John_Schwada's Blog

After a couple of hours hanging around LA school district headquarters on Tuesday I came away with a deep sadness....but confident that ex-U.S. Navy admiral David Brewer's career as superintendent at LA Unified is taking on water faster than the Titanic.

Unlike the Titanic tale/legend, however, in which Capt. Edw. Smith went down with his ship, Brewer is unlikely to go down with LAUSD. No. He'll probably get a bail-out package. As he sails into the sunset, in his taxpayer-funded lifeboat, we will - if we're lucky - get one last picture-perfect view of him waving amiably to us and the children on board...the Titanic.

It's easy to bag on LA Unified...consider the following exhibits gathered while cruising the school district hallways.

Exhibit #1:
A woman, nearly tearful, approaches me outside the locked doors of the LA School Board meeting room. She's holding a drawing of a horse, part of an assignment given to her daughter, a kindergarten student. Her daughter's assignment, the woman told me, was to color the horse. The child colored the body of the horse brown, the mane, tail and hooves blue. Next to the brightly-colored horse (the child dutifully did not color outside the lines) was the teacher's comment in red ink. "Use realistic colors."

Apparently there's a problem in LA Unified-Land with five-year-old girls coloring the tails, manes and hooves of their horses blue. A problem with imagination? With having fun?

The mother was livid over the teacher's remark. It was, she told me, thoughtless, unhelpful, even cruel. But there's more. When she confronted the teacher about this, she was escorted out to the playground for a little heart-to-heart. 'You're not going to win this one,' the veteran teacher told the mother. And, by the way, the teacher advised, 'If I were in your shoes I wouldn't have my own children in any school in LA Unified unless it's a magnet school.'

Great. Let's hire this teacher 1) to do sensitivity-training and 2) to handle district public relations. On the other hand, should we really expect more from teachers who are basically caste-less creatures in our society, looked down upon and ill-paid, battered by mandates....we could go on forever playing this screeching violin of misery, of pity....of bathos?

Exhibit #2:
Also while loitering at the school board headquarters, I ran into a hundred plus folks protesting...their leader Caprice Young, a former school board member who is now trying to reform LA Unified from the outside (perhaps after having despaired of being able to accomplish much working inside the "belly of the beast" to quote Jose Marti). Young is now the president of the California Charter Schools Assn., a group hell-bent on "subverting" our traditional public school system by setting up charter schools organized around the principle of self-governance....

This group of protesters - according to Young - was upset that the school district had reneged on an agreement to provide classroom space to a half-dozen charter schools in existing, unusedLA Unified facilities.

"These are teachers, parents and some students who are protesting because they have been refused facilities," Caprice said. "The law is that LA Unified is required to provide facilities for all public school students - and charter students are public school students. So we're here today to remind the board that they agreed to provide us with facilities, they offered them to us on April 1 (2008), and now these offers were rescinded. We know they have the space. Our (charter school) principals have walked the space, seen the classrooms. And now our kids are told they have to stay on the street. That's not fair."

On the street?

"Well," Young continued, "several hundred (of 2000 affected, 'homeless' charter school students) have no space and the ones that do have had to lease space (at something approaching market rate rents), paying for it out of the money that's supposed to go for books, instruction and teachers."

To add insult to injury, Young said, the school board was NOT going to let the charter school community tell its story at the board meeting.

Exhibit #3:
I asked Brewer, as he walked into the board meeting, if he still believed the school district was manageable after a year and half at the helm. Brewer insisted he is getting a grip on things now that he has finally hired Ray Cortines, the septugenarian educational Duracell Bunny Rabbit. Cortines was brought on board a month ago as Brewer's top lieutenant, apparently to keep the Visigoths from the school district's doors, plug up the sex scandals, tamp down the interracial riots, fix the screw-ups, foul-ups and missteps...perhaps even educate the kids.

Here's what Brewer told me, on camera:

"I was struggling trying to get results, and so I brought in Ray Cortines as my number two - and a strong number two to get results. And he's shaking things up and I'm sure he's making some people mad, because that's what I want...."

Should we be relieved to learn that t's taken Brewer, by his own admission, nearly a year and half to figure out that he wasn't in control of the district? That Cortines has now got us covered, got our back, that we can all breath a sigh of relief? Why do we need Brewer if that's the case?

And really what evidence is there - after a mere month of Cortin-ization - that Cortines is going to turn this giant district around, pump out the seawater that's rushing in, plug the holes, fix leaks, repair the shattered bulkhead, etc.? Who says Cortines is a miracle-worker?

Doesn't everyone know by now that just about the only miracles happening in LA Unified are the hopeful five-year-old girls who color their horses' tails, manes and hooves blue?