COLUMN ONE : Breaking Up’s Been Hard to Do : For 23 years, people have tried to split the L.A. school district. It is a saga of flip-flops and feuds fueled by shifting political alliances and the city’s big swing in demographics.

The clock was advancing toward midnight on Sept. 20, 1970, and an unlikely alliance of school reformers stood on the brink of victory.

At the stroke of 12, their measure aimed at dismantling the vast Los Angeles Unified School District--and its attendant headaches over forced busing, bureaucratic bloat, anemic test scores and restless students--would automatically become law.

But at 11:45 p.m., then-Gov. Ronald Reagan abruptly took up his pen and vetoed the bill.

Now, as then, people are astounded that a politician famous for his aversion to big government would rescue the unwieldy urban district. Yet the episode is just one of the ironies that run through years of legislative attempts to break up the nation’s second-largest public school system.

That is because the long-running saga is, at its core, a story about outsiders and insiders--and who is inside the Los Angeles schools has changed dramatically over the years. As a result, key players have either taken improbable positions or switched sides in a debate where the arguments, emotions and rhetoric have remained largely the same.

“The players have switched. The conditions have switched,” said Julian Nava, the Cal State Northridge history professor who promoted the district’s breakup during his unsuccessful primary campaign for Los Angeles mayor. “The majority has become the minority and the minority has become the majority.”

As the first Latino elected to the school board, Nava lambasted breakup efforts in 1970 as the “American version of South African apartheid.” Now retired from the board, Nava says he has “evolved with conditions” and is gung-ho for the idea.

In 1970, then-Assemblyman David A. Roberti voted against the measure to carve up the district. Now the state Senate’s leading Democrat, Roberti has introduced his own bill establishing a commission to split up the system. The bill has passed one Senate committee, but it faces its stiffest test in the Assembly.

Twenty-three years ago, frustrated San Francisco Assemblyman Willie Brown and other minority lawmakers voted for the 1970 measure to give African-American and Latino communities “local control” to escape an Anglo-dominated school board slow to correct segregated education.

Today, Brown is against the breakup proposal and stands by other minority leaders who say white, middle-class San Fernando Valley parents are promoting the idea to form educational enclaves and condemn minority students to inferior schooling.

The fulcrum for this political seesaw has been the sheer force of demographics. Since 1970, minority students have gone from 50% to 87% of school population, and the number from welfare families has doubled. With 640,000 pupils from myriad nations, the educational polyglot has more students than Alaska has citizens, and its teachers hear “good morning” in 86 languages.

Educating such a huge, needy student population--a “third-world constituency” one LAUSD official calls it--is expensive. The strain can be felt not only in the district’s Grand Avenue boardroom but 400 miles north, in the marble halls of the Capitol, where suburban lawmakers and “educrats” ruefully eye the school system known as “The Elephant”--or worse.

“It is one of what I call Luppie districts--Large Urban Pig Districts,” said Assemblyman Pat Nolan (R-Glendale), a loud critic of LAUSD spending. “The gravity from the bureaucracy sucks up every dime.”

It costs $21.4 million for the district to open its doors each classroom day, and just getting students to their seats requires 2,200 buses traveling 250,000 miles a day--enough to reach the moon.

The problem of size is also a privilege: Nearly a fourth of California’s 120 lawmakers represent families living within the district’s 708-square-mile territory. That translates into matchless clout to preserve funding and, says LAUSD lobbyist Ron Prescott, serves as the surrogate protector for minority students otherwise at “political risk” because their parents do not get involved with government.

Chop up the district and those children will lose their voice in the public debate over how to spend the state’s educational dollars, Prescott said.

“Let’s say you have just a Watts Unified School District, with only two representatives,” he said. “It’s dead. It’s over.”

Unrest Begins

Ironically, it was in Watts where breakup fever took hold 25 years ago.

The 1965 riots threw a spotlight on racism, and an obvious target was the massive school district, which had been making only glacial progress toward integration despite the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision declaring that separate was not equal.

Despite a 1963 class-action desegregation lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, Los Angeles schools, then 50% white, were woefully stratified. By the late 1960s, a third of the district’s elementary schools had minority enrollments of 80% or greater; students at all but eight of those minority schools were reading below the national norms.

General unrest compounded the problems. In early 1968, thousands of Latino students walked out of classes demanding more Mexican-Americans in authority and ethnic food in lunchrooms. The board was forced to remove a white principal at Fremont High in South Los Angeles because he refused to sanction the Black Student Union. Activists pressured for courses in African-American history and black English.

