Tensions Rise as Mayor Miffs School Board

The long-simmering tension between a mayor impatient with school bureaucracy and an increasingly defensive Board of Education has broken into the open.

It happened when Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan said in a Times interview Wednesday of the seven members of the Los Angeles Unified School District board:

“They don’t have the mental equipment, the experience equipment, to run it right.”

Reaction among the seven apparent butts of the insult Thursday was strangely mixed. Some seethed. Some didn’t even blink. Others suggested that by raising his rhetoric to a new level of pique and pointedness, Riordan was sabotaging a quiet reform movement that could bring forth some of his wishes.

“My paper is still steaming,” said board member Barbara Boudreaux, a former school principal, who took the remark as an act of war--especially Riordan’s accompanying suggestion that board members are more concerned with ethnic constituencies than with children.

“If you declare war on me, I declare war on you back,” said Boudreaux, an African American.

Riordan is hardly alone in criticizing the board, which has been vilified for everything ranging from low test scores to massive textbook shortages to the high price of the Belmont Learning Center.

His complaints have largely been general, tending to echo the public’s overall dissatisfaction with public education.

Until Wednesday.

Victoria Castro saw the newest remarks as a taint on all board members.

“To be petty, insulting, name-calling is really beneath him and the position of the mayor and an apology is due to the board members,” she said.

But newcomer Valerie Fields was sure the remark didn’t mean her.

“I don’t take any offense at all,” Fields said. “I’m sure the mayor didn’t mean me, because he keeps on telling me he thinks I’m doing a good job.”

And David Tokofsky only found the language “exaggerated”--a consequence, he believes, of the mayor’s justified frustration.

Though Riordan has no formal authority over schools, he has taken up the bully pulpit on the topic, especially in his second term. He has hammered education bureaucrats, particularly principals who run underachieving schools.

“We need a revolution in our schools,” he has often said.

Riordan has shown great interest in educational experiments underway in Boston and Chicago, where city chief executives have been given broad authority to set school budgets, hire and fire top education officials and intervene in a broad range of educational issues. He has also discussed possible charter reforms, including expansion of the school board.

The apparent escalation in Riordan’s criticisms of the school district comes at a time when one of his close political allies is cultivating school board support for a series of reforms designed to answer the mayor’s complaints.

Supt. Ruben Zacarias is expected later this month to ask the school board to approve significant governance changes. In essence, the proposal would increase decision-making authority at all the district’s 660 schools and narrow the authority of the school board and administrators. The Board of Education would be primarily responsible for holding individual schools accountable to performance standards, rather than telling them how to do their jobs.

William Ouchi, a UCLA management consultant and close advisor to the mayor, said he has met with every board member seeking support for the reforms, which he helped fashion as a leader of the LEARN reform movement, which seeks to give more autonomy to schools that join.

Ouchi said he is optimistic about winning a majority.

But some board members said Thursday that Riordan’s remarks will be counterproductive.

“It seems a very strange way to get the board to go along with your suggestions, by attacking them,” said board President Julie Korenstein, who said she wrote a letter to Riordan on Thursday expressing her dismay.

Boudreaux was blunter.

“They are trying to degrade us, undermine us, make us less than officeholders,” Boudreaux said. “Then he can come through with Mike Roos [the president of LEARN] with a flag saying they saved L.A. Unified. That’s a bunch of hogwash.”

Seeking to defuse the reaction, a spokeswoman for Riordan said the remarks, part of a lengthy interview with The Times as he wound down a trip to Washington, were not intended to single anyone out or be insulting, but merely reflected an escalation of the mayor’s frequent complaints about the performance of the Los Angeles school system.

“He’s cranking up the volume on something he’s been saying for years and years,” said Noelia Rodriguez, the mayor’s press deputy. “If it got too loud, at least it got people’s attention.”

While neither retracting nor apologizing for the comment that board members lack the “mental equipment, the experience equipment” to run the district properly, Rodriguez sought to clarify the mayor’s point as referring primarily to board members’ lack of resolve to resist narrow political pressures.

“There was no intent to portray anybody as not being intelligent,” she said. “The intent was to point out the fact that children seem to not be the top priority in the current system.”

Some board members rebuffed that explanation.

“They’re very personal words,” said Castro, who represents the largely Latino Eastside. “It’s not quoting an action. It’s not a policy we’ve done. . . . I will read into his words what I believe is his perspective. It is his perspective that I only look at education ethnically.”

Boudreaux, who represents the predominantly minority portion of the district in South-Central Los Angeles, viewed the comment as an attack on all blacks.

“This is the greatest insult to Black History Month that I have ever seen, for the mayor to openly come out and assault the black elected officials of this city,” Boudreaux said.

“Who else could he be talking about but the three of us,” she said, referring to herself, Latina Castro and board member George Kiriyama, a Japanese American. “He has put himself out front as being anti-ethnic.”