Reform itself has corrupted LAUSD

None of the State's top education "reformers" knew anything about education when they began tinkering with it to suit the purposes of a handful of billionaires.

"If you're a molester, you go where you perceive the lowest-hanging fruit to be," a confessed child molester chillingly tells the camera in a Catholic-produced film from five years ago.  He encourages administrations to look for people like himself: unmarried adults who were always looking for excuses to be alone with children.

That's the composite, and that's who LAUSD should have been looking at when the first LAUSD employee went to jail on molestation charges.

Now there is a third molestation charge in the LAUSD, and it also turns out that there was a violator at Miramonte seven years ago.

A priest once told me, in the middle of the Catholic church's own crisis years, that men who never felt called to be priests at all began showing up as priesthood candidates in the 1970s.  They did so because they knew that once the church was afraid of diminishing vocations after the sexual revolution--and indeed, it was vastly diminished--it began to become more and more thinly stretched with regards to policing itself.

What we now have is something similar--a group (who knows how large) who began to show up at the LAUSD when Mayor Riordan--a man who learned everything he knows about education from billionaires--began to "reform" the district by bashing teachers and district alike in the early 1990s.  Mayor Hahn, conversely, knew that the Mayor's role was not school oversight, but Mayor Villaraigosa gladly took up Riordan's billionaire "cause," and has continued to stretch the district to its elastic limit.

It must have made most staff and even some of the reformers cringe to read the Board's statement about the scandal yesterday, in which it said "The District takes each and every reported act of criminal and administrative misconduct seriously, and we will continue to work with law enforcement to ensure the safety and security of our students and campuses." (This CNN report certainly speaks otherwise--assaults on students, restraining orders, and the District did nothing).

Ever since Riordan's manipulations, and certainly all through Villaraigosa's mayoralty, the nation's largest school district has become more and more thinly stretched when it comes to personnel. (There has been abundant money available for physical plant as the educational charlatans duped the people with bonds passed in the name of education but that really went to contractors and developers outside of the district, indeed outside of the city).  Everybody has been focusing on a new agenda, and nobody was really focused on protecting children--often pushing the concerns of actual educators aside, or dismissing them as insufficiently consistent with a corporate-minded reform.  All players--as I have said before--have been interested only in stretching the resources of the district to make it bend to their will, and few have ever had the interests of children in mind.  It's showing now, and I suspect now that this terrifying thing is very far from over.

EARLIER: Riordan, Broad, the Eastside Latino Machine, and the Legacy of District 5