LAUSD and the Ritualistic Killing of School
- 13 May 2014
- Written by Odysseus Bostick
THE BOSTIC REPORT-If the Los Angeles Unified School District were a used car, parents would be reading the fine print of California’s historic lemon law by the end of first grade. The second largest school district in the nation is not the most well oiled machine, to put it kindly. It’s a labyrinthine of administrative fiefdoms whose goal seems to be to operate in an absolute vacuum and often at odds with other administrative arms. Kids? Nowhere to be seen.
The school district is an organism, but it works less like an octopus and more like a virus. Power struggles appear to be constant and efforts as a parent to incite positive change against the bureaucratic quagmire reminds me of old comic books I read as a kid where the Japanese samurai warrior must commit an act of seppuku to ensure his master’s honor.
Standing in line to wait for five or six hours outside the district’s downtown headquarters where they hold school board meetings feels like ritualistic suicide. Only in this case, your master is not some local shogun. This is about your six year old’s education – something far more important than any power struggle in 15th century Japan.
Waiting in a line all day on a Tuesday afternoon to get a coveted speaker card is a mental journey, taking you through emotional swings of anger, resentment, bewilderment, and more all in the name of fighting a budget cut to our miniscule arts curriculum or some asinine program change dreamed up in a fit of a political gerrymandering.
Our biggest problem in LA Unified is that too much money is spent on administrative efforts off campus and those expenditures are mired in bureaucratic silos of opaque missions. Working completely out of sight of parents and kids, these administrators and project managers have migrated away from the purpose of a school district – educating children – and fallen into political and personal traps.
We’ve got competing armies of bureaucrats holding an ungodly number of meetings in various administrative LAUSD and the Ritualistic Killing of School: