Roosevelt High teachers give the Education Mayor a failing grade

"Your attention, please.

Will Antonio Villaraigosa please report to the principal's office at Roosevelt High.

Immediately."

Yes, folks, I'm once again calling out the Education Mayor, as he has called himself. The L.A. mayor attended Roosevelt in Boyle Heights as a kid and took control of it last July along with nine other schools he promised to rescue.

"Judge me by what we do in these schools," Villaraigosa said in September.

Three weeks ago, teachers at Roosevelt did just that, taking a poll on how things are going.

With 199 teachers casting a ballot, 184 expressed no confidence in the mayor's Partnership for Los Angeles Schools (PLAS).

Is "rebuke" a strong enough word?

How about "revolt"?

"We basically switched one bureaucracy for another one," said English teacher Esteban Lopez, who sees no improvement over the way things were when Roosevelt was controlled by the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Lopez was one of seven teachers I met with Monday night, all of whom had gripes. Four of the seven had voted to support the mayor's initiative in 2007, when it won by a 152-62 tally. But now they're giving PLAS a big thumbs down.

Decision-making by PLAS administrators is irritatingly haphazard and confusing, said English teacher Rebecca Lizardi.

Can a student in one of the seven small academies take a class available only in another academy? One day yes, the next day no.

"Why don't they just use a Ouija board?" Lizardi cracked.

Not that special ed teachers Yolanda Rivera and Graciela Lopez or social studies teacher Chris Berru expected miracles when they threw their support behind the mayor two years ago.

"It was the lesser of two evils," Berru said.

He and others knew the mayor's team was appallingly short on details as to how things would get better. There were vague references to giving teachers more say in running Roosevelt, but Berru insisted that hasn't happened.

Nor have teachers seen the infusion of money the mayor promised, and they're unclear on how the transition to smaller schools will be executed.

"We're not against small schools," Berru said, "but they don't seem to know what they're doing."

The teachers told me many of their colleagues at other PLAS schools are equally lathered up.

"They're furious," Lizardi said.