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By The Times Editorial Board

It’s all too typical at the Los Angeles Unified School District: Leaders want to make a change to help the district’s students, but instead of investigating costs, options and whether the change is even achievable or desirable, the board forges ahead. Only after it has committed itself do the very foreseeable problems emerge.

The iPads-for-all project that blew up in the district’s face. The requirement that every high school student pass the full set of college-prep courses with at least a C, which has left most of its current 10th-graders unlikely to graduate unless the policy is reconsidered.

The newest example is the requirement that every student take an ethnic studies course in order to graduate, a policy scheduled to take effect in 2019 — meaning it will be imposed on the freshmen who enter high school this fall.

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