EDITORIAL ABANDON HOPE.

LAUSD administrators once more have lowered the bar on improving education: Don't fail students who've been failed by the LAUSD.

Toward that end, staffers told gullible board members - those who left reform on the shelf, along with all integrity - that fourth- and fifth-graders who flunk should be socially promoted to the next class, in the interest of justice.

The crumbling Los Angeles Unified School District might as well emblazon ``Abandon hope, all ye who enter here'' across every schoolhouse door.

The district isn't in the teaching business. It's in the retread business, slapping frayed ideas on kids who want to get ahead and sending them out into the world to crash and burn.

Board member David Tokofsky was concerned that students would be promoted only because they agree to shut up and behave in summer remedial classes.

Tokofsky raised the right question: Were administrators applying standards of social behavior rather than standards of learning?

The district's resolve in ending a quarter-century of promoting students who aren't learning to the next grade seems to have evaporated into the black hole that has become school reform.

And the district once again has played mind games with people of conscience until they're re-educated and indoctrinated into the world of mush and make-believe, good people like board President Genethia Hayes.

Hayes talked tough a year ago, when first elected to the board as a reformer who seemed to understand that schools should stop failing children.

Sadly, Hayes now talks the language of the LAUSD. ``I don't want us to get caught up in this issue of what the state requires,'' Hayes said in arguing to preserve the failed policy of social promotion despite a state law ending it. ``We ought to be pushing the envelope in the other direction.''

Huh?

The district should be sending kids through without even a preschool education?

That's the LAUSD for you. Always pushing kids back into the envelope.