The mayor’s field trip

MAYOR ANTONIO VILLARAIGOSA is scheduled to return to Sacramento today, and one view of the trip is that he’s on a rescue mission. His friend and ally, Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D-Los Angeles), called the mayor last week and told him his plan to take control of Los Angeles schools was in deep trouble and would fall apart soon without some serious face time with skeptical lawmakers.

A more realistic take on Villaraigosa’s schools plan is that rather than being near death, it is nowhere at all, in large part because the mayor has not fleshed out crucial details. Lawmakers have been unwilling to commit to a bill they haven’t seen. They don’t know what mayoral control means apart from the broad outlines the mayor has sketched out.

The basics are hard not to like. More accountability for school performance and student achievement, vested in a single elected official rather than spread across a seven-member board of education. The Los Angeles mayor would act through a council of his counterparts from smaller cities, a nod to the fact that more than 20 municipalities send their children to Los Angeles Unified School District campuses.

But would mayoral control mean municipal control, with roles for the City Council, city attorney and city controller, or would the mayor be alone atop the district? Would any elected body have oversight over the mayor’s actions on schools, or would that be left directly to the voters? Could funding be transferred between the city’s budget and the school district’s? Many lawmakers, whom Nunez said were preparing to turn thumbs-down on the mayor’s plan, are actually just scratching their heads, unwilling to turn their thumbs either way until they know more. It hasn’t helped that Senate Majority Leader Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles) has yet to release the text of her bill to accomplish the mayor’s plans.

Outside Sacramento, and perhaps L.A. City Hall, the process looks like a major fiasco. But lawmakers know that the speaker’s very public call to the mayor, and the mayor’s quick response, may well be part of Villaraigosa’s strategy. This is a battle he badly wants to win, and both he and Romero may be reluctant to commit to paper anything they can’t later reshape in an image more palatable to teacher unions and the legislators they support.

One objection to the mayor’s plan, voiced by Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg (D-Los Angeles), a former teacher and school board member, is that it would force a governance change on the district without giving local residents a vote. Villaraigosa, in turn, worries that fear and inertia would sink a local ballot measure, as well as delay the entire reform.

A solution may be to write a local vote into the legislation -- to take place in five years, after residents have had a chance to see whether they like having the mayor run the schools. In Boston, a local mayoral-control measure squeaked through by a single percentage point in 1989. Five years later, a second referendum chose mayoral control, 70% to 30%.