The Ghosts of ‘Bustop’ Haunt LAUSD, This Time Speaking Spanish

When my sources at the Los Angeles Unified School District told me they’d seen a ghost wandering the halls of district headquarters, I figured it was a Halloween prank. But then the reformers who recently took control of the LAUSD board ousted Supt. Ruben Zacarias and put the ghost in charge.

That’s what happened Tuesday when the LAUSD board quite suddenly--and quite sloppily--created the new post of chief executive officer, reducing Zacarias to a figurehead. The 33-year veteran of the school district has not taken kindly to the coup, and is marshaling his political support in the increasingly assertive Latino community. As a result, I can foresee a scenario for both public education and ethnic politics in this city that--to extend the Halloween metaphor--gets pretty scary.

The ghost is Howard Miller, the Century City attorney who (for the time being, at least) is the LAUSD’s new CEO. This is the same Howard Miller who, as president of the L.A. school board, was recalled from office in a bitter election 20 years ago over the issue of busing for racial balance.

Those of us who cover politics in L.A. wrote Miller’s political obituaries after that 1979 vote. He was, after all, the first (and still the only) public official recalled by citywide vote since 1938, when the notoriously corrupt Mayor Frank Shaw was run out of office.

To be sure, Miller’s sins were not like Shaw’s. Indeed, some still consider Miller, a USC law professor when he was first appointed to the LAUSD board in 1976, one of the smartest people to ever hold public office in Los Angeles.

But in politics, Miller had a tin ear. He came onto the LAUSD board publicly skeptical about mandatory school busing, then looming over the district as a result of a 1963 desegregation lawsuit. But when the courts ordered busing to begin in 1978, the dutiful law professor took the lead in trying to implement their mandate.

And that sealed Miller’s doom. In less than a year Bustop, the San Fernando Valley-based group that led the opposition to busing here, launched the recall campaign that drove Miller from office. Elected to his seat on the board was a Valley anti-busing activist, Roberta Weintraub.

Weintraub wound up serving on the board until 1993. But the ripple effect of the Valley’s rebellion against school busing lingered far longer, and far more profoundly, than that.

Bustop, and all that it accomplished politically--the defeat of a judge involved in the desegregation case and at least one liberal congressman--gave Valley voters a sense of just how much political clout they could wield. Its echoes resonate in the Valley secession movement of today, a movement that will almost surely force a vote to break up the city sometime early in the next century.

Now, in their zeal to shake up the LAUSD, the well-meaning but ham-handed reformers who brought Miller back to political life may have set the same kind of political dynamic in motion. Only this time, thousands of newly enfranchised Latino voters are in the position of the Valley suburbanites: their children are a majority in the schools, and while they tend to like their neighborhood schools, they are increasingly worried and frustrated over what they see going on at LAUSD headquarters.

This is the simmering discontent that Zacarias and his many political allies can tap into if they choose to make a fight of the current impasse. For, whatever his flaws, the superintendent has done a very thorough job of cultivating his support not just among Latino parents, but among Latino public officials and the middle-class Latino voters who provide the backbone of their political support. And let no one forget that many of those middle-class Latinos owe their social status to jobs in the public sector--including the public schools.

Zacarias is not blameless for the bureaucratic mess at the LAUSD. The district’s biggest single problem, the scandal-plagued Belmont Learning Complex project, began long before his watch. But in his three years on the job, Zacarias has been far too tolerant of the painfully obvious shortcomings of his colleagues in the schools’ administration. He pats too many a head that would be better lopped off--which is why the LAUSD board voted 4-2, with one abstention, to bring Miller in.

But like the political neophytes and zealots they are, the board majority got ahead of itself. They did not do a good job of laying the groundwork for Zacarias’ ouster. Indeed, a smarter strategy would have been to find a way to make Zacarias part of the solution. The good cop to Miller’s bad cop.

Instead, the reformers now have as the foremost symbol of their great experiment at the LAUSD a man whose name is forever linked to the last great failed experiment in L.A.’s public schools--forced busing.

And if Zacarias’ ouster creates the political firestorm I fear, with a newly empowered Latino majority facing off against downtown business leaders, liberal Jews and African Americans, I can foresee the LAUSD being broken up into smaller districts, with the city of Los Angeles itself to follow not long afterward.

My sources at the school district have good reason to jump at the sight of political ghosts. For even as Howard Miller and Ruben Zacarias struggle, looming over both of their heads is the specter of Bustop--speaking in Spanish.