Los Angeles’ new school superintendent, John Deasy, says one of his top goals is to persuade middle-class families, including Jewish parents, to return to the Los Angeles public schools. “It’s one of the major projects I have to deliver,” he said.
“A great school is an anchor for a neighborhood,” Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said. “A great school district is an anchor for a great city.”
Much of the recent history of the Los Angeles Unified School District is also part of the past of Tamar Galatzan, who now sits on the governing board of that giant bureaucracy of a school district.
Zev Yaroslavsky’s latest nation-building assignment wasn’t easy. Dispatched to Nigeria as part of an international corps of election observers, he checked on polling places during elections this month in a nation better known for ethnic violence and corruption than orderly changes in government.
If there was ever a time for Jewish parents to fight for Los Angeles public schools, this is it.
When Susan Kent was a child in Westchester County, N.Y., she read her way through the public library children’s section and then headed over to the adult books. When the librarian told Kent they were for adults only, she called in her father. “My father came to the library and said, ‘She can read anything she wants,’ ” Kent recalled.
The teacher evaluations recently posted on the Los AngelesTimes Web site deserve acareful but skeptical reading.
In 1947, Stanley Mosk, then a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge, was confronted with a case that divided the city. Three African American families had moved into the all-white Mid-Wilshire district, and the neighbors were trying to run them out, invoking restrictive covenants banning blacks from the area.
When this recession is a memory, the Jewish community’s unemployed and their children — just like the rest of the country — will still feel the psychic impact of prolonged, desperate days of job hunting and scraping for house payments or rent. Making it worse will be the injury to their pride, as people with a distinct work ethic face the humbling experience of explaining their plight to family and friends.
What’s the place of Jewish life in the multiethnic mixing bowl of the Los Angeles public schools? It’s a complex question in a district where young people from Mexican, Central American, African American, Armenian, Persian, Korean, Chinese, Japanese and Syrian homes, among others, bring their traditions, religions, sensitivities and prejudices to the classroom and school yard.
