Change Takes Time? Or Time for a Change?

Goodness, I don’t know why it is that everyone’s taking out after the poor Los Angeles Unified school board, ahead of Tuesday’s election.

Harsh? Why, the Day of the Short Ballot is turning into the Night of the Long Knives.

Just what are board members doing that’s so wrong? They have modeled themselves on the best CEOs in America, haven’t they? Screw over the employees, dismantle the company assets--just as long as the money keeps rolling in, as long as the stockholders are pleased, who cares?

Oh, wait. We are the stockholders. And we are not pleased. A Times poll found that only one voter in four holds the board in high regard. This is no proxy ballot we cast Tuesday, but the real thing, four of seven board seats put to the vote.

We hear much about the school board of late, little of it good. Oh, there’s the “whipping boy of the month” phenom of public life to consider, that the board’s turn has just come around again. And we hear members wailing that surely this is the Job of school districts, misfortune strewn in its path, boils and locusts and cankers plaguing it: low test scores, toxic ground beneath its most expensive high school, textbooks thin on the ground as Shakespeare folios, principals warring with parents, teachers at odds with administrators, a new state-ordered reading program, confusion and lamentation. God knows we do our best, but it would test the patience of the angels, this school district.

To be sure, L.A. is no one-room schoolhouse. Hundreds of square miles, thousands of employees, hundreds of thousands of kids, a macedoine of culture and language and aptitudes in each classroom, kids who don’t have a safe place to live, much less a quiet place to do schoolwork. No school board can reach into a quarter-million homes to even that playing field.

Even so: The president of the United States gets eight years to run the entire country, or run it into the ground.

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Snowballing criticisms have rolled wide across the city. In an event as rare as the syzygy of planets, L.A.’s two daily newspapers and two weekly alternative papers agree that three of the four up for reelection do not deserve it. (Their exception: David Tokofsky, the most willing to think “outside the box” instead of pulling its lid closed over him.)

The mayor, term-limited out, wants to make a lasting mark on the city, especially in education, on which he has spent public energies and private millions. He has done so this time, raising both hackles and hopes by fielding an opposition and helping to bankroll it to the astounding extent of television ads.

The pop-psych spin is that the board is a dysfunctional family, an elected version of the basic social unit. The studies, the polls, the critics say it frivols away big issues, big opportunities, yet keeps a death grip on the trivial . . . it may boldly plot a course but then allow itself to be second-guessed and carped into stasis . . . it is answerable to constituencies, not to kids’ needs . . . teachers and administrators can play it as children play their parents, hearing a “no” from one board member and running to another for a “maybe” . . . that it puts a premium on “working in channels” until it has dug itself an inescapable Grand Canyon . . . that it declares itself for improvement but seems terrified of its costs and consequences.

Like a dysfunctional sitcom family, it too can be seen on the tube, its meetings televised on cable. I have lately wondered whether, like its sitcom predecessors, the nuttier things get, the higher the ratings go.

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In a country frustrated at having no voice in national policy, no leverage in the arm-wrestle of big money versus bigger money, the school board is still democracy in action, the first rung on the power ladder, the first play from scrimmage on the playing field of politics.

Its issues are neither abstract nor distant--not the consumer price index, not Kosovo, but kids and desks and books and grades. In the 1970s and 1980s, they were busing, and year-round schools; for a time, board members were as recognized as pop stars, when the San Fernando Valley school board faction penciled the same suburban lines drawn in ink today by the secessionists.

In bumper-sticker-speak, Change Takes Time. In this election, that is the excuse of the incumbents and the caution of the challengers. But while school boards may reckon time and change in Ice Age increments, students cannot. They have only a dozen years for an education to “take,” and 50 or 60 years more to pay the forfeit--for it is they who must pay, not the board, not the principals--if the education we give them does not.

Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is: patt.morrison@latimes.com