This Job Is as Serious as a Heart Attack

The man who saved the children of Los Angeles told a darkly amusing story at a recent Board of Education meeting.

If board members were listening, it doesn’t show.

If they had truly heard his telling tale, they would stop dithering with the results of their soft-headed public survey about the qualities of a good superintendent and begin salary negotiations with Colin Powell, whom I appointed to that position two weeks ago. If they truly grasped how brutal the job of superintendent has become, they wouldn’t be fretting that publicly naming members of their selection committee (my colleagues Duke Helfand and Joel Rubin outed three this weekend) might scare away people who are considering the assignment.

The district’s PR 101 public outreach effort and selection committee caution suggest that some of the seven board members have internalized the pathetically small voter turnout in school board elections. They then behave as if they’re serving the relatively hick Los Angeles of the 1960s, when a board member’s main jobs were to smile during student songfests, hand out retirement paperweights and play PC patty-cake with a small-town spectrum of ethnic players.

As often as not, however, low voter turnout and other signs of people’s seeming unconcern for Southern California’s children have less to do with apathy than with a reluctance to be schoolmarm’d by district leaders who haven’t grasped that they serve the sophisticated citizens of a 21st century megalopolis.

So, although the district sent out thousands of printed surveys and trumpeted the fact that anyone who didn’t get a copy could join in on the Web, only 3,474 people responded -- in a district with 727,000 students. But really, what self-respecting adult would take the time to respond to the survey’s squishy management-speak: “deploys resources to improve classroom conditions.”

Then there was its insincerity. This poll, after all, was written in such a way that the same pool of people who said it’s very important to “plan for using money and other resources effectively” also said that “experience with business/financial management of a complex organization” is unimportant.

Survey respondents put “plan for keeping campuses clean and safe” and “stand up to powerful individuals and interest groups” near the middle of the importance rating.

But how would a new superintendent with middling skills in those areas contend with the recent tragedy at Venice High, where young men identified as local gangbangers allegedly shot a student dead as his brothers tried to intervene.

On Wednesday, the slain boy’s parents, in the company of their lawyer, accused the school of not doing enough to prevent the fight -- a charge that comes up every time a brawl bloodies a district campus.

A sincere survey would ask people to weigh such criteria as: “Must be able to fend off lawsuits from all quarters while maintaining diplomatic ties with a public that thinks the superintendent’s job includes pacifying the Crips, Bloods and other powerful interest groups that have terrified Southern California for decades.”

If the survey weren’t a sham, I’d be mildly heartened that people don’t think being a current LAUSD administrator is a crucial quality for the next supe. I’d be appalled that they kiss off “experience overseeing major building construction.”

That brings me to James McConnell, the man who saved the children of Los Angeles.

McConnell is the former Seabee Romer coaxed into heading the district’s building program. He and those who have worked with him describe his first months aboard the LAUSD as so mired in inertia, resistance and bureaucratic tomfoolery that it would have caused the Pharaohs to give up on the pyramids.

Last month at a board meeting, McConnell told a story about those early days. Here’s how I remember it:

Seems McConnell was driving home on the 110 Freeway one evening not long after taking the job. A sharp pain suddenly hammered his chest.

He drove to Huntington Memorial Hospital’s emergency room and quickly found himself on a gurney. A doctor examined him.

“Is there any particular new stress in your life?” the doctor asked.

“Well,” McConnell gasped, “I build schools for L.A. Unified and

Before he could finish, a voice boomed from behind one of the curtains: “Did you have anything to do with that Belmont High School fiasco?”

McConnell left the district last month in advance of Romer, who bails in the fall. He spent his time with the district cutting through complex knots of red tape and weaving deftly through the obstacle maze created by the entanglement of business, bureaucracy and politics. If it weren’t for him, Los Angeles students would still be crammed into schools like squabbling crabs in the hold of an Alaskan fishing boat.

But there’s still plenty of hard work and head-butting ahead -- and that’s just to keep the building program from backsliding into lethargy or falling prey to the ever-present danger of corruption.

This week the board will probably announce that it has appointed a selection committee to help find the next superintendent. I’m concerned that board members, in seeking help from solid usual-suspect pols such as state Sen. Martha Escutia (a Latina!) and Assemblyman Mark Ridley-Thomas (he’s black!) may be more interested in tiptoeing around the district’s vociferous ethnic lobbies than in finding creative thinkers with the vision to track down brilliant national candidates.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s fight to take over the district won’t make it any easier to attract the sort of star the job requires. Some board members worry that the selection committee might blanch at the political roughhousing that is sure to embroil the process -- reflecting the misguided belief that bush-league scouts can find a Hall of Famer.

I’m still working out my thoughts on the mayor’s power grab. But I do know this: Whether the board picks the next supe or Villaraigosa miraculously pulls off his coup before they’ve decided and selects his own person, the job’s No. 1 qualification is courageous leadership.

The candidate, of course, will need all the management qualities discussed in the survey. More important, the next superintendent must have the clout, gumption and expertise to bulldoze past self-interested politicians, careerist bureaucrats, unscrupulous developers and murderous gangbangers to do what’s right for the city’s students.

That and very high stress tolerance.

To discuss this column or debate the question, “Do Southern Californians care about kids?” visit www.latimes.com/schoolme.