How Antonio Got His Groove On

The lengthy legislative lucha libre was all over and Antonio Villaraigosa was the winner. He took his bows August 30, not at City Hall, but at Animo Charter High School way down on 111th and Western Ave., where the sound system played the Jackson 5's "ABC" for one generation and U2's "Beautiful Day" for another. He'd called in all his markers and so had the governor, and with just two days left in the summer legislative session, Los Angeles became the first city in California to have legally transferred control of its 712,000-pupil school district from its school board to the mayor. Sort of. The bill that passed, AB 1381, is really a lopsided, five-legged calf of a law, unlikely to survive a probable LAUSD court challenge in its current form - or maybe at all. It gives the mayor power to fire an otherwise all-powerful school superintendent. It also gives the mayors of the handful of nearby cities that share the district with Los Angeles a share of the decision-making power and neuters the current seven-member school board. It creates an institutional ER that puts the worst schools in the system under direct mayoral control.

On paper, the proposed system looks like a flow chart of Enron reinvestment strategies - rife with unresolved power blurs, confusions, and potential city charter and state constitutional issues. The governor signed it anyway.

The mayor called it "a new day for the schoolchildren of Los Angeles." That precise day won't dawn in the school system for a while - even after the law's effective date of January 1. It is far too soon to say what the law will look like when the courts have done with it, or what it will mean to the kids in the system and their teachers. Whatever its eventual physique, though, AB 1381 probably represents the biggest single power shift ever effectuated by a mayor of Los Angeles. Why did he go after this? After all, Villaraigosa's official electoral issues were integrity in government, housing, law enforcement, parks, the environment, and animal control. And how did he do it? Is it all really as it's been presented: the doing of one smart, smiling guy in a perfect suit?

One achiever often stands upon another's shoulders, and that is very much the case here. Villaraigosa's friends and enemies have come to think of him as having risen from the ranks of labor in the previous decade to become the L.A. Progressive Left's first City Hall champion in 35 years. He's claimed the late Tom Bradley as a role model. But in a lot of ways - both in terms of his own organization and his school reform objective - Villaragosa more resembles L.A.'s most recent conservative mayor, Richard Riordan.

Who, just by coincidence, was one of Villaraigosa's prime supporters even back in his failed 2001 mayoral bid, and remains - insiders say - an important advisor right now. No one would ever mistake the incandescent and sinuous Antonio for the uncomfortable and lumbering Republican mayor the lefty press used to call "Mayor Howdy." But there can be no doubt that the two have a lot more in common than they do with the intervening mayor, Jim Hahn. Or even with the stately, ineffective, post-1985 Tom Bradley. And of course it was Dick Riordan and no other who decided to change the game and say that the state of the schools was the business of the mayor of Los Angeles.

Although it only contains four actual Riordan vets, Villaraigosa's inner circle of deputy mayors feels like Riordan Redux, with moderation and competence the prime directives: Robin Kramer, Riordan's most effective and long-serving chief of staff, holds the same office in Villaraigosa's cabinet. Marcus Allen, the city's leading numbers wizard, is deputy staff chief along with former campaign head Jimmy Blackman, who started with Antonio in Sacramento nearly 10 years ago. As for the rest, you could find nowhere else in California politics so archetypal a cluster of mainstream (not progressive) wonks. Education Deputy Ray Cortines, an educator with a 50-year resume, is a Riordan veteran in that, in his six months as LAUSD superintendent, he bridged the gap between Riordan and the resentful school board. Finance Director Deputy Karen Sisson also served under Riordan. Communications deputy Cecile Ablack served in the Clinton administration and held a top advisory post at Yale; Transportation Deputy Jaime de la Vega sat at the MTA table for Riordan. Government relations Deputy Mayor Kevin Acebo worked in moderate L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky's office. Energy Deputy Mayor Nancy Sutley worked with Clinton and Gray Davis. Home Security Deputy Maurice Suh is a former federal attorney and 2001's Prosecutor of the Year.

