Two truly depressing articles in today’s L.A. Times (intrusive registration required, just use ‘laexaminer’/’laexaminer’). The first one on schools in St. Louis, and the reaction to change.

ST. LOUIS – The school district was broke – and failing. Half of all high school freshmen quit before graduation. Fewer than 7% of juniors scored “proficient” on a state reading and writing test.

In desperation, the school board took a radical route: They handed control of public education here to a corporate turnaround firm from New York.

Alvarez & Marsal has a 20-year track record of restructuring companies in crisis, from clothing manufacturer London Fog to the Trump Casinos, from Liquor Barn retail stores to Arthur Andersen accounting. But its experts had never applied their business models to public education. The school board here gave them a $4.8-million contract to try.

No other urban school district has ever offered itself up for such an overhaul.

The result has been dramatic change and fierce public anger.

Why the anger? From here, it sounds like he’s doing a good job:

The management consultants put William V. Roberti, a former Brooks Brothers chief executive, in charge of the district, with the title of acting superintendent. He can’t fathom why his reforms have provoked such rage.

Districts across the nation have let teachers go and class sizes swell, but here, Roberti has cut $60 million from the budget without laying off a single classroom teacher. He has made sure that kindergarten, first- and second-grade teachers have no more than 23 students – down from 25 last year. He’s also hired 94 “literacy coaches” to work full time on reading.

In short, he’s doing just what he did in the private sector: helping his client focus on what counts. For Brooks Brothers, that was selling suits. For the St. Louis Public Schools, it’s educating kids. Anything not directly related to that mission goes.

Before Roberti took over, the district ran a warehouse to distribute books, a property management division to tend to 40 unused buildings, even a greenhouse to grow plants for classrooms. He swiftly dismantled those operations.

Sounds good so far, right?

But many in St. Louis have made it clear they don’t want their schools run like a corporation. They want their schools to be community anchors.

“If there is such a budget crisis in this district, why are they spending all this money for an outside firm to come in and bulldoze our community?” asked the Rev. Timothy Tyler, who decided to send his daughter to a suburban district this year rather than face the turmoil here.

It might make business sense to shut down 16 schools with declining enrollment. To parents, though, those schools were often the only safe, stable haven in their neighborhoods.

It might make business sense to privatize food service and custodial work. But to parents, that means hundreds of neighbors will lose jobs with benefits. It means that lunch ladies and janitors who had worked in the same school for decades will be replaced by a rotating cast of minimum-wage contract workers.

…

“It’s no good for kids and it’s not fair to taxpayers,” said Eric Thomas, 41, a machine operator. He will keep his son, Shawn, home in protest on Monday – and if need be, for weeks to come, until the district is in new hands. “As long as it takes,” he said.

Roberti finds such criticism exasperating. When he took over, the school district had a $90-million deficit out of a $450-million budget. Substitutes were running hundreds of classrooms due to a shortage of credentialed teachers. Test scores were so bad that the district has only provisional state accreditation.

Financial oversight in recent years has been so lax that the district was spending $50,000 a year insuring vehicles it no longer owned. Last year, the district spent nearly $450,000, the equivalent of a dozen teacher salaries, to cater banquets for meetings often attended by just a handful of staff. “The facts are, this place was a mess,” Roberti said. “People in St. Louis have to decide: Do we want to have a great system to educate our kids, or do we want a bloated system that gives a lot of people jobs?”

There, in a nutshell, is the issue that will face anyone who, like me, wants to support government social programs. What is the program for? Is it there to really deliver a service, or to provide stable jobs for people in the communities – a good thing – and political patronage for the powerful – a not-so-good thing. How do you impose the kind of controls that any enterprise needs – which imply a kind of centralization – with the demands of public service?

Before you answer, take a look at another story in today’s Times, and make the contrast:

Born out of the Watts riots and embattled throughout its 31-year history, Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center this week faces one of its greatest challenges yet – saving its ability to train new doctors.

On Tuesday, King/Drew and its medical school will attempt to convince an outside reviewer that they have corrected myriad problems in programs that prepare doctors to specialize in everything from delivering babies to operating on gunshot victims.

The hospital, owned by Los Angeles County, depends heavily on its group of 331 trainees to care for its patients, most of whom are impoverished African Americans or Latinos. Without those physicians, it is unclear how King/Drew would serve this population.

In 2000, the last time the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education reviewed how King/Drew trains residents overall, the council gave the hospital a rare “unfavorable” rating. Nationwide, of the 374 institutions with more than one residency program, only 13 have an unfavorable designation.

And it looks like that designation may well be coming, barring political pressure to change it.

* Six of King/Drew’s 18 residency programs recently have received sanctions from the council conducting this week’s site visit. The radiology program is slated to lose its accreditation in June, meaning it must be closed. Revocation also has been proposed for the surgery program, although the university plans to seek a reconsideration within the allotted 30 days.

The anesthesiology, family medicine, neonatal-perinatal and internal medicine departments either have been placed on probation or received warnings in the last two years. The accrediting council has cited problems ranging from inadequate supervision to insufficient medical research by the faculty.

* Far more King/Drew-trained residents fail the exams required to become certified as medical specialists than at other institutions nationally. Of the 25 King/Drew pediatric residents who took the boards between 2000 and 2002, for example, only 36% passed on their first try – tied for the second-lowest in the country, according to the American Board of Pediatrics.

* The amount of work available for residents has decreased markedly. The number of admissions at the hospital has dropped 40% in the last 10 years and the number of births more than 85%. The accrediting council requires that residents perform a certain number of procedures to practice safely and independently upon completing the program.

But the management team is in denial.

“Of course, we are concerned that the possibility exists that we might not be able to have residencies, but this is something that we have to deal with,” said Dr. Charles Francis, president of Drew University. “We have, I think, successfully responded to every challenge that we’ve been faced with.”

During the last institutional review, the accrediting group cited King/Drew for a lack of commitment, insufficient supervision of residents, overworking residents and using them for inappropriate chores, according to a summary provided by the county.

Here’s a case of a failing institution – failing not only the students who train there but the sick and helpless who come there for treatment.

And it raises a broader question for the communities effected: What’s important to you? And for those of us who fund these institutions, and must deal with the consequences, What’s important to us?

Clearly, something’s got to change. We can’t afford more St. Louis schools or more King/Drew hospitals. And we can’t afford the kids who come out of the schools or the patients who come out – or don’t – of the hospital.