MAYOR, BOARD CLASH BECAUSE DISTRICT'S PERFORMANCE SO POOR.

Byline: Earl O. Hutchinson

AT a press conference in September, Board of Education member Barbara Boudreaux, flanked by a bevy of local African-American leaders, angrily blasted Mayor Richard Riordan for practicing what she called plantation politics. By that she meant that Riordan had interfered in school district politics when he endorsed another African-American, Genethia Hayes, to run against her in April's school board race.

To Boudreaux, this was clearly a case of a white politician sticking his nose in to black community affairs and trying to tell blacks how and who they should vote for. The black leaders at the press conference dutifully nodded their heads in agreement with Boudreaux.

What she failed to say is that Hayes is hardly a carpetbagger plucked out of nowhere by a white politician to spite her and local black leaders. She is the executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, has a solid track record as a civil rights and public policy advocate, and has worked closely with school district officials to develop programs and curriculum for elementary schools.

Hayes is every bit as competent and qualified to run for a board seat as anyone. Boudreaux also didn't mention that Riordan picked on two other incumbents as well when he endorsed their opponents.

But the squabble between Boudreaux and Riordan is more than just a petty fight between two politicians. What scares Boudreaux and made her play the race card with Riordan is money. He has lots of it, and he has promised to throw his financial muscle behind the candidates he's endorsed. This could mean a campaign war chest as big as a quarter of million dollars for each of the candidates Riordan has endorsed.

The mayor's bounty makes them real contenders and guarantees that the campaign will be one of the wildest free-for-alls in decades for the four board seats. The contenders will almost certainly have the money to indulge themselves in an orgy of blame and table-rattling accusations against the incumbents for failing schools. This will force the incumbents to radically inflate their claims about all the great things they've done for the schools.

The battle lines between Riordan and the incumbents are sharply and contentiously drawn because the Los Angeles Unified School District is in shambles.

The test scores in reading and math remain nestled near the bottom of the national averages; the secession movement by Valley school separatists is gaining momentum; more parents and politicians than ever are touting school vouchers; more white students than ever have fled the city schools leaving the schools poorer and more heavily minority; overcrowding is still a huge problem; and school Superintendent Ruben Zacarias hasn't come close to delivering on his promise to turn the top 100 worst achieving schools into paragons of learning.

Things are so bad that a flood of corporate leaders has jumped into the act and offered a load of plans to make the schools succeed by running them corporate-style.

Billionaire Walter Annenberg has even tried to test out corporate management practices in the schools. Three years ago he shelled out $53 million and created the Los Angeles Annenberg Metropolitan Project to raise achievement levels at a handful of high school and elementary schools in Los Angeles County. The effort only marginally increased student test scores at the elementary schools. At the high schools the test scores continued to plummet. If this isn't enough, according to a survey in January by the U.S. Education Department, four out of five teachers admit that that they feel ill-prepared to teach in classrooms. And an appalling one out of three don't even have degrees or training in the subjects they are teaching.

So while Boudreaux and two other incumbents scream that Riordan's move to dump them is a misguided power play, the truth is that his action seems more like a desperate attempt to grab onto someone, anyone, with even half a workable idea about how to turn the LAUSD around.

The three candidates he endorsed are making a mighty effort to sound like they have answers to the crisis.

They propose teacher pay for performance, strategic financial planning, better pay and training for teachers, and increased funding for textbooks and equipment.

But these are pretty much the same things that the incumbents say they want, and claim that they are working hard to implement. They're probably right. These are much-needed reforms that anyone who sits on the board, or wants to sit on it, should be working for. But nearly every board member that has talked about reform in poor and minority schools has crash-dived against the problems of bureaucratic inertia, protect-their-turf teachers unions, pass-the-buck administrators, indifferent parents and chronic budget shortfalls. The pity is that it doesn't have to be that way.

This year's crop of candidates would do themselves and students in Los Angeles city schools a big favor by trying to copy from the dozens of innovative programs in other school districts nationally that have boosted achievement levels among poor and minority students.

Even though these programs take different approaches to instruction and curriculum use they have several things in common. The teachers, administrators and parents work together and challenge the students to learn by setting specific goals, require mandatory participation of the students and parents in class and homework assignments, stress clarity of class and homework assignments, provide positive reinforcement to students, and continually monitor their classroom progress.

Most important they believe that poor and minority students can learn and achieve like students in well-heeled suburban schools, and they push them hard to be the best students that they can be.

There are two especially good programs that board candidates should immediately implement or expand in the Los Angeles city schools. One is the Talent Development Program, which targets schools in the poorest inner-city neighborhoods in Baltimore, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. In three years the reading and comprehensive test scores of the students in the program have soared. The other program is Teach For America, which offers new teachers a workshop and institute to sharpen their mentoring and classroom skills. In return they commit to teach two years at a rural or inner-city school. Educators overwhelmingly agree that Teach For America recruits have done much to raise the achievement scores of students at their schools.

Boudreaux and the other incumbents are right when they say that politicians who play politics with education almost always make a mess of it. Yet given the mess that the LAUSD presently wallows in, anyone who can do something to clean it up should be welcome to try.