Former UCLA labor scholar and Community Affairs deputy Larry Frank - the neighborhood and community person - is possibly the only capital-P Progressive in the lot. Replace Frank with someone like UCLA's business expert Bill Ouchi and you've got an inner circle that Dick Riordan could have assembled in his fourth term as mayor. (Although it's important to note that Riordan's inner circle was more accessible to the media then Antonio's. Almost daily attempts to contact top staffers, apart from Kramer, were not returned. Neither were several calls to Riordan himself.)

But Riordan used his cabinet of moderates to interface his apolitical entrepreneur's message with the city's liberal political majority. Villaraigosa already has that consensus in his pocket. What does he need wonks for?

Professor Jaime Regalado of Cal State L.A.'s Pat Brown Institute sees at least two purposes: "He needs a strong, establishment cabinet to rein him - and his [more extreme] supporters - in. I think it was on their advice, for instance, that he pulled back on going after school reform too early, back last year when Sen. Gloria Romero first proposed it."

Villaraigosa seems to have learned - possibly in that fatal '01 election campaign, that his own charisma can sometimes be hazardous to him; accordingly he has surrounded himself with bright, workaday charismatics. "He's trying to create a culture of responsibility around him," Regalado said.

There's another reason too, says Regalado. Call it ambition. In the age of term limits, a state office holder has to visualize an entire elected career and plan his steps forward, not concentrate on a specific office that is now only the most recent of those steps. "Villaraigosa is looking ahead," notes Regalado. "He's brought top people like Kramer and Sisson into his team, people who would work as well in the governor's office." In other words, he's picked professionals whom, he feels, can go with him as far as he can go.

The Question of Charisma

Clinton worked this way, too: it's charisma (or its lesser cousin, charm) that drives the staff, but it's the staff that gets things done.

Insiders say, off the record, that the mayor can be a brilliant improviser. Then the staff has to somehow catch up and keep up. It is as though the mayor is up there under the balloon and the crew runs along the ground holding the ropes. The school issue is the best example of that so far. When, after delaying on Romero's proposal, the mayor finally gave notice at a Valley luncheon event that he was ready to move on the schools, there are those who say he ? didn't give his deputies a lot of warning. His energy was suddenly there, and all systems were go. His instincts told him the time was ripe and everyone had to get in step.

"His forces were united; on the other side you had two opposition factions here that don't agree with each other. That's fatal," says Cal State Fullerton Professor Raphael Sonenshein. Those opposed to mayoral control of the schools, he adds, were "divided, some thinking the mayor shouldn't run schools at all, others that he should have more control than AB 1381 provided." The foes had no common ground, so Villaraigosa's forces rolled over them as he lined up the teachers with promises of more input into curricula, the Republicans via the governor, and members of his own party via Senate leader Don Peralta and Assembly Speaker (and possible future mayoral candidate) Fabian Núñez.

School board member David Tokofsky said that the AB 1381 passage was all about avoiding offense to the leadership. "Because the members each have what they consider some pretty nice bills of their own that they'd like to see go through this year."

Some of those bills, it seems, will also get scooped up for a ride on the Villaraigosa steamroller - though with sometimes less-than-optimal results. Earlier this year, Villaraigosa got behind another cause: the $10 billion bonded low-income housing initiative that passed unanimously out of the City Council in July and onto the November ballot, after City Council President Eric Garcetti had spent a year trying to get it through the council. Proponent groups like the Southern California Association for Non-Profit Housing professed pleasure at the passage, but behind the scenes you heard mumblings about its ill-favored placement on a ballot with a number of other measures of dubious popularity. That, however, is where the mayor's enthusiasm's put it.

Even with the straight-arrow staff, the mayor's enthusiasm counts for much when it actually comes to getting things done. By contrast, the mayor's interest in fulfilling a campaign promise to replace the city's Animal Control manager Guerdon Stuckey flagged after his election, forcing the Jim Hahn-appointed office-holder to make an embarrassingly awkward exit. A similar regression on a promise to get the city zoo out of the elephant business left the city with a dead pachyderm on its hands.

But bringing the schools a sense of "urgency and reform" still dominates the mayor's agenda, and if successful is likely to be the money shot of his entire first term of office. There was the Victory of Sacramento last month, of course. But even his outreach to the LAUSD and its school board failed to persuade them not to file suit questioning the legality of AB 1381. He continues to try to make school reform a popular cause, even as he has avoided putting it on the ballot, à la the Housing Bond.

