Not a grain mill on acid, but a $230 million LAUSD high school | Eric Richardson

For a long time, one of California school districts' main complaints was the financial inability to build new schools.

Starting in the early 80s, the result of Prop. 13 and the subsequent Reagan and post-Reagan political climates, school funding tanked, making LAUSD, among many other districts, unable to build schools. That meant classroom overcrowding, overworked teachers, year-round scheduling, and busing disputes, among many other distractions from the business of education.

But now, after a political shift that has seen conservatives embrace the notion of public schooling, and a spate of state and local bonds to fund public schools, the LAUSD is building schools again.

That seems like it should be a good thing. Until you look more closely at how the district has been handling its role as school-builder.

LAUSD has built a bunch of new schools in the past few years – driving west-to-east on any major street will show you that. And the district says that, even with enrollment declining, schools are still way overstuffed and yet more are needed. Let's grant them that.

What's worrisome to me is not their claim of a need for schools, which may indeed be real, nor the inherent compromise of spending on new buildings instead of (say) new teachers.

No, the thing that bothers me is the way they're going about rebuilding the district. Why is LAUSD eminent-domaining low-rent neighborhoods? Why is the district dropping $100 million more than necessary on an (admittedly cool-looking) high school? Couldn't they build new schools without making these sorts of moves, which do little more than damage public trust?

Maybe I wouldn't be as concerned about that if the district was doing a great job under its other charges – like educating students. But there's no question that the district is doing its typically poor job of that, too. Even looking past standardized test scores, a new study shows that many L.A. students don't even know about state-required college prep classes.

And let us not forget last year's payroll disaster that dramatically underpaid some teachers and overpaid others.

Reacting to the questionable management of both the educational and infrastructural sides of the district, Mayor Villaraigosa has quietly wrested control of LAUSD's operations away from the school board's elected superintendent, David Brewer, and handed it to some dude in his office, named Ramon Cortines.

It's too early, of course, to know what difference that's going to make, but I hope Cortines has the mettle to get LAUSD's runaway mine cart back on the rails. As part of that, maybe he can make the LAUSD's construction initiatives justifiable again.

The Cost of Living

photograph by YuDesign

David Zahniser's piece in today's Times laid out some of the latest about anti-gang program reform in Los Angeles - mainly, that the L.A. Bridges program will be dropped in favor of (hopefully more accountable) prevention and intervention programs in 12 specific gang-reduction zones. While reading it, I tripped over the following piece of information:

"Each of the 12 zones -- neighborhoods such as Panorama City, Cypress Park and Baldwin Village -- will receive $1 million per year in prevention funds, enough to target at least 200 children per zone."

It was sobering to think about how, even after whatever lessons have or haven't been learned by the inefficiency of L.A. Bridges, this is the best we can realistically hope for in terms of raw numbers. $1 million to target 200 children per gang-reduction zone (to this, Councilwoman Janice Hahn reliably quips: "'I mean, all of Markham Middle School' -- which has an enrollment of 1,500 -- 'is at risk of joining gangs'"). And what would an acceptable success rate be in terms of gang prevention? 70%? 10%?

I believe strongly in the value of human lives, and 20 or 50 "saved" children per zone is no small thing, but with tens of thousands of gang members in L.A. (estimates vary between 30,000-60,000), we're talking about band-aids. In addition, there is the problem of measuring success: How long would one keep tracking the children involved in such programs? How effective can long-term tracking be, when many of these children are illegal immigrants? Do we declare success if they stay out of gangs for 10 years, and join in the 11th? How surely could we determine whether they were active gang members or not? How to know whether a child would have stayed out of gangs anyway?

I'm in support of both prevention and intervention programs, as I think too much emphasis is placed on law enforcement when it comes to this problem. And I certainly am not smart enough to draw up a short-term plan that sounds better than this new strategy. But I don't think much will change unless this city somehow tackles larger issues of economic and educational inequality (in addition to all those thornier issues of gun control, immigration, prison reform, interracial tensions, etc.) If ever gang membership and gang violence significantly decrease in L.A., I can't see it being by design.