In L.A. Schools, Who Speaks for the Students?

Rhetoric over the teachers strike threatened for Monday has exposed the fundamental truth about the Los Angeles Unified School District: Its internal groups--administrators, teachers and board members--speak only for their own interests.

Who speaks for the students? Who is accountable for student educational performance? No one.

Those are not only the lessons of today. I learned them more than a decade ago as president of the Los Angeles Board of Education.

Los Angeles had in 1978, as it has now, a failed educational system. What was publicly at stake then was integration. In fact, there was a lot more involved, and it told a great deal about the district’s view of accountability.

As part of the integration plan, I pressed for a strong competency testing program. In all grades, starting with the first, students would take objective tests of what they had learned. If they failed the tests, they would not be promoted to the next grade, but would instead receive additional educational help. It was so obvious any ordinary person could understand it; only a person with a certain kind of education would object.

I had a critical, memorable meeting to discuss the testing plan with some senior district administrators. They objected. One said, “These kids can’t do the work. They’re doing as well as they can. If you insist they perform better, they will fail.”

When I said that in a system where there was no possibility of failure there could be no success, he looked at me as though I were from Mars. Another administrator, sounding puzzled, said, “But they aren’t failing now,” meaning students received few F grades and were automatically promoted.

One of the most influential administrators in the district said the key to education was making students feel good about themselves. If we could do that, he said, they would learn to read. When I suggested the reverse might be true, that if we taught children to read they would then feel good about themselves, he told me I was an educational primitive.

Part of my insistence on testing and standards grew out of a visit I had with UCLA freshmen from Los Angeles public schools. A group from a South-Central high school was in anguish. They had all graduated with A’s but were failing basic classes at UCLA. From talking to their college classmates, they realized their A’s were not the same as grades from other high schools.

“Why didn’t they tell us our grades weren’t really A’s?” one of the students said. “Why didn’t they force us to do A work? Maybe we really could have.”

With enormous effort, competency testing was finally included as part of the integration plan. After I was recalled from office, the testing part of the plan was amended. Students would be promoted based on a combination of factors, which included the tests--and the teacher’s evaluation of their emotional and physical maturity. Competency testing was dead; automatic promotion stayed in.

Testing went to the heart of the issue of accountability. If students failed, soon teachers and administrators would be held accountable for student failure.

Lack of accountability permeated the entire district. The example that stays most clearly with me was the case of the missing teachers.

The district then had about 540,000 students (compared with 592,000 now), and 30,000 “certified personnel” (now 32,000), meaning people with teaching credentials who could be in the classroom. Clearly the question was why the actual student-to-teacher ratio wasn’t 18-1, instead of about 32-1, in reality.

Even after the number of budgeted administrators and counselors, preparation periods for secondary teachers and other specified non-teaching assignments were accounted for, the student-to-teacher ratio still should have been 25-1 in the classroom, based on the number of people carried in the budget.

But it was still about 32-1. There were at least 4,000 “missing teachers”--that is, people with teaching certificates who were not present in the classroom, based on actual student-to-teacher ratios, people who were otherwise unaccounted for in the budget. Under the district’s accounting procedures, they could never be found, but everyone had a general idea what was going on.

First, there were a number of people doing administrative work who were not carried on the budget as administrators.

Second, individual administrators, to increase their power, made off-budget deals with teachers to make their lives a little easier. Administrators gave teachers time off or special assignments or consulting work or temporary administrative tasks. Whatever, despite the fact that on the budget they were carried as teachers, they were not in the classroom.

Finally, the district administration insisted on playing a game in announcing student-to-teacher ratios. The ratios were announced based on the number of teachers assigned to the school rather than teachers in the classroom. Thus though the district may have announced a student-to-teacher ratio in a particular high school at 25-1, that was before subtracting one period a day for teacher preparation and other special assignments, leaving the actual teacher student ratio in the classroom, where it counts, at 32-1.

It became clear to me after about a year on the board that though there were many superb and dedicated individual administrators and teachers in the district, institutionally the district did not have as its first priority student educational performance. As organized, it substantially existed to serve the needs of those who worked in it even when their needs conflicted with students’ needs.

The system needed to be reformed, from top to bottom. On the horizon was an external threat with the power to reform it: the court-ordered integration plan.

Though I had never met Judge Paul Egly, who was assigned the case, nor spoke to him during its duration, he was clearly sending a signal to the board: He would approve any educational improvements the board included as part of an integration plan. And those improvements we put in the plan (lower class size throughout the district, competency testing in all grades) constituted 80% of the cost of the plan--more than $70 million dollars’ worth--and under law all were paid for by the state on top of the regular school budget.

Unfortunately the strategy of using integration to bring educational improvements and accountability to the school district failed. Even though only 5% of the students in the district were bused and the educational improvement reached all students, busing was simply too emotional an issue.

At this point people often ask the natural question, “But why did you need the pressure of the integration plan to force accountability? Can’t the district just adopt tough standards and enforce them?”

There’s the rub. The district as it is now organized can’t. After all, it hasn’t, and no one is even seriously talking about doing it. There is no working constituency within the district for strict and excellent academic performance.

The terrible truth, difficult to face because of the consequences, is that the organized internal constituencies of the district, though they would never say so outright, are opposed to higher and strictly enforced academic standards. Board members, the superintendent, administrators and teachers know that once students are held strictly accountable for their performance, everyone else will be too.

Some outside force, some new pressure, some basic reorganization is needed to raise student performance. I thought court ordered integration, properly planned, could be that force. It wasn’t. But the problem is the same. We now need to find something else that will force change.

In a long ago age, an ethic of accountability permeated the schools. When I was a Los Angeles high school student, I had to prepare an important assignment over a school holiday. My teacher knew that I had been ill over the vacation but had done the best I could. He still gave me a poor grade and no chance to redo the paper. “There is no special standard for one-handed piano players,” he told me.

By perceptions of today it may seem a brutal comment. But it wasn’t. Each student’s performance was vital to that teacher. We knew it. The lessons I learned then were more important than the grade: What counts is achieving excellence; obstacles are to be overcome; there are no acceptable excuses.

By another standard, my teacher’s comment was totally understandable: Athletics is where the ethic of accountability persists as strong as ever. Teams win or lose. No excuses. No replays, no changes of schedule. When a player is sick, a team doesn’t get extra points. Performance against obstacles is valued. The coach is fully accountable for losses.

We need to recapture those standards for the classroom. Academic consequences are far more serious than losing a football game. When average high school graduates cannot read the daily newspaper, and a leading Los Angeles bank has trouble finding graduates who can add and subtract--both of which are unfortunate truths today--then we are all in trouble. Lives fall apart, productivity falls, sloppily made products cannot be marketed, machines that should work crash. Nothing, including a democratic society, can function.

The integration plan did not do it, but whatever outside force it takes, we must bring accountability back to our school system.