Half of City Residents Favor Breaking Up L.A. Schools

Despite reform efforts by the Los Angeles Unified School District, half of city residents believe it continues to educate children inadequately and a bare majority says it should be broken into smaller systems, a new Los Angeles Times poll has found.

About 51% of respondents favored dismantling the school district, citing as their reasons the need for smaller classes, local control and improved quality of education. Only 32% of those surveyed said the 650,000-student school system should remain intact, naming quality of education and racial diversity as their top concerns.

The poll, conducted June 1-4, surveyed 942 adults citywide and revealed the widespread dissatisfaction many residents have with the school system. It was undertaken at a time when several groups in the district--from Carson to the San Fernando Valley--are intensifying campaigns to form independent districts, and others are pressing for the Valley to secede from the city of Los Angeles.

But there are signs that the district’s reform efforts are beginning to repair its tattered image. Dissatisfaction with the school district is less than it was three years ago. According to a 1993 Times poll, 60% of residents citywide said the quality of education was inadequate, compared with 50% in the current survey. Forty percent of those polled recently said the district was doing an adequate job, versus 33% in 1993.

Ted Mitchell, dean of UCLA’s School of Education, said support for the breakup is not surprising. Any suggestion to create smaller systems will receive support because of people’s disenchantment with large bureaucracies, Mitchell said.

“Most parents feel dispossessed by large urban school systems, that their voice isn’t heard and they aren’t encouraged to be active in the school system,” he said.

School board member Jeff Horton, a breakup opponent, said he understands residents’ concerns but cited efforts to reorganize the district into smaller regions and give schools more local control through the LEARN reform program as signs of change. More than 300 schools are now using the LEARN model.

Support for decentralizing the school district was split along racial, geographic and economic lines with mostly whites and the affluent favoring the idea. Among respondents with annual incomes of $60,000 or more, 71% favored a breakup and 74% called the district’s quality of education inadequate. Conversely, among those surveyed with incomes of less than $20,000 a year, nearly 50% opposed a breakup and 54% considered an LAUSD education adequate.

Surprisingly, 62% of Westside residents support a breakup, compared with 56% of those surveyed in the Valley--the center of the breakup movement for years. Forty-nine percent of residents in Central Los Angeles back a split, the poll found.

The strongest opposition to a breakup came from Latinos, African Americans and residents in South Los Angeles. It was a South Los Angeles group in March that filed the first formal proposal to sever ties with the LAUSD--not activists in the Valley, where the idea of a breakup has been discussed on and off since the 1970s. The group wants to create an Inner City Unified School District that would be one-fifth the size of the LAUSD.

Nonetheless, many South and South-Central Los Angeles residents polled preferred to stick with the status quo.

In a follow-up interview with poll respondent Cynthia Jenkins, the 40-year-old mother of two sons in public schools said: “I just kind of feel that breaking up the district isn’t going to help our inner-city students. We have so little as it is, and if there’s a split, we’ll have even less.”

Half of all citywide respondents to the poll--which has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points--supported the idea of the Valley forming its own school district. A majority of those came from the Valley and the Westside; 60% of residents in those two areas supported a separate Valley district.

For decades, dissatisfied parents have sought to carve up the nation’s second largest district, believing that smaller districts would be more responsive to community needs.

Lomita unsuccessfully attempted to secede from LAUSD in 1989 and 1993. Carson also has developed a breakaway plan. On and off, various groups in the San Fernando Valley have organized efforts to split from the district, though none have done so. Some argue that even a Valleywide district, which would be the second largest in the state, would be too big and should be divided into smaller school systems.

Legislation by Assemblywoman Paula L. Boland (R-Granada Hills) and state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), which took effect Jan. 1, would make it easier to split the district by reducing the number of signatures required to put a school breakup proposal on the ballot. The measure also would ensure existing racial and funding equities. Mayor Richard Riordan, who called for breaking up the district in his 1993 bid for office, put up $40,000 of his own money in March to start a breakup review group at UCLA.

