Los Angeles voters hear mayoral candidates talk endlessly about homelessness, crime, transportation and affordability. Yet almost none confront a crisis that may matter most to the city’s long-term future: the collapse of public confidence in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Every candidate seeking to lead this city should have to answer one simple, urgent question: What will you do to fix LAUSD?

The city is a stakeholder

The mayor does not directly control the school district, but to claim that the mayor has no role in a failing education system is an evasion. The city’s future workforce, economic competitiveness, public safety, and quality of life all depend on whether its children receive a functional education. A mayor who ignores the condition of LAUSD is ignoring one of the central determinants of the city’s future.

This issue is no longer abstract. By many measures, student outcomes within LAUSD remain deeply troubling. Consider the contradiction: while fewer than half of LAUSD students can read at grade level, the district continues to spend millions expanding administrative functions, consultants and central office operations. Parents are left wondering how a system can repeatedly claim budget shortfalls for classrooms while finding resources for more bureaucracy. In any functioning organization, literacy would be treated as the emergency that it is. In LAUSD, it too often feels like just another item buried beneath layers of administration and political priorities.

The district has grown into a sprawling administrative structure marked by inefficiency, political infighting, labor unrest and, increasingly, allegations of corruption. The recent indictments of two LAUSD employees over a $22 million fraudulent contract and money laundering scandal, coupled with the FBI raid on the superintendent’s home and office, reveal a breakdown in trust at the highest level, and confirm what many parents and taxpayers already suspect: too much money flows into bureaucracy instead of classrooms.

Voters are justified in asking why. This demands more than another internal review or carefully worded statement from district leadership. Restoring trust requires independent oversight. City leaders should call for an independent monitor – appointed through either the U.S. Attorney’s office or the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office – to conduct a full forensic audit of prior district contracts and to review major contracts going forward until confidence is restored. That is not an overreaction. It is what responsible institutions do when confidence collapses.

None of this diminishes the extraordinary dedication of teachers, school staff and many hardworking individuals within the system. In fact, they are often the ones most harmed by the dysfunction. Teachers should not have to navigate endless bureaucracy while struggling with inadequate support and administrative instability. Frontline educators deserve a system that prioritizes classrooms over politics and outcomes over ideology.

A private organization that repeatedly failed its customers while expanding its overhead would be forced to reform or close. In government, the same failure too often produces only more studies and more consultants. Public education should not be held to a lower standard simply because taxpayers fund it. The status quo is untenable.

Instead, employers increasingly face a workforce pipeline weakened by educational underperformance. A failing school system is ultimately an economic development problem. Companies hesitate to expand where public schools are failing, and families are leaving, and skilled workers seek out communities where their own children can thrive. If LAUSD continues to fail, Los Angeles undermines its own long-term competitiveness.

This is why candidates cannot hide behind governance technicalities. A mayor who does not run LAUSD still commands a powerful platform: the mayor can convene business and civic leaders, press Sacramento for intervention, support reform-minded school-board candidates, and demand measurable accountability from district leadership. Influence is not the same as control, but it is far from nothing.

Schools part of economic fabric

The next mayor must also recognize that schools are not merely educational facilities; they are anchors of neighborhoods and civic identity. A neighborhood school is a gathering point for families, youth activities, and local life, and when one closes, nearby businesses suffer, and families face longer commutes and greater instability. Declining enrollment may make some consolidation unavoidable – the same shrinking enrollment that makes the district’s administrative growth so hard to defend – but consolidation done carelessly inflicts real harm. The next mayor should insist that parents, teachers, neighborhood leaders and local businesses have a genuine voice in those decisions, rather than have closures imposed by distant administrators who neither understand nor value the neighborhoods affected.

The city’s affordability crisis compounds the problem. Many young teachers can no longer afford to live in the city they serve; they commute long distances or leave the profession altogether, even as administrative salaries and consulting contracts grow. A city that cannot retain its teachers cannot sustain good schools – and a city that prices out its middle class eventually prices out the very professionals it depends upon.

City leaders should also make clear that their political support for LAUSD is not unconditional. If outcomes continue to stagnate, and if literacy rates remain unacceptable, if waste persists, if corruption allegations continue, the public will rightly demand structural change, not reassurance. Voter frustration is already growing. The needs of Boyle Heights are not the needs of the San Fernando Valley, yet both sit inside the same centralized bureaucracy. If meaningful reform does not come soon, voters may eventually demand structural reform through a ballot initiative.

Every year that meaningful reform is delayed is another year in which thousands of children fall further behind in reading, writing, and opportunity. Those lost years cannot be recovered for the students living through them now. The next mayor of Los Angeles should be prepared to answer difficult questions about education because education sits at the center of nearly every other challenge the city faces.

Daniel Gordon is a Los Angeles businessman and the founder of GLD Partners.

The post OpEd: LAUSD a Concern For Mayor Hopefuls appeared first on Los Angeles Business Journal.

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