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.
