Anger at Zacarias Issue May Have Ripple Effect

What many see as the humiliating way that a school board with a non-Latino majority has treated the Latino superintendent it inherited has prompted an outpouring of anger from Latino elected officials and civil rights leaders with political implications far beyond the school board.

That anger looms as a potential stumbling block for candidates who hope to incorporate the swelling ranks of Latino voters in their winning coalitions in next year’s Los Angeles mayoral race.

It has galvanized a sometimes-divided Latino leadership around the theme that Supt. Ruben Zacarias--and, by extension, the broader Latino community--has been mightily disrespected.

The anger stems from the decision earlier this month by the Los Angeles Unified School District board, which has only one Latino member, to appoint a former board member, Howard Miller, as the chief executive officer for the district. That decision had the effect of stripping Zacarias of most of his authority.

The act and particularly the way it was done--at a closed-door meeting on a 4-2 vote with no advance notice to the public--has prompted talk among the Latino political elite of disrespect and abuse of process.

“We learned to play by the rules and we finally arrived and they changed the rules on us,” state Sen. Martha Escutia (D-Whittier) angrily remarked to a reporter.

The contrast between that perceived lack of respect and the growing Latino presence at the ballot box has prompted some Latino leaders to believe that the time is right to break with Westside and downtown business and political leaders. The region’s political and business elite, some Latino leaders charge, pulled the strings in the Zacarias affair in an infuriatingly paternalistic way.

Alan Clayton, research chairman of the Los Angeles City/County Latino Redistricting Coalition, for example, has begun exploring the possibility of breaking away from L.A. Unified, which has a 70% Latino student body, but a non-Latino voting majority,to create a new Eastside district, which would have a Latino majority in both the classroom and voting booth.

“I’ve been a staunch opponent of secession [from the school district],” Clayton said. “But now I’m looking at options because of my disbelief at how the school board has acted.”

That sort of break, if it occurs, could lead to decisive changes in the Southern California political landscape. Although a breakup remains a difficult task, splitting the district could contribute to a climate encouraging efforts in various areas to secede from the city of Los Angeles.

Alternatively, the Zacarias controversy could quickly fade. People on all sides are working feverishly, trying to feel their way to a compromise that will let everyone save face and refocus on the district’s problems as they relate to children.

But even if it fades, the Zacarias affair could serve as a reminder that, in a city where more and more ethnic groups are positioning themselves to share the same political table, politicians have to take ethnicity--and perceived ethnic insults--into account.

Everyone on all sides of the Zacarias controversy can and will speak at length about how his or her first concern is what is best for the district’s students.

But some Latino leaders wonder how a group of non-Latinos suddenly became so concerned about a school district that is 70% Latino, one whose problems have been allowed to fester for years. They wonder why the group felt it had to take emergency action by summarily removing from authority a Latino superintendent with more than 30 years of experience--without even bothering to formally evaluate him.

Earlier this month, school board officials were told that the district, already plagued by environmental problems at the half-built Belmont Learning Complex, faces another badly polluted site in South Gate that could cost millions of dollars to clean up. That revelation led school board members to declare an emergency that required immediate changes in top management.

But some Latino leaders don’t buy the argument that it was such an emergency that Zacarias had to be effectively demoted without a formal chance to defend himself.

Some of the skeptics think something else was going on: a preemptive act to keep Latinos, who are severely underrepresented in the ranks of district teachers and administrators, from gaining a more meaningful foothold purveying goods and services to a district that is also a growing billion-dollar-a-year business.

State Sen. Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles), chairman of the Latino Legislative Caucus, talks of an old-boy network that controls the district’s money.

“Here’s the bottom line,” he said. “I’m of the opinion that a lot of the people are sincere [in their concern] about student achievement. But there [is] $7 billion at stake here” over the next several years, he said. “There are those who think, ‘We need to have our own team managing that.’ ”

Depth of Support Uncertain

Zacarias is clearly a popular superintendent in many parts of Los Angeles. The 71-year-old Mexican American walked into a literacy conference at an Eastside middle school last weekend and was treated like an icon. A Los Angeles Times poll last spring found that Latino parents of school-age children who were aware of him viewed him favorably by a margin of 3 to 1.

But the same poll found that nearly half of the Latino parents reported that they were unaware of him.

Protest organizers also face potential difficulty in sustaining popular interest in school board politics. Indeed, a rally on Friday to support Zacarias drew a substantially smaller crowd than organizers had hoped for.

One former member of the school district’s Mexican American Education Commission conceded that although Latino parents turned out in unprecedented numbers to support Proposition BB, the bond measure designed to fix schools, it is “hard to get people terribly excited about LAUSD.”

He predicted “reasonable-size demonstrations if somebody [rents] buses,” and displays from “a lot of high school students angry about the [poor] education they are getting. [But] it’s not so much a [mass] mobilization thing.”

How much support there will be for the option of breaking up the district also is unclear.

Four Latino legislators interviewed about it in recent days were noncommittal. Assemblyman Gil Cedillo (D-Los Angeles), for example, said it is appealing in that it “responds to people’s sense of . . . self-determination,” but that it could cause more problems than it is worth.

But it is not hard to understand why it is getting a look.

The way Zacarias has been treated reminds many Latinos who grew up in Southern California of the days when they were pejoratively called “wetbacks,” when there were only a handful of Latino elected officials and the community had a very real sense that it was excluded from decisions such as how to draw City Council districts and where to place freeways that often wound up taking Latino homes.

