When Bob Hertzberg pledged to shatter the Los Angeles Unified School District into smaller, family-friendly school districts, his plan got the kind of attention a mayoral candidate craves. When it comes to L.A. Unified, however, there's no getting around the crooner's axiom: Breaking up is hard to do.
For starters, the laws are stacked against it, with more steps than a Bulgarian folk dance. The last major breakup attempt, in 2001, failed even to reach voters because its San Fernando Valley proponents couldn't satisfy a host of rules, some of which apply only to L.A. Unified.
"Folks brought a credible effort forward in 2001 and they failed, and failed miserably," LAUSD general counsel Kevin Reed said. "There are a number of gnarly questions that would need to be unraveled."
Critics counter that LAUSD bureaucrats and the teachers union used friendly legislators to embed those legal provisions within the state's education code precisely to make a district split-up nearly impossible.
The process includes collecting signatures in the area that wants to secede. Proponents must get 5% of all registered voters, or 8% of those who voted in the most recent race for governor. That part's a challenge, but anyone with funding or committed volunteers could handle it.
Besides gathering the signatures, however, petitioners must draw boundaries that satisfy myriad conditions. For one thing, none of the new, smaller districts can be worse off than the old or than each other.
For example, if the new districts are less racially or economically diverse, the breakup bid is likely to go nowhere. Resources also must be distributed fairly. A new district cannot emerge with markedly less-crowded schools than that portion of the old district from which it split.
The new districts also have to prove they will comply with lawsuit settlements negotiated by L.A. Unified, even though district critics and some activists have repeatedly questioned the LAUSD's own compliance with them. There's more, including retaining health benefits for retirees and honoring collective bargaining agreements. And the new districts, by statute, also would have to honor the provisions of various district reform efforts, including the LEARN initiative, which was supposed to give individual schools full control over academic reform but barely exists anywhere anymore in any meaningful form.
