Whatever His Legacy, Cortines Jolted District

Lynn Roberts got the troubling call from interim Supt. Ramon C. Cortines over the speaker phone during a staff meeting: A roofing project was behind schedule, and he wanted work done on weekends.

“I argued there were more roofs than available contractors,” recalled Roberts, director of maintenance for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

“Damn the costs!” barked the superintendent.

It was vintage Cortines: impulsive, intimidating, impatient for change and pushing up against the constraints of a giant bureaucracy.

In the end, Roberts never ordered the weekend overtime on grounds that Cortines was not fully informed about the district’s limitations. And for all Cortines’ accomplishments during his six months as interim chief, there were limits to how far he could move the massive district.

Most certainly, the hard-charging leader whose term ends today scored many successes. He established a coherent reading policy, implemented a program to halt social promotion, took steps to end the district’s patronage system and tried to create a new culture of accountability. He laid a foundation for reform by establishing 11 subdistricts with their own superintendents and maintained a dialogue with the powerful United Teachers-Los Angeles during a year of confrontational contract talks.

“I’ll miss Ray,” said Eli Brent, president of the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles. “I’ve worked with 12 superintendents in this district, and I regard Ray as one of the best--short-term, but an educator’s educator.”

There were also disappointments. Even some of Cortines’ strongest supporters have criticized his decision to choose mostly longtime school district administrators to head the subdistricts and to be top members of the staff of Supt. Roy Romer, who takes over Saturday.

“The bureaucracy won,” lamented Howard Lappin, principal at Foshay Learning Center. “I had such high hopes, and now I’m worried, because I see all the same players simply being shifted to new positions, whether they fit or not.”

Others said Cortines’ explosive temper, demanding personality and, in some cases, seemingly impulsive choices undercut his mission of reforming the district.

“On one hand, he raised the school board’s expectations about the kind of person they could get in a superintendent,” said former board member Mark Slavkin. “But if leadership means publicly attacking the people who work for you--deriding them as incompetent--well, that makes it hard to get the best and brightest to want to work for you.”

No one can say whether Cortines’ efforts to salvage the ailing system will hold. But by all accounts, his lofty rhetoric and clear sense of mission, for the time being at least, have revived hopes that the district can improve.

“Ray stabilized the politics,” said Fernando Guerra, executive director of the center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. “He stopped the school board from consistently going against the superintendent and the district. And, like a great setup pitcher in baseball who gets you through the seventh inning, he left his successor with a lead.”

The workaholic former superintendent of the Pasadena, San Francisco and New York schools was seen as a fixer when he took over a district that suffered from financial fiascoes, botched construction projects, a growing list of environmental crises and poorly performing schools.

Unlike his predecessor, Ruben Zacarias, who liked to emphasize the positive, Cortines felt it was imperative that the district own up to its failings--then work hard to overcome them. That strategy began to take shape on his first public appearance, when the trim, bespectacled and articulate man called L.A. Unified “the most dysfunctional district in America.”

A strict taskmaster, he arrived at his desk by 6:30 a.m. and worked out of a small, sparsely decorated office, poring over data sheets and, on several occasions, delivering withering tirades against underlings who didn’t measure up. Then, too, he dispatched gushing congratulatory memos to principals and teachers he felt were exemplary.

If nothing else, Cortines was decisive. He set deadlines and met them, and he grabbed bureaucrats by the collar in a way his predecessor never could. Instead of organizing “accountability task forces,” Cortines simply started to hold people accountable.

“There’s no doubt he hit the proverbial mule squarely between the eyes with a 2-by-4,” said William Ouchi, chairman of the LEARN reform program, speaking of Cortines’ verbal assaults on bureaucrats. “The people we ought to shed tears for are the second-graders who are not learning how to read.”

Board member David Tokofsky agreed. “Ray took a petrified organization and infused it with renewed mission and purpose--and a sense that the man on top really understands the issues and controversies of education,” he said.

”. . . But what comes next may be the disintegration of the regime he created, or an utter return to standard operating procedures as lifeless as he found them the day he arrived,” Tokofsky added.

In an interview in his office, Cortines said he has few regrets beyond not being able to settle the ongoing talks with the teachers union, or clear away the thicket of problems surrounding the unfinished Belmont Learning Complex.

As for his short temper, he said, “I don’t mean to hurt people,” adding that he wasn’t always able “to get some people’s attention.”

In any case, he said, “I wasn’t brought here to be Mr. Nice.”

In a surprising concession, Cortines acknowledged that he recently warned Romer that some of his superintendent appointments, which followed a nationwide search, may not work out.

“I am an eternal optimist,” Cortines said. “But I am also not sure that some of them can stay the course in terms of what is expected of them. This is a very few; I’m not sure they really understand what the work ethic is, as it relates to what is needed in academic achievement. But if those superintendents have not visited all of their schools at least once in the first month and a half . . . to see what’s going on in classrooms . . . then it will have been an exercise in futility and I will have wasted six months.”

Cortines made unannounced visits to schools part of his management style. Often without introduction, he would slip in and out of classrooms, staff meetings and parent-teacher conferences. Within minutes, the career educator could decipher a given school’s weaknesses, strengths and needs.

Then do something about them.

Take Dorsey High School, where painting crews walked off the job a year ago during a legal battle with the district. Until the legal issues were resolved, district officials told Principal Nancy Rene, the work would not be completed and the school would have to put up with cracked and grubby walls.

Wrong, all wrong, decided Cortines, who ignored the warnings of legal advisors and dispatched one of the district’s own maintenance crews to trim trees and paint as many buildings as possible.

“Ray left this message with my secretary: ‘Tell Nancy not to worry,’ ” Rene recalled. “A few hours later, a team of maintenance specialists arrived.”

Given his experience in tackling the toughest tasks in the most troubled school districts, it is not surprising that Cortines has had numerous job offers in recent weeks.

San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown wants him to be that city’s first-ever education liaison. Cortines’ duties would include keeping tabs on a school district with financial problems so severe it has no idea how much cash it has.

L.A. Unified spokeswoman Stephanie Brady said Cortines has also been contacted by Philadelphia’s school board, which wants him to mop up a mess there.

So how would Cortines, who owns a ranch in the forested Sierra foothills, feel about leaving one troubled district for another?

That’s hard to know. He informally left his post a week earlier than expected--in part, some insiders suggested, because Romer was giving signals he did not need help.

But Monday afternoon, while packing the few belongings he had neatly arranged on his desk, Cortines looked up at Tokofsky and sighed, “David, I’ve never worked so hard in my life.”