This week, the societal burden falls heavily and unwanted, like a bookcase toppling in an earthquake, upon a dysfunctional group of seven people who must name the new superintendent of the Los Angeles schools. In a secret conference room at the posh offices of O'Melveny and Meyers, the seven members of Los Angeles Unified School District's board of education are mired in uncomfortable and contentious talks to settle upon a choice among three finalists culled from a nationwide search.

Expected to announce their decision at any time, board members understand that their actions are being watched by everybody from angry moms in Van Nuys to the worried mayor in City Hall to the pissed off teachers in Highland Park and Venice. That's a stunning change from the early 1990s, when the board's debate over who should be the next superintendent was ignored by the lazy and disengaged Los Angeles Times and local TV news stations that mimic the Times like insecure siblings. Today, the board's choice of superintendent has been forced into the public conscience by angry community leaders fed up with years of anti-reform posturing by the immobile school board.

Critics point to the board's disastrous past choices of Bill Anton in 1990 and Sid Thompson in 1993, two long-time district insiders under whom L.A.'s schools spiraled into unprecedented academic despair, driving record numbers of children into private schools (now the destination of one out of every five kids who live in Los Angeles). Meanwhile, the bright and capable public school kids who can't afford to run have been trapped in a slow-motion disaster; with the exception of a few standout schools, the district's reading and math scores are among the very worst in California, and LAUSD has a shocking drop-out rate of 37% (double the statewide rate.)

Both Anton and Thompson were chosen by elected school board members utterly uninterested in fixing the schools but deeply mired in ethnic politics. In 1990, Latino leaders demanded and got their Latino choice, Anton, and in 1993, after a phony "nationwide search," black leaders got their black choice, Thompson.

Last year, with a partly new school board in place, some city leaders hoped that L.A. would finally launch a national search for a real reformer this time. But the nationwide search was a sham from the start because board members Vicky Castro, Barbara Boudreaux and George Kiriyama cut yet another backroom ethnic deal and insisted that 30-year district insider Ruben Zacarias be appointed superintendent. Castro and Boudreaux bitterly fought the nationwide search and, with money from Castro's discretionary budget, bused in crowds of Latino activists to board meetings to demand that Zacarias get the job. Even the likable Zacarias publicly announced that it was "my turn."

This week, Zacarias emerged as the almost certain choice of the board, and the top outsider contender, Long Island's Daniel Domenech, dropped out of the hopeless race. Said one disgusted district insider: "Remember the names Castro, Boudreaux and Kiriyama. They sacrificed the future of these kids just to get their man. They should be flogged in the square."

This theater of the absurd was directly aided and abetted by the Times's bizarre coverage of the issue, beginning last year, in which it treated the ethnic obsession fueling the campaign for Zacarias as a perfectly legitimate and reasonable reason for picking a superintendent. "Somebody needs to start trashing the Times for its continuing role in suffocating civic debate and hurting the city, which it managed to do yet again in this fiasco," said one fed-up Democratic leader.

The ethnic fixation grew so twisted that, in the end, Mexican-American pressure groups, including the Mexican American Political Association and the county Chicano Employees Association, were calling opponents of the Mexican-Syrian Zacarias racists.

It was hardly a surprise, then, when they only gifted educator even interested in the job--Domenech, the sophisticated and respected East Coast suburban school reformer--pulled out of the race Tuesday. Domenech heard through the grapevine that he had failed to dislodge any of the three rigid votes for Zacarias and that other board members had quickly begun to cave. "I was insolent enough to believe I could change their minds," Domenech said. And he was warmly welcomed home by a throng of supporters--including top New York state officials and corporate leaders who had openly begged this gem of a leader not to leave New York for L.A.

That left only two finalists: Zacarias and the tough-talking but politically incorrect shakeup genius, former First Interstate CEO William Siart. Ironically, it was the wealthy non-educator, Siart, who impressed the district's most serious educators. Only Siart had the nerve to publicly say the LAUSD should be declared a disaster area. Only Siart, raised in Pacoima and schooled in Los Angeles public and Catholic schools, demanded that Los Angeles kids be taught reading by the third grade--a political hot potato for the intentionally dumbed-down district, where principals each year send tens of thousands of children to sixth grade without teaching them to read, and where powerful anti-phonics ideologues in the schools are fighting the state Board of Education's long overdue decision that phonics be taught rigorously from kindergarten through third grade. In fact, as Siart kept pointing out, Los Angeles kids test in the lower third of the nation in reading, well below districts with similar poverty and immigration problems. And the nonreaders become the dropouts who have pushed L.A.'s dropout rate to 37%.

Little wonder that, with word spreading that Zacarias was a shoo-in, the headhunting firm Heidrick & Struggles turned up precious few educators for the job. Among some three-dozen top educators nationwide who refused the job outright was San Francisco superintendent Bill Rojas, a hard-hitting reformist from New York City, who as part of his aggressive Bay Area reforms, has fired the majority of school principals in San Francisco. As Rojas told me last week, "You guys are crazy, trying to change a district where the supe can't even visit his schools to figure out who's screwing up the kids because he's got 660 campuses. I told the L.A. recruiters, please, don't call me back."

