System Finally Undid a Career It Had Nurtured

It was an exhilarating moment for Ruben Zacarias and his widespread network of loyalists--the parents, the teachers, the principals and the Latino elected officials who had collectively ensured his victory in an unusually public proceeding to choose a new superintendent for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

“Si, se puede! (Yes, we can!),” Zacarias told the cheering crowd on his inaugural day, July 1, 1997. “Si, se puede!”

Proud, polished, handsome and impeccably dressed, the then-68-year-old Zacarias stood at the peak of a career that had spanned 32 years as a teacher, principal, area administrator, deputy superintendent and finally, No. 1.

Rather than accepting a well-earned retirement, Zacarias had sought promotion to a reputedly thankless job because, he was fond of saying, he believed he could make a difference.

“It sounds corny, but I really care about these children, I care about this district, I care about this profession,” he told a reporter. “Part of me’s the idealist.”

Twenty-eight months later, Zacarias stands at the precipice as a majority of the Board of Education has declared its intention to buy out his contract.

Through two weeks of tumultuous infighting that led to that decision, not one board member has questioned Zacarias’ ideals, his goals or the high standards he articulated for the future of public education in Los Angeles. It was a lack of execution that disappointed them.

In the end, Zacarias was stymied by the very system that had nurtured his achievement.

“As someone who grew up in this system, his instincts were to trust the people he had around him,” said Mark Slavkin, a former board member who now works for a private school reform group. “In retrospect, that didn’t work.”

Zacarias has had some notable successes.

Slavkin particularly cites the superintendent’s efforts to beef up the power of the district’s central office after several years in which a push for decentralization appeared to some to be eroding accountability.

“His legacy as superintendent is one of reasserting the central authority of the district in opposition to some of these reform models based on local control,” said Slavkin, who added that he personally did not endorse that change.

“One can like him or not, but I would say he stood for something and made some change.”

And by being able to personally connect with people--whether visiting schools or expressing empathy for those who came to board meetings to complain--Zacarias maintained a mystique that seemed to transcend the failings of the district.

“I don’t think anybody out there cares as much as he does,” said Bill Mabie, spokesman for state Sen. Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles).

But in many other areas, Zacarias has suffered setbacks. In recent weeks, the focus has been on a series of school construction fiascoes--the debate over whether to complete the environmentally plagued Belmont Learning Complex, the revelations of additional environmental problems at a school site in South Gate, the admission that the district has blown the deadline to claim nearly $1 billion in state bond funds.

But the problems that now appear to be bringing Zacarias’ tenure to a close also have affected his educational goals.

For example, while competing for the superintendent’s job, Zacarias announced a plan to identify the 100 lowest performing schools in the district and hold them to the fire until they improved.

After taking office, he sent a shock wave through the 660-school district by actually drawing up a list of the most troubled campuses and summoning each principal and their key staff members to personally brief him on their plans for improvement.

But after those immediate public relations successes, the 100-school plan gradually fell apart--victim of a lack of administrative follow-through and an absence of a solid theoretical grounding.

First came revelations that the simple reliance on test scores to identify low-performing schools had singled out and stigmatized schools with the highest percentage of poor children, but not necessarily the lowest educational achievement.

Zacarias promised to develop a new system that would extend the scrutiny to every school, including those in middle-class neighborhoods that were not performing up to their potential.

But that plan also fell apart after Proposition 227, the anti-bilingual education initiative, eliminated most Spanish-language tests, which the district had used to measure school performance.

After a Times article disclosed that the district’s new test scores had no continuity with those of previous years, Zacarias dropped the entire program, saying he would leave performance evaluation to the state.

The gradual demise of the 100-school program set a pattern that other Zacarias’ initiatives fell into: an attractive idea, fanfare for the announcement, but no eventual resolution.

A promise to end social promotion--also an element of his campaign for the office--fell off the agenda for a year until a new state law set a deadline.

After a Times article documented a severe textbook crisis, Zacarias decreed that every student would have a textbook.

Despite a massive spending program, reports of textbook shortages in predominantly poor schools persist today.

Last year, the byword was accountability. To meet the board’s demand for a system to hold district employees accountable for student performance, Zacarias assembled an impressive team of education experts to compile the best practices from across the country.

Their reports, filling a thick binder, plumbed the depths of statistical analysis of test scores and complex management systems.

But months later, nothing has been done with them--in part because of the turmoil between Zacarias and the new school board majority that won election last spring.

Although the three board members elected in a reform slate backed by Mayor Richard Riordan speak passionately about their desire to bring the district’s instructional work up to par, their first four months in office have been dominated by a mushrooming crisis in the district’s business administration.

It began with Belmont, the $200-million high school being built on a former oil field west of downtown. Tests this spring showed that hazards of explosive methane and toxic hydrogen sulfide are pervasive on the 35-acre site and were not adequately assessed before construction began.

Zacarias could credibly claim that the Belmont mistakes were made before his term as superintendent began. But this month, a new environmental mess emerged on his watch with disclosures that the real estate branch was rushing headlong to acquire the even more polluted South Gate site without telling the board.

Despite his mounting troubles, Zacarias continued to show the spirit that made him a cultural icon in some city neighborhoods.

When hundreds of students poured into district headquarters two weeks ago to protest conditions at Fremont High School, Zacarias walked among them, stood on a bench and shouted over the clamor that he would have his deputies solve their problems.

This week, Zacarias tried one more inspirational announcement--unveiling a plan for a sweeping but thinly detailed plan to reorganize the district. This time, his effort backfired. Rather than rallying support, the move infuriated board members, who had not been told in advance of his plans.

Less than 24 hours after what seems likely to have been Zacarias’ final grand announcement, school board President Genethia Hayes posted notice that the board would move toward dismissing him.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Ramon C. Cortines

*

School officials say Cortines is the leading candidate to be named interim superintendent of L.A. Unified.

* Age: 67

* Residence: Pasadena

* Career highlights: Served as superintendent of schools in Pasadena, San Jose, San Francisco and New York and as a senior official in the U.S. Department of Education.

Quote: “It’s easy to say, ‘It’s so bad, I can’t do anything.’ But you’ve got to start.”