a Parallel Reality

The first chapter draws on Louis’s firsthand experiences within the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). His attempts to persuade the district to use an interest-based learning concept to more successfully engage students in the educational experience unexpectedly triggered a retaliatory narrative.

During this period, he documented what he observed to be systemic dysfunction and the influence of powerful interests setting the tone California’s educational experience - Dystopian on par with George Orwell - local corporate interests taking billions from LAUSD's coffers through a hidden culture of corruption inside LAUSD.

Louis reports that a significant portion of LAUSD’s budget is allocated to legal services and independent consultants. Despite disclosures from auditors and oversight reviews, he believes the media has not sufficiently examined how billions of district dollars are spent under the categories of legal expenses and consulting fees. This experience shaped Louis’s understanding of why many schools and communities in Los Angeles are neglected—a pattern he attributes to misaligned incentives and financial priorities.

His journey forced him to operate as an internal observer within LAUSD’s complex administrative system. Louis submitted a complaint to the LAUSD Inspector General. During the process, he discovered that the Inspector General’s office reports to the same senior leadership group that had retaliated against him because of his participation on the district’s iPad technology committee. While serving on the committee, Louis pointed out that many iPads on campus were not being used by students. At the same time, the district paid a vendor nearly half the cost of each iPad simply to configure the devices for district use.

After months of attending committee meetings, Louis was scheduled to present the results of his work on the ClassNube Global Learning XPRIZE project. Working alongside a professor he had recruited from his alma mater, University of Southern California; he was scheduled to present to the committee to consider an interest-based learning system as part of their instruction technology strategy, which would likely engage all learners, and update learning enviornments from the the industrial age educational model.

However, the head of Instructional Technology, Sophia Mendoza, feared that Louis’s presentation might interfere with the committee’s decision regarding a Learning Management System. She canceled his presentation. Shortly afterward, she sent two members of the Instructional Technology Committee to observe Louis’s classroom. By 2017, Louis began to sense that a retaliatory narrative was taking shape.

By 2021, Louis was frustrated that the district still refused to return him to the classroom after more than two years away, even after he had won his case with the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CTC). Concerned about what this meant, he began a research project exploring what would happen if he attempted to qualify for the ballot as a candidate for Mayor of Los Angeles. His hypothesis was simple: if the district interfered with that process, it would demonstrate that the system was operating like a real dystopia.

After Louis posted a video of himself collecting signatures to run for mayor, LAUSD transferred him to Van Nuys High School, where he was assigned to teach English to 10th-grade students, 11th-grade students, and a group of 12th-grade Honors students.

Around this time, a colleague informed him that a student at a high school in Granada Hills had recorded an administrator asking the student to fabricate evidence against a teacher. Knowing how the district operated, Louis devised a plan to document the district’s process of manufacturing evidence against teachers. According to Louis, the plan worked.

Toward the end of the retaliation process, Louis reported his findings to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing and to the office of California Attorney General Rob Bonta, describing what he believed to be systemic practices within LAUSD that harm both teachers and students. Today, Louis’s teaching credential can be found on the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing website under the name “Louis De Barraicua.”

This is the information Louis XX discovers as he reads the journals of Louis A. De Barraicua—accompanied by photographs and documentation of events that form the foundation of “Chapter 1: The Los Angeles Dystopia.”