Fear Is Seldom the Best Reformer : Would school district breakup guarantee better results? No

It is no exaggeration to say that as goes the L.A. Unified School District, so goes Los Angeles.

It doesn’t matter whether you personally have children in the district’s public schools. It doesn’t even matter whether you have children. If this school district is not made to work better, companies won’t be able to induce enough top employees to move here, the best teachers won’t stay and the workers of tomorrow will be sales clerks who can’t add and hospital technicians who don’t know biology. All the private schools and neighboring suburban public school districts together can’t compensate for the social and human disaster that would occur if the mammoth L.A. Unified School District were to decline further. It cannot be allowed to happen. On that, all agree. It’s how to save the district that brews controversy.

The Times took a comprehensive look last week at the L.A. school district and the battle for its future. Staff writers Sandy Banks, Jean Merl, Stephanie Chavez, Henry Chu and Ralph Frammolino examined the complex political, neighborhood, class and racial battles that spawned the current move, led by Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Van Nuys), to break up the district of 640,000 students into seven districts of about 90,000 students each. Roberti himself admits that there’s nothing in his proposal that would automatically improve education in the classroom.

The experts on opposing sides of the debate agree: Merely reducing the district’s size will not help. Given the severe mismanagement and budget problems--as well as petty bureaucracies that stymie common sense--it’s understandable that frustrated parents want to do something, anything, to change the district now. But all of us owe more to the children of Los Angeles than a throw-up-your-hands solution that isn’t a solution at all. Many advocates of division say it point-blank: Breaking up the district may not help but at least things can’t get any worse. Oh yes they can.

The move to break up the district could yield more societal division: endless lawsuits from black and Latino organizations that see the breakup as promising nothing more than pitting several L.A. districts against each other in Sacramento to fight over the same shrinking pot of total education dollars.

It’s true that the San Fernando Valley, the heart of the breakup movement, is increasingly Latino and not the all-white enclave that some suggest. But racial suspicions run high, at a time when this city is least equipped to inoculate itself against racial poisons.

What’s driving this campaign, we suggest, is fear. Parents everywhere want the best for their children. Change is scary. Change must come, but it must come in ways that we know actually work. Much of what LEARN (Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now) proposes are tried and true reforms that have worked in other school districts. The education, civic and business leaders of LEARN, led by former Assemblyman Mike Roos, know that local control--at the school site--has been shown to be a key factor in successful reforms. You have to reorganize--but you don’t have to Balkanize--the district in order to ensure that parents, teachers and principals have the say at the local school.

LEARN deserves a chance to work. Why break up LAUSD--a drastic step absolutely unproven to be a cure for what ails this district--without first trying the less drastic, less divisive route advocated by LEARN?