The demands were part of a nationwide movement among minorities, especially African-Americans, to assume some control of schools and other public institutions in big cities, said Stanford University education professor Michael Kirst. Unable to occupy mayoral suites, school board seats and superintendents’ offices, black activists embraced the idea of dismantling urban districts as the “logical way” to seize political power, he said.

African-American politicians led the charge to radically decentralize New York City’s public school system in the late 1960s, and copycat legislation soon appeared in Sacramento. Assemblyman Leon Ralph, a Democrat, introduced a bill in 1969 allowing disadvantaged communities to form their own school districts. His claim: Minority parents could do a “significantly better job” of teaching their children than Los Angeles Unified.

Other bills introduced about that time attempted to change the number of seats on the school board, required each Los Angeles school to have an elected community council and split the district into 10 independent regions.

Unlikely Allies

None survived the Capitol gantlet, but the one that came the closest bore the name of Watts Assemblyman Bill Greene--a black former Freedom Rider in the South and field representative for the Congress of Racial Equality who was educated in the segregated schools of Kansas City, Kan.

Greene’s unlikely ally was Sen. John L. Harmer, a white conservative Republican from Glendale. In 1968, Harmer penned a screed warning about the dangers of big, centralized government. In his view, few institutions personified that evil as much as Los Angeles Unified.

The bull-necked liberal and the austere conservative, an odd couple even by Sacramento standards, were accused of being tandem bigots and separatists when they sponsored a 1968 bill to break the mammoth system into entities of no greater than 60,000 students. The measure died.

The next year, however, Harmer persuaded the Senate to establish a 10-member panel of lawmakers to study reorganization of large urban districts. It provided political cover for the pair’s 1970 proposal establishing a seven-member commission to divide the district into 12 or 24 entities, each with a locally elected board but operating under a central authority for such duties as purchasing.

Transcripts show that although some community activists, such as future Los Angeles City Councilwoman Rita Walters, staunchly opposed the bill, key minority lawmakers--among them Brown--gave it crucial support. Brushing aside promises by the district to radically decentralize, leaders such as state Sen. Mervyn Dymally--who would become California’s first black lieutenant governor--were angry that the white-dominated school board continued to fight desegregation.

Records show that Brown sparred verbally with at least one board member over the issue, helped to move the measure out of a committee and voted in the majority when the bill was approved by the Assembly, 43-33.

Although the bill was passed by a Democratic Legislature, Reagan had the final say. The California Constitution allows a bill to become law if the governor takes no action within a certain time after it gets to his desk. And as that Sept. 21 deadline drew near for the break-up bill, everyone expected exactly that from the politician who preached the virtues of downsized government.

Then the telephone rang at Harmer’s home late in the evening of Sept. 20. Harmer, now retired and living in Utah, said Reagan called to explain that he was going to veto the bill because his kitchen cabinet, a coterie of prominent white Los Angeles businessmen, feared that the measure would add $500 million to local government costs.

In his official veto message, Reagan said he wanted to give the district’s decentralization plan a chance. Others saw another purpose.

“A Republican governor could veto it because it kept power over the education of everybody in white hands,” said Jim Mills of San Diego, Senate president pro tem at the time. “That’s the kind of thing that could appeal to a conservative like Ronald Reagan.”

Power Change

The transformation of power began in 1979, when the district began holding elections based on geographic districts rather than systemwide. It was hastened July 7, 1992, when the City Council approved a controversial plan shifting a board seat from the San Fernando Valley to the urban core.

With the election of Victoria Castro to a new Eastside seat in April, minorities occupy four of the seven Board of Education slots. Two are Latinas, one is Asian-American and one African-American. The board has its first Latina president, Leticia Quezada, and its first African-American superintendent, Sid Thompson.

But in the Valley, the reapportionment wars were added to a list of indignities that included forced busing of minority students to Valley schools in the 1970s, closing some neighborhood schools, bilingual classes and a year-round schedule that put students in summer classes in an area where it is three times more likely to hit 95 degrees.

During the 1980s, this frustration found a voice in Assemblywoman Marian W. La Follette (R-Northridge), who waged a lonely campaign in Sacramento to break the Valley free from LAUSD. Like the minority lawmakers in the late 1960s, La Follette said constituents felt “completely disregarded.”

Sacramento had little sympathy, though, and Democrats quietly scuttled a succession of La Follette breakup measures. Widely perceived as an excuse for white flight, the idea seemed to lie dead on the political trash heap.

