EDITORIAL CONSENTING TO FAILURE LAUSD LEARNS THE HARD WAY ABOUT FEDERAL COURT DECREES.

OFFICIALS at the Los Angeles Unified School District must take their commitment to education very seriously. That's why they're providing the public an object lesson in the perils and limitations of consent decrees.

According to an independent monitor's report, the LAUSD is failing on terms of its decade-old Chandra Smith consent decree even worse than it fails most other tests. Out of 18 targeted areas, the district has met its improvement goals in only five.

That rounds up to 28 percent, or an F on even the most generous of grading curves. Of course, this is a test the district was destined to fail from the very beginning.

Like officials in various other local government agencies, LAUSD officials decided 10 years ago that their many failures would be indefensible in a court of law. Rather than fight litigants who claimed the LAUSD was shirking federal special-education laws -- or, better yet, get into compliance with those laws -- the district settled for the easy way out, the consent decree.

Easy, that is, for the officials in charge at the time. Signing on to the decree puts ultimate control -- and responsibility -- into someone else's hands, while making an ugly legal and political fight disappear.

But the costs of consent decrees, as the district has come to learn, are steep. The commitments usually set unattainable goals as a precondition for their termination. They're costly to maintain. And they bind local officials for years, if not decades. Just ask officials in the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Los Angeles Police Department who have been hamstrung by consent decrees of their own.

Worst of all, though, there is little reason to believe that the decrees actually make government any better -- as the LAUSD's dismal report card underscores.

Let's hope local leaders take the lesson of the LAUSD's disastrous consent decree to heart.