The biggest public school system in California is the Los Angeles Unified School District. The District is the second largest in the country, behind the New York City system. In 2005, the District served over 710,000 students, and employed more than 74,000. After the LA country government, the District is the largest employer.
The whole city of Los Angeles and parts of several nearby cities are served by the District. It even runs its own police department. Amazingly, if the system was a Fortune 500 company, it would fall in at around 250. It has almost as many buses as the LA Transportation Authority. More than 500,000 meals per day are proffered in school cafeterias.
The District has a reputation for overcrowded schools, poor maintenance and ineffective administration. The graduation rates are not great either, leading to a large number of basically unemployable young people going out on the local job market. Additionally, the system has long been derisively known for its top-heavy bureaucracy. Various attempts to reform the system have been tried, but none too successfully.
The divisive school dropout issue has been at the heart of District reform talks for quite some time. An in depth study performed by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University postulated that only about 45 percent of Los Angeles students were graduating in four years.
A Washington, D.C. based public policy think tank estimated that one year's class of public school dropouts ultimately costs California over 38 billion dollars in lost wages, taxes and productivity over the former student's lifetimes.
