Slavkin on State Education Code

Re “Lift the Education Code Dead Weight,” Commentary, Dec. 31: Mark Slavkin’s column was highly misleading. He writes about “the 12-volume education code” that is “7,745 pages of rules and regulations that govern our public schools.” He is obviously referring to West’s or Deering’s annotated version of the code that contains extensive cross-references, legislative history and case law. But anyone can buy the regular, unannotated California Education Code in a one-volume paperbound book from West’s that is 1,685 pages long.

Of those 1,685 pages, 440 pages are in Title 3, post-secondary education, which does not affect districts like the Los Angeles Unified School District. Another 494 pages are in Title 1, general education code provisions, that mostly concern county and state educational programs; very little of it contains material that local school districts need to know. That leaves about 750 pages covering Title 2, elementary and secondary education.

We need to get rid of the “dead weight” incumbents on school boards who don’t want to read, and to get rid of the overpaid “dead weight” educrats who absorb money that would better go to the classroom.

W. SNOW HUME

Fullerton

* I agree with the spirit of everything that Slavkin wrote and yet found his call for increased local autonomy a bit hypocritical. I could not agree more with the need to free school communities from the often burdensome Education Code.

But in looking to reduce the barriers to effective school restructuring, we have to start at home. While calls are being made to decrease state micromanagement, board members need to honestly look at how they are, or are not, supporting school reform. School-based management and LEARN schools have encountered more roadblocks in school board policy than in any part of the Education Code.

As pioneering schools have engaged in restructuring, there have been fewer than 10 requests for waivers from state code. Of the hundreds of requested waivers, a small amount have to do with the UTLA-LAUSD contract. These have centered on such things as the composition of the leadership team or the school calendar and all have been granted. The vast majority of waiver requests have been for school board policy and the response has been mixed at best.

The hiring of new principals at Sun Valley Middle School and Wilson High School was a classic example of how bureaucracy frustrated local school reform. While these communities overwhelmingly supported Manny Rangel and Ina Roth respectively, school board members informed them that they could not hire them because they were not on the district principal list. The schools appealed and the dialogue went on for more than five months until a new policy was created that allowed their appointments.

HELEN BERNSTEIN, President United Teachers Los Angeles