Corporate Suites Become Arena for Activist Politics : Government: Doors have opened to old foes in bids to alter power structure of the police and schools.

Every week, a group of 30 or 40 people from all over Los Angeles, dressed in pantsuits and corduroys, blue jeans and running shoes, gather in downtown skyscrapers to map out political strategies with some of the city’s most prominent executives.

It is a scene that is becoming familiar this year as corporate suites--not City Hall or the Board of Education--have become the headquarters for grass-roots campaigns to alter the power structure of the city’s school system and its police force.

The two efforts--to impose more civilian control over the Police Department as recommended by the Christopher Commission and to rehabilitate an ailing school system--have thrust the business community into the forefront of local politics. But its role is decidedly different from the days when secretive committees handpicked public officials and set public policy agendas in private clubs.

Today’s executives are trying to transform their concerns into popular causes by opening their doors to old antagonists, including labor organizers and civil rights advocates.

It adds up to a tacit admission that private elites do not believe that they can win on their own anymore in Los Angeles and that coalition-building is the order of the day even for those at the top who used to shy away from the hurly-burly of street politics.

“The private sector is no longer the secret, invisible hand,” said Robert Gottlieb, a UCLA urban planning professor who has written extensively about the city’s power structure. “The attitude today is to bring in the minorities and outsiders.”

Dominated as they are by members of the downtown Establishment, the two campaigns for school reform and police restructuring have a surprisingly populist flavor.

Men such as lawyer Warren Christopher, the former U.S. deputy secretary of state; Robert E. Wycoff, president of Atlantic Richfield, and Roy Anderson, chairman emeritus of Lockheed, are adopting the tactics of grass-roots activists, getting their message out to churches and synagogues, participating in debates and presiding over raucous public meetings.

The corporate architects of the two campaigns are gambling that if they take their case to the public, they can build a majority around common goals and values--even in a city as divided as this one is by culture, language, income and geography.

“Basically, business leaders learned from (Mayor) Tom Bradley that rainbow coalition-building can serve the interests of the downtown Establishment,” said Steven Erie, a political science professor at UC San Diego.

If the corporate reformers have a chance of winning enough allies to succeed, Erie and other political consultants said, it is because a growing number of people agree that the city is in crisis.

“It’s the fear of unraveling, the specter of New York, of the ungovernable city, that is bringing people together in these curious alliances,” Erie said.

The campaigns to change the school district and the Police Department operate independently from one another. But they have much in common. Both are trying to force formidable bureaucracies, the educational system and the Police Department, to become more accountable to the citizenry.

The school reform movement, led by the private, nonprofit Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now (LEARN), contends that education will improve only if the teachers union, the Los Angeles Unified School District’s central administration and the state Department of Education relinquish to parents, teachers and principals much of their power over school finances, curricula, hiring and firing.

The second campaign, run by Citizens for Law Enforcement and Reform (CLEAR), is backing a June 2 ballot measure that would change the City Charter to make elected officials more responsible for the conduct of the Police Department. If approved by a majority of voters, the measure would give the mayor and the City Council greater authority to hire and fire the police chief.

Many of the same people, including Lockheed’s Anderson, influential downtown lawyer Richard Riordan and Urban League President John Mack, are active on behalf of both causes.

A number of the city’s major downtown law and accounting firms have provided free staff time to the two efforts. Both campaigns are relying on some of the same corporate benefactors, such as Arco, Southern California Edison and First Interstate Bank of California. To date, LEARN reports contributions and pledges of more than $1.5 million. Spokesmen for the campaign for changes in the Police Department said last week they have raised $300,000.

The campaigns also have contracted with the same political consulting firm, Marathon Communications.

And the campaigns face a common struggle. Each could wind up in a battle royal with one of two key unions--United Teachers-Los Angeles and the Police Protective League.

Bill Violante, president of the Police Protective League, announced last week that his union will oppose the June ballot measure. The police union’s participation means that the campaign for stronger civilian control of the department could be outspent by the financially robust union and outmatched on the street by a phalanx of volunteers.

As for the school reform effort, Helen Bernstein, president of UTLA and a member of LEARN’s 13-member executive board, has made it clear that her presence is no guarantee of union support for its agenda.

“Teachers are extremely distrustful of business,” Bernstein said. “They view them as outsiders coming in to dictate how things should be done. And of course, big business tends to be anti-union, and (that) doesn’t help the perception.”

