Breaking Up Couldn’t Hurt L.A. Schools : The arguments of LAUSD officials and teachers against dissolving the district sound logical, but they are based on self-interest.

Assemblywoman Paula Boland has laid down the gauntlet. Will the Los Angeles Unified School District now use its considerable political clout, and your tax dollars, to block her efforts to break up the Gargantuan school district?

You bet your sweet bippy it will.

Would you allow a $4.2-billion annual budget to slip through your hands without a fight? Would you risk unemployment--and many LAUSD administrators may not have other options--without a fight?

If the district holds true to form, it will barrage parents and the public with “informational,” “nonpolitical” literature about how their children will suffer if the district becomes a dozen districts.

Based on a personal intuition, the empirical observations I have made and, I have to admit, an accumulated frustration, I was thrilled to read Boland’s proposal to ease the way for a breakup. But I was short on supporting facts, and I know that looking at the district from the classroom is like having tunnel vision.

So I asked both the district and the teachers’ union why they are opposed.

Bill Rivera, communications director for LAUSD, said that first, the Los Angeles City Charter would allow only the schools outside the city limits to form their own districts--a small percentage of the students. Second, based on the number of students being bused to the San Fernando Valley from the inner city, he estimated that 30% to 40% of West Valley schools would close due to low enrollment while inner-city schools would swell without cross-district busing. He said the problems of maintaining integration would be staggering.

Breaking up the district, Rivera said, would multiply the number of school superintendents and boards of education. Finally, he said, there is no guarantee that smaller districts would do a better job.

I couldn’t argue with his logic or his numbers.

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Next I called the teachers’ union and spoke with John Perez, a director.

Perez dismissed Rivera’s argument that legally we can’t break up the district by noting that state law supersedes city law. He agreed that 30% to 40% of the Valley schools would close and that trying to maintain integration would be a nightmare. He agreed there would be administrative replication totaling, the union figured, $33 million. All of it, he said, would be taken from teaching dollars, translating to the loss of 660 teachers and even larger classes.

I couldn’t argue with his logic either.

Still . . . something continued to nag at me. And then I understood what it was.

They’re the ones with tunnel vision. The district, the union and other opponents assume that new, smaller districts, would use the same models the current district has always used: top-down administration, promotion of only those who leave the classroom, routine protection of incompetents.

But what if we really had a new vision? What if every school selected its own principal who could be fired for failure to perform?

Suppose every certificated person in the district, from the superintendent on down, had to teach at least one class each year or two? Do you think there would be 40 students in a classroom or classroom temperatures reaching 95 degrees? If schools controlled their budgets, would they keep buying from overpriced district warehouses or shop around?

I’m not enough of a Pollyanna to believe that breaking up the district would be a cure-all for education’s ills. We still have a terrible shortage of qualified teachers and many thousands of overworked teachers who burn out prematurely. As a state, we still spend at least $1,000 less per student than the national average and have the largest classes in the nation.

Looking out from the classroom, I don’t think we have a prayer of implementing meaningful reform under the existing system.

Besides, why not try a whole new approach? It couldn’t get any worse. Could it?