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.