The Black Informant

(latimes.com) Fifteen years after the 1992 riots, South Los Angeles has seen dramatic population shifts — but frustratingly little economic progress.

Latinos are a growing presence in a community that was once the center of African American life. Many middle-class black and Latino families have moved out of the area for better schools and safer streets. Those remaining are disproportionately poorer and have fewer job skills.

New grocery stores have opened since the riots — a longtime goal of residents and activists. Yet the area still suffers the region’s highest unemployment and underemployment rates.

By almost any economic measure, South Los Angeles has lost ground compared with the city and county. The area, bordered roughly by the Santa Monica and Century freeways between Alameda Boulevard and west to the city limits, grew jobs by only 0.4% from 1993 to 2005, versus 24.6% growth for L.A. County as a whole, according to the state Employment Development Department. The area’s average wage grew 21.3% in that period, versus 47.3% for the county.

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Many middle-class African American and Latino families have moved to such places as Baldwin Hills, the Inland Empire and Lancaster. From 1990 to 2000, the African American population of San Bernardino County rose 34% and the number of Latino residents surged by 79%, according to census data.

Those who remain in South L.A. have less education and fewer job skills, Flaming said. Forty-five percent of adults in the community do not have high school diplomas, and 37% of those with jobs are considered to be among the state’s working poor, he said.

And more of the residents are Latino. Although experts disagree on the exact numbers, South L.A.’s Latino population has grown dramatically since the 1992 riots, hitting 54% by 2000 versus 38% for African Americans, according to the Los Angeles City Planning Department. (more…)

Quick thoughts:

And of course this article doesn’t mention the amount of illegals (Mexicans, Asians, etc.) that make up this issue. While there are many good places within the region where former LA residents are relocating, the article also fails to mention the jump in crime statistics in these areas since the riots (read). I mention this because there are much deeper issues here than the lack of better education and employment.

Speaking of education, here is something worth thinking about…

* The LAUSD (Los Angeles Unified School District) annual budget is currently around $11 BILLION dollars. They are also in the midst of a $19.2 BILLION dollar school construction and repair program (I do not know if the $11B is included in this number). Wanna know the total annual budget for the entire city of Los Angeles?

$6.7 BILLION!!! (source)

You read that correctly. It is cheaper to run the entire city of Los Angeles than to fund its failing public school system.

Question for you:

With an ever-increasing cost of living rate within the city of Los Angeles and a population with a high concentration of non-English speakers (numbers of whom are illegal)– combine that with the portion who no matter what will fully use the resources around them to move ahead, what else can the city do? With this type of demographic, what businesses could actually pay enough to help lift these folks out of poverty?

South LA still exists, even after the riots. Perhaps it will take the crime of yet another 4 White police officers to get the attention of the nation again to this depressing issue.

Related

(source)

THE latest standardized test results show that nearly one-third of Los Angeles Unified students don’t have the skills to pass the high school exit exam.

That’s roughly triple the state failure rate, which is bad enough. But it gets worse, much worse, when those numbers are considered with the district’s dropout rate of about 50 percent.

Taken together, it begins to be clear that students entering their senior year September at Los Angeles Unified School District high schools have catastrophically bad chances of getting the skills they need to graduate in June and go on to further education or training so they can lead productive lives. This is a serious breakdown in our educational system. While some improvement is being made among younger students, the fixes that have been undertaken aren’t going to come in time to help the 31 percent of those entering their senior year who still need to pass the English and math portions of the exit exam. And the evidence still is spotty whether improvements among younger students are carrying over to high school.

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The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, in conjunction with UCLA, produced a controversial report last spring saying that official dropout statistics in California’s largest school districts were shockingly out of sync with reality. The researchers found that only 48% of the L.A. Unified students who started ninth grade in 1999 graduated four years later. The district claims a graduation rate of 66%.

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who wants to take over the school district, jumped on the study to assert that half of the students in L.A. Unified were dropping out.

School district officials said that was wrong, since the UCLA numbers included as dropouts students who had left to continue their education elsewhere. They put the dropout rate for 2003-04 at 33%.

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The debate can be seen in microcosm at Birmingham High. UCLA calculated the graduation rate at Birmingham at 50%. L.A. Unified, using federal formulas, puts it at nearly 80%, with just 3.5% classified as dropouts. (source)

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CNN Finally Recognizes Dropout Rate Scandal