NEWS ANALYSIS : Schools Issue Muscles Into Mayoral Race

With an emotional power reminiscent of the 1970s furor over school busing, the movement to break up the Los Angeles Unified School District is muscling its way into the 1993 mayor’s race.

Not only is the controversy heightening racial tensions, it is threatening to overshadow issues such as the economy and crime over which the mayor has direct control.

But while the mayor of Los Angeles has no statutory authority over public education, it is an issue that any candidate for political office can ill afford to ignore. Too many voters are either parents or taxpayers with a vested interest in local schools. And nearly 40% of the city’s voters live in the San Fernando Valley, where the sentiment is strongest for breaking up the school district.

“It really doesn’t matter what the mayor can or can’t do,” said Arnold Steinberg, a Valley-based pollster and political consultant. “People really think the mayor can and should do more with education. If you try to explain that the mayor has no jurisdiction, people don’t want to hear it. They think he ought to take a leadership role.”

Paul Clarke, another Valley-based consultant, said he thought the issue of breaking up the school district could become a “litmus test” for mayoral candidates.

“It’s one of those issues that says something about a candidate’s philosophy about local control,” said Clarke, who campaigned against school busing. Communities everywhere are demanding more control, not just over schools but over decisions relating to the number of liquor stores in neighborhoods or to the kind of commuter rail system to be run along their streets, he said.

“Any time a candidate does not respond to what people are talking about, he gets himself in trouble,” Clarke said. “But there is always a danger in getting involved in the school board morass.”

So far, seven of the top candidates for mayor have weighed in on the issue. Councilman Joel Wachs got the debate rolling by advocating the breakup of the district. He was quickly joined by Councilman Nate Holden and former LAUSD school board President Julian Nava.

Meanwhile, Councilman Michael Woo, one of the candidates who is working hardest to attract minority voters, surprised some supporters this week when he refused to dismiss the breakup concept, and in fact said it “needs serious thought.”

State Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Panorama City), like Woo, said the idea deserves further study. Multimillionaire attorney Richard Riordan and former deputy mayor Tom Houston are against the dissolution.

Valley school activists for years have entertained the notion of creating a separate district. But the idea gained fresh momentum after a school redistricting fight last summer in which the Valley lost political power.

Valley Advocates for Local Unified Education (VALUE), the prime champion of breakup, grew out of that struggle, said Jill Reiss, VALUE’s co-chair, a Northridge mother with two children in LAUSD magnet schools.

State Sen. David A. Roberti (D-Van Nuys), a liberal Democrat and president pro tem of the Senate, gave greater political legitimacy to the movement when he joined it late last year.

Then Wachs, responding to polling data, brought the issue into the mayor’s race.

According to Wachs’ political consultant, Harvey Englander, reforming the education system was identified as one of the top three issues on voters’ minds in a Wachs poll a month ago.

Another private poll, taken by a New York-based research firm for downtown business interests seeking to get a fix on voter sentiments, also has confirmed that education is a hot-button issue with Los Angeles voters, said one political operative familiar with the survey.

Still, candidates who advocate breaking up the district run the risk of being accused of pandering to separatist and even racist sentiments. That reputation could prove fatal in a citywide election.

In the short run, a candidate courting the proponents of a school district breakup could gain enough votes to make it past the mayoral primary in April, where the top vote-getters may need less than 25% of the votes to advance to the runoff.

But in the runoff, where victory requires 50% plus one vote, a candidate who espouses dismantling the district could face a groundswell of opposition, not only from East and South Los Angeles, where a breakup is particularly unpopular, but from the Westside, as well, where liberal voters may reject what they see as a racially divisive policy.

Los Angeles City Councilwoman Rita Walters, an African-American and former school board member, said she sees the movement as “extremely divisive” and has expressed disappointment that many of the city’s leading mayoral candidates have waffled on the issue or supported it.

People such as Reiss at VALUE insist that critics are misreading their motives.

“If I were a racist I would not have my kids in magnet schools where the racial makeup is more diverse than it is in my local schools,” Reiss said.

She said the true impetus behind the VALUE movement is a sense that the school district is an unmanageable, remote behemoth that responds badly if at all to the interests of Valley students.

But even critics who do not see racist motivations say the movement is a danger to the community, and is being cynically exploited by certain candidates.

“It’s a way for candidates to attract media,” said Esther Valadez, project manager for the New Economics for Women, a nonprofit group that builds inner-city housing with day care and after school facilities for the children of working parents.

Some local politicians are questioning why the mayoral candidates are focusing on educational matters that are beyond mayoral jurisdiction when there are so many vital issues facing the city.

“What ever happened to public safety?” asked City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas. “What about economic development? Where are the fresh, bold public policy ideas around those issues? If the candidates can’t get voters interested in their ideas on those subjects, it makes you wonder why they’re running.”