Yet the same process of reapportionment that would hurt the Valley locally, ceding one of its two school board seats to the inner city, would deliver a powerful new champion in state politics. A new legislative map approved by the state Supreme Court in late 1991 pushed Roberti “over the hill” from his old Hollywood district into Van Nuys.

Roberti said running for office in the new district gave him an education about school politics. Not everyone north of Mulholland was rich or white, he discovered, and his new constituents were fed up with a public school “behemoth that gets bigger and bigger” but cannot seem to educate students or allow parents a voice.

“How can parents be involved if they travel an hour and a half in traffic from Van Nuys to downtown?” asked Roberti, who voted against Harmer-Greene.

Although the district’s budget has increased more than fivefold since 1970, statistics show that it is administratively leaner. Its administrative cost of $137 per student ranks among the lowest of the state’s largest districts.

But its test scores are among California’s worst, and Roberti has joined the outsiders in trying to wrest control. On Oct. 18, the Senate leader stepped forward at a community meeting in Panorama City to sign a symbolic “Declaration of Independence” written by a coalition called VALUE--Valley Advocates for Local Unified Education. Its goal: Break free from LAUSD.

Just as a conservative Republican’s signature had snuffed a movement 22 years earlier, the stroke of a liberal Democrat’s pen had resurrected it. Since then, Roberti has unveiled a bill that would establish a citizens commission to redraw the district into at least six entities, a plan that would be submitted to voters.

African-American and Latino leaders have denounced Roberti’s plan as a “power grab” by middle-class whites. Los Angeles National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People President Joseph H. Duff said it would create central city districts of “low political esteem, totally saddled with the kindred problems of racial isolation.” Other critics say breakup proponents should give an ambitious district decentralization plan by the LEARN coalition (Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now) a chance to succeed.

Switching Sides

Standing with them now is Willie Brown, who has emerged as the quintessential Sacramento insider after his 1980 election as Assembly Speaker, a powerful post he has held longer than even the legendary Jesse M. Unruh.

Brown initially declined to comment on the reasons for his switch. When asked what has changed since the days he voted to splinter LAUSD, he would only say through a spokesman, “With age, comes wisdom.”

But in an interview last week, Brown said: “I’ve never been for breaking up that district. I did a political convenience for Harmer and Greene 30 years ago, and it had nothing to do with the merits.”

La Follette and others in Sacramento say Brown shifted his position because of the rising political influence of teachers unions, which have traditionally opposed district breakup bills. One of the Capitol’s most generous special interests, the California Teachers Assn., has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years to Brown, as well as to candidates and initiatives he has backed, records show.

During the 1989 and 1990 election cycle, the union contributed $380,000 to committees the Speaker formed to fend off ballot measures on term limits and reapportionment. That is in addition to $300,000 the union spent independently to aid Brown’s fight for the status quo. CTA political director Alice Huffman helped Brown found the Black American Political Assn. in the 1970s, and recently she began a movement to draft the Speaker for governor.

Roberti has also received large donations from CTA and its affiliate, United Teachers-Los Angeles, but he now finds himself at odds with them over the proposed breakup. Teachers unions generally oppose dismantling large urban districts because it threatens their bargaining power base and forces them into the uncertainty of negotiating contracts with new districts, said Stanford professor Kirst.

Steve Thompson, Brown’s chief of staff during the early 1980s, said the unions’ hostility toward a breakup scheme contributed to the Speaker’s changed position. But Thompson believes that Brown’s main worry, as the consummate insider, is keeping his job, and that means keeping minority lawmakers happy. Holding on to the speakership takes 41 votes each session from fellow Assembly members, so Brown cannot afford to alienate minority colleagues in the lower house who, unlike 23 years ago, oppose dismantling the giant district.

“One of the rules of maintaining your speakership is not to go crossways with a significant number of the members of your caucus on an issue that’s not directly related to your district. . . . I think that’s fundamental,” said Thompson, now an officer with the California Medical Assn.

“When you couple that with the CTA’s position, it becomes obvious.”

CHRONOLOGY: Times of Change

In 1870, the boundaries for the Los Angeles school district were fixed at the Los Angeles city limits. Suburban areas were added in a spate of annexations between 1900 and the early 1930s. Except for some isolated secessions, the major push to dismantle it came after the 1965 Watts riots. Some key events:

1936: Beverly Hills schools withdraw from the district, forming a separate system.