Yet there doesn't seem to be any released polling as to the actual popularity of mayoral control of schools vs. the none-too-popular LAUSD. There were the four mayor-backed "town hall" meetings in the districts - which turned out to be as much venting sessions for people unhappy with the LAUSD as propaganda for AB 1381. The deputy mayors have been deeply involved in the discourse here. Patient sessions with reporters over the multitudinous amendments were followed by further flurries of amendments. And less patient meetings with LAUSD officials and board members.

If you were looking carefully, though, charisma was still at the wheel. Mayor Villaraigosa wasn't so much pushing legislation as social reform - if not actual not cultural overhaul. In fact, you could even denigrate his schools proposal as "social engineering," in that, in his words, it seeks to change people's behavior regarding their children's education.

"We have to create a culture of responsibility, a culture where you have to participate in your child's school," he told 800 people at L.A. Valley College in July. This was a huge promise, particularly on behalf of Los Angeles' low-income working parents who make up the lion's share of the district's fathers and mothers. Elsewhere, he suggested peer pressure would bring parents to the schools.

'Make It So'

How much can this one man do, you asked yourself, with his dazzlepuss smile and beautiful suits and his nascent moral altitude, about a flawed education system that Los Angeles, along with most other big American cities, has managed to avoid reforming for over 40 years? And how can you legislate better parenting? One person's charisma can only do so much. Even if he had plenty of support from our newspaper of record, which lauded Boston's, New York's, and Chicago's' mayor-run schools, he was starting out with a far less-unified command than in those cities.

But the promise was characteristic of Villaraigosa's style of engagement - reaching far out from the premises of mayoral convention with a lightning offensive, and leaving it to his hard-plodding deputies to fill in the details and "make it so."

Steve Barr, the CEO of Green Dot Public Schools, says that the mayor's solution has problems, but it promises at least something better than the status quo. "It's [now] a bad deal, a bad process," he says. "School quality is the only issue. Nothing else matters."

Green Dot is a leading local charter school provider. Barr is someone the mayor talks to about education. Villaraigosa picked a South L.A. Green Dot school, Animo High, as the site for his Aug. 30 victory speech. Barr spent much of his 20s putting together Rock the Vote. He's still a visionary with a capital V. Green Dot is responsible for the charter transformation of the LAUSD's troubled Jefferson High School. For someone who's made his reputation with them, however, Barr's enthusiasm for charter schools is surprisingly limited.

"They are like experiments, like laboratories," he says, but they aren't the solution to the larger public education problem. "It's really about moving charter school features over to the regular schools."

Some credit Barr with forcing the takeover proposal into the 2005 mayoral primary election. It turned out, in the field, to be a far hotter issue than honest government, safe streets, and improved infrastructure. Incumbent Jim Hahn took the position that schools ought to get better, but right now, it's not the mayor's central responsibility. Candidate Bob Hertzberg, who preached district breakup and possible mayoral control, obviously made a strong impression on front-runner Villaraigosa when he came within 4,000 votes of beating Hahn in the primary. Suddenly, the invisible issue of school improvement was everywhere.

Villaraigosa picked up his former roommate Hertzberg's educational torch and carried it to victory (Hertzberg did not return phone calls requesting comment). After his victory, school reform disappeared into Antonio's closet. Accounts differ as to what brought it out. The L.A. Times editorial board kept pushing the issue. Others suggest that moguls such as Eli Broad put on the heat. Some old Villaraigosa acquaintances say that, after weeks of warming up, he simply reached his own critical mass on the issue: "I don't think any of his staff knew this was coming," said one longtime Eastside Villaraigosa watcher. But quickly enough, they climbed on board.

