Los Angeles, CA - Education And Employment by Matthew Paolini

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Los Angeles, CA - Education And Employment
by Matthew Paolini

The most extensive public school system in California is the Los Angeles Unified School District. The District is the second largest in the U.S., behind the New York City system. In 2005, the District took care of over 710,000 students, and employed more than 74,000. After the LA country government, the District is the largest employer.

The entire city of Los Angeles and portions of several nearby localities are served by the District. It even has its own police department. Amazingly, if the system was a Fortune 500 company, it would fall in at around 250. It runs almost as many buses as the LA Transportation Authority. More than 500,000 meals per day are proffered in school cafeterias.

The District is known for overcrowded schools, lackluster maintenance and incompetent administration. The graduation rates are not great either, leading to hordes virtually unemployable young people flooding the local job market. Additionally, the system has long been derisively known for its laden bureaucracy. Many attempts to reform the system have been implemented, but none too successfully.

The divisive school dropout issue has been at the heart of school system reform discussions for quite some time. An in depth study performed by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University calculated that only about 45 percent of LA students were matriculating within four years.

Lastly, a Washington, D.C. based public policy think tank estimated that one year's class of public school dropouts in time costs California over 38 billion dollars in lost wages, taxes and productivity over the former student's lifetimes.

Author's Biography:

Matt Paolini is a business analyst for CityBook.com, the family-safe

Posted on: November 15,2007

Email: matt@university-of-phoenix-campuses.com
Website: http://www.citybook.com/