Schools Need Daring Experiment

Those who operate the multibillion-dollar Los Angeles public school system ought to try a daring experiment to ease its worst-ever financial crisis.

They should continue to operate the schools only until the money that is now available to provide children a decent education runs out.

Then, together, they should simply shut down the schools, sending a powerful message to Sacramento and taxpayers that it takes more money to run the decent school system properly, and they won’t tolerate the current mess anymore.

If the experiment works here, perhaps other hard-pressed school districts might consider doing something similar to direct the nation’s attention to the root of many of our problems: Our taxes are too low. Citizens of all other major industrial countries except South Africa pay higher taxes than we do.

Los Angeles schools could lead the way, but first the leaders of unions representing thousands of Los Angeles school employees, including supervisors and school district management, must stop damning each other for the crisis here, as they are now doing with such fury.

Then, they ought to be able to agree on a frugal but adequate budget of about $5 billion. That should not be difficult to reach since they already agree on the needs of the schools. They are feuding with one another because they cannot agree on how to meet those needs with the little money they are going to get.

When the money that they do have is gone, school board members, administrators and all employees--or at least a majority--should stop working and refuse to be parties to a ridiculously underfunded educational program.

If they stay united, no government could force them to keep the schools open by threatening to jail or otherwise punishing management and a majority of the 58,500 full-time school employees and the thousands of other substitute teachers and part-time workers. And it would be impossible to replace them with a new work force.

So, unless we taxpayers and our political leaders are unbelievably foolish, the message would quickly become clear: We would realize we must pay more taxes to educate our children. The lesson would be taught dramatically by the 640,000 students who will be at home or roaming the streets instead of getting an education in school.

By increasing taxes generally, as other countries have done, we could also meet other basic needs ranging from welfare to health care.

Gov. Pete Wilson and most Republicans actually want to cut $2 billion from the state schools. Or, as a cruel alternative, brutalizing programs to help the elderly, the sick and the poor. The Democrats want to cut less, but none of them, even liberal Democrats, are apparently able to even utter the words tax hike without making them sound like obscenities.

But if the radical experiment is tried, all of them, and taxpayers too, would learn to say the words as quickly as Vice President Dan Quayle learned to spell potato after first spelling it recently with an e at the end.

A serious threat to operate the schools only as long as the money lasts might get the message across without carrying out the threat.

Those who operate Los Angeles schools react like people in any other government entity or private corporation when essential needs are not met. Ugly political and social battles erupt, jobs are lost and wages and salaries are cut. Sometimes poor people riot.

In the schools here, feuds erupted among employees as Republicans and Democrats in Sacramento began fighting, not over whether but over how much to cut the school district’s income.

Union representatives of about half of all employees ranging from administrators and custodians to bus drivers and bookkeepers began fighting furiously with the teachers who make up the rest of the schools’ employees.

Helen Bernstein, president of the United Teachers-Los Angeles, says relationships have deteriorated so much that School Supt. Bill Anton “is not speaking to me at all.” But Anton replied: “We did talk a couple of weeks ago.” That hardly sounds as if a once-cordial relationship has been resumed.

The teachers’ union recently came up with a modest plan that is well worth consideration to minimize the impact of the Sacramento budget cutters by, among other things, slashing the number of middle managers, freezing hiring and paying top administrators the same as the highest-paid teachers.

But the unions of other school employees denounced that as “unrealistic and divisive . . . drawn up to benefit teachers.”

Connie Moreno of the California School Employees Assn., which represents bookkeepers, clerks and other school employees, raised yet another serious but rarely discussed matter that underlies the feuding:

“Teachers show little respect for our members, most of whom are minorities. We get no recognition from the teachers at all.” She implied that racial bias is involved by adding that an estimated 70% of the teachers are white while more than 80% of the clerical staff, cafeteria workers, bus drivers and custodians are members of minority groups. (Nearly 65% of the students are Latino, 14% black, 13% white and the rest are from other minorities.)

The feuds within the school district here, and the shameful inadequacy of the school budget, will continue unless we all realize we cannot educate our children without paying the costs.

That fact applies to most other social problems facing this country. Maybe Los Angeles schools could lead the way by dramatizing the need for the obvious solution: Let’s pay enough taxes to do the right things.

They would trigger that beginning by refusing to operate the schools with less than a budget they all agree is the least they must have to give our kids a decent education.