So far, the deputies have had their individual ups and downs. On the one hand, there's Deputy Mayor Karen Sisson, who did a much-applauded job on this year's city budget. And then you had Public Safety Deputy Suh, the former prosecutor, who appears to have been an influence in a regressive Police Commission policy change: the one forbidding the 24-year-old practice of publishing the names of officers accused in bad shootings. Villaraigosa's team announced Sept. 23 that a U.S. Department of Justice official, Arif Alikhan, will replace Suh, who is returning to private practice. Transportation Deputy de la Vega achieved notoriety early this year when it turned out that his personal car was a fume-belching, fuel-guzzling Hummer. Cortines, of course, could end up being the interim LAUSD super under AB 1381, though the possibility is being firmly denied - particularly with a petulant school board looking to pick their last emperor.

Staff Chief Robin Kramer says that Villaraigosa's action on the schools was inevitable. "When we gather with all these wonderful little children, we have to think - in 12 years, half of these kids will have dropped out of school," she said.

Kramer started working at City Hall 25 years ago. In the mid 1990s, she became Mayor Dick Riordan's staff chief. She was an early Villaraigosa supporter, working on both mayoral campaigns. Last year she was on leave from the Eli Broad Foundation, a job she said she loved and looked forward to returning to once she helped set up Villaraigosa's new administration. What changed her mind was one morning when "I talked to the mayor and asked him how he was feeling. He said he was tired, he'd been up late. This was the first time I recall him saying he was tired from anything. I later found out he'd been up all that night helping the hotels and the unions reach an agreement," avoiding a citywide strike. "And then I knew that I had to go on working with him.

"The pace, the sense of urgency that the mayor has - it's triple what it was for Dick Riordan," she continues. "It's partially the style of the mayor; he's both night owl and early bird."

Evidently, he's not out raising money all the time, either. For instance, asked whether much of that time isn't spent with the likes of the three top Westside developers who dumped $275,000 into Villaraigosa's AB 1381 campaign entity, the Committee for Government Excellence and Accountability (CGEA), Kramer says: "Of course he spends as much time in the communities as he does [with the high-roller crowd]. He's out in Hollenbeck after shootings - he doesn't do this for the publicity."

Revolution Number 2

It's a historic truism that revolutions, such as those in France, Russia, or America, typically happen when conditions have already bottomed out and are on the uptick. Departing Superintendent Roy Romer can claim to have seriously bettered the bottomed-out LAUSD: 60 new schools have been built with 95 to go in a $19 billion spending program. Twenty percent of the bussed pupil population is now going to schools in their own localities. But the LAUSD and its board don't really have much of a constituency. The district's been, for too long, an entity to which the word "urgent" seemingly didn't exist. This is probably why so much of the population seems to have acquiesced to AB 1381.

If there was one sector in which AB 1381 didn't go over big, it was among African Americans. Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally, the grand old man of the Black Caucus, voted against it. Assemblyman and former L.A. City Councilman Mark Ridley Thomas declined to vote. But widespread reaction in the community seems muted.

Which is not the same thing as consent.

"They are taking the community for granted, and that's a bad idea," said acerbic Sentinel newspaper columnist Larry Aubry. This is tragic, he says, because "black kids are the worst hit by bad schools and the fact is that black kids are failing, just as the district is failing them. It's the process I object to. There's been no apparent real effort to reach out to the African-American community. And that is the politics of exclusion."

Subsequently, there was a moment where Villaraigosa, almost after the fact, got in some face time with pastors in a South L.A. church. It got some air and an item in the Times, but you wondered what difference it really made. Statistically, a case can be made that the black community is losing influence in the LAUSD. There would be two African Americans on the proposed 27-member committee of mayors. There is one African American on the seven-member LAUSD board. Arithmetically speaking, that isn't an improvement.

On the other hand, Sonenshein says, Villaraigosa has managed to bring the entire state government to bear on a local Los Angeles objective. "His experience in Sacramento allowed him to dominate the legislature with cooperation of the governor. Now if he can only bring over the other side to the concept, the school district, he'll have won. That's what he still has to do and it will be hard. He has had the sense to pick the right arena, which was how he won the battle."

Won the battle, yes. But the war for mayoral control goes on. What would Richard do next? Hard to say. But in the course of his campaign, Villaraigosa made an even bigger, costlier pledge to the voters: to take the Red Line subway under Wilshire Boulevard from Western Avenue to Santa Monica. The idea suddenly seems a lot more possible than it did last year.