Honig Resurrects Issue of Dividing L.A. School District by Calling Idea ‘Feasible’

State Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig on Thursday rekindled the controversial proposal of splitting up the sprawling Los Angeles City Unified School District into smaller entities as a way of improving efficiency and student performance.

Honig, while insisting that he was merely offering the idea for study, said dividing up the nearly 600,000-student district was now “feasible” because it would not fall victim to desegregation barriers that dashed similar proposals in the late 1960s and early ‘70s.

“Our research shows small is better sometimes,” Honig said, noting that he had told district Supt. Leonard Britton in advance that he intended to raise the issue in testimony to Gov. George Deukmejian’s newly created commission on educational quality.

Idea Usually Dropped

Britton said Thursday that the idea of breaking up large school districts has been raised throughout the country but usually dropped after further investigation. The financial and curriculum advantages of a large district outweigh those expected for the proposed smaller ones, he said.

“A large district can do things a smaller district can’t even begin to think of,” said Britton, who came to his job this year from a similar post at the sprawling Dade County (Miami) school system in Florida. It is difficult for small districts to run magnet schools, to offer attractive benefits and pay, to train teachers well, or to offer specialized programs in music, drama and athletics, he said.

Nevertheless, Britton said he understood that some people are frightened by the size and bureaucracy of the Los Angeles district, particularly with the furor over a proposed switch to year-round schedules for all its schools. He said he wants to ease those concerns by strengthening the district’s regional offices and by increasing parent and teacher participation in decision-making at each school.

‘Simplistic Solution’

Rita Walters, school board president who represents much of South Los Angeles, said of Honig’s idea: “I’m surprised he would offer such a simplistic solution to such complex problems. It really has very little logical basis.”

Roberta Weintraub, a school board member who represents parts of the San Fernando Valley, reacted angrily to Honig’s statement. She said the issue of breaking up the district had been studied in the past and found to be unworkable. “I’m really upset,” she said. “I don’t know why he is talking about this now.”

In 1982, a state-funded study by the Evaluation and Training Institute, a West Los Angeles consulting firm, looked at breaking up the district but recommended that it remain untouched. The study said the district had plenty of problems but that few were due to size alone.

Honig, in remarks to the governor’s commission and to reporters afterward, said he advanced the idea for “exploration and discussion” as one option to make the second-biggest school district in the nation--behind New York--more efficient and to increase students’ performance.

He said it was his “personal feeling” that the Los Angeles district “is awfully big to run effectively” and that breaking it into 10 or 15 districts of 60,000 or fewer students each would eliminate a huge school bureaucracy. He said the bureaucracy may spend more energy on keeping the system running than on educating children.

As an alternative to creating new districts, he suggested that existing regional administrative jurisdictions within the district could be given more authority.

‘Not Taking a Position’

“I’m not taking a position yet,” he told reporters. “I’m saying it is something we should start exploring.”

District officials reported 592,237 students enrolled for school this term, an increase of 2,000 over last year. Although current figures are not available, they said that the enrollment broke down this way last year: Latino, 55.7%; black, 18.2%; white, 17.1%; Asian-Pacific Islanders, 8.1%, and American Indian, .3%.

Honig said a breakup of the district now would not get “hung up” on racial desegregation issues as it did years ago because racial and ethnic minorities had increased dramatically since then. Previous attempts to break up the district failed when it became clear that smaller districts would run afoul of desegregation mandates.

Honig’s mention of breaking up the Los Angeles district failed to evoke a response from the commission Deukmejian recently appointed to advise him on whether the taxpayers are getting their full money’s worth from expenditures on education.

Honig maintains that education needs more money than Deukmejian is willing to provide, a situation that has thrown the two elected officials into sometimes nasty public combat.

However, the commission of Deukmejian appointees treated Honig cordially, without a hint of animosity during a nearly two-hour appearance where he unveiled a 16-page document he called his “blueprint” for education for the 21st Century.