Race, Gender Complicate Hiring Issues in L.A. Schools

After months of anxious searching, Los Angeles Unified School District officials breathed a sigh of relief last December when they finally put through the paperwork to name Nathan C. Hardman the newest assistant principal at Markham Middle School in Watts.

The 56-year-old black counselor was willing to take the promotion, he was enthusiastic and, according to the internal recommendation, he fit the bill because the school’s selection committee “wanted an African American male” to serve as a role model and “enhance school security.”

But within days, the district had to eat those words. A union rushed in to challenge the appointment based on anti-discrimination laws, sending red-faced school officials scurrying to rewrite Hardman’s recommendation to omit the mention of race and downplay his gender, interviews and records show.

And even now, legal experts warn that the explicit references to race expose a troubling link between race, gender and employment in the district. The author of Proposition 209--the ballot initiative banning race-based preferences in government hiring--says he may take Los Angeles Unified to court.

“We will be following up on this to explore a lawsuit,” said Ward Connerly, a University of California regent.

The episode involving Hardman underscores how, even in a post-affirmative action world, the sensitive issues of race and gender continue to influence the hiring decisions in the nation’s second-largest school district, a polyglot where nearly nine out of every 10 students are from minority groups.

Official Cites Need for Diversity

Hardman has declined to comment. High-ranking district officials say they made an honest mistake when they first cited his race and gender, but insist he got the job based on his qualifications as a counselor and his work in the inner-city community.

Federal and state laws make it illegal for an employer to discriminate against anyone based on race, national origin or sex. Conversely, Proposition 209 amended the California Constitution to ban race- and gender-based preferences in hiring, college admissions and contracting by state and local government.

School Board President Vickie Castro says that although qualifications should always come first, race, gender and ethnicity are rightly used to “balance” a school’s management team “so that you don’t have an all-white male administration.”

“You have some responsibility in providing a diverse team of administrators, for teachers and the community,” said Castro. “Diversity is what L.A. is about, so we shouldn’t shy away from it.”

One leading reformer, however, argues that the drive for diversity gets in the way of making major improvements in a school system where two out of three third-graders can’t read at grade level.

Mike Roos, executive director of LEARN, a nonprofit educational reform group that operates in nearly 400 Los Angeles Unified schools, says infighting between ethnic groups for administrative slots is such a powerful “political dimension” in the district bureaucracy that superintendents are forced to play a “mishmash game of trades” just to keep peace.

“It debilitates the system when you’re more concerned with ethnic background than you are with excellence in the classroom and at the school site,” said Roos, adding that issues of race and ethnicity aren’t nearly as important or obvious when local parents and teachers choose their own administrators.

Indeed, according to recent polls, an overwhelming number of parents of all colors say they care much less about the racial makeup of school faculties and administrations than the quality of education they deliver.

But as the case of Burton Street Elementary School shows, a cultural mismatch between parents and school officials can get ugly. In February, a white principal said he was beaten unconscious by men who told him to leave the heavily Latino school, where a number of parents had been petitioning the district for a bilingual replacement.

Holding what are probably the most crucial and grueling jobs in the Los Angeles Unified hierarchy, the 1,549 principals and their assistants are directly responsible for the success of their campuses. Currently, 53% of the district’s instructional administrators are from minority groups, compared to 89% of the 700,000 students whose education they run.

Superintendents are pressured to close that gap. “Community groups do come and talk, not about individuals, but about the fact that they want . . . role models, that type of thing,” said Supt. Ruben Zacarias, who added that his hiring choices are based on qualifications.

His predecessor, former Supt. Sid Thompson, recalled being lobbied “hard” over 20 to 25 campus administrator appointments, often by professional organizations representing minorities such as blacks, Latinos and Armenians.

“You did get pressure, from time to time, that said we need a Hispanic principal, we need an African American, we need Armenians in specific schools,” said Thompson, superintendent from 1992 to 1997 and now a senior fellow at the UCLA graduate school of education.

