It’s a Lot Like Many Districts, but Bigger

One of the stranger aspects of a place as vast as Southern California is that one man’s disaster here is so often another man’s TV show. If the “wind-whipped” brush fire isn’t whipping your suburb, well, that’s entertainment. If the guy in the live high-speed chase isn’t your brother having a televised breakdown, the customary impulse is to tune in and gawk.

But there’s something about the current furor in the Los Angeles public school system that seems, uncharacteristically, to hit home far beyond the boundaries of L.A. Unified. This may be because the LAUSD story is less a school story than a war story, starring a reviled bureaucracy and those who are fighting to fix it. Few things are more riveting than the sight of the mediocre-yet-mighty clawing and conniving to hang onto the failed-yet-familiar.

More deeply, though, the widespread fixation also may be because there’s a little bit of LAUSD in a lot of school districts, for reasons suburbanites only pretend not to recognize.

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Pop quiz: Picture your local public school. How resplendent is it with barracks-like portable classrooms? Do the administrators exude confidence and dignity, or shuffle around with the bitterness of clock-punchers? Have you ever said to someone, “Look, they’re hiring teachers off the street here; you don’t even need a credential.” As if educating children could be done by just anyone.

Now reconcile your answers with society’s constant assertion that we regard the public school system as noble. This is not to place blame, but to illustrate a fact we aren’t proud of but can’t quite help: At a fundamental level, public schools are not completely respected, and neither are the people who work in them.

Yes, we give lip service to pollsters that nothing is more important than education. We go on jags: school reform and toughened standards and big school bonds. But such outbursts have more to do with short-term outrage than long-term commitment. There’s a chasm between the way people want to feel, think they ought to feel about public schools and the way a lot of them actually do feel. How often is it said that schools should be smaller and cleaner and staffed with uniformly competent, fire-able people? How many communities put up with less?

Actions speak loudest, and, post Proposition 13, our actions have been: Ante up for wrapping paper and candy bars for our kids in our schools, or, in poorer districts, just pray for the best. Interest wanes if the fixes aren’t quick; many districts limp along on pure bureaucratic inertia without a peep from the public unless the incompetence spirals into a Belmont-level fiasco. The obvious conclusion is that we’re not all that bothered. A personal theory is that this stems from a lingering view of school employment as glorified day care--a job for people who don’t mind tending to society’s lowest-ranked and most tediously self-centered members, namely kids.

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LAUSD’s problems arise from this bedrock. Yes, individuals have mucked up the place, and have gotten away with it. But LAUSD also reflects a general adults-first focus that has shielded school incompetence for decades. We the public permitted that.

And it’s complex. These things aren’t just “bad” administrators versus “good” reformers. Bureaucracies are human constructs. Imagine the human who has put a career’s worth of faith in the system, or who was drawn to school bureaucracy because of a knack for following rules. Imagine the desperation as some new boss announces everything must change, not just at the top but at the level below that, and the level below that. And that your job depends on creativity and independence--qualities that, for some, would require a character transplant.

The fight between Supt. Ruben Zacarias, a loyal, 70-year-old, LAUSD veteran, and the trustees who want to replace him is interesting for its intrigue--they call for a new culture, he can’t make it happen, they let it be known they want him out, he won’t go. Latino allies announce that anyone who wants him out is a racist. The board kicks him upstairs. The bureaucracy digs in. Mass demonstrations are threatened, and state takeovers, and expensive battles in court.

But it is also interesting because LAUSD is not all that different from a lot of school districts. It’s not the only one with too many kids and no place to put them, not the only one with a stubborn, dug-in bureaucracy. It’s just the biggest. Suburban schools may have slightly cleaner bathrooms and newer computer labs, but that does not make them immune to bureaucratic incompetence. LAUSD’s problems are as apt as any human problems to jump the city line into the suburbs that tut-tut so smugly now over “that mess at LAUSD.”

Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.