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Busing and prop 13 = Two of the worst decisions LA has made in the last 35 years. Short term benefits (supposedly)....but such long reaching consequences.
I went 12 years in lausd, walgrove, mark twain and venice (because they were the local schools). Its funny how the history of LAUSD, busing, etc is never talked about in class.
I think LA is *extremely* tolerant of anyone who is different....gay/straight/bi, people with blue hair, people with noise rings, "punk rockers"....immigrants (maybe very hard working)...whoever it is. Where as in a small town somewhere else, they can be much less tolerant. "Segregation" I don't think has ever really been an issue here since the 70's or 80's.
I think the middle schools and highschools here are in the bottom 30% of the country. "less bad" would be an eye sore somewhere else. People do survive...but if they were great, families wouldn't be leaving in such large numbers.
-I haven't been to SLO in a while (back in the 90's), but its probably on par with where LA was in the 50's or 60's in terms of the schools and way of life. Or at least that's the ideal people are seeking. Gangs (bad influences) and traffic are what drive families away.
Los Angeles has segregation based on sexual orientation.
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Originally Posted by John23
Excellent post majoun.
Busing and prop 13 = Two of the worst decisions LA has made in the last 35 years. Short term benefits (supposedly)....but such long reaching consequences.
I went 12 years in lausd, walgrove, mark twain and venice (because they were the local schools). Its funny how the history of LAUSD, busing, etc is never talked about in class.
I think LA is *extremely* tolerant of anyone who is different....gay/straight/bi, people with blue hair, people with noise rings, "punk rockers"....immigrants (maybe very hard working)...whoever it is. Where as in a small town somewhere else, they can be much less tolerant. "Segregation" I don't think has ever really been an issue here since the 70's or 80's.
I think the middle schools and highschools here are in the bottom 30% of the country. "less bad" would be an eye sore somewhere else. People do survive...but if they were great, families wouldn't be leaving in such large numbers.
-I haven't been to SLO in a while (back in the 90's), but its probably on par with where LA was in the 50's or 60's in terms of the schools and way of life. Or at least that's the ideal people are seeking. Gangs (bad influences) and traffic are what drive families away.
I always the the black-Latino tension started in 1990. It goes that back in the seventies? How did blacks and Latinos interact in the rest of LA before the 1990s?
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Originally Posted by majoun
LAUSD was created in 1962, so technically one couldn't do a graph depicting a decline from 1950. It was a merger of the L.A. City district and the L.A. County district. Hence my mother's Hollywood High yearbook saying "Los Angeles City High School District" on it, as there was no LAUSD at the time.
Under Pat Brown's governorship it was thought that there were too many small municipalities and small school districts in California and the general trend was towards "unified" school districts, created by merging smaller districts.
From 1950-80 there wouldn't have been that much of a difference in a school like Uni. In the 1950s and 1960s, California public schools were at least decent unless they were in really bad neighborhoods. During the '50s and '60s the schools that declined were in areas with major ethnic changes like L.A. High, Dorsey High, etc. (Keep in mind that during that period there was class based discrimination as well as race/ethnic based discrimination. The reason why Hamilton, for example, was set up was as a school for the working class Westside kids to keep them separate from the middle class/upper middle class/upper class etc. kids, even when that school was all white. That's one example.)
OTOH, the '70s saw some major declines. For example, Hollywood High and Hamilton High in 1970 were still decent schools . By the end of the decade they were nightmares full of racial tensions and violence. Venice was fine at the beginning of the '70s but once the Shoreline Crips came around (at a time when V13 was temporarily weakened otherwise they would've never permitted a black gang to organize in Oakwood) circa '75 that school started having problems. (Venice was virtually the only place in the '70s that had black vs. Latino gang wars ; in most of LA that was virtually unknown until the '92 riots). Venice was having "issues" at the end of the '70s which it didn't have at the beginning of the '70s (the events depicted in the film "American History X" were loosely based on events that occurred in late '70s/early '80s Venice.) Fairfax was starting to have similar "issues" in the late '70s. (refer to Anthony Kiedis' autobiography). Those schools at the end of the '70s still weren't as bad as a Hollywood High or a Hami High, though.
Uni, otoh, was just fine at the beginning of the '70s and was just fine at the end of the '70s. (Ironically, today Venice is a better school than Uni is for reasons I'm about to go into) I don't know as much about Marshall High's history but that school circa 1950 had been one of L.A.'s best schools, but by the end of the '70s it was still an OK school.
