ISN'T ANYBODY ELSE SICK OF SUITS?

The Mayor and his lawyers obviously know nothing about education. One of the most disruptive things to any student’s achievement is inconsistency, shifting gears midstream, instability—in two words chaotic change. And our kids learn much by what they see we adults do. So dragging on the vitriol and the double talk is not going to help the kids grow in their capacities or create the kind of civic character we hope will populate all our new flash downtown LA plazas in the future.

How could these leaders argue that their educational demonstration project should move forward pending the legal challenge’s resolution? That would mean 80,000 kids would very possibly experience one dramatic shift under the Mayor’s plan and then revert back to being run by the district, perhaps in only a few short months. That would be to put the kids on an educational see-saw, increasing the destabilizing effects on them of all this political bullshit for certain. Nobody who argues for this scenario can conceivably care about kids most in all of this. Well, I guess it is always possible they're just not all that swift, but everybody keeps assuring me that they are, so what explanation for their position does that leave us?

Villaraigosa, the wannabe who fudged his name, is trying to temper his delivery while simultaneously sleazing up next to the little guy for street cred, saying he is a man of the people. One day he is making a speech about how the war on drugs is harming communities of color and the next he is meeting with Alberto Gonzales asking for federal money for more crash units. This is a guy who has been in a 6 figure + perks station for the last umpteen years. He says he wants to re-invent the American dream—that if you work hard and plan well you too can rise above the squalor that is life, and in our society, will continue to be life, for a significant number of urban Americans of every stripe. The Mayor does not wish to change this—and if he does, can’t be naïve enough to think that just being a good talker is going to restructure the fundamentals of our economy. It seems, sadly, that he is yet another dog-eat-dog wheeler and dealer. He doesn’t want to transform or even reform the system--maybe back in the day when he was a naïve UTLA hack he might have wanted to improve the system itself--but now it seems he just wants to own it.