The L.A. Weekly reports on the L.A. public school system:
Between 1980 and 2000, LAUSD's population exploded from about 500,000 to more than 700,000, causing classrooms to become seriously overcrowded. Elected officials responded to the crisis by moving schools to a year-round schedule, by busing students to less crowded schools, and by hiring hundreds of teachers and throwing up hundreds of cheap, prefab bungalows on playgrounds.
Then, in the 1990s and 2000s, voters passed a series of bond measures to fund the construction of more than 100 new schools. Some, like the $578 million Robert Kennedy School, built on the site of the Ambassador Hotel, became among the most expensive public schools in the country.
"We had overcrowding, we were busing kids — some of them were on the bus for a couple of hours," says LAUSD superintendent Michelle King, who's been with the school district since 1978. "At that point, we really wanted to ensure every child could attend their neighborhood school. No one could have foreseen, I think, that the landscape would change."
A little more than a decade ago, something unexpected happened. The district's enrollment, which peaked in 2004 at just under 750,000, began to drop. Some of the loss was to independent charters, a growing trend that would soon amount to a veritable exodus of students. But the total number of kids being served by both the district and charters also was dropping. The reason was simple: People are having fewer children. They're also having them later in life — and they're often leaving L.A. once they do.
There's more:
Today, LAUSD's enrollment is around 514,000, a number that the district estimates will fall below half a million by 2018. But L.A. Unified's costs have not gone down. They've gone up. This year's $7.59 billion budget is half a billion dollars more than last year's.
What could be worse?
Today, the district has more than 60,000 employees, fewer than half of whom are teachers. School board members were shocked to hear, in a report by the superintendent in May 2016, that LAUSD's administrative staff had grown 22 percent over the previous five years. Over that same period of time, the number of teachers had dropped by 9 percent, mostly due to attrition.
It appears big public school districts just don't work. We suggest you read the entire article .
