The schools’ loss

BY TRAVELING TO SACRAMENTO to broker a deal for mayoral control of schools that offered something to the existing school board, teachers unions, parents and other cities in the Los Angeles Unified School District, Antonio Villaraigosa, former Assembly speaker, reminded us all of what a remarkably gifted politician he is. Too gifted, in this case.

Villaraigosa needed to go to Sacramento and play the role of strong mayor, sticking to his initially stated principles on behalf of Los Angeles students at the risk of offending powerful interests. Instead, he played the role of skilled legislator accommodating these conflicting interests. In other words, he caved.

What’s attractive about mayoral control of school districts is that it tends to enhance accountability by creating a cleaner governance structure. But Villaraigosa’s deft deal-making skills have twisted his original plan into a convoluted compromise that would actually lead to more confusion and less accountability.

The actual legislative language is still being hashed out, but this page cannot support any bill that remains faithful to the compromise announced Wednesday. It’s a lamentable turn of events, given our enthusiasm for the concept of mayoral control. But partial mayoral oversight is not a recipe for the type of success and reform that is needed and can be attained when a visible and powerful elected official is fully in charge of the schools.

Under the deal the mayor brokered with these entrenched interests, it is not clear who will be in charge. The mayor claims that the preserved school board will make policy instead of micromanage, but there seem to be too many garbled lines of authority. The plan gives the board some power to give the superintendent marching orders -- on some issues but not all -- but then dilutes accountability by granting the mayor the ultimate power to hire and fire the superintendent. Again, this would be the only major city plan that moves toward mayoral control while creating an even more confused governance structure than previously existed.

It’s naturally alarming that the deal was brokered with the teachers unions, which have long resisted meaningful reform and retain too strong a voice in the district’s governance. As the main contributor to scarcely followed school-board elections, union interests often discourage the board from making key reforms.

So it was appalling to see Villaraigosa effectively hand control over curriculum to individual schools. That’s something the current board would not give up in a contract. Its insistence on central oversight of the curriculum has been a major force in what improvement the L.A. schools have made. The mayor is looking less like a reformer eager to overcome union resistance to change.

One benefit of mayoral control elsewhere has been that it changes the conversation about schools. Instead of talking school politics, the debate switches to the more fruitful topic of how to teach kids.

Villaraigosa’s bill ensures the opposite. By tearing the district’s structure asunder, retaining an elected board but splitting its powers and setting up an adversarial relationship between board and mayor, and board and superintendent, the main talking points of the next six years will be about who’s fighting whom, and who’s to blame for what. That’s not what an already contentious district needs.