The reconstitution of a school by making teachers reapply for their jobs or by replacing administrators is to education reform what blood letting is to good health. For the most part, it is not who is doing the teaching of administrating, but rather what they are administering. If I had a mechanically perfect car, but decided to put polluted old gasoline in it as its source of energy, I would have performance problems no matter how many parts on the car I decided to change.

Rather then design an academic program that specifically address the subjective needs of the student population, those in power propose ideas that are non sequiturs that have no chance of success, because those in power know that successful public education means their demise and an end to the obscene waste that public education continues to incur throughout this country with no significant positive results. Most programs and reforms today accommodate to failure rather than address it.

Back in the 1990s, "LEARN president Mike Roos described [LAUSD] as 'an internal culture of go along and get along. It absolutely swallows any effort at change...nothing permanent will happen till that culture is gone.'" So the obvious question is: If we knew this back then and even before, why are LAUSD and other big city predominantly minority filled school districts allowed to continue causing more damage to American society than Al Qaeda ever dreamed of?

It can be rather tedious writing day after day about what oblivious LAUSD administration continues to do wrong in the face of incontrovertible evidence. Therefore, I would like to make one of what I hope will be many suggestions put forth in the next few months by perdaily and others who come to the site as to what might be better approaches to accountable public education reform that has a likely chance of succeeding because it is based on an approach that is specific enough and grounded in an historical context as to what needs to be in place in order for success.

We have about as much chance of fixing public education in this country with the mass firing of teachers and administrators in Rhode Island and elsewhere as we would if we threw a virgin into a volcano. This type of post hoc fallacy thinking would rather create a causal relationship between teachers and student failure, then look at the immutable structure of all public education reform over the last 100 years that fails to address the underlying student problems and deficits that are brought to the system. In listening to President Obama's endorsing of Rhode Island's simplistic pogrom-like solution to solve its public education problem, he fails to take into account that the town of Central Falls, like many of our educational failing communities in Los Angeles, was "one of the poorest districts in Rhode Island" long before the teachers did their level best to try and fix it.