(Guest post by Greg Forster)
This morning Pajamas Media carries my column on the much-ballyhooed plan to put the management of up to 250 LAUSD schools up for bid. Back when the city school board was voting on the policy, it was sold as though it were a school choice plan – but the devil was in the details:
Earlier that day, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democrat, stood outside the school district’s offices and told 2,000 charter school parents and other supporters that “we’re here today to stand up for our children.” Standing under a banner reading “Parent Revolution,” the name of an organization backed by charter organizers, he said: “I am pro-union but I am pro-parent as well. If workers have rights, then parents ought to have rights too.”
For good measure, he added: “This school board understands that parents are going to have a voice.”
So somehow, people got the crazy idea from all this that the reform in question involved school choice and empowering parents. “We are here to support parents’ ability to make choices,” said one parent attending the rally.
That parent got the wrong idea. The policy before the school board that day had nothing to do with school choice. It only said that contracts to manage schools could be bid out to non-profits. And bidding out the management of public schools without changing the underlying dynamic of the system has always proven to be a recipe for failure in the past.
Sure enough, when the first draft of the bidding rules came out recently, it contained a provision designed to ensure that the schools in question will not become schools of choice.
Improving public schools by bidding out the management contract is like trying to improve a baseball team with an incompetent owner by changing the team manager. As long as you have the wrong guy in the head office, you won’t get real change because no matter how good the management is, it always has to answer to the dunce at the top. To turn the team around, you need a change of ownership, not a change of management.
The same goes for schools. Right now, the government monopoly owns all public schools. Nothing major will change until we get new owners — namely parents, via school choice.
Matt was right to tout this as a slap in the face to the unions and an admission that the union-dominated status quo is catastrophic. It’s also further confirmation (if further confirmation were needed) that much of the left is turning against the unions. But that’s about where the good news ends.
Posted by Greg Forster 
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