How L.A. Unified Got Into This Fix

When he was appointed to the Los Angeles Board of Education in February 1976, Howard Miller saw himself as an outsider, an advocate for parents, someone whose role was to shake up a moribund bureaucracy.

The school district, he said at the time, was “so large to most people, so out of control and so distant” that the public felt left out.

That may be the best that can be said of it today, when there is little question that the Los Angeles Unified School District is facing a monumental, and multifaceted, crisis.

Back then, Miller alienated his fellow board members with what they said was inflammatory rhetoric. He also angered voters and in 1979 was recalled, largely over his support of court-mandated busing to desegregate the schools.

Today, he’s the man in charge. Appointed last week to the position of chief executive officer, he ostensibly reports to Supt. Ruben Zacarias. In fact, he will exercise sole power over every aspect of the sprawling, 700,000-student district for the next nine months. And the job will be anything but easy.

The controversy over his appointment, and the apparent usurping of Zacarias’ role, is but the latest furor in the district.

The management shortcomings that frustrated Miller during his first tour of duty have festered, many observers say. As a result, the nation’s second-largest school district has been caught flat-footed by one blow after another, rarely reacting to problems until they became unmanageable.

L.A. Unified is reeling from the expected loss of $900 million in state bond money to build about 100 badly needed new campuses. Enrollment, meanwhile, is growing by 10,000 students a year. The district employs 9,000 teachers without licenses; 300 classrooms are staffed only by substitutes; and the possible state takeover of failing schools is looming.

Miller’s task is to revamp the district’s management structure to improve reading instruction, purchase textbooks and restore dilapidated facilities.

“This is a corporate turnaround situation,” he said Friday. “We have a . . . $7-billion organization that has failed, and we’ve come in . . . to try and change that situation.”

To do that, Miller and board President Genethia Hayes said, it will take nothing short of a change in the culture of the district. It is a culture that is both insular--out of touch with research and promising practices elsewhere--and inward, in which political maneuvering often wins out over good policy.

“This district has spent the last 15 years placing blame,” Hayes said. “ ‘This person didn’t do something. That person didn’t do something.’ . . . We need to get off the dime.”

Day Higuchi, president of United Teachers-Los Angeles, agreed that the issues facing Miller are not new. So solving them, he said, won’t be as simple as replacing top leaders.

“The system is incredibly unstable from the classroom on up . . . and to change it is going to take some time and some real effort,” Higuchi said. “Otherwise, we’re just looking at another round of head chopping.”

It may be helpful, therefore, to study the district’s recent history for clues to what has gone wrong. In many ways, Los Angeles’ educational struggles parallel those of other large cities. As the middle class has moved to the suburbs, often taking jobs with them, those left behind have been more likely to be minorities and to be living in poverty.

Stanford University education professor Larry Cuban agrees that the dynamics of change in Los Angeles have also played out elsewhere across the country.

But Cuban said the focus on management issues misses something even more central.

“What’s at stake here is that people really don’t know how to educate low-income minorities very well, and they’re looking for quick fixes,” he said. “They assume that the teaching and learning that goes on is fine, and I would say that’s not the case.”

Board Members Had Greater Prestige

A good place to begin tracing the decline of the schools in Los Angeles, coincidentally, is 1976, the year trustees appointed Miller to fill a vacancy on the school board.

Miller was a 38-year-old USC law professor, an avowed liberal who quickly emerged from the crowd of 336 people who wanted the job.

The interest in the position was a measure of the greater prestige and power that board members enjoyed at the time. Not only did they vote on issues such as textbooks and teacher salaries, they also set tax rates and could ask voters to issue bonds to finance the construction of new schools.

Miller’s initial focus on management, policies and budget soon gave way to a more emotional issue.

In June 1976, the California Supreme Court ordered the district to prepare a desegregation plan. At the time, more than 300,000 minority students in the district attended schools segregated, not by law, but by residential patterns and other factors.

Miller emerged as the leading architect and salesman for the integration plan, which gave communities incentives to volunteer to have their students bused to a partner school. If they didn’t, however, the busing would be mandatory.

In 1970, when Los Angeles Superior Court Judge John Gitelson had first ordered an end to segregation in the schools, half of the district’s 639,000 students were white.

Bobbi Fiedler, whose opposition to busing propelled her first into a seat on the board and eventually to Congress, said that before 1978 “people went to their neighborhood schools and were proud to do it. If they didn’t like what was going on, they could do something about it.”

Not all the successful schools were in white neighborhoods.

Author and scholar Earl Ofari Hutchinson graduated from Dorsey High School in the Crenshaw district in the 1960s. He attended school with Asian Americans and Latinos as well as other blacks. He recalls that he had good teachers and that many of his classmates went on to college.

Today, his nieces attend Dorsey. One of them “has substitute teachers, there’s no lesson plans, no homework assignments,” he said. “How do you explain that happening in a quarter of a century?”

With the advent of busing, not only did whites leave the system, so did many middle-class blacks.

And it wasn’t just students who quit the district. Under pressure from the federal government to desegregate faculties, administrators transferred teachers across the district. The teachers too fled in droves.

By the fall of 1978, when Miller’s busing plan began for grades four through eight, white enrollment had fallen by half. Black enrollment was dropping too. Latino enrollment, however, was rising by 10,000 to 15,000 students annually.

Ever since, the district’s students have become poorer and less likely to speak English. By 1996, one-third of students countywide were poor. And today, 70% of the students in L.A. Unified are Latino.

