Are L.A. Unified Parents Pawns or Power Brokers?

The morning’s first wave of yellow T-shirts swarmed out of the elevators, down a hallway and into one of the white-domed Capitol’s hearing rooms. Abruptly their upbeat mood turned sour.

It was 2 1/2 hours before an important Senate committee would discuss the bill that Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa hoped would let him take control of Los Angeles’ sprawling school district. The yellow-shirted parents had arrived by bus the night before to stop him, and they weren’t pleased to march into the hearing room and find every seat taken. By parents and children in blue T-shirts -- the color of the enemy.

Anyone who cares to understand why Los Angeles’ mayor will soon succeed in his public school power grab might consider that scene and ponder the touchingly naive slogan that the mayor’s opponents displayed on their LAUSD-issued yellow shirts: “Parents, not politics.”

As if.

A few minutes before the hearing began, I ran into the mayor in a hallway. He advised me, in passing, to expect nasty heckling by the yellow shirts, who had dogged and discomfited him at other public meetings.

He need not have worried.

At 4:30 that morning the Sheraton Hotel’s doorways had resonated with the sound of fists on doors. Acorn, a community-action organization, and the Los Angeles Parents Union, a group pulled together by swashbuckling charter school entrepreneur Steve Barr, had bused 350 or so parents and children in the day before to support the mayor, at least two hours ahead of their rivals. By dawn, the bleary-eyed takeover advocates had fumbled into blue T-shirts, grabbed a quick breakfast and headed for the Capitol.

The counteroffensive had started weeks earlier, soon after yellow shirts began showing up at public events. State Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles), a longtime Friend of Antonio, demanded that L.A. Unified officials publicly disclose how much money they were spending on those buses and T-shirts. Before long, the mayor’s bill assumed an official name: the Gloria Romero Education Reform Act of 2006.

Was it any wonder, then, that on the morning of the hearings someone from Romero’s office arrived early to open the hearing-room doors for those nice people in blue T-shirts?

The milling yellow shirts seemed as surprised as they were outraged. If they had any fight left in them, it faded when, at a signal from organizers, the mass of blue shirts stood in unison to greet the mayor.

For weeks I’ve been growing increasingly embarrassed by the way my fellow L.A. Unified parents have allowed themselves to be used as pawns by both sides in this struggle for control of the district. I wasn’t surprised when, after the hearing, the blue-shirted throng assembled before news cameras on the Capitol steps and, led by an enthusiastic young organizer, shouted out triumphant chants: “We are the parents! The mighty, mighty parents!”

The day before, I’d talked to yellow shirts near Chinatown as district operatives began herding them onto buses the district had rented for the ride north. By and large, these are moms and dads who fought hard to infiltrate the system that is educating their kids. Along the way, many have picked up official titles -- “community rep,” “parent facilitator” -- as well as tolerance for the bureaucracy’s devout commitment to “process.”

Maria Mendoza is typical of the yellow shirts. At one point, she darted away and returned with a vinyl zip-lock envelope containing her daughter’s latest report card from Locke High: All A’s and E’s (for excellent), even in geometry, chemistry, and AP Spanish.

“There are success stories in the schools,” she said, seething with resentment at the mayor for failing to discuss his plans with parents like her, who have invested so much time in trying to improve the system from within. Having grabbed scraps of power locally, she and other anti-takeover advocates feel betrayed by a legislative process conducted largely in secret, hundreds of miles away.

The blue shirts I met, on the other hand, are a more goaloriented lot, eager to push full steam ahead for sweeping reform, and damn the details -- including the fact that, behind closed doors, teachers unions made sure the mayor’s bill offers no encouragement for the sort of charter schools to which many of these rebellious parents send their kids.

On the spur of the moment, I climbed aboard one of Barr’s buses for the trip back to Inglewood. My seatmate, Kerry Martin, a district school bus driver for 13 years, bristled with anger. As many as 60 members of her family, including her son, attend or have attended L.A. public schools, she said. “Generation after generation, we’ve gone through L.A. Unified and we’re still not making it.... Ten in my family dropped out of school.”

Like most blue shirts I spoke to, she’s hardly conversant with the specifics of the mayor’s deeply flawed bill. What matters is that someone is offering hope for the sort of revolution she thinks is needed to disrupt the decades-long stupor of the status quo.

Somewhere around Buttonwillow in Kern County, Barr schmoozed his way down the aisle. A big guy, with surfer dude good looks, he triggered peals of laughter with a story about his high school prom date throwing up in her hair on a long bus ride back to Cupertino from Disneyland. He also talked gleefully about the favor he figures the mayor now owes the Green Dot charter schools.

Barr says he came up with the idea for organizing parents back when then-mayoral candidate Villaraigosa suggested, over a glass of wine, that what the city really needed was a parents revolt. That hardly makes him the mayor’s puppet, Barr says, adding that the mayor’s operatives have asked him more than once to ship blue shirts to an event, only to hear him fire back: “We’re not your movie extras.”

I don’t doubt that Barr and the mayor and school board members are, to varying degrees, committed to both change and to true parent involvement. But if I were them I’d start worrying about blowback, about the unintended consequences of their hastily organized parent crusades.

In the halls of the Capitol, you see, I’d watched blue shirts and yellow shirts intermingle. Sure, some were busy spreading rumors that one group or the other had been paid to attend the hearings, that they’d been yanked from homeless shelters.

But something else was happening too: Moms and dads and aunties and abuelos from the opposing sides were talking, and beginning to grasp not only the power of politics, but the potential they’d have if they fought together for their children, leading a revolt rather than letting themselves be used as pawns.

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How do you participate in your child’s education? To answer this question, or discuss this column, visit latimes.com/schoolme. Bob Sipchen can be reached at bob.sipchen@ latimes.com.