Putting L.A. Schools in Competition

The theater of the campaign hid the substance of Dianne Feinstein’s visit to Palms Junior High School in West Los Angeles last week.

Television crews and print reporters trailed Feinstein as she visited two classrooms, recording the banal dialogue between the Democratic candidate for governor and the embarrassed and amused students. Teachers, who seemed to be ambivalent about the interruption, dutifully played show and tell.

The substance was much more controversial and interesting. It came up when Feinstein was asked at a press conference in the school library about a much-discussed method of improving public school instruction--forcing schools to compete for students.

The idea is to make education a marketplace. Give parents and children a choice. If the neighborhood school doesn’t measure up, let the the kids go to another school in the district. Or, in a more extreme version of the plan, have them go to a private school with the assistance of state aid. That’s known as the voucher plan. The competition would improve the public schools.

Feinstein was suspicious. She warned against pitting weaker schools against stronger ones. “Bring every school up,” she said.

Her Republican opponent, Sen. Pete Wilson, likes it more. A few months before, he’d said, “The concept of marketplace competition, or parental choice . . . is sufficiently attractive as a stimulant to good teaching that it deserves a thorough testing and comparison with other traditional school assignments.”

The issue’s crucial because the public schools are in a fight for their lives.

Political support for them is weakening. Many affluent white parents, unhappy with multiethnic public schools, are putting their children in private schools. In addition, the electorate is aging. An increasing number of voters have no schoolchildren. Put those two factors together and you see why Republican Gov. George Deukmejian has been able to resist demands for more school spending. He couldn’t have gotten away with it when the baby boomers were children.

Palms Junior High School, serving a middle-class and affluent section of West L.A., illustrates how competition can bring children back to the public schools. A few years ago, white parents were pulling their children out of Palms and two of the elementary schools that feed it, Castle Heights and Overland. Parents were afraid of the increasingly minority L.A. schools, and didn’t like the quality of instruction. When Linda Rosen told other parents she was sending her son, David, to Castle Heights, she said, “they just looked at me. They didn’t say a word.”

Rosen, several other parents and Palms Principal Minnie Floyd decided to compete with the private schools. Their slogan was “The Best-Kept Secret in This Neighborhood Isn’t Private.” They spread it around the neighborhoods, placing posters in store windows.

Floyd, who is black, understands the ethnic change that was frightening the white parents. She’d been principal of Manual Arts High School, a South Los Angeles school that began as working-class Anglo, became solidly black and now is increasingly Latino.

The West L.A. parents moved to stop the white flight in the elementary schools. They nagged downtown school authorities to improve the rundown-looking Castle Heights school building and grounds. A day-care center opened at the school for working families.

Floyd talked up Palms Junior High School to doubting Castle Heights and Overland parents at night meetings in neighborhood homes. Palms had a magnet school program for gifted children. But it served children from around the city and there was a waiting list. So she opened up a separate gifted program. When the school district wouldn’t fix up Palms, parents persuaded the owners of the Westside Pavilion shopping mall to repaint some of the school.

The effort paid off, said Rosen. Neighborhood enrollment is up at Castle Heights and Overland. And last year, she said, the overwhelming majority of sixth-graders at both schools went on to Palms.

Both Feinstein and Wilson approve of such efforts. Anyone would. The issue is just how far the plans should go. Feinstein and her followers fear inner-city schools could lose in the competition against schools like Palms, in prosperous neighborhoods. Wilson and his supporters relish the competition and think other schools should be forced to do the same thing.

It’s a difficult issue for both of them, one that touches of the lives of millions of parents and children. This time there was plenty of substance behind the political campaign show.