Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa recently got
his reform plan, or what many are calling his “control plan”, passed
through the state legislature. AB 1381, gives the Mayor some control
of the nation’s second largest, and most dysfunctional school district.
It is on the Governor’s desk and the Mayor has promised a more aggressive
success rate than the one percent per year that the outgoing school
superintendent, Roy Romer, has achieved. The Mayor says he has a
plan. Of course, the devil will be in the details, none of which
have been revealed. This, and the fact that he came to them late,
has caused black community leadership to be less than enthusiastic
about the Mayor’s promises of reform. Some have called it a bad
experiment, and even compared it to the Tuskegee experiments. Others
have called it an “ego play.” Whatever you call it, it does appear
to be a desperate attempt to resolve a desperate situation. Radical
measures for radical problems, and this is a radical measure, for
sure. The Mayor forced the city and the black community to take
up the issue of education. He forced everybody’s hand, and truth
be told, everybody’s hand needed to be forced. In the case of LAUSD
(Los Angeles Unified School District), something is better than
nothing. And if black leadership doesn’t like the Mayor’s plan,
what are they prepared to do to bring radical change to a school
district that is worse than segregated conditions in 1954?
The Mayor has hinged his “Teflon” political career
on this takeover plan. If nothing else sticks to his butt, this
school stuff will. It will be everywhere he is,and he’ll feel
it every time he sits. The Los Angeles Unified School District
has been a pain in everybody’s butt for the last two decades.
When you go to the dictionary and look up failure, you see a picture
of an L.A. Unified school. The district has produced at least
two generations of functionally illiterate adults. The district
has become a bigger feeder for the prison industrial complex than
the state’s college systems. Still, the black community and its
leadership, stuck in the 1960s, seem hesitant to divorce a public
education system that has failed it in more ways than it can
count. They want to criticize anyone who advocates for the abandonment
of LAUSD. Well, here’s a “News Flash” for black leadership, LAUSD
abandoned us years ago. How can you leave somebody, or something,
that’s already left you? And if nobody else wants to say it, I
will: the public school system, in particular, LAUSD, is killing
our children. It’s killing them educationally when they can’t
compete; it’s killing them emotionally when many of them are social
misfits; it’s killing them health-wise as overcrowded schools
feed them sugar all day (as a revenue stream); it stresses them
out by packing them on top of each other, and it is taking away
everything, from PE to music, that fosters any mental and physical
well-being. Lastly it’s killing them physically, as schools are
more dangerous than anything that we as adults have ever known.
It’s become a holding tank, instead of a learning institution,
for an overwhelming number of our children. We can no longer point
to the one or two kids who are learning as the rule, rather than
the exception. It’s just not so.
The artificial argument that antiquated leadership
gives is that they, themselves, are products of public schools
as if that should be good enough to maintain public schools in
their present condition. This is not your grandfather’s, or even
your mother’s or father’s public school system. If black leaders
think public schools are going to turn around anytime soon, they
are bigger fools than I thought they were. I don’t fault the Mayor
for his “DO SOMETHING NOW” approach to school reform. I had long
resolved that I would NEVER put another child of mine, or my grandchildren,
through public schools in their current state. The leaders know
this because most of their children are in private, parochial,
or self-selecting schools and other forms of modified learning
(charter schools), including the Mayor’s children. If public school
is not good enough for their children, why is it good enough for
ours? The Mayor chose not to stand on the sideline even though
it doesn’t affect his own children. Black leadership could take
a page from this. Either be bold enough to close schools by pulling
our children out of these sorry schools, or take the same kind
of initiative to get our youth out of the trap they’re in. The
trap called LAUSD.
The challenge for black leaders is to fashion something
out of this that will benefit our children. If you’re not with
the Mayor’s program, come up with something of your own. Pretend
that it’s Prince Edward County, VA in 1952, where the children
knew their schools were inferior, and walked out—refusing to attend
separate and unequal schools. Our children today are just as desperate
to learn; they just need somebody to make something happen for
them. Well, the Mayor has done that. His approach is not a panacea
but it’s something, and it’s better than nothing, or 1% a year.
Now, black leadership’s hand has been forced to
do something about education. Hopefully they’ll do something more
than just wait and see what happens. Waiting got the schools in
this situation, and our children, more than most, are paying the
price. The Mayor may have bitten more off than he can chew, but
at least he had the moxie to try…forcing all of our hands in the
process.
Anthony Asadullah Samad is a national columnist,
managing director of the Urban
Issues Forum and author of 50 Years After Brown: The State
of Black Equality In America. He can be reached at AnthonySamad.com.
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