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Life & Times Transcript
06/19/06 Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times -- Los Angeles's mayor wants to take over the LAUSD. The idea is gaining momentum and opposition. Don Dear>> Since we have no vote in who the mayor of Los Angeles is, we would have absolutely no democratic right to make a change or to any way respond to our concerns about our schools. Val Zavala>> And then, ever heard of a professional tree climber? Whether it be for hire or for fun, this outdoorsman knows the ropes. [Film Clip] Val Zavala>> These stories and more on tonight's Life and Times. Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education. And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg. Val Zavala>> A major battle is brewing over control of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Los Angeles Mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, has made it clear that he would like the nation's second largest school district to be under mayoral control and that has sparked strong reaction from unions, teachers, staff and even other cities. Sam Louie brings us the controversy that could impact hundreds of thousands of students. Antonio Villaraigosa>> "I can't say it more clearly. Reforming public schools is the central challenge facing Los Angeles and it will be a central priority of my administration." Sam Louie>> When Antonio Villaraigosa was sworn in as Mayor of Los Angeles last July, he envisioned a brighter future for the city's public school students. Antonio Villaraigosa>> "Dream with me of a Los Angeles where kids can walk to school in safety and where they receive an education that gives them a genuine opportunity to pursue their own dreams." Sam Louie>> Those dreams may be out of reach for thousands of students in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Students score in the bottom third on national standardized tests. The graduation rate is at sixty-seven percent and a quarter fail to meet state standards in English and math. Antonio Villaraigosa>> People are ready. They want to do something about these schools. They want a leader who rallies them around the idea that we need more in the way of authority for parents and teachers to make decisions on school sites. Sam Louie>> And Villaraigosa believes that he's that leader, so he's making a bold move. He's proposing that control of the Los Angeles school district with its eight hundred sixty campuses and seventy-seven thousand employees be taken away from the school board and given to the mayor's office. Thomas Saenz is the counsel to the mayor. He's working on a bill that would give citizens a chance to vote for or against mayoral control of LAUSD. Thomas Saenz>> It is best going to be achieved with one person able to answer for the successes or failures of the school system. It means there is one person who everyone within the school system will look to to provide the vision, to tell them where they need to go, how they need to go, what they need to accomplish to make sure that the system is working. Sam Louie>> Predictably, LAUSD's school board members are strongly opposed to that idea. Marlene Canter is the school board president. Marlene Canter>> Although change that we are seeing is not fast enough, it's steady and it's stable and it's strong and it's moving in the right direction and I believe that we don't mess around with trying things out on kids. >> "So if X is equal to 2, how much is Y equal to?" Sam Louie>> Canter points to the rise in test scores at Alta Loma Elementary School as a reflection of the district's overall success with young students. Marlene Canter>> This school has jumped two hundred points in their API score, from four hundred to now close to seven hundred. We're seeing this all over Los Angeles. Five years ago, I think, there were twenty-five schools that scored over eight hundred. Now we have a hundred schools. Sam Louie>> She understands that vast improvements also need to be made at the middle and high school levels, but she insists that a drastic change like mayoral control is the wrong way to go. City government, she says, is already over-burdened. Marlene Canter>> The bloated bureaucracy of the city is dealing with many, many facets of the city's housing, transportation, safety, airports. You wouldn't want our kids to get lost in the shuffle. [Film Clip] Sam Louie>> But proponents say that getting lost in the shuffle is what mayoral control would prevent. How? By establishing more schools like this one. This is Synergy Charter Academy. It is a charter school. Charter schools are independent of the district. They govern themselves, including their budget. [Film Clip] Sam Louie>> Meg and Randy Palisoc taught at LAUSD for a combined ten years. They were frustrated with the district. Meg Palisoc>> It broke my heart that I felt powerless to really make a difference with such a large school district. Sam Louie>> So two years ago, they started Synergy Academy in South Los Angeles. With only twenty students per class, the students here made significant gains in its first year. Meg Palisoc>> We were amazed and excited and really proud of our families, the parents, the students and the teachers, because in one year we outperformed all the schools in the 90011 zip code and most of the schools in our neighboring areas. Sam Louie>> Caprice Young is the president of the California Charter School Association. She says that there would be many more schools like Synergy Academy if the mayor was in charge. Caprice Young>> We need more magnet schools. We need more small schools. Charter schools have oodles of kids on the waiting lists, thousands and thousands of kids on the waiting lists. And a mayoral administration of the school district would be more supportive of these kinds of small schools and special schools. Sam Louie>> Young is also a former LAUSD school board president. Caprice Young>> Having been in that chair, having been president of the school district, I can tell you that that bureaucracy is enormous