The Los Angeles 2020 Commission report “A Time For Truth” presents a paradox to the reader: it seeks to educate, but succeeds only in trivializing the issues it presents.
The report lays out a wide range of significant problems facing Los Angeles, but it does so only in vague overviews. Without a better understanding of the issues presented in the report, the city will continue to experience the same setbacks the report highlights.
This is not to say the report is all bad, and it brings up new and forward-thinking ideas. The report should expand its focus on building relationships between the city of Los Angeles and large research institutions like UCLA, USC and Caltech.
However, in order to significantly revitalize the culture of the city, the second half of the report, set to be released later this year, needs to emphasize how to grow the relationships between universities and the city. Specific details about how to incentivize graduates of these universities to stay in Los Angeles need to emerge as key components of the second report.
While the second half of the report is supposed to provide recommendations to address the issues facing Los Angeles, the first half, released in December, constitutes a laundry list of problems associated with poverty and joblessness.
It’s unsurprising, then, that the tone of the report is predominantly negative. But the outlook about the city’s potential collaboration with universities, by contrast, is largely positive. Thus, the second report needs to use the incredible promise of this innovative relationship to detail how exactly the universities can work with the city.
Equipping the universities with data about the type of unemployment that exists, such as the lack of entry-level jobs, will allow the universities to better prepare their graduates for the Los Angeles job market.
When the report addresses the issue of keeping college students in the Los Angeles job market, the ideas it presentscome off as lofty, idealistic and broad.
Considering that the report is centered around economic stability and job growth, it places little focus on the need to capitalize upon opportunities to put Los Angeles college graduates to work in this city. It’s odd that it contains so few details about how to make this goal a reality.
The report could have served as an opportunity for the commission to educate and connect to a variety of Los Angeles communities, from the elderly, affected by high retirement costs, to college students, who are dealing with high rates of unemployment and slow job growth upon graduation.
The commission lost this opportunity, producing a document that could keep readers’ attention rather than allowing them access to information about big issues like high unemployment and poverty. This can be remedied in the second half of the report, but only if the research put in by the 13-member commission is evident in the document.
Nine months of work by 13 individuals surely yielded a significant amount of research, yet the information is not presented in a way that shows the time put in to the report.
Ultimately, the report is a starting place. The second half will determine whether or not the ideas offered up in the first can become tangible realities.
Pointing out a problem is one thing, but coming up with a solution is another. The commission has yet to prove it can do the latter.
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