LAUSD Breakup Proposal

* Your July 31 editorial on the proposed breakup of the Los Angeles Unified School District shows that you still lack a fundamental understanding of why the district’s educational performance is so abysmal. You hint at several factors (Proposition 13-related money woes, the district’s labor unions, non-English-speaking students) and completely miss the bull’s-eye.

LAUSD is an educational wasteland not because of any of the aforementioned factors, but because its policies and curricula have been formulated and implemented by a liberal education elite that has made its educational mission the turning out of future liberals intellectually unequipped to discern liberalism’s vacuousness, rather than future doctors, engineers and accountants. The LAUSD educrats are more vigilant against Bibles and postings of the Ten Commandments in the schools than guns, drugs and condoms. And as long as this aristocracy is in charge of LAUSD, nothing will change, because real improvement would require a complete repudiation, not merely a “reforming,” of their philosophy and practices.

HOWARD GOODMAN

Glendale

* Re “Pair Cut School Breakup Debate Down to Size,” July 20:

Unlike Ron Prescott of LAUSD, I feel that the motivation of the breakup advocates is the point, for several reasons. First, I have seen no evidence that breaking up school districts has improved schools. In fact I have heard that consolidation has helped schools. That is why so many school districts are “unified.” The breakup advocates don’t have much to say on this aspect.

Second, the breaker-uppers are mostly white people from the west San Fernando Valley. There is little support for breakup in East or Central L.A. And why not? Because people there are in favor of an integrated school system and recognize that whatever LAUSD’s faults, two LAUSDs would not make it better.

Third, I am in L.A. to take advantage of the opportunities offered by a big city. I expect a big city to have a big school district. The breaker-uppers want to live in a big city, but with “their own” little school district. I feel their motives are transparent, have nothing to do with local control or improving the school district and are really the heart of the matter.

LESTER R. TIMMS

Pasadena