Opinion: Mayor challenges lawyers
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
Hundreds of California lawyers who gathered in Anaheim for their annual convention got an earful from Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who told them that these days their profession often stands in the way of progress and equal protection. His chief exhibit: the two court rulings, one last year and one this year, that invalidated the legislation that would have transferred substantial control over the Los Angeles Unified School District from the school board to him.
‘Let’s face the hard truth,’ he told lawyers Friday. ‘The legal system no longer leads the way.’
Villaraigosa compared the failure of public schools today to the era in which national guardsmen blocked the schoolhouse door to prevent black students from attending previously all-white schools. Treatment of students in Los Angeles schools, he said, is ‘as insidious as it was in the Deep South, when we see how few of our kids graduate from high school, and how many of them, if they do, are scoring in the bottom 20 percentile in the nation.’
It was a comparison Villaraigosa used often during his fight last year to get Assembly Bill 1381, also known as the Romero Bill, through the Legislature. After Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Dzintra Janavs struck down the law as unconstitutional on Dec. 21, 2006 and California’s Second District Court of Appeal sustained her decision on April 17, the mayor successfully campaigned to win a majority of supporters on the school board and is now moving forward with a plan to lead two LAUSD high schools and the elementary and middle schools that feed them. He recently announced that two donors had given $50 million to the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools that he established, proving that he was right all along when he said his involvement in schools would spur unprecedented investment from donors.
But his combative speech at the annual Morrison lunch displayed at least as much anger at his bill’s fate in court as it showed resolve to try a different approach to improving schools.
We wanted to achieve greater efficiency and more local control of our schools. Our position was one of good faith and it was straightforward.... The state Constitution grants the Legislature the exclusive authority to determine the structure of the public school system. Cases going back a hundred years tell us the school districts derive their authority directly from the state Legislature. It is the Legislature, after all, which created the schools in the first place.... Opponents — school board members — argued that the law violates the Constitution. And two courts agreed with them. The courts reached their decision in spite of two well-settled principles: that the Legislature has plenary authority over the administration of public instruction; and duly enacted legislation is entitled to considerable deference in the face of a legal challenge... Yet the basis for the court decision was that the Legislature...cannot transfer any authority over the public school system....
‘I’m not here to quibble,’ Villaraigosa said. If anything, though, ‘quibble’ seemed too weak a word for the mayor’s complaints. The AB 1381 litigation
challenged our fundamental values. The court decided that the will of the Legislature and the city and communities to stand up to reform our system is not enough.... An invisible school board running a failing system of more than 700,000 students was preferred, even despite our state’s guarantee of a quality public education for every child.
By the way, it is not unprcedented for non-attorneys to headine the State Bar convention. But see a commentary from my former editor, Roger Grace of the Metropolitan News-Enterprise, about the practice here. See a California Lawyer cover story on Villaraigosa and his counsel, Thomas Saenz, here.
Villaraigosa’s argument has a few weak spots. In rejecting a bill to transfer power from the school board to the superintendent and to create a ‘council of mayors’ that Villaraigosa would control and that would have the power to veto the selection of a superintendent, the court was not standing in the schoolhouse door in some attempt to prevent improvement. In the LAUSD, where roughly half (the exact numbers are in dispute) of 9th-graders fail to finish high school and earn a diploma, education may well improve if control is transferred from the elected school board to the mayor. It’s worth trying. But stripping the school board of control is not some judicial no-brainer equivalent to ordering desegregation despite state laws to the contrary. It is the right to an education that is fundamental, not the right to have a mayor obtain school control by a bill rather than by a public vote.
After the speech, a much smaller group of lawyers gathered in a nearby room at the Anaheim Marriott to hear from LAUSD staff attorney Kevin Reed, as well as Fredric Woocher, one of the co-counsels in the district’s successful lawsuit to overturn AB 1381. They discussed why the court ruled for them, and in the process continued — probably without meaning to — the battle with Villaraigosa that ended in court six months ago.
Behind the bitterness Villaraigosa expressed over his court losses, he made some important points. He said most of the people in the room — and a look around showed several hundred mostly white California attorneys in their 30s, 40s and on up — got where they did with the help of a public school education. He guessed that most of them who had children were putting them through private schools. The implication — Villaraigosa left it unsaid, but it is common knowledge in LAUSD — was that public schools serve, or fail, mostly people of color and the poor. Many schools in Los Angeles are, in fact, nearly as segregated today as were schools in the South when governors were still resisting Brown v. Board of Education.
It was the legal system, and not bureaucracies or lawmakers, that opened up public schools and compelled them to improve the quality of education delivered to non-whites. Without lawyers and judges, Villaraigosa, said, schools that were opened to Latinos in the landmark 1947 case of Mendez v. Westminster may have remained off-limits to him and thousands of other students. The mayor may be wrong in equating mayoral control with civil rights; he is not wrong in decrying the state of the schools and their lack of support today from people who benefited from them years ago.
Oddly it was Reed, the school district’s lawyer, who crystalized the point the mayor made earlier. Reed noted that Los Angeles is the home of the entertainment industry and many wealthy people, but that it always astounded him that they took little responsibility for the city’s schools.
‘People talk about the Los Angeles Unified School District as though they are somebody else’s kids,’ Reed said.