Sometimes a blogger has to know when it is simply best to post the straight-up text from a powerful piece of journalism. This is one of those times. Take it away Tim Rutten:
Every day, the Los Angeles Unified School District fails its tens of thousands of ambitious students, dedicated teachers and hardworking principals in so many ways that it's difficult to imagine how its elephantine bureaucracy could shamble into some new outrage.
Difficult, but not impossible, because the LAUSD runs this city's schools about like the generals run Myanmar.
Put aside for a moment the fact that the district can't figure out how to graduate a decent number of its students, or even how to pay its teachers on a reliable basis. Ignore the Daily News' report this week that the administration, confronted with what may be half a billion dollars in budget cuts, nonetheless is spending $173 million on consultants, many of them connected to various bureaucratic functions — like making the computers in the superintendent's office work.
Consider, instead, how the LAUSD's highest officials have chosen to deal with what would seem to be the fairly straightforward problem of child molestation.