Riordan to Use Bully Pulpit for Education

Mayor Richard Riordan, who pledged in his recent inaugural address to make the needs of children the top priority of his second term, now is embarking on a controversial foray into education, an area in which the mayor has little authority beyond the bully pulpit afforded the chief executive of the nation’s second-largest city.

In an interview late last week, Riordan for the first time spelled out in detail his views on the hot topic of bilingual education--a subject that has long interested Riordan and about which he increasingly is seeking scientific and academic insights. Riordan was highly critical both of bilingual education and of the school establishment that supports it.

“You start out with the axiom that you act in the best interests of children,” the mayor said. “Too much of bilingual [education] is driven by what is in the best interest of bureaucrats.”

Saying he would favor changes to that system, the multimillionaire mayor, whose personal philanthropy has been devoted largely to educational causes, proposed requiring any student who spoke fluent English to be removed from bilingual classes. And he added that it was inexcusable that parents did not receive better, clearer communication about how to keep their children out of bilingual programs if they preferred English-only instruction.

Nevertheless, Riordan stopped just short of endorsing a proposed ballot measure that would essentially eliminate bilingual education. Riordan said he may yet support such a measure, but for now has decided to keep studying the issue.

Ron Unz, a Silicon Valley executive who ran for governor in 1994, is leading the anti-bilingual education campaign and says supporters have gathered two-thirds of the signatures needed to put it on the state ballot next year. California Republicans endorsed the measure at their recent state convention, but even though Riordan is a Republican, he often parts from party regulars and so far has resisted joining support for that measure.

“I would rather use a scalpel to correct it, but in a bureaucracy, sometimes it takes a sledgehammer,” Riordan said. “What Unz’s initiative is is a sledgehammer.”

Riordan’s tentative first steps toward tackling the issue of bilingual education are part of his larger determination to play a role in educating Los Angeles children. This week, he will travel to Detroit to join educational and political leaders from the nation’s largest cities, in part to study how other municipalities manage their schools.

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While there, Riordan, who has long eyed the approaches of cities such as New York and Chicago, will appear as part of a discussion group that will include Chicago Mayor Richard Daley. At the direction of the Illinois Legislature, which was alarmed at the poor state of Chicago schools, Daley in 1995 assumed virtually complete control over his city’s schools. Although Riordan will not discuss that model, some education advocates and municipal leaders believe that the best hope for school accountability in big cities is to give mayors broad power to control school boards and education budgets.

In California, however, the state Constitution puts that authority in the hands of elected school boards, leaving the Los Angeles mayor with far less power than his big-city counterparts when it comes to tackling school issues.

Consequently, Riordan has fewer tools but still significant ones: He can lobby for legislative changes, issue management directives and make his case to the public.

But all of those depend on the mayor’s ability to wield the bully pulpit, and so far, Riordan has struggled to claim it. In part, the mayor’s failure to grab that particular mantle of public leadership is a result of Riordan’s wooden public speaking style. And, in part, it reflects his aversion to controversy.

Riordan, after all, dawdled before publicly stating his position on high-profile issues such as Proposition 209, the state anti-affirmative action measure. He eventually opposed it but only after most other politicians had already registered their positions.

Similarly, Riordan hedged Friday on bilingual education. He criticized the current state of the approach to teaching children, but he conceded that simply rejecting bilingual education out of hand also poses problems. He warned that the scientific studies of it are incomplete, and he said he has doubts about much of the research that has been done, since it often is funded by organizations with a vested interest in perpetuating the status quo.

“It’s a cottage industry,” Riordan said of the bilingual education establishment. “I’m very suspicious of these studies.”

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And yet, Riordan held back, not only from endorsing the Unz initiative but also from ruling out his possible endorsement.

“I may still opt for the sledgehammer approach,” he said. “It may be imperfect, but it still may be better than what we have.”

As Riordan moves into his second four-year stint, term limits that he helped enact keep him from running again. And despite urging from some political observers, Riordan has said he is not interested in running for governor.

Recognizing that this term may thus be his last stint in public life, Riordan and his staff have identified issues on which they believe the mayor can have an impact.

One is charter reform. Riordan is expected today to unveil his thoughts on what a new city constitution should contain and how it could work to streamline and improve Los Angeles government.

Another is children.

Denying youngsters the tools to compete, Riordan often says, is a moral failure as well as an economic liability. In Riordan’s view, inadequate education is an indefensible abandonment of those who most need the government’s help and also hampers Los Angeles’ ability to field a competent work force attractive to business.

That notion was at the center of Riordan’s second inaugural address, delivered three months ago. In that speech, the mayor made children’s issues the focal point of his leadership, saying that all government programs and initiatives must be evaluated in the context of “what is best for the children.”

Ever since, the mayor has been mulling ways to enhance his influence in educational matters.

At a recent staff retreat, for instance, Riordan’s top aides gathered to discuss priorities for the coming term. According to participants in that session, person after person highlighted educational concerns, coming at the issue from a variety of perspectives but agreeing that the city needed to do more.

“Everyone agreed that education needed to be put on the front of the agenda,” said Ted Mitchell, vice chancellor at UCLA and Riordan’s recently appointed education advisor. “Everybody is really thinking about it, talking about it, working on it.”

More difficult, however, is figuring out what the city government is in a position to do. Although California mayors do not oversee education, big-city chief executives do command large bureaucracies, with thousands of employees and far-flung assets, some of which can be tapped for educational projects.

One example of Riordan marshaling city resources and the persuasive power of his office concerns the establishment of so-called primary centers, small schools covering kindergarten through second grade that were originally created to relieve overcrowding. Riordan favors building more of the centers, and he has joined Los Angeles Unified School Superintendent Ruben Zacarias in forming a task force to push the idea forward.

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That group is charged with finding sites for primary centers, as well as arranging for money to build them. The city is identifying its own assets--land belonging to the Department of Water and Power, for instance--and chipping in the land to provide space for some of the centers.

The goal, according to Mitchell: “to keep 5-year-olds off buses.”

It is those types of efforts that allow Riordan to play a role at the margins of the region’s educational debates. But for the mayor’s office to play a more central role, it would require significant changes in the state constitution.

Some people close to Riordan believe that Los Angeles would be best suited by following the lead of Chicago, where Mayor Daley has eagerly taken control, or New York, where the superintendent is appointed by the mayor and where the school budget is controlled by City Hall. Riordan declines to comment on such a proposal, but even advocates of the idea concede that they lack the political muscle to make it happen in California.

Mitchell, the mayor’s education advisor, said he does not believe that those other models would necessarily work in Los Angeles.

“There is no direct evidence that schools perform better under one model than another,” Mitchell said. “There’s a real danger in looking at those other models, because so much is determined by local history and local circumstance.”

Still, Riordan on Wednesday will make his trip to Detroit, accompanied by Zacarias and a few top city officials. There, Riordan and other mayors and school superintendents will gather around a circular table and compare notes about what works best and what has failed children in their cities. No matter what language the children speak and no matter who controls the purse strings of their schools, Riordan said his goals are clear--and his commitment to them unwavering.

“Everyone ought to have a clear objective of teaching children to read, write and do math by the end of the second grade,” he said. “And they ought to execute the bureaucrats who fail to give their children that.”