One District, Under Genethia

Hayes hardly characterizes it that way. She does acknowledge now that she and her fellow board members could have handled matters more, well, gracefully. “Let me apologize about the process, about what’s been perceived as an insult to Latinos,” she says in her brusque, rapid-fire delivery. “I mean that. I’m not being cavalier. But people don’t need to have this one-note thing about me being a mediator. When you’re trying to bring about extraordinary change, you can’t mediate. With the district being in such crisis, I can’t sit around and twiddle my thumbs and look explicitly for a win-win situation.”

Actually, it would be difficult to find fault with Hayes’ community and professional credentials, at least on paper. She was raised in Texas, where she became an active participant in the civil rights movement. She first worked in LAUSD as a teacher in the ’70s, in the Child Development Division, then developed curriculum for preschool and elementary school students. It was during this time that the seeds of her discontent with school bureaucracy were sown; it was after questioning why the division chose to cut out any academic focus from preschool education, that Hayes was eventually “kicked upstairs” as a curriculum specialist. “I was moved from one place to another,” she recalls. “The moment you begin to question the relevance and correctness of what is going on, you become persona non grata.”

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Hayes’ determination has a dark side, an unwillingness to move off a point — however ill-advised — once she has settled on it. “She can be a mediator,” says Compton deputy superintendent George McKenna III, a veteran of inner-city school-reform efforts, “but once she exhausts all remedy, she is also very tenacious.” For all of Hayes’ powers of analysis and her admirable work with building cross-cultural alliances with Latinos, much of it appears to have been neutralized by her flat refusal to entertain any notions of restoring Zacarias to full strength, or at least going through the proper firing motions — a stand that has already cost the school board much political capital and Latino good will. Rice admits that the price is proving too high, as do some of Hayes’ Latino supporters who feel rebuffed by what they see as a circumvention of due process, and who are also caught by their own sense of ethnic fealty. “I never expected [Hayes] to be involved in these kind of politics,” says Arturo Ybarra, president of the Watts Century Latino Organization, a grassroots group that, like Project AHEAD, works to unite black and Latino parents. “I’ve known her as an educator, as a person with an open mind, very inclusive. I’m frankly surprised, and very disappointed.” Ybarra adds that he always saw Hayes as championing the causes of people of color at the district; now, ironically, he says she may be bringing them together to join forces against her. That the clearly savvy Hayes failed to anticipate that dynamic, or overestimated the scope of her power and visibility, may be her biggest blunder so far. “Genethia has said, ‘How can the Latinos say I’m against them when I’m one of the few black people who stood up for them?’” says a black associate who asked not to be named. “I told her, ‘Genethia, that’s the problem. They don’t know you.’”

As to the black contingent, the one that spurned Hayes in the first place, it has been quiet, for two opposing reasons — it still has nothing good to say about her, and despite its heated opposition to Hayes during the campaign, it has closed ranks and does not want to publicly disparage a black official. Political considerations aside — if such a thing is possible — it is nonetheless deplorable that blacks, whose children consistently suffer the worst effects of the district’s institutional failure, are not weighing in on the board’s machinations. Rice is probably right in saying that this latest “crisis” is really one playing out among the mandarin elite, not amongst the student masses who have endured crises — lack of textbooks, quality instruction, credentialed teachers — for years. Still, solutions must trickle down from the top, and however good their intentions, Hayes and the board have created turmoil at the top and cut off any flow at all, at least temporarily. The district can’t exactly afford time to recover. Hayes counters that with environmental disaster looming at a new school site in South Gate, she believes she had no choice but to do what she did. “Look, when other public institutions got in such a state — the city, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the Department of Water and Power — they started kicking people out,” she says. “We forget about [former MTA CEO] Franklin White.” And while she offers apologies to Latinos for any political insensitivity on her part, she says that painting the issue as largely Latino, or even largely about process, would be a far greater mistake. “To portray this as a Latino issue is to marginalize the rest of us,” she says firmly. “If we fail, we’re all diminished. If we succeed, we’re all enlarged. Latinos have numbers on everyone else, sure, but their stake is no bigger than anyone else’s.” As to process, she throws up this challenge: “If civil rights folks and others could come to me and say, ‘We have a reasonably well-run system, we don’t have poor communities of color in crisis, we do have well-trained teachers — unless there are legions of people saying that, we can argue all we want about process. I wonder,” she adds, a bit caustically, “when Rosa Parks refused to get out of her seat, or when Martin Luther King stood up for the garbage workers, whether they were concerned about process.”

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A passionate and unimpeachable argument — but in some ways wholly beside the point. Hayes’ eyes may be on the prize, but her tragic flaw may be the arrogance of not recognizing the ground-level details that make up the path leading to that prize. The board may have been reacting to a specific action in stripping Zacarias of his authority, but it is almost certain that Hayes recognized the symbolic importance of making a big, dramatic move in a moribund district culture that hasn’t produced a big move in the last 20 years. Kerman Maddox says such symbolism is what really resonates – and Hayes certainly knows that. “To the average person, it looks like this black woman took off after this Latino, which can’t do anything but hurt black-Latino relations, which are already frail,” he says. “Genethia may not care at all about Zacarias’ ethnicity, but that doesn’t matter. Perception is reality.” Hayes argues strenuously for herself as an individual — “I am not one thing,” she says — but she doesn’t seem quite willing to compromise that individuality even for the ultimate good of the district, or the public. Joe Hicks, director of L.A.’s Human Relations Commission, once effusively described Hayes as the “the most damn stubborn woman I know,” a description that may haunt her for a while.