Thompson said he benefited from those same kinds of pressures 30 years ago when the district tapped him “primarily because of my race” to become principal of--ironically enough--Markham.

“They said, ‘We’re looking for an African American principal at Markham because we want representation,’ ” Thompson said.

To speed the pace of such affirmative action promotions over the years, the district has often used an obscure procedure to give minorities a “jump-start” into administrative positions, said Thompson and others. Known as Board Rule 4214, the loophole allows the superintendent or a designate to pick a new administrator based on “special personal or professional qualifications,” even if they haven’t taken the required eligibility test.

But as the eligibility lists began to swell with minorities, and reforms allowed more schools to choose their own administrators, the need to invoke the rule as an affirmative action tool subsided just as Proposition 209 was taking effect, they said.

District officials say they continue to use the rule to promote administrators based on special qualifications. Statistics show that between 1996 and 1998, district officials initiated 51 such appointments, the bulk of which placed minorities as assistant principals.

In the case of Hardman, who was selected under the rule, internal memos raise the question of whether race and gender played too much of a role.

Markham Principal Elizabeth Norris said she puts a premium on maintaining good discipline on the 23-acre campus on East 104th Street, which borders four public housing projects and has a predominantly Latino student population.

So when the school, a LEARN campus, advertised last summer for an assistant principal, it listed a preference for a bilingual speaker who could help develop a discipline plan. The ad did not state a need or preference for a male.

Five people applied from the district’s eligibility list, but all were rejected by the school’s screening committee, said Norris. She declined to say why except that the “committee never made any statement as to ethnicity or gender.”

But Hardman’s race and gender were specifically cited as “special personal and professional” qualifications on the initial recommendation made by district officials, who had taken over the process at the school’s request.

“The current administrative staff consists of four females,” the Dec. 10 recommendation said. “The LEARN Personnel Selection Committee wanted an African American male for the assistant principal position, in order to provide a role model and to enhance school security. Only one male applied for the position during the LEARN process and was not selected by the committee.”

A Revised Approach

The day after getting a courtesy copy, the administrators union cried foul. “It seemed to me it was a blatant refuting of our basic laws in the United States,” said Eli Brent, president of Associated Administrators of Los Angeles.

Deputy Supt. Liliam L. Castillo agreed, ordering the promotion rescinded and the paperwork rewritten. On Dec. 17, she signed a new recommendation that played up Hardman’s experience as a counselor at Mt. Vernon Middle School, leaving mention of his gender as an afterthought.

“Note: He will also be able to provide some gender representation because of security purposes and serve as a role model,” it read.

Hardman’s promotion not only added a man to Markham’s all-female management team, it also brought to four the number of black administrators at the school. The fifth is white; none are Latino.

The cluster administrator who wrote the original recommendation said he was so happy to find Hardman after a long search that he might have been “overzealous” when he cited the counselor’s race, which, he added, played no part in the selection.

But he acknowledged that he felt it was important that Markham have at least one male administrator to pass metal detecting wands over male students or make spot checks of boys’ restrooms.

“It just makes sense to have a male on your staff who could go into the boys’ restroom on a dime. He doesn’t have to knock and say, ‘I’m coming in,’ ” said William Elkins, who supervises Markham and 23 other South-Central schools in the Jordan-Locke cluster.

Yet in an era of female police officers and prison guards, legal experts said the episode leaves the district vulnerable to a lawsuit. The district would face an uphill battle explaining how having a male administrator on a middle-school campus is a professional necessity, they said.

Connerly, as well, said he was dissatisfied with the district’s solution of simply rewriting its paperwork to omit race and downplay gender.

“They’re covering their tail, it seems to me,” he said, adding that he will explore a lawsuit through his nonprofit American Civil Rights Coalition.

Meanwhile, Elkins and others say Hardman, who holds a state administrator certificate, continues to do a good job at the school, where he is in charge of discipline as well as campus plant and operations.

“So far, it’s worked out fine,” said Norris, Markham’s principal.