Cortines Blunt in Criticism of Schools

For a guy in just his second day on the job, Ramon C. Cortines had plenty to say Monday about the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Interim Supt. Cortines told parents and taxpayers that the district has been doing too little and getting away with too much.

“You’ve got to raise hell with the system,” he said in response to a parent’s complaint that she had to go door-to-door to beg neighbors for money to pay for school supplies. Cortines said parents should never be placed in that position. Neither should teachers, he said, calling it “unconscionable” that teachers who buy supplies have difficulty being reimbursed.

Cortines made his remarks at a town-hall style radio broadcast on KCRW-FM (89.9). About 200 people attended the session at district headquarters. If any of them wondered whether Cortines regarded his interim appointment as a chair-warming exercise, they were quickly informed otherwise.

Other district officials--School Board President Genethia Hayes, board member David Tokofsky and Chief Operating Officer Howard Miller--also answered questions, but it was clear who owned the stage: Cortines, a slight, tidy, wire-rimmed, bow-tied man, who took over leadership of the district from Ruben Zacarias just this past Sunday. Cortines will stay in the job only until June and made it clear he’s in a hurry to get things done.

Public question-and-answer sessions such as these often devolve into thrust-and-parry affairs, with school bureaucrats tiptoeing away from the most pointed questions, taking care not to offend any of the dozens of competing constituencies that make up an urban school district, and trying their best to promise everybody everything.

Cortines did little of that. He answered some questions with blunt yeses or no’s. He said he would take care of some complaints first thing today. Others, he said, were beyond his abilities.

Among other things, Cortines said that the bar has been set too low for minority students, that the district has neglected its basic duties, that teachers are underpaid, that environmentally unsound schools should be closed, that current achievement levels were “unacceptable,” that the school board can’t play favorites with administrators, that there are a lot of things the district cannot do right now and shouldn’t waste time and money trying until it gets its act together.

His first priorities are simple, he said: Ensure that students have seats to sit in and, once they’re in them, that they learn to read.

Everything else should be subordinated to that, he said.

In a reversal of normal bureaucratic protocol, Cortines and, to a lesser extent, Miller, his second in command, were far blunter than Hayes and Tokofsky--two of their bosses.

The 90-minute session was broadcast as an expanded version of KCRW’s “Which Way L.A.” series. It was open to the public and attending were a mix of students, teachers, parents and activists. Radio host Warren Olney at several points commented on the remarkable forthrightness of the answers.

Underscoring the sense of urgency he says he wants to bring to the district, Cortines referred to an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit filed last week over the lack of proper classrooms at Rosemont Elementary School west of downtown Los Angeles. The suit was filed last Tuesday. Cortines said he would have portable classrooms at the site by today.

He also said he was sending out a memo freezing professional training budgets immediately if the training had to do with anything other than reading. Another bulletin being sent to district staff today, Cortines said, would bring all special education directly under his control and it would stay there until he figured out what was wrong with it.

At one point, Hayes remarked about the lack of money available to do what the district needed to do, and two teachers in the audience asked whether the problems were too intractable to be addressed by schools.

Cortines, for his part, would have none of it. He said he didn’t want “to deal with straw men.”

“I believe I can make a difference,” he said.