the commission that supported mayoral control. Rather, the commission believes that it is in the best interests of children to collaborate and partner with city and county leaders, using models found all over the country.

And, finally, the populist citizens of this state take a dim view of having the governance of their institutions diverted from their control without their consent. We are reliably informed that the reason the mayor went directly to the Legislature to secure his objectives was because the issue “didn’t poll well,” and would likely be defeated if taken to the voters. I wonder why?

In the final analysis, this entire debate has been a colossal waste of everyone’s time. Some folks are willing to be charitable, giving the mayor credit for surfacing a “useful” debate about the conditions of schools in Los Angeles. OK; I’ll grant him that if that is what it takes to get folks to exercise real leadership in addressing the real problems of real kids and schools.
However, if this legislation is successful in some form and we witness a fundamental break by a term-limited and politically driven governor and Legislature with the age-old concept of representative governance of our public schools, then we will have a major fight on our hands. It was not by accident that the governance system of our schools was invented over 100 years ago; the state constitution defines that system the way it does to insulate schools from the rampant corruption of city government at that time.

This is a system that has proven itself and is worth saving, and one of the reasons why the observance of the 75th anniversary of the California School Boards Association has been such a big deal for us this year. We represent a form of self government that is epitomized in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, wherein he called on all Americans to ensure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”