NEWS ANALYSIS : No Signs of Backing Away From District Breakup Fight : Education: Senate leader Roberti ran into unexpectedly strong opposition from Assembly Speaker Brown. Both vow to keep up the pressure next year.

The massive, 640,000-student Los Angeles Unified School District has withstood one of the greatest challenges to its existence.

Senate President Pro Tem David A. Roberti (D-Van Nuys), one of the state’s most powerful politicians, launched the assault last year by mounting a high-profile campaign to split the nation’s second-largest district into a collection of smaller districts.

But as the 1993 legislative session ended Saturday and lawmakers headed home, Roberti had failed to reach his goal, blocked by the equally powerful Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco), whose segregated education in rural Texas led him to see the proposal as an attack on inner-city schools.

Brown’s victory, however, may be short-lived.

Even before the session ended, supporters were mapping ways to revive various legislative proposals to reshape the district, which they see as too big and unresponsive to parents. Roberti and other breakup proponents say they may launch a signature-gathering drive to place an initiative on the ballot next year.

What made the breakup movement falter?

Supporters may have misjudged the depth of Brown’s personal opposition. They may also have underestimated legislative support for the Los Angeles school district’s reform-by-decentralization alternative, the LEARN plan, which began on some campuses this fall.

The legislation snagged when it hit the Assembly. Brown and his allies in the California Teachers Assn.--a prime source of campaign contributions, especially to Democrats--quickly made it known that there was little room for compromise and managed to bottle up breakup proposals. Brown, Assemblywoman Delaine Eastin (D-Fremont), chairwoman of the Assembly Education Committee, and their allies in the state’s public education Establishment said smaller school districts are no guarantee of better schooling.

“There is no magic in the number of children in a district. The magic is in how you organize the delivery of education,” said Eastin, a likely candidate for state superintendent of public instruction next year.

Roberti, citing low test scores and parent dissatisfaction in Los Angeles, won Senate approval for establishing a commission to put the breakup issue on the November, 1994, ballot. But Eastin’s committee rejected that measure in July, contending that the commission should be given broader authority to study the district, not just be focused on breaking it up.

Looming over the debate has been Proposition 174, the initiative on this November’s ballot, which would provide each school-age child with a voucher that could be redeemed at a public or private school.

Some breakup proponents believed that they could draw support by portraying their proposal as a less sweeping alternative reform to Proposition 174. But that notion seldom arose in the public debate.

Next year, the political dynamic will be different.

As Roberti sees it, if Proposition 174 wins--or even loses by a small margin--it would provide renewed impetus to the breakup forces.

At the same time, Roberti’s own political fortunes may lessen his influence in the breakup debate.

Prohibited by term limits from seeking another four-year term, Roberti is a lame duck who is expected to step aside as Senate leader within the next six months. Although he insists that schools will remain a top priority, his focus may turn elsewhere. He is considering whether to run for state treasurer or some other statewide office next year.

Meanwhile, Speaker Brown may have even more to say about education.

As interest mounts in the voucher campaign, Brown appears to be seeking to raise his profile on education. Last week, he complained that public schools are “still operating like the little red schoolhouse that I attended in the ‘40s and ‘50s.”

Brown also announced that he may organize a summit with top education officials and others patterned after the statewide economic summit he staged this year.

Brown said that if individual Los Angeles school district campuses are successful in taking control of their budgets and curriculum under the LEARN (Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring) program, the effort should be duplicated on campuses throughout the state. Brown urged Roberti to give LEARN a chance before he seeks to break up the district.

The breakup fight reflected the strains and divisions in a city that was just a frontier town of 3,000 in 1855 when the first school was built and now is a sprawling metropolitan area drawing its schoolchildren from a racially and ethnically diverse population of 4 million.

It was the most serious bid to break up the district since 1970, when the Legislature passed a measure to dismantle the district, only to see then-Gov. Ronald Reagan veto it. Ironically, Roberti--then a member of the Assembly--opposed that breakup bill, while Brown and other minority lawmakers favored it to give African-American and Latino communities greater control to break off from an Anglo-dominated school board that was slow to desegregate.

Ever since, the idea of splitting up the district has been embraced primarily by Republicans and has never advanced far in the Democratic-controlled Legislature. It remained, in Roberti’s words, “a back-burner of back-burner issues.”

But a year ago, shortly after Roberti won a special election to a new Senate seat in the San Fernando Valley, he revived the idea with a vengeance. With the clout of his Senate leadership position, he managed to put the breakup on the legislative front burner for the first time since Reagan’s veto. He immersed himself in the cause, visiting campuses and complaining about everything from graffiti-covered bathrooms at Fairfax High to the financial balance sheet of the district.

Several breakup proposals were approved by the Senate, but Roberti’s clout was limited in the Assembly, where Brown controls committee assignments and staffs and is a major source of campaign contributions to Democrats. Republicans say the speaker turned the breakup issue into a test of loyalty to him and to teachers unions, and that few Democrats were willing to challenge him.

Brown denies the charge. As he tells it, his opposition to breaking up the district was forged in the crucible of segregated schools in his native Mineola, Tex.

On Saturday, waiting for the Assembly to adjourn for the year, Brown told reporters that he fears that if the district were dismantled, inner-city schools would be penalized.

“You break up the Los Angeles school district, and you will have ghettoized schools with only kids from that given area and of that ethnic background going to school there, and the result will be separate and unequal,” he said.

Asked about the role his own educational experience played in his opposition, Brown snapped: “I was miseducated in a little red schoolhouse. . . . You don’t know how much self-learning and how much unlearning I had to do. I entered college on (academic) probation.”

In the end, both Brown and Roberti emerged from the fight as winners.

Brown helped his friends in the teachers unions and civil rights groups block a proposal they viewed as dangerous to education and as racially divisive. Roberti solidified his political base in the San Fernando Valley, hotbed of the breakup movement--a particular asset if he seeks statewide office.

They both await the next round.

Said Brown: “I’m sure that there will be a fight as long as Roberti is around.”

Said Roberti: “I intend to keep the heat on until the district is broken up.”