The Australian, (Sydney, AU) November 20, 2006

AFTER decades in decline, the bloated and beleaguered Los Angeles public school system has turned to a can-do retired navy admiral to save what has become a $US13billion-a-year ($16.9 billion) sinking ship.

David Brewer III, an energetic and well-regarded 60-year-old, today inherits a once mighty school system that produced some of the brightest minds in the US but which is now plagued by apathy and failure despite annual funding exceeding the entire budgets of 20 of the 50 USstates.

"To everyone in this community, I say I am not a reformer, I am a transformer," Mr Brewer said after being introduced last month. "We're going to shoot for world-class."

That would qualify him for miracle-worker status to the Los Angeles Unified School District's many critics.

Graduation rates among the nearly 750,000 students - who make up the second-largest school district in the US, behind New York - are less than 50 per cent, with test scores among the worst in the country.

Exams testing basic understanding last year showed only 27per cent of the students were proficient in maths and just 33per cent of students made the grade in English.

This year, a university that serves many students who come from the LA school district, California State Dominguez Hills, will have 33 remedial reading and writing classes as professors throw up their hands in disgust at the social promotion of students without the basic academic skills.

"Had the school district been an independent contractor with the County of Los Angeles, it would have been given its walking papers years ago," said Leron Gubler, president of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, and a critic of the system.

"Our members who attempt to hire (LAUSD) graduates complain with greater frequency and frustration that many of the applicants they encounter can't complete a simple job application, and are unable to pass standard job proficiency tests for entry-level positions - skills that require a modicum of knowledge in composition, maths and problem-solving."

Turning to Mr Brewer is seen by many as the desperate act of a desperate organisation.

"By bringing in someone from the military, it's basically an admission that the way schools have been governed and administered by educrats is just not working," said Lance Izumi, director of education studies at the Pacific Research Institute think tank.

Mr Izumi, a member of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's California Education Coalition, said Mr Brewer needed to surround himself with similar reform-minded advisers to make any positive changes.

"The Los Angeles Unified School District is incredibly top-heavy. There is one bureaucrat for every teacher (a ratio which was 1:7 40 years ago), so you've got a lot of people who are interested in saving their jobs," he said.

"Brewer needs to start cutting the fat, and there's a lot to cut, and to go outside of this culture for advice or it'll just be more of the same."

As parents who have had to endure underperforming schools know, more of the same means declining standards and rising exasperation.

"What really irks me is that they spend $US11,000 a year to basically not educate our kids," said Mary O'Connor, a mother of two.

"That's my taxes at work. And on top of that, parents have to pay for a private school because they can't send their kids to a public school."

The refrain is heard throughout the city, but despite popular support, voters turned against a voucher system, in which schools, public and private, compete for students who are given the power to choose a school with the money the state would normally spend on them.

"The fact that the school system here is not reforming itself means that eventually we will need to look again at something like vouchers, which makes a lot of sense to a lot of people," said Mr Izumi.

It makes little sense to the teacher unions, however, which pull the strings on much of what happens within LAUSD.

The influence of the unions has meant that bad teachers are virtually immune from being sacked.

"You can have a person committing educational malpractice in the classroom every day but they can't be removed," Mr Izumi said.

"It costs something like $US400,000 to remove a single teacher from the system with all the appeals and hearings, so it's really the dance of the lemons, shuffling them from one school to another, or in some instances, promoting them."

Many critics of the school system admit that the influx of Hispanics, who represent three of every four students within LAUSD and do not always speak English well, has provided an educational challenge.

But the system's decline can be traced back to the 1960s, when teaching universities began to move away from tried and tested methods of education such as phonics in search of more modern, though flawed, approaches, such as the disastrous language experiment.

"Students going into teaching were subjected to a whole lot of psychobabble about how children needed to discover their own knowledge," Mr Izumi said.

"That's fine, but teach them to read and spell and write and add up first.

"Instead, we got all these faddish ideas like 'whole language' and 'fuzzy math', which really made it impossible for kids to learn.

"And now we're bearing the fruits of that."