LAUSD -- a crisis too good to waste
That’s not the piney whiff of Christmas you smell -- it’s the saltier scent of revolt.
Angry Chicago workers are occupying the factory that shut down and fired them on three days’ notice. Angry stockholders picketed on Wall Street, one carrying a scrawled cardboard sign admonishing brokers to “Jump, You [bleeps].” Angry taxpayers fume about CEOs who pocket bonus millions as their stock value shrivels, or who fly private jets to D.C. to beg for tax money.
The national mood is for throwing the bums out. “Change” now feels like it has an “or else” tacked on.
This week, the head guy’s head rolled at the Los Angeles Unified School District. The man who navigated the U.S. Navy to become a vice admiral got deep-sixed from a job that turned out to be even harder: superintendent of the LAUSD.
David L. Brewer departs with a half-million-dollar contract buyout. The cartoonist and poet Tony Peyser told me he thinks Brewer should get paid in “tiny amounts at odd increments” by the same loused-up payroll system that’s cost the district tens of millions of dollars and still can’t get all the teachers’ paychecks exactly right.
The LAUSD is one of the few institutions that touches almost every life in the city -- even if it’s just because we all pay taxes to support it. And for years, the LAUSD has been the can’t-do institution. The billion-dollar Belmont Learning Center construction disaster. The payroll mess. Kids flunking. Kids dropping out.
“The notion of the district being in crisis has been with us for at least 15 years,” says Charles Kerchner of Claremont Graduate University. He studies the LAUSD, bless him, and has coauthored the book “Learning From L.A: Institutional Change in American Public Education.”
Brewer is getting out while the getting is good, before the biggest state budget cut tsunami hits. The word’s come down from Sacramento: At least $200 million has to go from the district’s $8.6-billion budget this year, and another $400 million next year.
This, as Ted Mitchell, president of the State Board of Education, told me, is “a crisis too good to waste.” Lean times force change in a way that flush times can’t. Brewer’s exit only adds to the momentum. Ideally, we would leave classroom spending unscathed but force a reinvention of the wheel at Beaudry -- shorthand for the LAUSD headquarters (on Beaudry Avenue) and shorthand for bureaucracy.
Sandra Tsing Loh, who talks and writes entertainingly of her fury not at the particular school her kids go to (which she finds heroic and effective) but at the LAUSD, told me parents have had enough of being summoned to protest budget cuts “on behalf of our children.” Because “we are given no say in what the billions are spent on,” Loh fulminates, “we are in effect shilling for all these padded professionals” at Beaudry.
When she gets even more riled up, you can almost hear her spitting out the word that describes perhaps her biggest bad guys: “consultants.” The Daily News has toted up $173 million in deals the district made with outside contractors, in some cases to do work that sounded like it duplicated what in-house staff does, from computer work to public and media relations.
In the LAUSD’s defense, Kerchner says it comparatively puts a lot of money into instruction -- 59%, more than any big district except Chicago, at 61%. And the LAUSD, Kerchner believes, is more willing to experiment than other districts, with magnet schools and charters and Green Dot.
Now if only it could be that creative at its downtown headquarters. As Kerchner says, the LAUSD, like many such institutions, runs on groupthink.
“Big organizations,” Kerchner told me, “have a way of getting things done, which is their way and very hard to permeate.”
Best case? Extreme budget cuts could offer up the opportunity to flatten out hierarchies and streamline ossified processes. “There are so many steps ... between the top of the system and the kids and teachers at the bottom,” Kerchner said.
For example, instead of just buying a textbook and letting teachers build classes around that, the LAUSD spends thousands of hours and millions of dollars on a massive instructional “system” that gives teachers orders, not goals, and can make as much sense as me buying a big fancy car for one trip to the grocery store.
Arnold Schwarzenegger said he wanted to blow up the boxes of government. He sure didn’t have in mind being forced to do it at the point of a budget gun. But now that the moment’s here, the LAUSD could make the best of it and help to restore the public’s confidence in its drift to the Rodney Dangerfield of districts.
Or else.
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