Protesting Latino politicians have made it clear that they are not so much interested in making sure that Zacarias stays as they are in making sure that the school board majority at least goes through the motions of treating him with dignity. They also are determined to ensure that they have a seat at the table whenever the next superintendent is chosen.

The controversy has unified Mexican American politicians, such as Polanco and county Supervisor Gloria Molina, longtime rivals who have found themselves working together.

“A lot of us come from activist backgrounds [during the 1960s and ‘70s] where we were protesters in the antiwar movement or in civil rights,” Molina said.

In those roles, “we learned a lot about the system. We said: ‘We need to know what the rules are so we can fight our way into those halls of power and figure out how to change the system.’

“Well, many of us are in those roles now,” she said. “We are in a position to be consulted when these things are going on. Then, here you have this situation where all of a sudden the process becomes insignificant. If nothing else, we should have been advised, or consulted or even brought into the process.”

Polanco said he wants to make sure that the school board majority, which he referred to as a bunch of “knuckleheads,” contracts for an independent evaluation of Zacarias’ performance. “If he’s doing great, fine,” Polanco said. “If not, the board has every right to get him out.”

At least some in the Latino leadership subscribe to the idea that Zacarias’ effective ouster is related to downtown and Westside business interests, in part represented by Mayor Richard Riordan and, in the eyes of some, the Los Angeles Times, having short-term pecuniary interests unrelated to advancing the education and employability of public school children.

Polanco advances one version of this argument, talking about “a shadow government . . . [consisting of] the mayor, with the mayor’s closest associates, including the Los Angeles Times” intent on preserving contracts for their friends.

Of course, on the other side of the debate, some believe that it is actually Polanco who is more concerned about getting contracts--in his case for Latino businesspeople--than in education.

Latino leaders attacked The Times, partly for editorials that criticized the former school board, then urged the election of a reform slate endorsed and heavily financed by Riordan, then lauded the decision by a majority of the new school board to bring in Miller as a bold and necessary step. In an editorial, The Times also called for Zacarias to step down for the sake of the kids.

Riordan, a multimillionaire venture capitalist with a long record of personal philanthropy toward schools and children, has made little secret of his own long frustration with the school district’s performance and his own lack of direct authority over it. After agonizing privately for years about how he could reform public education, and making admiring comments about the job the mayor of Chicago was doing after that state’s Legislature handed him direct control, Riordan moved this year to exercise indirect control.

Last spring he helped recruit and financially sponsor a slate of four candidates--none of whom were Latino--to run for seats on the seven-member school board. Although he has said he did not tell the new board majority to dump Zacarias, three of the four candidates he backed voted for the appointment of Miller, and Riordan has since made statements suggesting that he endorses their action.

Ethnically Tinged Theories

In addition, it was mayoral aide Steve Soboroff, himself a candidate for mayor, who brought Miller to the school district, proposing that the school board hire Miller as its facilities czar to run the school building program.

In that post, Miller became an ally of Barry Groveman, an attorney for the district’s environmental safety team. And together, they proposed putting Miller in the new post of chief executive officer, with all district employees reporting to him.

The fact that Miller, Groveman and Soboroff are all Jewish has uncorked some private expressions of anti-Jewish feelings by some Latino leaders.

Jewish leaders such as Anti-Defamation League Director David Lehrer, who are concerned about that sentiment, said that although some of the players are Jewish, no Jewish organizational agenda is at stake. Moreover, of the three Jewish school board members, only one voted to appoint Miller.

Those divisive, ethnically tinged conspiracy theories in the air are certain to complicate the job of candidates who hope to succeed Riordan as mayor. Winning election will require putting together the kinds of cross-cultural coalitions necessary in a city where Jews, Latinos and blacks each constitute about the same share of the electorate.

For Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles), who needs to both preserve his base among Latinos and reach out to Jews and white liberals on the Westside, the Zacarias controversy is a potential land mine, political analysts say.

Villaraigosa has been meeting with the school board majority and Zacarias to try to come up with a compromise. He could emerge as a hero or be spurned by both sides. So far, he said, he has been struck by the extent to which neither side understands the other. People on the Eastside are talking about lack of respect, he said. Westsiders are complaining that Eastsiders are making a non-ethnic issue into an ethnic one.

The Zacarias controversy has not hit home in the same way for City Atty. James K. Hahn, who is white, but whose political base is among African Americans. But he also will need to win with Westside liberals and to do at least moderately well among Latinos and elsewhere. He has so far not gotten involved in the controversy.

Soboroff, a Jewish Republican who lives on the Westside, has a base among San Fernando Valley moderates and conservatives. Strategists expect him to move left, emulating the 1993 tactics of his mentor, Riordan, by trying to hold his own among moderates and liberals on the Westside and tap into the substantial support Latino voters gave Riordan.

He faces possible tarring by Latinos, however, as the person who brought Miller into the school district, although he is counting on winning points with good reviews of his job as chairman of the Proposition BB oversight panel.

County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, a potential mayoral candidate who is Jewish and has his strongest support among Westside and San Fernando Valley voters, has had his own recent clashes with Latino elected leaders. He succeeded in limiting the size of a replacement for County-USC Medical Center on the Eastside and in reining in subway construction. His anti-subway ballot was opposed by Latino elected officials but won handily on both the Eastside and Westside.

In modern Los Angeles, he said, “There are racial implications to practically every decision we make, like it or not.”

He has offered his services as a mediator in the Zacarias affair, saying he is concerned, as a public school parent, that precipitous action by the school board has conveyed an image of “chaos and instability [that] threatens to drive whatever’s left of middle-class Latinos, blacks and whites out of the public school system.”