There were two real culprits here. Busing and Prop 13. Busing was appropriate for places like in the US South where there was de jure segregation, but not for places like California where legal segregation had already been banned right after WW2, or in the Northeast and Midwest where there'd never been de jure segregation. The Charlotte-Mecklenberg case opened the door for busing in cases of "de facto" segregation. The Crawford vs. LAUSD case had been filed in the '60s, but once forced busing took place in Pasadena and Inglewood in the early '70s it was only a matter of time until it hit LAUSD. While there was no actual "de jure" segregation in LAUSD in the 1970s - and the district instituted voluntary busing to try to fight off an order by the feds to institute forced busing - there was one particular LAUSD policy that led to forced busing being implemented. And that was building new schools in areas that were then non-Latino white while failing to build new schools in inner city areas. For example, the district in the 1960s built Pali, Grant, Kennedy, El Camino, etc. while NOT building schools in the Eastside and only building one new school in South Central, Crenshaw. If LAUSD either hadn't built new schools in (then) "white" areas or had built just as many schools in nonwhite areas it would've avoided the forced busing order. Unfortunately it lost and forced busing was ordered by the feds. After several delays in implementation it went through in 1980. While it didn't last very long it did a great deal of damage. Meanwhile, Prop 13 resulted in massive cuts in school districts across the state - and in a district like LAUSD which already had its hands full with fighting busing orders, its effects were devastating. Uni had SOME busing, but because it was the best school in the district the effects of the busing/Prop 13 double whammy weren't felt right away. It remained a good school throughout the '80s. Venice avoided busing which is why it didn't decline as much. Pali, otoh, not having Asian and Latino populations within its attendance area like Uni did, had A LOT of busing. And aside from those kids from communities like View Park, Windsor Hills, and Baldwin Hills, who were in an economic class more like Pali's white kids, there were major class disparities between the whites and the nonwhites.
Opponents of busing predicted that it would worsen gang problems because it would lead to bused in gangbangers quarreling with local gangbangers and creating problems in the neighborhoods they were bused into - they were right. Opponents of Prop 13 predicted that it would lead to a decline in the quality of schools, more gangs, more crime, worsened public services, more social and economic inequality, less ability to assimilate immigrants, etc. - they were right. The opponents of busing were smeared as racists. Some were. Most were not. In fact, there was no majority public support for busing amongst any ethnic or racial group in L.A.
Beverly, Samo, and Culver being in their own school districts were not subject to busing. Culver went from being mostly non-Latino white to being very diverse without any real issues of ethnic/racial tension, and preserved standards in a way that no LAUSD school could have. Also, there was no economic disparity between races/ethnicities (as a result of integration occurring naturally and not in a forced manner). With pretty much everyone being middle class, there weren't "issues". The community and the school were still connected. The same was true for Samo and Beverly (which had the added advantage of serving much more affluent areas which would become even more affluent.) The problem with LAUSD is that it's so big that the connection between school and community were severed.
San Luis Obispo's not even in Southern California - it's Central California - so that's not really on-topic for this discussion. It HAS had considerable population growth, which itself is not a good thing regardless of race or ethnicity. Not on an IE level, but it's definitely had some. I doubt its schools are anywhere near as bad as LAUSD's.
Needless to say that LAUSD manages to have a few good elementary schools, but is pretty uniformly bad when it comes to middle schools and comprehensive high schools. Some of those schools are "less bad" than others, but even "less bad" doesn't mean good. A parent living in LAUSD has to worry about their kids getting into magnets or charters if they want their kids to get a good public education. Sometimes this works out, often it doesn't.
The LA Times presents the decline in the number of children and minors as a bad thing, no surprise considering its history of boosterism. IMO, it's a good thing. It means fewer school related problems and fewer opportunities for gangs to expand (considering that gangs generally don't try to recruit adults, at least not as much as they try to recruit minors). Fewer young people may also be one of the reasons why crime rates are generally stable or declining rather than rising rapidly as one would expect during bad economic times. If anything, I hope the population of minors declines even further. If it declined to San Francisco levels that would be GREAT for L.A.
Me too. I seriously hope Californians would stop having kids. I would hope the US birth rate gets slower this decade.
[font=Arial]I always the the black-Latino tension started in 1990. It goes that back in the seventies?
Only in Venice were there black vs. Latino gang wars in the '70s. Mainly because the number of places with established Latino gangs where black gangs formed was pretty small.
Outside of Venice and a few places in the Valley, black vs. Latino gang violence began with the '92 riots.
Busing and prop 13 = Two of the worst decisions LA has made in the last 35 years. Short term benefits (supposedly)....but such long reaching consequences.
I went 12 years in lausd, walgrove, mark twain and venice (because they were the local schools). Its funny how the history of LAUSD, busing, etc is never talked about in class.
We went to two of the same schools, although not at the same time.