School district officials and other opponents have publicly denounced the various efforts as hollow and mean-spirited with little interest in children’s education and with little hope of succeeding.

“I think people are rightly unhappy, and they are right to want a connectedness to their schools, but I don’t think the legislative, bureaucratic process of creating a new school district with all the legal requirements is going to better connect people to their schools,” Horton said.

Even if there is a chance to successfully divide the 708-square-mile district, it wouldn’t happen for years. The earliest that breakup proponents could get enough signatures to have the issue on the ballot for voters would be 1997. Then there could be years of litigation and negotiation as LAUSD’s billions of dollars in assets and debts are divvied up, and responsibility for everything from employee pensions to campus security is determined.

But poll respondent Kirk Clark, a Tarzana parent with two children in public schools, said the time and logistic hurdles would be worthwhile.

“In a very selfish way, I think we’d do better for our children if we could separate our own area here,” Clark said. “The overall economic situation for the Valley itself is probably higher than most parts of L.A. County, and we’d probably be better off on our own.”

Quality of education was a universal concern. Among breakup proponents, 21% cited quality of education as one of their top reasons for supporting a breakup. Among opponents, 31% named diminished quality of education as a reason for their opposition.

“I think smaller is better for students to get more attention from teachers and to be more focused, and that’s not what I hear is happening in a lot of these overcrowded schools,” said poll respondent Wayne Staples, 22, of Westchester, who was educated at small magnet schools during his junior and senior high school years.

“I don’t think I would’ve done half as well if I wasn’t in smaller classes, and I think unless you’re in a magnet school or charter school, you’re stuck in this clump of students,” Staples said.

As one of their reasons for opposing a breakup, 14% also pointed to the possible unequal distribution of funds, which could leave children from poorer parts of the district behind while students from wealthier areas would benefit.

“By separating the Valley and other parts of the city to their own districts, you’re stripping away the monetary base that the city needs to run these schools, especially schools in the inner city,” said Shelly Salk, 44, of Westchester, one of the 20% of Westside residents who oppose a breakup. “The money should go to helping all children, not a selective group.”

Parents of public schoolchildren generally gave higher marks to public education than residents as a whole. Fifty-four percent of public school parents characterized public schools as adequate or excellent, while 45% of those parents were split between rating school quality inadequate or very poor.

Jenkins of South Los Angeles said parents need to become more involved in their local schools.

“The old adage is to run away. If you don’t like something, run away,” she said. “But that doesn’t solve any problems, not here in South L.A. with their small district, not in Carson, not in the Valley. We need to have more input in our children’s education, but I don’t think separating is the way to do it.”

Acting Times Poll Director Susan Pinkus and research analyst Monika McDermott contributed to this story.

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Breaking Up the Schood District

Most residents of Los Angeles, including the San Fernando Valley, would like to see the Los Angeles Unified School District carved into smaller districts to achieve more local control, smaller classes and better education.

* Would you favor or oppose breaking the Los Angeles Unified School District into smaller, independent school districts?

*--*

All of Los Angeles San Fernando Valley Favor strongly 35% 40% Favor somewhat 15% 16% Oppose somewhat 8% 10% Oppose strongly 24% 17% Don’t know 18% 17%

*--*

Note: Numbers may not add up to 100% where more than one reply was accepted or not all categories are shown.

Source: L.A. Times poll

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How the Poll Was Conducted

The Times Poll contacted 942 adults citywide, including 392 San Fernando Valley residents, by telephone June 1 through June 4. Telephone numbers were chosen from a list of all exchanges in the city of Los Angeles. Random-digit dialing techniques were used so that listed and unlisted numbers could be contacted. Interviewing was done in both English and Spanish. The sample was weighted slightly to conform with census figures for sex, race, age, education and region. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points for the citywide sample and 5 percentage points for the San Fernando Valley; for certain subgroups the error margin may be somewhat higher. Poll results can also be affected by factors such as question wording and the order in which questions are presented.