Further, dropout rates are high, test scores are low and the district has been slow to emphasize learning to quickly speak English.

“It’s been the school district’s inability to respond to this demographic shift that’s created a major problem for it,” said Fernando Guerra, the director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University.

But the board’s ability to deal with such issues eroded with the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978. Not only did that measure cut taxes, it sharply limited the ability of school boards to raise money locally.

School board members and administrators point to another important event that occurred in 1978--one that transformed the board itself and undercut efforts to hold top managers accountable for results.

That year, voters approved Proposition M, which changed how board members are elected. Before then, board members were elected citywide. After the proposition was passed, they were elected from seven geographical districts.

The effect of that was to solidify the power on the board of not only the unions but also ethnic groups. Such interest groups could focus their resources on one district and have a greater impact on the outcome of an election, rather than diluting their power citywide.

But, once elected, board members felt obligated to serve those who had helped them win their seats and to serve the interests of their constituents. Even though the oldest schools by far were in the poorest areas of the district, board members insisted that money for maintenance be spent equally citywide.

“All the talk was of pork, pork, pork,” one policy expert who has been a longtime student of the district said.

With school board members now more likely to care about parochial interests, the need grew for a strong superintendent to look out for the district as a whole.

Harry Handler took the post in 1981 and was masterful at mustering support for his programs among board members. The district was continuing to grow rapidly, but with hands-on help from some board members he managed to address some critical problems, such as the need for teachers.

Many remember Handler’s tenure as the last time of stable, firm leadership in the district. In the 12 years since he left, the district has had four superintendents, only one of whom--Sid Thompson--served out his contract.

Mark Slavkin, who left the board in 1997, acknowledged that the management problems in the district were made worse by board members.

“One of the themes of all of my eight years on the board was a fundamental lack of ultimate trust and confidence between the school board and its top staff,” he said.

That led school board members to meddle, he said. But over the years, that meddling had another effect, others said.

Administrators came to realize that angering a school board member could ruin their careers. So, rather than working hard to solve a problem--such as cleaning up nonfunctioning bathrooms or quickly supplying textbooks to schools--staff members attempted to curry favor with their elected bosses.

With management bogged down, business leaders in 1993 launched a dramatic effort to go around the bureaucracy. Called LEARN, the plan was to go directly to schools, empowering teachers and parents to make decisions about spending, staffing and training, in return for greater accountability for student performance. The program had little wide-ranging impact, however.

Number of Students Has Soared Since ‘70s

By far the biggest difficulty now facing the district is creating enough classrooms. Since 1978, the district has built only eight schools. Meanwhile, enrollment has soared during that time by more than 150,000 students, meaning that schools operate year-round and thousands of students ride buses.

The most spectacular debacle, of course, has been the environmentally troubled $200-million Belmont Learning Complex near downtown, a badly needed high school whose construction is on hold while a commission considers whether to recommend that it be finished.

That problem and a similar situation developing at a proposed school site in South Gate were the most immediate reasons that the board hired Miller to temporarily take over its facilities operation three weeks ago.

But the continuing management difficulties in the district are just as easily illustrated by another unfolding facilities-related fiasco.

L.A. Unified has long been at a disadvantage in competing for state bond money, because it has not had a source of local matching funds. Now it does, with the $2.4-billion Proposition BB approved by voters in the spring of 1997.

But the district has been slow--once again--in getting its applications into the pipeline. It is now scrambling to prepare nearly 100 more before the state bond money runs out.

At stake is $900 million, which the district now hopes to obtain by lobbying for changes in rules governing the allocation process.

“The issue in making progress with this school district is that you’re not running on a field that is level,” said Steve Soboroff, who chairs the bond oversight committee. “Instead, it’s like climbing a mountain. You can be an inch from the top and, if you slip, you go back to the bottom. And there are people at the top of the mountain who want to make you start over.”

Zacarias remains the district’s putative leader and is resisting turning over power to Miller. That sets up a showdown between the board and the superintendent, which could play out within days.

Yet, even as opposition to the board’s action mounts among powerful legislators and as Latino leaders plan demonstrations, the board on Friday remained committed to its course.

Many Skeptical That Miller Can Pull It Off

Many people are skeptical that Miller possesses the vast political skills he’ll need to carry off the daunting task. Moreover, the rather bizarre nature of how he was appointed immediately gets him off on the wrong foot.

Fiedler, the former congresswoman who was Miller’s anti-busing nemesis, called his appointment “an act of desperation.”

“These problems didn’t arise overnight, and they won’t be solved overnight,” she said. “And there’s nobody with a magic wand, even Howard Miller.”

Still, said John Mockler, a policy expert who has observed Los Angeles schools both as an employee and consultant, “it’s hard to be critical of someone doing something, when there’s so much that needs to be done.”

And this time, with a recently elected slate of change-oriented board members backing him, Miller is expected to have support.

The new CEO himself is confident.

“This is the best chance in more than a generation to have a significant impact on the management and performance” of the district, Miller said Friday. “The reason it’s never succeeded in the past is because there’s always been factions, there’s been people who could report around other people, people who could establish relationships with individual board members.”

Trustee Valerie Fields portrayed the current situation even more dramatically.

“If we don’t act now in a decisive manner to improve this school district, then . . . it will never happen,” she said. “And I would see it as an omen for public education in Los Angeles, and then California and then the nation.”

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* ZACARIAS DEFIANT

Superintendent tells more than 1,000 cheering parents that he will not quit voluntarily. B1