I can't remember a "California history" class above the Jr. High school level and those were mostly talking about the missions, the Gold Rush, and Old West stuff. Which, if you think about it, would be most interesting to children and teenagers. I remember in Jr. High taking a field trip to City Hall and getting to meet Mayor Bradley, who was as universally beloved as any politician could be (even amongst adults who had prejudices). The US history classes I took in high school probably DID focus on Asian-American issues more than US history classes in other states (Hawaii and probably Washington excepted). "Local interest" material included material about the rise of movies and the Japanese internment (both not only very local for L.A. but for the westside of L.A. - a sizeable number of students in the Uni and Venice classes of '42 didn't graduate because they were interned.) Although those were important for the country and the state as a whole. Much of my expertise on this subject comes from college studies, my own reading, and talking to older people.
I was at Uni when busing and Prop 13 were both current events. Don't feel bad about recent events not having been taught to you, my history teachers were very reluctant to talk about Vietnam as it was still thought to have been "too controversial". My history classes often ended with the Bay of Pigs or the Kennedy Assassination.
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I think LA is *extremely* tolerant of anyone who is different....gay/straight/bi, people with blue hair, people with noise rings, "punk rockers"....immigrants (maybe very hard working)...whoever it is. Where as in a small town somewhere else, they can be much less tolerant. "Segregation" I don't think has ever really been an issue here since the 70's or 80's.
In the '80s it was no longer an issue in L.A. itself or most of the inner burbs, and certainly not involving whites vs. Latinos or Asians when it came to neighborhoods, not even regarding blacks any longer - it was only still an issue when it came to law enforcement agencies. (And that was genuinely a real issue.) I think busing may have made race relations issues worse - in the smaller districts that didn't have busing, integration was natural and more diversity didn't produce tensions.
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I think the middle schools and highschools here are in the bottom 30% of the country. "less bad" would be an eye sore somewhere else. People do survive...but if they were great, families wouldn't be leaving in such large numbers.
-I haven't been to SLO in a while (back in the 90's), but its probably on par with where LA was in the 50's or 60's in terms of the schools and way of life. Or at least that's the ideal people are seeking. Gangs (bad influences) and traffic are what drive families away.
I'd agree, in some cases the culture of conspicuous consumption could also drive families away as well.
I doubt there's anything in San Luis Obispo like the 1960s Sunset Strip in "way of life" (there's nothing like it anywhere in the US today) but in general I think you're probably right about the similarities.
(and kids of illegals in mediocre public schools as in bh or Greenwich)
Op should consider renting not buying in era of depreciating real estate but no doubt most of LA's highest achieving families w young kids reside in Brentwood and palisades nr high income job corridors of cent city, dla and sm
And as usual you're wrong (except for the part about renting being better than buying, which is correct).
I doubt this will make a difference to you (if you are indeed a real person) but Brentwood is nowhere near Downtown LA and getting from anywhere west of the 405 to Downtown is an ordeal. I doubt you've ever been to the places you're talking about.
I also would not refer to Beverly as a "mediocre public school". Those Asian and Middle Eastern immigrant kids are from families as well off as the "white American" (and black American) kids.
You realize a fair number of students go through Uni and Hami and go onto to good colleges and make something of themselves. Hami actually has a respectable arts program. And even a few do at Hollywood, Fairfax, LA High, Jefferson etc. It's not as bad as you're making it out to be. People survive.
When I was going to high school Uni and Hami wouldn't even be mentioned in the same sentence. Fairfax was "Hami Lite". The only other LAUSD high school which had any white kids at all which was as bad as Hami was Hollywood High, and the decline of HHS was related to the general decline of Hollywood in the '70s. Those schools being compared shows how much Uni has fallen. Our LAUSD rivals were Pali and Venice, our non-LAUSD rivals were Samo and Beverly. Hami's big rival traditionally was L.A. High and also Venice High (an indication of how the area for the school spanned the Westside/Central L.A. divide). There was a saying, "Uni prepares its kids for college, Hami prepares its kids for prison" (or, long before my time, "Uni prepares you for UCLA, Hami prepares you for Nam")
I know some kids from Uni still go on to good colleges but far fewer than in my day.
So Hami had a bad rep even back in the 60s? I don't think it's so terrible now. Hami has a lot of upper middle class Jewish kids (reflecting the neighborhood). And friends I knew in the arts program at Hami managed to do okay.
And as usual you're wrong (except for the part about renting being better than buying, which is correct).
I doubt this will make a difference to you (if you are indeed a real person) but Brentwood is nowhere near Downtown LA and getting from anywhere west of the 405 to Downtown is an ordeal. I doubt you've ever been to the places you're talking about.
I also would not refer to Beverly as a "mediocre public school". Those Asian and Middle Eastern immigrant kids are from families as well off as the "white American" (and black American) kids.
Some people have referred Century City as the second Downtown. Maybe the downtown of the Westside.
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