In a typical year the promise by the Mayor of America’s most under-policed city, Los Angeles, to expand the LAPD by 1,000 officers over the next four years, to be paid for by an increased trash fee, would be the lead story.
But in yesterday’s state of the city speech Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced at a charter school that he was staking his mayoral reputation and political future on remaking the Los Angles Unified (County) School District. His proposal, based in large part on Mike Bloomberg’s takeover of the New York City Schools, would bypass local voters by seeking the approval of Sacramento to replace the current school district with a council of mayors, which would then pick a CEO who would be given broad powers to streamline the bureaucracy. With Los Angeles representing eighty percent of the counties' students, the mayor of LA would dominate the council.
Villaraigosa, a former teacher, whose wife still teaches in the public schools, has taken pains to reach out to his former allies in organized labor who are the chief opponents of the reforms. But this is a fight he can win.
The limited success of New York's experiment with mayoral control should serve as a caution. There is probably no alternative to a far more decentralized alternative that replaces the dead hand of the teacher’s contracts with a heavy emphasis on charter schools and vouchers. But the LA Daily News probably got it right when it argued in an editorial that the “breakup of the district will never go anywhere until this mayoral-control debate is played out.”