Panel Says School District Fails to Prepare Future Work Force

As employers lamented the difficulty of finding workers who can spell and add, a panel of business leaders and educators Friday agreed that the Los Angeles Unified School District has failed to adequately prepare the next generation’s work force, but few advocated dismantling it.

The education forum, sponsored by the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn., was designed to address the question of whether a “fundamental restructuring of LAUSD would produce meaningful improvements” in education.

VICA has yet to issue an official position on a proposal to pull the Valley out of LAUSD and create two smaller--but not small--districts. Friday’s meeting was designed to focus on why reform is needed, from an employer’s standpoint, and whether size does matter.

Most of the speakers did not address the breakup issue head-on, preferring instead to talk about broad concepts such as accountability and standards, offering no specifics.

For Gary Thomas, who spoke on behalf of the breakup campaign, “The district is simply too large.”

Thomas is co-founder of FREE, or Finally Restoring Excellence in Education, which wants to divide the Valley into northern and southern halves with about 100,000 students in the north and about 90,000 students in the south.

LAUSD, with its 670,000 students, is 13 times larger than the optimum size for a school district, from a fiscal efficiency standpoint, said Thomas, citing one recent study.

With the breakup, Thomas said, you would see a “renaissance in education and increased accountability by school board members that live right down the street.”

But Lawrence O. Picus, an associate professor at USC and director of the school’s Center for Research in Education Finance, called the proposed breakup “the full employment act for school administrators,” and argued that it would consume district resources and attention for years to come, sacrificing the education of an entire generation.

“There is no question that [LAUSD] is a big, difficult organization that needs to be restructured,” said Picus, son of former Los Angeles City Councilwoman Joy Picus, and an education finance expert who disputed some of the figures cited by Thomas.

“The question is how. If you create 10 school districts you’ll need 10 more superintendents and assistant superintendents.”

Without prescribing a cure for the region’s educational ills, most of the speakers were quite clear on the symptoms: job applicants who can’t read, communicate effectively in English or do basic math. One speaker mentioned a job-seeker who misspelled his name on the application.

VICA Chairman Steve Lew called education “one of the most important challenges facing business and industry today.”

VICA President Bonny Herman said two of the organization’s committees will review the matter and may issue a position paper this year.