Knowing When to Leave

Supt. Ruben Zacarias is a good man with a great devotion to the education of Los Angeles schoolchildren. He inherited mammoth problems when he took the top job in the school district more than two years ago. Those mammoth problems remain, even as new, frightening ones, such as an environmental disaster at a South Gate school site, come bubbling to the surface. Following the $200-million Belmont Learning Complex fiasco, the South Gate matter has already used up $39 million in taxpayer funds--and once again, no one seems to know why, how or who was in charge.

Zacarias, a veteran of 33 years in the Los Angeles Unified School District, is not the person to turn the LAUSD upside down, which is what is so obviously needed. After the bold and necessary action taken this week by the Los Angeles Board of Education to bring in a CEO to manage the daily operations of the out-of-control district, the 70-year-old superintendent must think of new ways to serve education. Clearly, continuing as superintendent is not the best way.

Hardly a week passes without some new revelation of what the nightmarish bureaucracy has wrought: missed deadlines that deny the district hundreds of millions of state dollars, departments run by cronyism and nepotism, and the “not me” method of operation that deems no one person responsible for any key decision.

Zacarias did not create this culture. But he has not changed it. Changing the culture of the district is crucial because it affects what really matters--the education of the LAUSD’s 700,000 students. Zacarias declared a phonics-based curriculum to be the order of the day; it isn’t happening in the classrooms. Zacarias declared that all schoolchildren would have the textbooks they need; it isn’t happening. A largely unresponsive bureaucracy grinds on.

Listen to the pleas from LAUSD teenagers interviewed in today’s Times: “The covers are falling off of my textbooks. . . . I have a health book that’s older than I am,” says Ronnie Thomas, a 17-year-old senior from South-Central. “It’s like, we’re crammed together,” says Patricia Lopez, 17, a senior from Boyle Heights. “It can make learning hard.” Or Valerie Horn, 14, from Westwood, describing her shabby high school restroom’s doorless toilet stalls: “It’s unbelievable. I’d rather wait until I go home to use the bathroom.”

This district is still failing to provide the basics. It’s hardly a wonder that its academic performance remains in the bottom third in the national rankings.

The board this week took decisive action: It placed Howard Miller, a former school board member, lawyer and real estate developer, as CEO in charge of the daily operations of the district. It is, as it should be, a temporary job, designed for an outsider with some insider knowledge. He should come in, take a total inventory, restructure and clean house as necessary, and leave. In bringing in Miller, school board members Genethia Hayes, Caprice Young, Mike Lansing and Valerie Fields did the right thing. They exerted real, look-it-in-the-eye leadership. It was a hard and messy move, and we wish it could have been neater. But it was necessary, even as it causes political reverberations along the delicate fault lines of race.

Zacarias himself has said in the past that his tenure in his job should not in any way be connected to the fact that he is Latino. He is right, and he should urge those who would make his retention of the superintendent’s job an ethnic cause to think about what is really important. What matters, Zacarias has said, is that the LAUSD provide its students--70% of whom happen to be Latino--with an education that at the least ensures they can read, write and do math at the proper grade level. No one can pretend that is happening. Good intentions, in the end, are not enough. Supt. Zacarias, it’s time to go.