Let’s Put an End to Unequal Schooling : Education: Settlement of a lawsuit promises to equalize resources between affluent and poor areas of Los Angeles.

Six years ago, four Los Angeles parents with children in the Los Angeles Unified School District recognized that the promise of equal educational opportunity for poor and minority students was not being met.

One parent, who had immigrated to the United States as a teen-ager, believed she had received a more thorough grade-school education in El Salvador than her children were receiving in Pacoima. But she did not have to look to Central America to see an even greater contrast. One year, one of her daughters was directed to attend school in Granada Hills, less than 10 miles away, because of overcrowding in her Pacoima school. At Granada Hills, the teachers had been teaching longer and seemed to know more. The school had a better physical plant.

Parents complained that children attending schools in Pacoima, Boyle Heights and South-Central, for example, did not receive the same education as children in Pacific Palisades, Chatsworth and other more-affluent communities within the district.

Investigation proved that in minority and low-income communities there are more teachers with limited experience or emergency credentials; more have teaching assignments outside their fields. Physical facilities are older and run-down. Student populations are more dense. Schools in affluent communities have more space per student and smaller student populations overall.

These size differences affect the quality of education. In large schools there is less sense of community. Too many students are lost in the crowd, resulting in lower achievement and higher dropout rates.

A lawsuit, Rodriguez v. Los Angeles Unified School District, was filed to challenge these inequities. The case was scheduled to go to trial earlier this year, but a tentative agreement has been reached. The proposed agreement will, if adopted, bring budget decisions to the local school level and equalize educational resources by allocating funds to schools based on enrollment. It will attack the problems of overcrowding and large schools by ensuring utilization of all available construction funds, establishing enrollment limits and directing efforts to restructure large schools into more manageable units.

Hearings on the settlement are being held this month before the Los Angeles school board.

Those who recognize the inequity of a public-school system spending a disproportionate share of its funds on students in more affluent communities support the agreement. But there is dissension. Although expressing support for the principle of equalization, Helen Bernstein, president of the United Teachers of Los Angeles, has attacked the proposal, charging that it will interfere with collective-bargaining rights and cause massive transfers of senior teachers.

She is mistaken. The agreement does not modify or supersede any contract provisions between unions and the district. Teacher transfers are not ruled out as a means of addressing inequalities, but with adequate planning during a five-year phase-in period, most adjustments will occur through attrition and new teacher assignments.

The proposed agreement will bring long-overdue reforms. More than a decade of experience has shown that transportation is an inadequate answer to equal educational opportunity. The district is busing thousands of poor and minority students to relieve overcrowding and to comply with integration programs. Achievement levels and morale of these students is poor. Indeed, some studies show that these students are not only doing worse than students in the receiving schools, but are also falling behind those in the home schools left behind.

The current inequalities are not simply illegal. They reflect a shortsighted and indefensible public policy. The enormous gulf developing between extremes of wealth and poverty, a direct consequence of unequal educational opportunity, has disturbing implications for our democratic institutions. Quite apart from public-policy concerns, we cannot ignore the moral implications of our society’s willingness to perpetuate inequality through its funding decisions respecting public schools.

The children attending underfunded schools do not overlook the message that they are less valued by society. When these children internalize that judgment, they abandon their dreams of a better life.

Our children are the innocents. The quality of their education should not be determined by the accident of where, and to whom, they are born. Instead of perpetuating inequality, our schools should be the foundation upon which the aspirations of all students may be raised.

The proposed agreement will further that end. Who can tell poor and minority students that they do not deserve an equal chance?