Deal Is a Lesson in Education Politics

Six weeks ago, Deshawn Hill and I walked into Pacific Dining Car and caught a glimpse of democracy in action: A.J. Duffy and Robin Kramer having a late evening chat.

Duffy’s the charmingly cocky boss of Southern California’s biggest teachers union. Kramer is the mayor’s charmingly clever chief of staff. I’ll remind you who Hill is later. For now, let’s stick to the boss and the chief.

Kramer tells me the meeting was a coincidental bump-into-each-other thing. But seeing those two together at the city’s power-broker steak palace resonated with a hunch I’d been harboring: All those months of teachers union squawking about Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s plans to take over the Los Angeles Unified School District were mainly for show.

Political plot lines are often convoluted, of course. But I’ve never believed that the mayor, a longtime friend of labor who hopes to be governor some day, would really butt heads with the unions, which not only control the schools but run the whole crazy state -- not when there’s such politically advantageous and potentially lucrative symbiosis at stake. Last week’s deal clinches my skeptical view.

I like Antonio a lot. Until he moved into the mayor’s mansion, we were neighbors. Over the years we’ve chatted at pancake breakfasts, BBQs and on the sidelines when our sons played AYSO soccer together -- not to mention here at The Times when I was on the editorial board.

I have no doubt that he is sincere in his empathy for students, particularly the poor Latino students whom the public schools are failing. I’m sure, too, that he’s telling the truth when he suggests that reforming education is as important a challenge as any a civic leader can fling himself into these days. I’m even convinced that a heartfelt desire to make society better for kids is among the reasons he wants to be governor (come on, we all know he wants it) and then -- another hunch -- president.

That ambition, however, is also why I’ve always been suspicious of the politically brilliant mayor’s stated reasons for wanting to take over the career-crippling quagmire that is L.A. Unified.

Most characters in life, as in good novels, have complex and even conflicting motives. In striking that deal last week, ambitious Antonio smacked down Antonio the altruist.

I also like Duffy, who’s such a character I sometimes walk away from an encounter suspecting that he’s fictional. And I believe him, too, when he says he cares deeply about kids -- he’s a teacher, after all.

Because he’s a teacher, though, his motives conflict.

Like you, I think good teachers are heroes who deserve more money and respect and smaller classes and more control over what they teach. I understand why many people have a hard time accepting that their kids’ teachers’ interests don’t always overlap with students’ interests. In protecting a teacher’s interests, a union often adds to the bureaucratic bloat.

Since I began reporting this column in January (and in the 17 years I’ve followed my children through L.A. Unified schools) the most righteously frustrated people I’ve met have tended to lash out at two villains: the district bureaucracy and the union to whom so many board members and bureaucrats are beholden.

Even many teachers say privately that they’re disgusted that unions erect barricades against merit pay, charter schools and administrators’ ability to move experienced teachers to the schools at which they’re most needed. Hear enough stories about just how hard it is to fire an utterly incompetent teacher, and you begin to wonder why the public tolerates unelected union power brokers in their children’s lives at all.

Duffy has been trumpeting the union-mayor collaboration as a way to spread decision making to all the players, making everyone a general and a soldier in this noble fight for the children.

School board member and history teacher David Tokofsky calls that wackiness a prescription for anarchy or fascism. He jokes about trying to draw the convoluted organizational chart for the redrawn district structure, with its dis-empowered board, an unequally empowered council of mayors, locally empowered teachers, overlapping budget powers and a re-empowered superintendent who answers to everyone but whom only the mayor can fire.

People I respect and who know far more about education than I do, see promise in the proposal that’s supposed to start moving down the legislative conveyor belt this week.

Ramon Cortines, who by most accounts did a bang-up job as interim superintendent before Roy Romer was hired, has reservations about the bill’s details. But he thinks that cooperative reform could prevail as long as there’s a very strong superintendent (he now says he’d consider the job) to orchestrate the competing powers-that-will-be.

Former board member Caprice Young, the energetic queen of charter schools, thinks that the mayor grabbing even a piece of the school power pie is “huge,” a hard jolt to the sleepy status quo.

Then there’s Kramer. Citing the “the art of the possible,” she notes that “in this world,” school reform has never worked unless the prime movers of change persuaded teachers and principals (and hence their unions) that they’d be part of the process.

The mayor’s proposal, she says, aims to create a “stronger, more modern management system,” that reduces traditional labor-management strife. She assures me that the mayor has already told the union: “We all need to be in the flexibility business,” and that that means bending on the issue of putting experienced teachers where they’re needed most.

When board members first began wailing that mayoral control is an affront to democracy, I scoffed. I thought it was a reflexive aversion to the goal-oriented leadership required to cut through the muddle of horribly entangled interest groups.

But the way this deal went down gives me the willies. Please don’t tell me that visions of desperate students filled people’s minds as they broke out the champagne.

And that thought leads back to Pacific Dining Car.

Also known as “Scarecrow,” Deshawn is a Fremont High senior I wrote about a few weeks back after he finally, and with great joy, passed the state’s high school exit exam. Following an interview, we had decided to grab a bite. As we left the crowded apartment he shares with his sister and her children, he mentioned that he might want to be a chef someday. Sizzler was his idea of a fancy joint. I decided The Times could treat him to a better steak.

Duffy and Kramer were seated in the front room as we walked in, engaging in one of the hundreds of meetings, planned or serendipitous, required to make any big political deal coalesce. I understand.

I stopped to say hi, and introduced the big kid in baggy clothes beside me. The maitre d’ then led us to the far reaches of the restaurant, where he seated us next to a shaved-head dude who was so drunk or drugged that he toppled onto us as he tried to stand. The service stank.

Deshawn understood what was happening, and savored his steak anyway. My enjoyment was undermined by the symbolism. Being treated as if you don’t count, after all, is what too many L.A. Unified students have come to expect.

To discuss this column or debate the question, “Is the mayor’s proposal good for the kids?,” please visit www.latimes.com/schoolme.