Spelling the ‘R’ Word : L.A. schools: Now that minorities are the majority, the rules have changed.

As an elementary-school principal in the Los Angeles Unified School District, I feel I must comment on two related issues: the possible strike by teachers and the announcement / recommendation that our district be broken up into 30 smaller districts.

But before I discuss the “r” word, let me make a few points. First, it would be easy to count the number of threatened and actual job actions and number of strike days that United Teachers of Los Angeles has “sponsored” since minority students became the majority in the school district. Additionally, it would be easy to compare how many similar activities, threatened or actual, occurred before we became a “minority school district.”

Second, I find it interesting that politicians and their followers are now calling for the breakup of the district after the first Latino and first African-American educators were named superintendent of the second-largest district in the United States.

As a Latino administrator, I am getting a different yet clear message of racism (the “r” word) other than the one that the public perceives as it relates to these two issues. One message tells me that now that LAUSD has a majority of minority students, strikes or job actions can be called regularly, as the only people to be affected will be minority students and their parents. The second message tells me that minority educators and administrators have reached the “glass ceiling,” that now it is time to change the rules.

Both the teachers union and persons recommending the breakup of the district claim to have the best interests of the students in mind, yet they hold opposing points of view.

I need to re-emphasize that the message being received due to both the threatened strike and the recommendation to break up the district is one of racism: not your everyday “not in my neighborhood / school district” type of racism, but a more subtle, yet just as harmful form--institutional racism.

State Sen. David Roberti (D-Los Angeles), UTLA and their supporters have formed a vise of institutional racism that is now trying to close in on minority students, parents, teachers, administrators and the city’s minority population.

The color lines are being drawn, and the rhetoric is quite clear: In Los Angeles, minority educators will not be tolerated as the educational leaders for a district that is now a majority of minorities.

The good ol’ majority has become the minority, and they don’t like it.