Bradley Has an Idea on How to Motivate Children of Watts

Mayor Tom Bradley has proposed that poor preschool-age children from Watts be taken from their homes and put in motivational programs “away from their parents, because that’s what it’s going to take . . . to give them direction and training.”

The comments, made on a KCBS-TV program Monday evening discussing Watts 20 years after the 1965 riots, raised questions about whether Bradley was proposing forcibly taking children from their parents in order to “drill” motivation into them.

However, Bradley on Thursday made it clear that he had voluntary programs in mind. “I didn’t want anyone to misunderstand me,” he told reporters at a news conference. “This was never designed as some kind of juvenile hall or detention facility. It’s not designed to physically take children away from their parents. It’s voluntary. It’s never been intended to be anything else.”

Bradley’s remarks on the television show followed a discussion of education and employment problems in Watts.

Later, Bradley said: ‘This was never designed as some kind of Juvenile Hall or detention facility. It’s not designed to physically take children away from their parents. It’s voluntary. It’s never been intended to be anything else.’

“You’ve got to have better means of achieving success in the elementary schools and we’ve not yet found that formula,” Bradley said on the program. “I think that if we are going to have a change in this whole cycle of failure, we’ve got to get at the heart of it, that’s at the elementary school level. I suggest that we simply take young people out of the environment where they have no motivation because their parents don’t understand it, they never had any motivation when they were youngsters, they had their children when they were 16 and they never have gotten into this success cycle that many of us think of.

“I would propose that we take them as early as we can get them in elementary school (Bradley later said preschool) and keep them in that school setting, that formalized training and motivational setting, away from their parents, because that’s what it’s going to take, take them so that you can direct them, you can give them motivation, you can give them direction and training so that by the time they get into high school they are prepared to learn. And they will be motivated to make it through high school and get a job.”

Bradley said later in the program that the proposal was the “same concept” as child-care centers. “You might have a residential-care program or you might even be able to permit some of them to go home in the evening so they are not totally separate from their parents.”

Watts community leaders said they do not believe the mayor meant that children should be forcibly removed from homes.

“My first reaction is that what the mayor’s proposing is the same thing that we did here for years,” said Ted Watkins, executive director of the Watts Labor Community Action Committee, one of the most influential organizations in the area.

The WLCAC, Watkins said, operated a program for several years in the late 1960s and early ‘70s that sent poor children to Saugus for weeks at a time to teach them office and agricultural skills.

“Tom was very aware of that program and he was just talking about carrying something like that for preschool. He didn’t say anything about forcibly removing kids. To me it’s no different than rich parents sending their kids to boarding school for a different environment.”

But Watkins added that he thinks Bradley “faltered” in how he presented the proposal. “I’ve heard people say, ‘Did you hear him make that faux pas? ‘ Tom Bradley faltered a bit. I don’t think enough thought was given to his proposal, but there’s nothing wrong or evil in what he’s suggesting.”

Lee Jackson, deputy director of the Westminister Neighborhood Assn., who also appeared on the TV program, said he would “modify” Bradley’s proposal “because I question whether all people would react positively” to the mayor’s plan.

“To some, it sounds like you’re trying to take people’s kids away from them. Actually there are a group of kids who are not getting the kind of parenting they require, who really do need to be pulled out and allowed the opportunity to grow and develop. But most people have very conservative traditions about family life, and you assault those traditions at your own risk.”

Watkins does not expect Bradley to suffer any political fallout in Watts due to his remarks because, he said, “There hasn’t been a negative reaction to a black politician in Watts in 40 years.”

The mayor’s remarks got wide attention Thursday, and Bradley met with reporters at Burbank Airport after returning from a trip to Northern California.

The mayor said that he had no specific program or plan in mind, but that he had been talking publicly about his idea for nearly 20 years. He said that during his unsuccessful 1982 gubernatorial campaign, he had pledged to implement his idea in some sort of pilot program.

“It’s not a program confined to South-Central Los Angeles, he said. “It’s not confined to the black community.” Bradley said the problems he wants to address “exist throughout the city.”

At the press conference, Bradley likened his proposal to “military academies” where children stay for more hours than in other schools. He also likened his idea to an Israeli facility, whose name he said he could not recall, but which he said he had toured. There, he said, “they took a diverse population from many types of backgrounds and they molded those youngsters.”

Bradley also called his idea similar to the federal Head Start program.

That program began in 1965 as an “early intervention” effort to give impoverished preschool children the skills and motivation that are presumably needed to succeed in the early grades of school.

And the mayor said his idea was similar to Operation PUSH, the self-help civil rights organization founded by the Rev. Jesse Jackson in the 1960s.

Jackson has long crusaded about the need for “breaking the cycle of pain” in disadvantaged families through a stringent regimen of study and discipline in school.

He and other politicians have stressed the value of strong discipline away from home as a means of helping to strengthen the character of troubled youths. However, they have stopped short of suggesting that youngsters be “taken” from their parents--a word Bradley backed away from on Thursday.

Jackson has called for a strong partnership between parents and schools to motivate youths.

He also has bemoaned unrestrained sex among poor youths--”babies making babies,” he calls it--and says parents who are too young to motivate are responsible for the perpetuation of undisciplined family life.

Another politician who has struck similar themes is former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. He made the California Conservation Corps one of the cornerstones of his Administration. A basic concept of the corps was to take disadvantaged youths, ages 18 through 23, away from their non-motivating environment and teach them in military-like camps how to work and follow rules.

Educators have often observed that a child’s success in school is based largely on the parents’ educational level and the stability of home life. But both have been viewed as being outside the purview of public school officials.

At times, public schools have run small-scale programs to help teach parents to help their children.

But neither public agencies nor school authorities have sought to remove children from their homes as a way to improve their educational potential.

Times staff writers Nancy Skelton and David Savage contributed to this story.