Decrepit District Is Tough to Demolish

When Bob Hertzberg pledged to shatter the Los Angeles Unified School District into smaller, family-friendly school districts, his plan got the kind of attention a mayoral candidate craves. When it comes to L.A. Unified, however, there’s no getting around the crooner’s axiom: Breaking up is hard to do.

For starters, the laws are stacked against it, with more steps than a Bulgarian folk dance. The last major breakup attempt, in 2001, failed even to reach voters because its San Fernando Valley proponents couldn’t satisfy a host of rules, some of which apply only to L.A. Unified.

“Folks brought a credible effort forward in 2001 and they failed, and failed miserably,” LAUSD general counsel Kevin Reed said. “There are a number of gnarly questions that would need to be unraveled.”

Critics counter that LAUSD bureaucrats and the teachers union used friendly legislators to embed those legal provisions within the state’s education code precisely to make a district split-up nearly impossible.

The process includes collecting signatures in the area that wants to secede. Proponents must get 5% of all registered voters, or 8% of those who voted in the most recent race for governor. That part’s a challenge, but anyone with funding or committed volunteers could handle it.

Besides gathering the signatures, however, petitioners must draw boundaries that satisfy myriad conditions. For one thing, none of the new, smaller districts can be worse off than the old or than each other.

For example, if the new districts are less racially or economically diverse, the breakup bid is likely to go nowhere. Resources also must be distributed fairly. A new district cannot emerge with markedly less-crowded schools than that portion of the old district from which it split.

The new districts also have to prove they will comply with lawsuit settlements negotiated by L.A. Unified, even though district critics and some activists have repeatedly questioned the LAUSD’s own compliance with them. There’s more, including retaining health benefits for retirees and honoring collective bargaining agreements. And the new districts, by statute, also would have to honor the provisions of various district reform efforts, including the LEARN initiative, which was supposed to give individual schools full control over academic reform but barely exists anywhere anymore in any meaningful form.

The Los Angeles County Office of Education must verify the signatures on the breakup petition and compile a detailed analysis of the reorganization plan. There also are various public hearings along the way and a weigh-in from the Los Angeles County Committee on School District Organization. In some cases, this 11-member commission, elected by local school district representatives, can nullify the effort outright. Later, the state Board of Education gets a look at the matter. When the state board allows an election to move forward, it also decides which areas get to vote on the proposal.

The process would normally take several years.

Critics assert that the LAUSD’s arduous breakup rules are designed to protect entrenched interests, not advance students’ welfare. The counterargument is that many past breakup efforts, if successful, would have benefited one portion of the school district at the expense of another. And the disadvantaged would likely have included minority students from low-income families.

Over the years, this argument has become harder to make because L.A. Unified’s student population across the district has become more minority and more low-income. This downward leveling would make it easier for secession to pass legal muster. Still, there’s no simple logic by which to divvy up the district’s magnet program, for example, or the ongoing districtwide $14-billion school construction project, which will take at least six to eight years to complete.

Then there are the forces of history. It has been reported that the last successful secession movement created Torrance Unified in the 1940s. Not so, said Danny Villanueva, secretary to the county’s Committee on School District Organization. Torrance Unified sprang into being with the birth of the city of Torrance. It was, for the most part, assembled out of land never part of the LAUSD’s jurisdiction. Thus, there has never been a break of any major territory from L.A. Unified, Villanueva said.

The LAUSD and the teachers union rarely work so well in concert as when fighting breakup efforts.

The union outspent backers of a 2001 Carson secession effort 25 to 1 and won the ballot-box plurality by 3 to 1. The district’s employee unions always have been prepared to use their clout to retain their clout.

But complex regulations weren’t what finally thwarted the last major breakup attempt, in 2001, in the San Fernando Valley, according to L.A. schools Supt. Roy Romer. “I was up at the state Board of Education testifying that it ought not to happen because we are making progress,” Romer said. “And we are. This is not a failing school district. We are improving faster than other urban school districts and faster than the state average.”

Hertzberg cites a dropout rate of about 50% as evidence to the contrary.

It doesn’t help breakup efforts that the current Assembly speaker, Fabian Nunez, was a lobbyist for L.A. Unified before his election to the Legislature and that most Democratic lawmakers are indebted to the teachers union, as is state Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell.

Hertzberg’s staff says he may try to outflank both the rules and the traditional rule-makers by persuading voters to pass a statewide ballot measure, an increasingly popular tactic among certain California governors with an Austrian accent.

If Hertzberg does borrow Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s direct-to-the-voters strategy, the union will attack Hertzberg as anti-teacher and anti-student. That could doom any breakup initiative -- unless the governor were to throw his full weight behind the idea. State Education Secretary Richard Riordan, the former L.A. mayor, has sided with Hertzberg, the aspiring mayor. The governor -- Riordan’s boss -- has taken no position.

Before L.A. voters pass judgment on the breakup, they must decide whether to reward, punish or ignore Hertzberg for bringing the volatile matter up again.