Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa last night announced his plan to ask the California State Legislature to essentially grant himself as Mayor control over the L.A. Unified School District.  The LAUSD is a gigantic bureaucracy that proves everyday just about every folk saying about incompetent bureaucracies.  This may seem like a harsh statement but it has been earned over time and at great public expense.  The LAUSD is tragically failing the region and most importantly its students, with 60% dropping out before getting their high school diplomas.  60%.  If the LAUSD was a student performing at this level and it had any sort of real standards of excellence it would flunk itself and call for emergency remedial tutoring.

Is it possible to support any system failing 60% of the time to do its job?  It sounds like some tale of epic mismanagement from the former communist Soviet Union.  Only its worse than that because at least the USSR did a good job educating its citizens even in the worst of times.  The LAUSD is substantially more pathetic and inept than a social and economic system that made people willing to die trying to escape it.  Is it any wonder young parents are moving away from the L.A. area?  We deserve better.  The children need better.

Here are the broad outlines of the Mayor’s plan in today’s LA Times story :

Finally showing his hand after months of deliberation, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced Tuesday that he would ask the Legislature to give him overwhelming authority to run the city’s embattled public schools.

Villaraigosa unveiled his takeover strategy in his first State of the City address, during which he called for a "council of mayors" to oversee the sprawling Los Angeles Unified School District, second-largest in the nation.

That council - including leaders from the 26 smaller cities served by L.A. Unified and a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors - would hire the superintendent and approve the district’s multibillion-dollar budget.

But Villaraigosa would retain the reins of power because council votes would be in proportion to the member cities’ population and Los Angeles is bigger by far than all the others combined.

The elected Los Angeles Board of Education would not be disbanded but would be relegated to advocating for parents, ruling on student discipline and preparing annual reports on the effectiveness of schools.

The problems may be complex but the Mayor is correct in his analysis of the principle problem:  lack of accountability.  How is it possible for a system to get this bad and stay this way for so long?  Lack of accountability.  The public knows the system is broken but doesn’t know how to fix it, and they like their teachers so they are afraid of voting for anything drastic themselves.  Very few really have any idea who the school board members are, much less what they stand for and advocate.

The popular election of school board members was meant to give an informed electorate the ability to exercise direct control over the extremely important school system and force accountability directly and continually.  It doesn’t work because the electorate isn’t informed and never will be.  People are too busy with their lives while the information published about the schools is so infrequent and poor that elections for school boards are not much better than high school student government elections.

Which is to say School Board elections are usually popularity contests with little or no real substance informing most voters.  The voters are incapable of oversight over the school board.  So the schools are unaccountable and to the extent they respond to anyone are largely ruled by the interests of the unions representing its employees because they are the only ones really knowledgeable and involved in overseeing affairs.  Its a prescription for stasis with steadily increasing costs and declining quality.

The Mayor should drop the idea of the so called ‘council of mayors’ with population based representative voting however.  This is clearly a sham meant to blunt the truth of the power grab the Mayor is making here since L.A. is now and will likely remain larger in population than all the rest of the cities participating in LAUSD combined.  The sole benefit to the public of the plan would be to do exactly what the Mayor is claiming, to make one person accountable for running the schools, and the ‘council of mayors’ would just defuse the subject for the voters once again.  The Mayor is trying to have it both ways, to have sole power but still have some deniability to cover if things go wrong.  The Mayor should forthrightly propose direct control over the School District with the power to appoint and fire Superintendents and other personnel at will.  Then let the other cities decide if they wish to continue in the system based on negotiations with the Mayor’s office and the performance of the schools.  The voters of L.A. would hold the office of Mayor accountable for results one way or the other.

One can quibble about the details but the Mayor’s plan if enacted as he described it last night would in truth make his office responsible for the whole mess and give him the power to make real changes.  Voters would likely be somewhat confused by the structure but long term would hopefully figure out who’s completely in charge.  There needs to be a strong and powerful advocate for the interests of the public in education to make the serious changes so clearly needed and something like this plan is needed to break the political deadlock that has been preventing it for so long.