About a Mile Wide of the Mark : L.A. school district is denied $15-million grant because of inept application

There’s no doubt about it: The Los Angeles Unified School District bungled the application for a prestigious $15-million National Science Foundation grant. Supt. Sid Thompson called the botched application “a major mistake.” As the bad old joke goes, that’s like saying Quasimodo was a little bit ugly.

But there’s nothing at all amusing about the handling of the NSF grant request. All the school district had to do was present a coherent vision of what it would do to improve math and science classes for Los Angeles students. What was the plan and how would the district work with parents, education reformers, academic leaders, the civic and business communities to ensure success? Somehow, New York and Chicago managed to articulate their plans, and as a result they were awarded major grants.

The Los Angeles application, on the other hand, was “a shabbily presented document and it was very disorganized,” said one expert who saw it. Another said that the Los Angeles application amounted to “ ‘Give us the money, we’ll convene meetings and out of the meetings a plan will emerge. . . .’ That is not good enough.”

Indeed, it’s hard to see any way that the LAUSD application process worked as it should have. Thompson assigned the grant writing to two math and science instructors--who may be fine teachers, but the ability to secure a major grant is a different talent. The district didn’t collaborate with the leading education reform organizations in the city, LEARN and the L.A. Educational Partnership. Apparently no one considered calling on the thinkers at UCLA and USC who certainly could have helped.

The district came up empty-handed even though it had been given a $100,000 stipend from the NSF to research and write the grant. Luckily for the public school children of Los Angeles, the NSF is giving the LAUSD a second chance to get it right by July 30.

A former President spoke of “the vision thing.” Clearly, that’s something the Los Angeles Unified School District didn’t have in this case. It is just this sort of inexcusable embarrassment that causes weary LAUSD supporters to shake their heads and wonder.