and it's just not going to change without a big outside push. See, I think that's where the mayor can come in and do that kind of big outside push. Sam Louie>> But there's another problem with mayoral control. The jurisdiction of the Los Angeles school district extends well beyond the city's boundaries. LAUSD is the second largest school district in the nation. It covers more than seven hundred square miles and also includes twenty-six other cities. Community members in some of these areas believe that mayoral control of the district would strip them of their voice in education. Don Dear>> It would be like taxation without representation. It wouldn't be right. Sam Louie>> Don Dear is the former mayor of Gardena and retired middle school teacher. Right now, Gardena, Carson and Lomita have one board member representing them. Don Dear>> So at least we have one school board member that is responsible to us directly that we can elect or change if necessary. If the mayor of Los Angeles has total control and was able to appoint whoever he pleased, since we have no vote in who the mayor of Los Angeles is, we would have absolutely no democratic right to make a change or to any way respond to our concerns about our schools. Sam Louie>> Dear is also a member of a commission proposing different strategies on how to govern the school district. One plan he'd like to see considered: break up LAUSD into nine small districts. Don Dear>> We'd have a locally elected school board like other school boards in California who would actually run the educational program for the people in our area. Sam Louie>> As a result of pressure from other cities, Villaraigosa has agreed to compromise. He's proposed that twenty-seven cities form a council of mayors with proportional voting based on the size of the city. The takeover plan first needs approval from the state legislature. Antonio Villaraigosa>> "Dramatically improving student achievement and graduation rates is the goal." Sam Louie>> With the future of seven hundred thirty thousand students on the line, the question of who will run Los Angeles schools may be the single biggest issue on Villaraigosa's ambitious agenda. I'm Sam Louie for Life and Times. Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times". Val Zavala>> Times are changing for the four major commercial networks. Television audiences are shrinking. Tempers in the board room are flaring. And hit programs like "American Idol" often happen by accident. Little wonder the networks are desperate. That's the title of Bill Carter's latest book. Saul Gonzalez talked with Carter about the cutthroat business of network television. Saul Gonzalez>> Mr. Carter, author of "Desperate Networks", thank you for joining us on Life and Times. Bill Carter>> Great to be with you. Saul Gonzalez>> A lot of your writing concentrates on the rise of the mega-hits over the last several years, "Lost", "Desperate Housewives", "The Survivors", and so on. How important are these shows, which kind of almost dig themselves into American culture, into the American psyche, for network success now? Bill Carter>> I think they're life and death. I think that's what they're all about. You know, on cable you can see a show that attracts two or three million people. You'll never see a show that attracts thirty million people. They just haven't generated a show like that. The networks are the only ones that can do that, but they have to keep doing it. That's what really defines them now. They're the ones that generate these cross-cultural hits that young people and old people, black people and white people, rich people and poor people, everybody watches and that's what they sell to the advertisers. If you want to launch a product, you still have to come to network television because we're the ones that draw these mass audiences. We can still do that and nobody else can do it. If they can't do that, then they're no different from cable and they can't charge these extra rates for advertisers and then their whole economic structure falls apart. Saul Gonzalez>> Now your book is specifically a story of the last few years of network television and really the central tale in it, to me at least, seems to be the fall from Mt. Olympus of NBC post-"Seinfeld" and "Friends" years and the rise of ABC and CBS as two juggernauts. Bill Carter>> A very unusual circumstance. Network television is always considered to be cyclical because the guy on the bottom tends to be the guy that takes chances and he finds the hits that way. But it didn't happen for a long time because NBC maintained pretty much a twenty-year dominant string with only a few little, you know, slow periods in between. But then all of a sudden, after being, you know, pretty dominant and making the most money, making more money than anyone has ever made in network television, their long run of consistent hit shows fell apart all at once. Instead of going from first to second to third and slowly kind of dropping, they dropped like a stone. Saul Gonzalez>> They plummeted. Bill Carter>> No network had ever gone from first to last overnight like that, but what really happened was they managed for so long to milk the shows they had and stay on top that the cow was dry (laughter) and there was nothing left to replace it and they fell right to the bottom. Saul Gonzalez>> When networks go looking for new shows, when they take the risk and put a big new show in their schedule, how much of their decision-making is driven by intellect and experience and how much just sheer luck and instinct? Bill Carter>> Well, my reporting seems to indicate it's much the latter because, in almost every case, the big show that people love now from "Idol" to "CSI" to "Survivor" to "Lost" was rejected by virtually everybody and was basically abandoned. I compared it to Dickens. You know, in Dickens there's always like an orphan that finally is the hero and it's true in network television. These shows are orphaned. They're left at the doorstep. Saul Gonzalez>> These are all the Oliver Twists of ideas. Bill