David L. Brewer swept into his job as school superintendent last year brimming with charisma and management-speak. He evinced bravado about the transformation he would wreak in the district, but also naivete about the obstacles he would face -- and about his own shortcomings as a potential school leader.
His big ideas -- which included firing incompetent teachers, attracting investment from outside the Los Angeles Unified School District and launching a system of boarding schools for foster children -- were, and still are, attractive. And yet, one year into his tenure, he is not as far along on key goals as he ought to be. More troubling, he seems to have lost track of what those goals are, leaving the impression that he is succumbing to the district's deadening bureaucracy and the focused opposition of its unions. As we were a year ago, we're rooting for him while remaining uncertain he's the man to pull it off.
Certainly, the retired admiral walked into a situation with its share of challenges. He was hired by a fractious and dysfunctional board as a coup against Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who was seeking substantial power over the district. Hiring a superintendent without the mayor's input -- and an African American superintendent whom Villaraigosa could hardly criticize publicly -- was a deplorable act of racial politics, but it gave the board a short-lived victory. Then enough of the mayor's school board candidates won in the last election to hand him a majority, and suddenly Brewer was reporting to a board that hadn't hired him.
None of this is Brewer's fault, but as a military man accustomed to a hierarchical structure in which orders are obeyed, he failed to foresee that he was taking over an organization -- we use the term loosely -- marked mainly by its diffuse powers, entrenched bureaucracy and layers of hostile politics. Brewer is many things, but he is not an artful politician in the way that, say, Roy Romer, his predecessor, was.
The result is that Brewer has stumbled into one defeat after another, each one weakening his stature and his respect before the board. He launches ideas without laying the groundwork and then too quickly waves the white flag when rebellion erupts. His talk of pulling bad teachers out of the classroom disappeared first. He -- quite rightly -- told the board that the district could not afford health benefits for its part-time cafeteria workers; the board ignored him. Now his plan for a separate mini-district for low-performing schools has fallen apart after the teachers union got riled up and several schools flatly refused to participate.
