LAUSD TO KING-DREW HOSPITAL

It is now agonizingly clear. There is a direct line between public education in Los Angeles and the debacle at King-Drew Hospital. The administrations and overseers of both institutions have conducted themselves in the same manner and obtained the same results - disaster.

Beginning in early elementary school, there are no real consequences for antisocial behavior, disobedience and disrespect for authority. Children routinely refuse to obey rules, or accept responsibility for school work, homework, or even attendance. They straggle into class whenever they please, and since there are no repercussions, carry these sloppy, unacceptable, work habits into the workplace.

School attempts to have a child repeat a grade are often vetoed by the parent, so that they are passed year after year with little or no evidence of achievement.

So it has been with King Hospital. Year after year with deaths piling up, due to negligence, laziness and ignorance - and no consequences, nothing changes. The hospital is threatened year after year with closing, because of flagrant disregard for license requirements, but the hospital is still open and most employees continue to collect a check.

A large proportion of nurses have failed sections of their examinations and continue to be employed, while other staffers have an unusual preponderance for falling off chairs and suing for worker’s compensation.

All the now infamous failures would be hilarious in a stupid movie - picture the janitor mopping around the writhing woman - but this is a real life and death situation, and even agony and death were not worth the bother.

These attitudes, now carried to the unbearable limit, spring from a school culture that also is so overloaded, so lacking in the ability to change, and so fearful of parental disapproval, that it spawns the fermentation of a culture that has no moral center, and does the least it can, not the best.