At the heart of union hostility, said Bernstein, is the belief that if business had not championed various tax limitation measures over the last two decades, schools would not be in crisis now.

Bernstein talked about her own sense of disorientation upon meeting for the first time with the LEARN executive committee.

“It was an eye-opening experience,” she said. “All those white men sitting up there on the 51st floor of whatever building it was. It was a different life, another L.A.”

But LEARN’s efforts to accommodate the teachers union could backfire. Already, its decision to load up its seven task forces responsible for hammering out proposals with UTLA members, school administrators and other school employees has caused grumbling among some parents and community groups.

Nearly 20% of the 400-member task forces responsible for formulating LEARN’s reform plan are UTLA members, more than enough, say critics, to derail any proposal that might threaten the union’s influence over pay raises or disciplinary procedures affecting teachers.

“At the first LEARN meeting I went to, the first seven or eight seats at the head of the table were occupied by UTLA members,” said Mark Novak, a parent and member of a San Fernando Valley community organization pushing for school reform. “It was clear to me the union wanted to make a statement that they were a force to be reckoned with.”

LEARN grew out of meetings between a small group of downtown lawyers and executives and the Industrial Areas Foundation, a confederation of neighborhood activists working on school reform issues. Both groups were reacting to mounting evidence that because of the declining quality of public education, fewer students were qualified to enter the work force.

LEARN’s board, formed last year, includes Bernstein, Riordan, Wycoff, Anderson, Mack, school Supt. William Anton, and several business executives, including Phillip L. Williams, vice chairman of the board of Times Mirror Co., which publishes the Los Angeles Times.

LEARN’s stated purpose is to decentralize the school district, making individual schools the masters of their own fate and vastly expanding the power of principals, teachers and parents.

The decentralization plan is to be worked out by the LEARN board in partnership with the seven task forces, which, besides teachers and other school district employees, include parents and the leaders of civic and neighborhood groups.

Once a plan is adopted, it will be up to LEARN participants to win public support and approval from the school board and lawmakers in Sacramento. LEARN officials hope much of the process can be completed by the end of the year.

Veteran legislator Mike Roos, a former state assemblyman, was hired to shepherd the LEARN reforms through whatever political minefields lie between Bunker Hill and Sacramento.

Roos is optimistic, convinced that community pressure for meaningful change will prevail.

“The drive is going to come from those who have the kids most in mind. I don’t think they’re going to settle for a pot of warmed-over spit.”

Parents and others who want LEARN to champion drastic change in the school system hold something of a trump card. If the LEARN plan does not satisfy them, they can throw their support behind a voucher initiative, bitterly opposed by school district employees, which would let parents use public money to subsidize their children’s education at the school of their choice. Architects of the proposed initiative hope to qualify the initiative for the November ballot.

Nor is the voucher initiative the only dark cloud on the horizon for the organized teachers and school administrators. Many experts predict that, unless it is reformed, the school system will collapse into bankruptcy before the decade is over.

“I don’t think we have any choice but to stick with LEARN,” said Bernstein. “We can’t do what needs to be done by ourselves. We have to have reinforcements.”

The campaign for more civilian control of the Police Department has certain advantages over LEARN. It is not fraught with internal dissent and it has the highly publicized Rodney G. King police beating trial to help make its case for police reform.

But the campaign has less time and less money than LEARN does to mobilize public support. And it has a formidable opponent in Police Chief Daryl F. Gates, who is regularly on the stump arguing that the police ballot measure will make the department vulnerable to self-serving politicians.

Proponents of the ballot measure insist that they are calling for a degree of civilian control over the department, not a sellout to politicians.

But the troop of downtown lawyers and executives who have formed behind Christopher may have to persuade some people that their alliance with civil rights groups and ethnic activists is not an act of political expediency--a way of preserving their hegemony in the midst of a changing city.

Indeed, a few people who have signed on to promote the ballot measure have said privately that they did so, despite concerns about its effect on law enforcement, because they wanted to give Christopher and his patrician style of leadership a vote of confidence.

“At times like this, you have to put your doubts aside and stand with Chris,” said one prominent lawyer who asked not to be named.

So far, civic leaders such as Christopher who have mobilized the CLEAR and LEARN campaigns have impressed people with their ability to reach out to groups as diverse as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Industrial Areas Foundation, UTLA, Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the Gay and Lesbian Community Service Center.

As yet unproven is the ability of these new coalitions to win over the unaffiliated majority--those parents and voters who are primarily concerned with having good schools and safe neighborhoods.