Open seats, closed doors: LA’s top ‘public’ elementaries out of reach for many families 

Even as enrollment plunges in the Los Angeles school district, current policies are denying access to a quality public education for thousands of students, a new report concludes. 

“Without serious reforms, LA’s best elementary schools will remain out of reach for middle- and low-income families,” researchers write at Available to All, a watchdog organization working to defend access to public schools. 

“Top public schools, with reading proficiency rates of 70% or higher, have thousands of open seats yet deny access to those families that can’t afford to live in their pricey attendance zones.” 

The group calls this “educational redlining” and argues it violates the precedent set in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling. 

“By enforcing exclusionary school zones that only benefit the wealthiest voters, LAUSD is violating the sacred right of American families to have equal access to the public schools,” the report reads. “In doing so, the district also betrays the sacred mission of public education.” 

‘Exclusionary by design’ 

The report finds most of the district’s elementary schools wrestling with declines in attendance, as many operate at less than 25% capacity. 

At the same time, wealthy schools such as Ivanhoe Elementary in Silver Lake are reporting few or no available seats for additional students – despite their proximity to under-utilized schools, researchers note. 

“There are six other elementary schools in the neighborhood that are literally half-empty. These schools – Allesandro, Atwater Avenue, Clifford Street, Franklin Avenue, Mayberry Street, and Micheltorena –once educated 3,215 elementary school students. But their enrollment in 2023-24 was just 1,642.” 

As a result, the school’s recent $70 million renovation could have been avoided simply by reshuffling students: “All of these schools are four to six minutes from Ivanhoe by car and could have easily absorbed hundreds of students from Ivanhoe.” 

However, such a solution “wasn’t politically possible” because of the wealthy nature of Ivanhoe’s families, the report argues. 

“According to local real estate agents, a house inside this coveted zone can cost up to $300,000 more than a similar house outside of the zone. This is the real cost of a high-quality ‘public’ education in Silver Lake.” 

These parents would “raise quite a ruckus if the board were to approve changes to their school assignments,” researchers note. 

“The Ivanhoe attendance zone covers almost all of the area deemed ‘desirable’ back in 1939, and it excludes all the areas of town that (both then and now) have significant concentrations of low-income families of color.” 

These policies deny access for low-income and middle-income families, echoing the way these people were prevented during the New Deal era from qualifying for housing assistance, according to the report. 

“These coveted schools are exclusionary by design, using strict attendance zone boundaries to limit enrollment to the wealthier families who live in those neighborhoods.” 

‘Simple set of reforms’ needed 

To combat this, the group recommends a “simple set of reforms” that involves requiring every elementary school to reserve 15% of its seats for students living outside its attendance zone. 

“Such a requirement would only affect the small number of elementary schools that are already operating at more than 85% of their physical capacity,” researchers explain. 

Even though California mandates an Open Enrollment process, the state should enforce this with “a simple audit process” to obtain a report of schools’ “true physical capacity, as well as the true number of open seats.” 

For example, the report found Ivanhoe failing to report a single available seat to students outside its attendance zone in July, even though enrollment had fallen from 467 to 432 since the COVID-19 pandemic. 

“The real shame of Ivanhoe and Franklin (Avenue Elementary) is that they exclude children who live on the wrong side of the tracks, and their success is built on that exclusion,” the report concludes. “The schools use state law and district policy to turn children away, even those who live just blocks from the school, if those children live on the wrong side of the line.”