Wasting Our Future? : The causes of our public schools’ problems are hotly disputed by those responsible for finding a cure. : COUNTERPOINT... : The figures tell the truth. The bureaucracy is pampered while our schools decay.

Does the Los Angeles Unified School District spend education dollars on education? School Superintendent Leonard Britton won’t tell us, but the numbers do.

This fiscal year, federal, state and local governments will provide $4,524 per student enrolled in the district. Of that amount, $2,821 is spent at the schools, paying for everything from utilities to salaries. The rest pays the bills at the downtown headquarters and at the eight regional and nine division offices.

Chief among the bills are administrators’ salaries. In 1988-89, 10.6% of the district’s $3.5-billion budget--$374,449,981--went to administrators who supervised teachers, librarians, counselors, and so forth. Compensation for administrators who oversee business, clerical and custodial divisions cannot be calculated from the budget, though many of them make six-figure salaries. By contrast, the district’s 33,000 teachers received 29% of the budget--$1,040,590,000.

The number of school administrators making $100,000 a year is greater than that in city and county government combined. Britton still receives full-time chauffeur services from three rotated drivers who are called part-time bodyguards.

In the 43 school districts in Los Angeles County, the average salary of an L.A. Unified teacher ranks fourth. By contrast, administrator pay ranks first or second, no matter what the classification. True, the teachers are comparably well-paid, which Britton now takes great pride in. But they owe that to a picket line, not to the superintendent, who opposed any salary increase.

What about the kids? In 1988-89, the district spent $83,766,000 on textbooks and supplies--2% of its budget. The reported average for California’s 1,025 school districts was 4.1%. In the Los Angeles district, students often don’t have workbooks to write in, textbooks to take home or complete sets of reading books in elementary schools.

Schools are hard put to secure regular maintenance, and air conditioning is out of the question. Yet, in 1988-89, the district spent $26,840,000 redoing and redecorating central, region and division offices. All district offices are air conditioned, carpeted, well-equipped and clean--the complete opposite of a typical classroom in the district. And despite a court ruling cited by Britton, the majority of classrooms are still packed with 36 or more children.

Of course, the state should be spending more on students. But when the state does provide more money, the school district must be prevented from wasting it by rewarding bureaucrats.

Britton rightly acknowledges the importance of school leadership councils, though he omits the fact that there would be no such councils if teachers had not demanded and won them in last year’s strike. Still, under district-imposed limitations, the councils have spending control over no more than 3% of the money allotted to each school.

The brutal facts are that Los Angeles schoolchildren sit in overcrowded, dirty, hot or cold classrooms, without enough supplies to meet their educational needs, because those needs must give way to a pampered bureaucracy.