Bureaucracy Is the Heavy in L.A. Schools

This month the Los Angeles Unified School District, which serves 600,000 students with a $3.5-billion budget, will send out close to 100,000 W-2 forms. Of those, only 25,000 will go to classroom teachers.

The Los Angeles school district is in dire need of substantial reorganization. It needs to cut top-heavy administration and bureaucracy and place financial resources and educational decision-making in the classroom, with parents, teachers and principals. The classroom is the center of education, and all resources at the school, district and administrative levels should directly support the work of teachers and principals.

The district reports that it has one off-campus administrator for every 382 students. While we believe that this figure is substantially understated, it is still far more than necessary. For example, in the Los Angeles archdiocese’s parochial school system, 16 external administrators serve 102,000 students--one administrator for every 6,375 students. While there are obvious differences in the public and private systems, do these differences account for more than 16 times the number of administrators in the public system? More important, do larger bureaucracies lead to a better education? The answer to both questions is no .

A shift in funding priorities is mandatory. Of the $3.5-billion Los Angeles school budget, less than half is spent directly in the classroom for teacher salaries, books, materials, cafeteria, plant and on-site administration. Much of the balance is consumed by the bureaucracy. No doubt many of the services that it provides are critical. But we must carefully examine those expenditures and redirect back to the classroom the funds that do not directly contribute to good education. And we should start by offering the salariesand professional respect necessary to attract and retain the best possible teaching staff. Teachers should be rewarded for staying in the classroom, not for leaving it to become administrators.

Recent academic findings confirm what common sense tells us: As in the marketplace, the most successful schools are those where product decisions are made closest to their ultimate consumer--students and parents. If teachers and principals responded only to the needs of students, the focus would be on delivering a good education. Private schools, forced to compete for students, squarely address this issue. Public schools, due to their quasi-monopoly status, often have conflicting goals.

A principal in the Los Angeles system need not satisfy the real customers because in his or her mind the master served is not necessarily the student but the regional administrators. The customer is not the student but the bureaucracy. Ask any teacher or local school principal. They will tell you that much of their time is spent not in teaching but in meeting the demands of the bureaucracy.

Academic studies indicate that successful schools result from good principals and active teacher-parent groups with responsibility for making real decisions about curriculum, discipline and spending priorities. When responsibility rests in a remote bureaucracy, other priorities come into play. Politics, both bureaucratic and electoral, dominate, and education suffers.

Nationwide there is a move to decentralize decision-making and institute “school-based management.” Chicago has just initiated a system providing for each of its 595 schools to be run by an 11-member board of parents, teachers and the principal. Similar programs have begun in Dade County, Fla. (Los Angeles Supt. Leonard M. Britton’s former district); Rochester, N.Y., and Hammond, Ind. Here in Los Angeles we must give teachers, parents and principals the flexibility and trust to adapt educational policies to meet the needs of local communities and individual students.

Where we have done this, it works. The star in the Los Angeles system is the magnet school. Student performance in the magnets is demonstrably better than the mean, regardless of location or the racial composition of the student body. Performance is better because of strong school identification with a curriculum, creative principals and dedicated teacher-parent groups with substantial discretion in how they deliver their product.

The Los Angeles system should heed the example of its magnets. The district should either greatly expand the program or take the lessons learned and apply them to every school in the system. To make the parallel to the marketplace, if one product is selling out and another is languishing on the shelves, the successful company shifts production to meet the demand.

A consensus has formed among the education, business and parent communities that public schools should be doing a better job of providing their basic product --good education.