Carter>> Exactly. And finally they emerge usually because there's one champion. In "Lost", the guy who literally was running the programming department invents the idea for the show, gets tremendous resistance, the first script is terrible, he brings in J.J. Abrams, a really talented guy who rewrites it, comes up with the notion that the island is actually haunted in some way. ABC still resists because the pilot is too expensive. Finally, this guy gets fired. He's out of the network before it even goes on the air. Saul Gonzalez>> And he runs this kind of campaign from outside of ABC, this kind of insurgency to get some -- Bill Carter>> -- to get somebody else to put it because it was his last baby. It was so much his personal project that he was afraid ABC would just sit on it and let it die. So even though he had no authority over it anymore, he quietly contacts NBC and says to them, "I can deliver you that show." They go, "Wait a minute, Lloyd. You were fired. How is that going to happen?" He says, "I can surreptitiously deliver you the tape in the dead of night and you can watch it and you can buy it." Now ABC did not give it up. If they had given that up and it had gone to NBC, that would have been just an incredible scandal, but they didn't. They stuck with it and, to their credit, they wound up deciding it was at least promising and they marketed it tremendously and it launched really very strong. Saul Gonzalez>> Network television has been around for half a century or more. Why the reliance still on instinct and on sheer luck? I mean, don't we know what America wants by now? Fifty years after Jackie Gleason went off the air? Bill Carter>> The oldest saying in show business is that nobody knows anything. You can't guess going in what it is the viewers are going to like. You can intuit, you can research, but until it happens, like who would have thought that "American Idol" is going to work? I mean, I say in the book that it was passed over by everybody and I understand that someone walks in from England and he says -- Saul Gonzalez>> -- Simon Cowell. Bill Carter>> Simon Cowell and his partner, Simon Fuller, and he says, "We're going to do a reality show with singing." They're like, "What, are you crazy? The American audience for music is spread out all over the place. Some people like rap, some like rock." He was basically thrown out of every office in Los Angeles when he came to pitch it originally and I don't blame the network executives for that. Even at the very end when he finally has it at Fox, they won't pay for it. They're like saying, "We'll put it on if you find advertisers. We won't pay you a nickel for it." And only because of the champion there, amazingly enough, was Rupert Murdoch, the actual head of News Corp which owns Fox. He gets a call from his daughter who's seeing the show on in England and says, "Wow, there's a tremendous show on in England. Do you know what's happening with it in the United States?" He says, "No, I don't. I'll call my Fox people." He calls the network and they say, "Well, we're talking about it, we're thinking about it." He just says, "Well, stop thinking about it. Buy it today. Do it today. Get it today." So they went out and bought that show they wouldn't have otherwise and it's just transformed the network. I can't believe, in the abstract, that somebody would say, "That's what the audiences are going to want." You don't know until the audiences tell you. As soon as it was on, they said, "Yeah, that is what we want." Saul Gonzalez>> And then everybody claims that it's a good idea. Bill Carter>> Of course. Absolutely, because success has a million fathers. Saul Gonzalez>> As a well-informed observer of this industry, what do you think are the challenges it has to confront and grapple with in the next five to ten years out to remain relevant both as an industry and as a force in society? Bill Carter>> Mainly, the main thing they're facing is the changing of distribution systems because, you know, they can't count on people coming home and watching their television sets. The shows are going to be available on so many other means like on computers, on iPods, on wristwatches. Who knows how people are going to see this video content? Their challenge for them is to create the contents that people have to have. Before you know you want to download a show, you kind of already have to like it. So in essence, I think they're becoming sort of more like the movie companies in a way where the networks' run is like that opening week box office where you have to establish that's the product everyone is talking about, that's what we want to see. So they really have to continue to generate really big numbers for a certain amount of shows that they can then sell across these other platforms and try to make more revenue because the advertising revenue is going to go down. Advertisers are spending more money on the internet than ever and that's only going to continue. So it's incumbent on them, if they're going to keep making shows that are very expensive to make -- and that's why they're so good. They're much better and higher quality than shows you see on cable or internationally --then they've got to have revenue and the revenue has to come from these other sources. Saul Gonzalez>> Well, Mr. Carter, author of "Desperate Networks", I wish you many good years of reporting on the industry and many good hours of viewing its content. Bill Carter>> Thanks a lot. Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address: Life and Times 4401 Sunset Blvd. Los Angeles, California 90027 You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org. Val Zavala>> I'm out here at Topanga Canyon State Park where most people just stick to the trails, but we met one young man who went off the beaten path for an entirely different experience. His name is Nick Araya and he's a professional tree climber. That's right. You can hire Nick to take you up in a tree for a different view of the world and maybe, if you're adventurous, a little swinging. [Film Clip] Val Zavala>> But today, he's hitting the trail for a solo climb just for fun. About a quarter of a mile off the trail is a growth of his favorite climbing oaks and, along the way, a rattlesnake which we opted to walk around carefully. Now do you know this tree? Nick Araya: Yeah, I've climbed it, oh, four or five times already. Val Zavala>> How did you get into this? Nick Araya>> I started as a rock climber, actually. I lived in Wisconsin and, when I was in college, I didn't have a car, so I couldn't just drive to the nearest rock-climbing crag. So I had all the rope and the harness and everything and I thought, hey, I bet I can use this stuff to climb those oak trees on campus. So when the security wasn't watching, I gave it a shot and, sure enough, it worked. Part of it can be intimidating, I think, for people. They see all the ropes and all the equipment and helmets and swinging around and all and "I could never do that". But also keep in mind that the people that are doing it this way have been doing it for a long time and they have a more advanced understanding of what they're doing. I could set up a system in just a few minutes that any person, any able-bodied person, can do and even handicapped people have been brought up into trees. Most of us, probably all of us, have climbed a tree or several trees when we were little and, to be able to kind of get back to that, but now the lawyers are involved, so we need ropes and everything to keep us safe. But in reality, the ropes let you go a lot further than you ever could when you were a kid without that fear of "Mommy, I can't get back down." [Film Clip] Nick Araya>> When I was coming up from the ground, I was setting up what I call a foot-lock that attaches me to the climbing rope so that I can foot-lock up the rope, which is what I was doing where I was pinching the rope with my feet and kind of inch-worming up the rope, so that was it. Once I got up into the tree, then I switched over to the climbing setup, the doubled-rope climbing setup, which lets me go up and down at ease just by leaning on this knot and it locks in place. Then if I grab it and pull it, it will let me slide down. Val Zavala>> What do you see from up there? Nick Araya>> Oh, I can see the whole ridgeline of Topanga Canyon. I see a helicopter way off in the distance. What the neat part is, in the neighboring trees, I can see birds fluttering in the canopies way at the top which you might not necessarily see from the ground, and then the deer in the field way over there. Val Zavala>> Now when you climb, how long do you stay up there usually? Nick Araya>> If I'm climbing by myself, it's not uncommon for me to spend all day in the tree. Maybe get here in the morning, maybe it's ten o'clock right now, and stay here until the set sets and watch the sun set. I would be perfectly content to just sit right here for an hour or so. Maybe I'll bring a book and just kind of lean up on the tree. Val Zavala>> You'll spend all day there? You don't get bored? Nick Araya>> No, no. I'll bring a camera. Once you get set up, if you quiet down, the birds forget about you. I've seen some remarkable things from up in the canopy and taking some really neat shots of hawks and hummingbirds and things of that sort. I'm going to kind of scoot along and maybe walk across it if I can and set my rope on the other side of the tree. Once I do that, there's a good opportunity for me to lower myself down and stand on a branch and do some big swinging, which is a lot of fun. Just kind of pendulum in and out of the tree. [Film Clip] Val Zavala>> What do you think of people who, you know, those environmentalists and protestors who stay in trees from month to month to month? Nick Araya>> Well, it's kind of -- what they're trying to accomplish is very political and they're battling the lumber companies or something like that. I have a lot of respect for what they do, but also the lumber companies are just trying to meet the needs of the people -- the demands, I should say, of the people -- so we can make it a lot easier on the tree sitters if we just stopped buying so many wood products and use more recycled products. That said, I've actually climbed a couple of trees with tree sitters and brought them food and things like that because I'm a tree hugger and I side with the tree sitters more than I would the lumber companies. [Film Clip] Nick Araya>> But one of the other things that we strive for is to not hurt the tree. I could take this rope and just throw it over the branch like that and clip into it, but as it rubs on the branch, it starts actually cutting into the branch and that can be damaging to the tree. So if I run it through this pulley, now the rope rubs on that pulley and not on the branch. Most of the time when I climb is by myself, but occasionally I'll climb with other people. Sometimes you just want to get up as high as you can and get as far away from the people walking on the ground as you can, so a tall redwood would be the ideal. But typically, I like a tree much like this one. It's spread out a lot. I like the big jungle gyms. [Film Clip] Nick Araya>> I guess the neatest thing, the draw, for a lot of people, is that it's different from what we see in our day-to-day. You know, most people get up, get in the car, drive to work and do whatever it is you do at work. Then you get in the car and head back and do it again. Just to be able to stop that and just explore a world that we only see the bottom of as we walk around on the ground. We only get to see the bottom of branches. To see what the animals see and to play in a different kind of way than we got to play for a long time since we were kids. Phew, that was fun. That was one of my better swings. Val Zavala>> If you'd like to find out more about tree climbing, you can contact Tree Climbers International through their website at treeclimbing.com. And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education. And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg. Sponsored in part by:  | |
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