Wrong bill, right idea

THE LEGISLATURE is expected to vote soon on AB 1381, the bill that is meant to grant accountability for and control over the Los Angeles Unified School District to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. This proposal will have very harmful effects on the education of the children of Los Angeles. The effect of this bill has not been explained clearly, nor has there been consideration of any alternative bills to achieve the same goals. Before it’s too late, let’s do both.

The idea behind the bill is that mayoral accountability for L.A. Unified will produce better management and better student performance. The superintendent is now under the control of an elected school board whose members are largely unknown to the public. Because these board members are anonymous, the argument goes, they cannot be held accountable by the public. Many voters can identify City Council members or county supervisors because their responsibilities are broad and touch many aspects of voters’ lives. With single-purpose boards, though, it’s different. Can you name members of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board, the Franchise Tax Board or the LAUSD board? If you don’t know who they are, how are you holding them accountable? Without clear accountability, no one will make hard decisions, and the children will be the losers. This is a strong criticism of the system, and it points out real flaws.

Mayoral accountability is proposed as the remedy because everyone knows who the mayor is, and the public can hold the mayor accountable for school performance. That’s what is happening in New York City, Chicago and Boston, where voters know to blame Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Mayor Richard Daley or Mayor Thomas Menino if the schools fail. The mayor has no easy outs, no excuses and no one else to blame in those cities. Although it has not been established that mayoral accountability always works to improve the schools, the argument is a reasonable one.

Does AB 1381 provide for clear mayoral accountability? Not really. The problem is that L.A. Unified serves the children not only of the city of Los Angeles but also those of 26 other cities and some unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County. Under the bill, the LAUSD and its superintendent will be governed by the existing school board plus a new committee made up of the mayors of the district’s 27 cities and the five members of the Board of Supervisors.

If things go badly, will the public be able to turn its wrath on the mayor of L.A. or on any other mayor? Not likely, because we’ll have a difficult time finding our mayor in that crowd of 32 committee members and seven school board members.

What about mayoral control over the district in this legislation? Proponents claim that Villaraigosa would control the LAUSD because each mayor would have votes in proportion to the number of students he or she represents. Because Villaraigosa would have about 80% of the students, so the argument goes, he’d control 80% of the votes.

If the committee of mayors decides policy by a majority vote, or even a super-majority two-thirds vote, the mayor of Los Angeles will always win and the other 26 mayors and the five county supervisors might as well stay at home. Except that no court of law is likely to permit this to happen because the citizens who are represented by those other mayors and the supervisors would be disenfranchised where the LAUSD is concerned. If this bill passes, it will probably be mired in legal challenges for years, leaving the district without any clear-cut governance at all.

If our Legislature is serious about wanting to create mayoral accountability and control, here’s a suggestion. Pass a bill that does two things: Give the mayor of Los Angeles total authority over L.A. Unified and permit any of the other 26 municipalities and the unincorporated areas that are entirely or partly in the district to pull out of it with a majority vote of their electorates.

Voters should not be passive about AB 1381. Mayoral accountability might be the right thing for L.A. Unified, and Villaraigosa might be the right mayor to wield this power, but this bill would neither give him that power nor enable the public to hold him accountable for the performance of our schools.

What it would do is leave us with even less accountability and more ambiguous control over the schools than we have today.