At 600 schools spread across the sprawling Los Angeles Unified School District, painful spending cuts are reshaping priorities and reducing choices, transforming the effort to teach and to learn into a struggle merely to survive. From affluent coastline communities to impoverished inner-city neighborhoods, the fiscal crisis gripping city schools has embittered teachers who were forced to take pay cuts and alienated children trapped in classes that are among the largest in the nation.

While politicians in Sacramento and Washington debate reformist concepts such as "choice" and "accountability," and self-described "Education President" George Bush touts standardized testing and a sprinkling of "model schools," funding cutbacks are turning classroom basics--books, art supplies and science equipment--into luxuries.

Moreover, a national wave of school-management reforms that, a few short years ago, promised to transform public education by unleashing the creativity of teachers has come to a screeching halt. The realities of schools at the breaking point show up in small ways: boys and girls forced to share bathrooms, overworked janitors calling in sick due to stress, teachers assigning less homework--and students who wonder how important education is, after all, if the collective will to fund it adequately doesn't exist.

Squeezed between rising costs and shrinking state funding, the Los Angeles Unified School District has had to cut its spending by 15%, or more than $630 million, in the last three years. During that time, enrollment has mushroomed by more than 45,000 new students. More than 75% of the $3.9 billion the district spends annually comes from the state, which allocates to Los Angeles about $3,200 per student, and funds special programs for year-round schools, gifted students and handicapped children. But last year the state had to grapple with its own $14.9-billion deficit, so education spending was pared down and across-the-board cost-of-living increases virtually eliminated. State lottery revenues fell as well, leaving the Los Angeles Unified School District facing a $275-million shortfall last summer.