The L.A. media bragged that nearly 50 candidates were identified for superintendent, and 11 were semi-finalists. That's bunk, according to district insiders, who say the 11 were the only qualified candidates even willing to discuss the job beyond initial phone calls. In the end, Heidrick & Struggles conducted only six interviews with contenders from outside the district. The only widely respected and well-known educator among them was Daniel Domenech.

"In L.A., things are so bad that Heidrick & Struggles wasted an immense amount of time just trying to get people to stay on the phone," says one school official. "The grapevine among educators nationwide was: Stay out of L.A.! The applicants who agreed to talk at all were constantly reassessing whether they should just wash their hands of it." The district's search committee was so discouraged that, said the official, that when they turned the finalists' names over to the school board three weeks ago, "The committee urged the board to create a team to run the district instead of picking a new superintendent."

Which brings us to the emotional closed-door meetings that have gone on since April 21 at O'Melveny and Meyers among the seven-member school board. In this drama, the players are as important as the play. The crucial figures to emerge in the contentious debate are school board members David Tokofsky and Julie Korenstein, both undecided swing votes leaning toward Zacarias. On the other side were board members Jeff Horton and Mark Slavkin, who were reported to "want anybody but Zacarias" and told associates they view Zacarias as a tired bureaucrat who, at age 68, is not likely to transform himself and suddenly launch a fight for change. Slavkin, Horton and Tokofsky were impressed by Siart's tough talk but were apparently politically unwilling to vote for a rich, white noneducator.

A lot rested on Tokofksy, the only accomplished educator on a board dominated by failed principals and lackluster former teachers. Tokofsky led Marshall High School's impressive moot court and the district's academic decathlon team and he understands better than the others what a decent education actually looks like. But Tokofsky took an instant dislike to Domenech and his use of education buzzwords, which among many serious reformers, suggest a faddish and inneffective bureaucrat: "Block" classes instead of hourlong periods, "ability grouping" of students. This and Domenech's admonition that "you want to avoid a debate between phonics and whole language" made Tokofsky go absolutely pale with worry.

Korenstein, however, seemed impressed by Domenech during the three public forums at local high schools to which the candidates were subjected--his handling of intense questioning, and his clear vision for turning the schools around, beginning with directly comparable, publicly released "report cards" for every single school and principal. To her credit, Korenstein made a flurry of phone calls in an attempt to find out what Domenech actually accomplished in his current job. (On Long Island, Domenech wears two hats. He is both the overseer of a racially mixed suburban West Suffolk School District of 70,000 kids and he is a member of a respected four-person state panel which has taken over and turned around the, troubled nearly all-black Roosevelt Union Free School District nearby.)

Korenstein was so hungry for information that she actually contacted me to find out what I had learned about Domenech. But in its private talks, the board never seriously considered Domenech for the job and blithely ignored suggestions from several quarters that the board, duh, fly back East to check Domenech out--as San Francisco's board did when it decided to hire Superintendent Rojas.

The board, it was clear, did not care that Domenech was the only candidate who has actually turned a district around. In the past year, Domenech moved aggressively to repair damaged classrooms, toilets and roofs in the Roosevelt district, which, like our own scandalous Compton Unified School District, was taken over by the state--but with positive results. This year, 300 kids passed the tough Regent's Exam, compared to less than a dozen last year.

"This guy is a highly intelligent troubleshooter who identifies problems and finds resolutions," says Roosevelt Union Free school board vice president Mark V. Davis. "We have fired all the worst employees, from the district lawyer to the facility manager to the terrible cafeteria workers to bad principals. Now we've completed our reading standards for a brand new curriculum, the roofs are getting fixed, and there's just a lot of good things finally happening here thanks to Dan Domenech."

But Domenech never really had a chance in ethnically overcharged L.A. He was a Cuban-American immigrant seeking work in a town insisting on Mexican credentials. His biggest mistake was his failure to win over Tokofsky, who, though fluent in Spanish, has been under fire by hardcore Mexican-American activists since his election in 1995 for being "a white in a Latino district" and has even been wrongly accused of wanting a "Jewish" superintendent by absurd ethnic Eastside factions drowning in their identity politics.

Tokofsky, facing an almost certain recall election if he failed to back Zacarias, needed an ironclad reason to back an outsider. Perhaps grasping his pivotal role in whether the district sinks or swims, Tokofsky spent all week desperately trying to cut a deal in which Siart would be hired to "help" the insider Zacarias do his job (the plan was initially rejected by Siart) and the board would launch a new nationwide search for a top-level curriculum reformer to asssist Zacarias in classroom reforms.

Rojas, the fiery San Francisco superintendent, says Los Angeles could simply copy New York's school board, which a few years ago rejected every finalist brought before it: "They made Heidrick & Struggles start all over, from scratch," said Rojas. New York also made the job far more attractive, offering a salary of more than $200,000, a luxurious manse in Brooklyn Heights with a stunning view of the Manhattan skyline, and a limousine and 24-hour-a-day driver. "Applicants for a job as tough as L.A. need to be wooed," says Rojas, who called L.A.'s current salary of $160,000 "absurd."

Rojas is clearly onto something. Los Angeles should start its search for superintendent from scratch. I was reminded of what a sham the search has been when I heard School Board President Jeff Horton--who is generally oblivious to crucial events unfolding around him--actually wheeze in a newspaper story that L.A.'s search was so trendsetting it would become a "national model" for districts seeking superintendents.

A national model, one can be certain, of exactly what not to do.