The Business of Revolution in Schools

The audience of about 400 predominantly Latino working parents listened appreciatively as the orator urged them to fight.

“The parents and the children,” he said, “have become the enemies of the Los Angeles Unified School District.” The rhetoric smacked of the ‘60s. So did the surroundings. The meeting was in a humble old Baptist church in a poor neighborhood just south of downtown. It looked like a perfect spot to begin a social revolution.

The speaker, though, was no revolutionary. Just the opposite. Richard Riordan, 59, is a multimillionaire Republican lawyer and investor and an influential adviser in the affairs of the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese. That night, his Establishment background was emphasized by his attire. Riordan, headed to a black tie dinner later in the evening, wore a tuxedo.

Riordan is one of the city’s top back-room political powers. He has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Mayor Tom Bradley’s political campaigns, served him on the Recreation and Parks Commission and Coliseum Commission and undertaken many behind-the-scenes missions for the mayor.

Here in the city of the boast, brag and rude put-down, Riordan is soft-spoken and polite. But always conscious of his power, he insists that things be done his way. And that was why he stood this night in his tuxedo, essentially preaching to the choir about the city’s troubled schools.

Riordan had been invited to the meeting by the sponsoring Southern California Organizing Committee, a grass-roots group that has been fighting to improve education, housing and law enforcement in South-Central Los Angeles.

The SCOC and sister organizations in the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys and East Los Angeles are on the attack against public schools, particularly the L.A. Unified School District. They say schools in minority neighborhoods don’t provide decent educations.

Southern California business leaders, concerned about finding a competent work force in the future, share these criticisms. Aware of that, the SCOC groups invited Riordan to organize business support. It made sense. The organizations and Riordan have been part of the archdiocese’s efforts to improve life in East and South Los Angeles. Like Riordan, these combative grass-roots groups are not accustomed to losing battles or even taking prisoners.

At the church meeting, Riordan and SCOC speakers spelled out their demands: Classroom preparation for high-skilled jobs, more computers, an end to the old tracking system that parents say consigns their kids to dead-end shop classes, and more neighborhood control of schools and curriculum.

None of these goals are new. What’s different is the confrontational way SCOC and its business allies are going about it. A few days after the meeting, Riordan and I talked about that.

“This is the most important thing, by far, I’ve ever been involved in,” said Riordan, who on this day was more typically dressed in an understated suit that spoke to his Princeton background.

Some of the methods being discussed by the SCOC coalition are explosive. One would give parents more freedom to choose where their youngsters go to school. Another would create about 50 neighborhood school boards to supervise schools. They’d be appointed by the district’s elected board, but such a move would take away considerable power from board members.

A few school board members welcome the debate. But school board President Jackie Goldberg, every bit as tough as Riordan, is suspicious.

“Riordan would like to be czar of education,” she said, “with him alone having the ability to decide what’s best for education because of his business acumen.”

With some justification, Riordan’s foes point to the bad performance of neighborhood school boards in New York City.

But Riordan is not the only business leader demanding change from the school district. The LA 2000 Partnership, composed of business executives and community leaders, will soon issue a report calling for a reorganized school district, capable of producing employees for the high technology age. It’s certain to be more tactful than Riordan’s speech at the church, but the point will be the same.

For even though Riordan’s rhetoric sounds revolutionary, it really is nothing more than bottom-line business talk: L.A. commerce has a growing demand for talented workers. The schools appear to be in no shape to supply them.

Working-class parents want their children to be those employees. In that sense, they share the goals of the business leaders. The result is a powerful political coalition. It might even be powerful enough to produce a revolution.