1944: Culver City schools secede.

1945: Newhall, Castaic and Saugus schools secede, forming their own districts.

1961: The Los Angeles Unified School District is formed, combining Los Angeles City School District (elementary schools) and Los Angeles City High School District.

1963: The American Civil Liberties Union files a class-action lawsuit on behalf of minority students charging LAUSD with segregation.

1964: School board member Georgiana Hardy, speaking to the Sherman Oaks Rotary Club, outlines a plan to decentralize the school district, bringing supervision and administration closer to schools and parents.

1965: Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, commonly known as Title I, which required that parents have a say on how schools spend new federal grants. It became a catalyst for community activism in the schools.

1968: Former state Sen. John Harmer (R-Glendale) and Assemblyman Bill Greene (D-Los Angeles) sponsor a bill to split LAUSD, creating two or three separate districts in the San Fernando Valley. Among the opponents is then-LAUSD board member Julian Nava, who says the measure would create an “American version of South African apartheid.” The bill is defeated.

1969: Harmer persuades the Senate to establish a special committee and spend $150,000 for a study on how large urban school districts can be decentralized. The panel produces a 1,000-page report that declares LAUSD an educational disaster that wastes untold human resources and $11.4 million a year in administrative overhead. The committee’s work provides fodder for a second bill by Harmer and Greene to break up the Los Angeles district. That bill is supported by Assemblyman Willie Brown of San Francisco and opposed by then-Assemblyman David A. Roberti of Los Angeles.

1969: Assemblyman Leon Ralph (D-Los Angeles) offers a bill to let disadvantaged urban areas form their own school districts. Ralph contends that low-income residents could do a significantly better job of educating their children than large urban districts. The measure fails. Other bills propose making it easier for neighborhoods to leave the district, breaking it into 10 administrative districts with elected boards, and adding four seats to the seven-member board.

1970: Superior Court Judge Alfred Gitelson rules that LAUSD deliberately perpetuated segregation and orders districtwide integration. The district has 730,000 students, of whom 58% are Anglo, 20% black, 18% Latino and 4% Asian-American.

1970: To the surprise of almost everyone, Gov. Ronald Reagan vetoes the Harmer-Greene bill, which was modified to create a commission to reorganize the district into 12 to 24 administrative areas, each with an elected board.

1978: Proposition 13 passes, forcing the district to cut $180 million and drastically curtail an administrative decentralization plan.

1979: LAUSD holds its first elections by geographic districts since 1904. The move helps boost minority representation in a district where minorities now comprise 77% of the enrollment.

1981: Assemblywoman Marian La Follette (D-Northridge) begins an unsuccessful decade-long fight to allow the Valley to secede from LAUSD.

1982: The nonpartisan legislative analyst’s office advocates breaking up LAUSD to increase its fiscal efficiency and community involvement.

1991: State Supreme Court draws up new legislative districts. Roberti, a state senator since 1971, is pushed out into a new Valley district.

1992: The Los Angeles City Council approves a new LAUSD reapportionment plan that takes away one of the Valley’s seats and creates one in a largely Latino, Eastside area. This angers Valley Chamber of Commerce officials, who vow to renew their efforts to dismantle LAUSD. They take their cause to Roberti.

1992: Valley activists and Chamber of Commerce officials kick off a campaign to break up LAUSD. Attending are Roberti, Los Angeles City Councilman Joel Wachs, school board member Roberta Weintraub and Assemblyman Terry Friedman (D-Encino), all of whom sign a symbolic “Declaration of Independence.” Roberti vows to introduce legislation to break up the district and win approval within two years.

1993: Roberti unveils a bill to create a 25-member citizen commission that will study how to divide the district into systems of no more than 100,000 students. The commission’s plan would be submitted to voters in the district. Minority lawmakers--including Assembly Speaker Brown--vow to oppose the measure.

1993: Because of the reapportionment, minorities hold four of the seven school board seats for the first time, and all are opposed to breaking up the district.

About This Series

The Times today begins a four-part series examining the movement to break up the Los Angeles Unified School District:

* Today: Political flip-flops and sea changes in the district’s makeup shaped the tangled history of attempts to split up the district.

* Monday: Peeling paint and hot classrooms are among the problems that have made some parents favor a breakup.

* Tuesday: Remembering desegregation and other tough battles, many African-Americans and Latinos are suspicious of the movement to dismantle the school system.

* Wednesday: Experts tackle the question of whether smaller districts provide better educations than large ones.