PERSPECTIVE ON EDUCATION : Trojan Horse Cozies Up to Schools : The ‘Kids First’ school proposal misses a point. The chief cause of poverty is lack of jobs for parents.

For 35 years, I’ve made a second career out of criticizing the Los Angeles School District. My grievances include the high dropout rate among Latinos, the lack of Latino teachers, overcrowded classrooms, cumbersome bureaucracy, the fact that board members are prisoners of the bureaucracy and, above all, the failure of the district to keep pace with the needs of the changing demographics of the student population.

You would think, then, that I would applaud the “Kids First” movement to restructure the district, which is being promoted by a coalition of business leaders such as corporate attorney Richard Riordan and Industrial Areas Foundation organizations (VOICE in the San Fernando Valley, the East Valley Organization, SCOC in South-Central and UNO on the East Side).

True, some of the coalition’s proposals are the same ones that were being put forward by radical educators and Latino activists in the 1960s. But I still fear a Trojan horse.

People are poor not because they lack education. They are poor because they lack money. One would like to think that hard-nosed business management, which the coalition proposes, could solve the district’s problems. But the reality is that if business wants to help, the best thing it could offer would be to guarantee good-paying jobs to the students’ parents.

Historically, the business community has been more concerned with the schools as a source of labor, rather than with the quality of education. As long as taxes remained low and there were enough workers, usually white, to fill their needs, business said little about how Los Angeles schools should be run. Now, with legions of Latinos, blacks and other minorities entering the labor market, many without adequate training and some lacking English-language skills, suddenly there’s an explosion of concern.

There’s no argument that something has to be done. Los Angeles’ commitment to education has plummeted as the Latino population has zoomed. More than 60% of the Los Angeles district’s population is now Latino. Yet Latinos drop out at a rate three times that of white students, and they score among the lowest on academic achievement tests. School district administrators know this. They have also known for some time about the changes in the labor market that the schools are supposed to feed. So they must bear a major portion of the blame for not forcing teachers and other personnel to meet the needs of the students who now make up our schools.

But let’s face it--turning to the Los Angeles business community is no answer, either. Its leaders haven’t exactly been at the forefront of educational innovation.

Where was the uproar from the business community when Gov. George Deukmejian, obsessed with balancing the state budget this year, cut such creative educational items as the California Assessment Program?

Lest the public forget, good educational programs take money. But raising money has become much more difficult since Proposition 13 passed in 1978. That so-called tax reform measure, which enjoyed strong business support, contributed greatly to the deterioration of the schools while putting funding in the hands of the state. Stop-gap measures like Proposition 98 may have given the illusion of boosting education, but they have not been generating improved education in Los Angeles.

The Industrial Areas Foundation groups--VOICE, UNO, EVO and SCOC--are powerful organizations that have earned respect within the Latino community. But before they cast predominantly white business leaders in the role of our community’s saviors, the organizers had better heed the warning that I learned from my mother--that we have a duty to the family to not bring people into our home who might cause us harm. Just last year, these same sorts of business leaders locked horns with the foundation and its local affiliates over the issue of raising the state’s minimum wage to $4.25 an hour.

Any program to restructure education in Los Angeles must begin and end at the workplace, ensuring that parents earn enough money to maintain an environment conducive to education. Any restructuring of the schools must include a revenue base that will support the wish list. Education is a human right, and the Latino community shouldn’t have to rely on the charity of business leaders.

If business leaders are really concerned about giving power to parents rather than school district bureaucrats, they should spearhead electoral reforms that allow these parents the right to vote in school board elections, regardless of their citizenship status. It is their children who are being educated; they should have a say in how that education is to be delivered.