Since the fall, L.A.’s Unified School District has canceled plans to build 19 new schools and additions because the projected students haven’t materialized. Enrollment is down 7 percent from 2003. The L.A. Times doesn’t even mention a decline or reversal of immigrant flows as a possible cause, blaming only
years of declining birth rates and increasing housing prices that have pushed poor and working-class families out of many gentrified urban Los Angeles neighborhoods.
Hmm. Housing prices haven’t really increased since last fall, have they? But there has been an anti-illegal crackdown (and a decline in construction jobs). Is the LAT so committed to its ‘Latinos are the future’ line that it’s missing a major social and demographic development happening right under its nose?