LAUSD: Morally and Financially Bankrupt

 

Los Angeles Unified School District is having a hard time paying the bills, teaching the kids, and thus keeping its doors open.

Clearly, the administrators, bureaucrats, and the elected Board of Trustees don’t handle addition and subtraction all that well. The district is failing basic math, and not just for the students.

According to ABC News Los Angeles, LAUSD is on the brink of bankruptcy:

The Los Angeles Unified School District could run out of money within about a year and is showing severe signs of financial distress, according to county education authorities.

 

The nation's second-largest school district, which serves more than half a million students, faces possible insolvency, prompting the Los Angeles County Office of Education to take action.

 

The district's last student population estimate listed 497,105 enrollees. That’s LESS than half a million. Even ABC News is having number troubles.

 

 

What happened, and what could happen if the district doesn’t get its act together?

 

Officials cited massive union contracts estimated to cost more than $1 billion annually, along with declining enrollment and reduced state funding, as factors contributing to a growing deficit and the possibility of state oversight.

 

"Worst case scenario is the state takes over, and this goes under receivership under the state, and that takes a long time to get out of, and it is really hard to maintain any control over curriculum, over class size," Bacall said.

 

I am shocked---SHOCKED— (not!) that the school district is going belly up, and the parents are taking their students out.

The warning signs had been blaring for years.

The usual suspects cannot be ignored, and are easy to catalogue:

·         Plummeting Enrollment

·         Rising Inflation

·         Excessive Pensions and Salary Costs

·         Administrative bloat with Diminished Transparency and Oversight.

·         Lawsuit payouts

The biggest killer, obviously, is the plummeting enrollment. Los Angeles Unified kids aren’t learning, that’s for sure. According to US News and World Report, math proficiency scores have been plummeting across all grades. Reading scores show some progress from elementary to high school, but less than half of LAUSD high schoolers are proficient.

In the real world, companies without customers close down. In perverse contrast, government institutions get their money, whether they serve or not.

And LAUSD is not serving the public interest.

On top of that, LAUSD schools are not even safe. The students routinely run into abuse and harm from their peers—and sometimes their teachers! The rising rates of violence are frequently on the news. The feds could pull their funding because of the rising number of predator teachers who get transferred instead of incarcerated!

Getting a bad education from LAUSD was expected, but the student population was still relatively high.

Twenty years ago, I was a French teacher in South Gate, in a new school built on the site of an old General Motors plant. New school, lots of students (almost 3,000!), and there still weren’t enough classrooms. I had 45 students in one class! I could barely move around the room, and some students feared for their safety if there was a fire. When I threatened to call the fire marshal, the union rep leaned on the assistant principal, who moved three students out and dumped them in a P.E. class—those poor teachers had to deal with 70 students per period!

 

See how only three students were removed. Not much help there! Notice the bureaucratic hustle to get something done, too.

 

Fast forward to now, and LAUSD high schools, on average, manage around 1,000 students. Some of the schools should have been closed by now!

 

What changed the student population, then, if the bad education wasn’t enough? The dam broke with the COVID outbreak, which ended parental non-involvement. COVID-19 may have shut down the schools, but the whole ordeal opened the eyes of parents throughout the state. They saw the left-wing garbage their children were forced to learn. They saw the bad curriculum, the lack of attention to detail, integrity, and success. Los Angeles parents had had enough, and they voted with their feet, sometimes moving their kids to local districts (Downey, Torrance, Wiseburn Unified in the LAX-area are some notable examples), or they just left the state entirely.

 

COVID was a tipping point for another reason. Five years ago, I joined LAUSD teachers and parents protesting the outrageous health mandates from the district to “protect the kids.” Political affiliation or ideological leanings didn’t matter to all concerned attendees. Employees, students, and parents across the district protested in front of 333 South Beaudry, demanding that the district rescind its onerous vaccine mandates and mask rules and keep the schools open!

During the main rally after our march around the district office, teachers complained about the increased burden of contending with discipline issues and health demands. Then one of the students addressed the crowd, and her comments worked out to something like this: She lamented all the woke nonsense being shoved down her throat. She was tired of hearing all the race nonsense. She was tired of learning about the LGBT agenda and sitting through all the sexual diversity displays. Her summation was crystal clear about LAUSD, that they were not teaching anything, and then they make them wear these stupid masks, too!

Despite the rallying cry of parents and teachers, the district kept cracking down on the holdout teachers, staff, and students who had refused the jab. Facing the dim prospect of never entering the classroom again if they refused the dubious poke, students left.

The district didn’t care. They were looking for absolute obedience from the rank and file. If you didn’t step up, you got the boot.

And the teachers union—ULTA (United Teachers of Los Angeles)—didn’t care.

Five years later, their wicked, progressive partisanship could not be clearer. They don’t focus on education. They focus on leftist politics and progressive activism. In 2025, I was stunned by the large number of UTLA teachers protesting at Elon Musk’s Tesla headquarters in Hawthorne, CA. Didn’t they have more important things to do, like grading papers, preparing lessons, and contacting parents?

Their most pressing concern was stopping federal cuts to public education and the Department of Education. What they refuse to talk about—and this returns to the bureaucracy issue—is that public education could accomplish great things for students and parents with half the overhead, more accountability, lots of school choice, and efficient hiring and firing practices.

UTLA shouts “DOA!” at all of these reforms.

And the parents say, “CU Later.”

And now LAUSD announces that they’re broke.

Frankly, this is a fitting end for one of the largest school districts in the country. This kind of disruption, the cold equations of supply and demand, will do more to clean out the left-wing corruption that has marred states like California and New York while also limiting (and perhaps one day) shutting down the inordinate power of the National Education Foundation and the attending teachers unions across the country attached like tentacles to this destructive interest group.

LAUSD has been morally bankrupt for a long time, much of it from a corrosive teachers' union, inept and cowardly politicians, and misplaced priorities. Now their fiscal bankruptcy has come, and not a moment too soon.