Back-to-school assignments for L.A. Unified

Underfunded and under the gun, the Los Angeles Unified School District starts the new academic year on Monday.

The timing alone is telling. School traditionally begins a little earlier, but L.A. Unified worked out a cost-saving arrangement with the teachers union to trim eight days from the calendar. Some of that is being lopped off at the beginning of the school year. Reduced learning time is never a good thing, and the loss of pay is painful to the staff, but this was the best of several bad choices facing the district. Administrators and union leaders deserve credit for hammering out this deal.

Though teachers will be greeting students with welcoming smiles and big plans, there’s no question that they’ll be working under trying circumstances. The district has cut $1.5 billion from its budget over the past two years; an expected $110 million from the federal jobs bill will provide only partial relief. Yet L.A. Unified’s teachers already have shown that they can foster academic achievement even during hard times. On Monday, when the state releases the latest Academic Performance Index scores— its measure of student performance according to standardized tests—the district expects to see a double-digit rise overall, including significant gains at some schools that have long been among its weakest.

It’s a time to praise the hard work that went into this accomplishment, but also to reemphasize that L.A.’s schools, still among the state’s lowest performers, must continue to look for new ways to improve. There’s no telling how long shrinking public budgets will be with us. With this in mind, and as Supt. Ramon C. Cortines prepares for what he has said will be his last academic year with the district, here are what we see as the top priorities in the year ahead:

Effective teachers. The heated debate over the use of test scores to evaluate teachers, pushed to the forefront by The Times’ publication of 6,000 teachers’ names and ratings based on how much their students’ scores improved, has obscured the underlying issue: how to help schools effectively manage teachers, rewarding the best, training the mediocre to improve and firing the worst without going through a tortuous procedure that’s stacked against the district.

A Times report last year detailed how close to impossible it is to fire a teacher, even in the most egregious cases. School districts, including L.A. Unified, cannot change the situation alone, though, because the rules are set by state law as well as by union contract. The stranglehold of the California Teachers Assn. has repeatedly kept craven legislators from passing meaningful reform, which should include lengthening the time it takes for a teacher to get tenure and streamlining the rules for appeals of firings.

Teachers justifiably complain that administrators’ evaluations of them are cursory, and that no one’s career should hang on them. This is one area in which the L.A. Unified school board has made admirable progress, by planning for more robust performance reviews and bringing teachers and parents into the process of developing them. The problem is that United Teachers Los Angeles will probably fight any attempt to make the reviews count for more — for example, in determining compensation or whether a teacher can be fired.

Hard times or no, L.A. Unified has to insist on change at this most basic level. Teacher quality makes a huge difference in how well students learn. Teachers cannot take credit for how important they are without also assuming the responsibility that goes with it.

Public School Choice. We applauded and pushed for L.A. Unified’s Public School Choice initiative, under which operators such as charters or teacher groups could apply to run some of the district’s new or failing schools, bringing fresh and innovative ideas to the students who need them most. At the same time, we noted that the politics of the school board and the district itself could undermine the promise inherent in the initiative.

So far, the latter has sadly been truer. In the first round of applications, the parent and community advisory votes deteriorated into shameful and dishonest attacks on some applicants and favored access to parents for others. Ignoring its own resolution to pick operators based largely on their records of excellence, the school board overruled several of Cortines’ carefully reasoned recommendations and kept charters from running all but four of the 30 schools. Worst of all, some of the teacher groups whose applications won haven’t been able to carry out their plans because UTLA refused to release them from union work rules.

The second round of applications is now under way and will need to be handled differently if Public School Choice is to fulfill its promise. The board should eliminate the divisive advisory votes and make its decisions based on who will educate students best, not on which groups are most effective at politicking. For each application from an inside group such as teachers, Cortines should get advance written agreement from UTLA that it will allow the teachers to run the schools without interference.

Turnaround schools. In addition to jobs funding, L.A. Unified has received federal school improvement grants — about $5 million per school — with which it intends to revamp nine persistently underperforming schools. Five of those are part of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s Partnership for Los Angeles Schools.

This is a delicate and difficult task, especially since the Obama administration has been pushing for radical turnaround methods that include closing schools or firing much of the existing staff, tactics with a mixed record of success. Fortunately, Cortines has resisted making this a cornerstone of school reform. So far, only Fremont High School has been substantially revamped; close to half of its teaching staff is new. Reconstitution should be a last resort, used only when a school has failed so consistently that any change would be an improvement.

The new federal money, which is substantial, shouldn’t be allowed to fall into a dark hole of good intentions; Expenditures should be approved only if there are research-based reasons to expect better outcomes. And if the schools fail to improve over the next couple of years, more systemic change should be considered, including putting the mayor’s schools back under the school district.

Fiscal prudence. Handed $110 million, the first and understandable inclination is to spend it. But Cortines wisely wants to save a substantial amount of this money for the next academic year to avoid sudden increases and drops in staffing. He’s right. The school board pushed back on his attempts to do this last year; it should listen this time.