Why You Need to Learn More About LEARN : It’s a careful, thoughtful, serious plan for saving L.A.’s schools

The Los Angeles Unified School District is not doing the job it needs to do. Even many of those elected to govern the district, members of the Los Angeles school board, are quick to admit that the district is now facing a make-it-or-break-it crisis.

Two years ago a group of concerned educators and corporate and community leaders looked around and saw a disaster in the making. Not just a disaster for schoolchildren. A disaster for any person who planned to live in Los Angeles or any business that planned to operate here. Because these leaders knew that when a public school system has trouble delivering graduates who can reason, read, write and become productive adults, it’s not long before the community’s quality of life--and business profits--go the way of the dinosaur. Thus the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now (LEARN) was born.

LEARN brought together hundreds of diverse groups, with all major ethnic and interest groups represented, to try to fashion a reform plan. LEARN now has that plan, drafted by some of the best education reformers in the state and drawn from reforms tested in other cities. It is no exaggeration to say, as many have, that it may be the last, best hope for public education in Los Angeles.

A recent Times Poll shows that no group of parents--not Anglo, not Latino, not African-American, not rich, not poor, not middle-class, not in the San Fernando Valley, not in the central city--expresses contentment with the way the LAUSD schools are run. Education seems to be losing the battle against crime and excessive bureaucracy. The news is full of stories about anguished middle-class parents who want to send their children to L.A. public schools but fear that the LAUSD cannot ensure that they will get the education they need, in a safe environment.

The LAUSD, in the meantime, has been charged with the mammoth, and some suggest impossible, task of managing a school system of 640,000 students who speak 87 languages and dialects, in an area where crime rates have risen. The district is run by a seven-member elected board, which often has acted merely as a launching pad for career politicians. Then add to this messy mix the teachers union, United Teachers-Los Angeles, a powerful force representing 35,000, which has been at bitter odds with the board and the district administration over pay and benefits. There’s one more major player in this sometimes tragic play: the state government, which is $8 billion in the red.

Now, consider these ingredients in this nightmarish political brew and think of multiplying most of them by seven. Seven districts. Seven school boards. Multiple unions. Mini-LAUSDs jockeying for funding in Sacramento. That’s what Sen. David A. Roberti (D-Van Nuys) prescribes--prematurely--as the tonic. Roberti’s frustration with the LAUSD is understandable. But even he freely admits that there’s nothing in his district-breakup proposal that really gets at providing better education in the classroom.

LEARN, on the other hand, has put forth specific recommendations for improving education, increasing parent participation and, probably most important, returning control of schools to principals, teachers and parents.

The LEARN plan calls for reforms at all 650 campuses within the district over five years. The seven-part program calls for giving parents more say over which district schools their children attend, proposes on-campus social services as needed so that children are ready to learn and recommends better training for both new and veteran teachers.

The initial plan, which if approved by the school board next month as expected, will be implemented in about 30 schools in the 1993-94 school year. The first phase is expected to cost $3.3 million, all of which will be raised privately; there’s no question, however, that support from Sacramento will be needed.

There will be a series of community meetings about LEARN in the next few weeks. The LAUSD district office can tell you where a meeting will be held near you. And more news stories are forthcoming. It’s a proposal worth learning about, and supporting, because Los Angeles needs its public schools, now more than ever, to be the best they can be.