Let This Strike Ring a Bell : Issue Now Should Be School Reform, Not Business as Usual

The Los Angeles Unified School District teachers’ strike will be settled. Strikes of this magnitude always are. Additional state money may be needed to reach an agreement. However, give-and-take by both management and labor, perhaps with a nudge from parents and public officials, will eventually result in a settlement.

Nevertheless, if past practice can be relied on for a prediction, after the strike the teachers will teach, students will go to class and school policy-makers and managers will continue to operate the system in the current manner. The principal legacy of the strike will be a residue of ill will, cynicism and distrust.

If this dismal scenario again proves true, it will be a great loss. Far more is at stake here than pay raises for teachers. The outcome of this strike may well be the bellwether for urban school reform in the United States. Los Angeles’ is the largest school district in California, the second-largest in the nation. In its rapidly spinning ethnic and linguistic whirlpool resides much of America’s economic and social future. For that future to be bright, the Los Angeles Unified School District, as well as many other city school systems, must be forcefully yanked into the future and fundamentally transformed.

The existing system was fabricated in an earlier industrial era. School attendance was mandatory, the three R’s were stressed, a teacher’s authority was seldom questioned, the overwhelming majority of students came from English-speaking, two-parent, education-poor, God-fearing households, and the United States could dictate economically to much of the world.

Under these 19th- and early-20th-Century conditions, it appeared efficient to consolidate small schools and school districts into ever-larger governmental units, establish a managerial hierarchy to provide direction for a low-paid, virtually voiceless work force and operate the system in a centralized bureaucratic manner patterned after the successful industrial corporations of the time.

Schools cast in this industrial mold succeeded for their era. Children were kept off the streets and generally out of trouble until their labor was needed, an abundant supply of inexpensive teachers was available in the form of unmarried women (for whom there were few attractive employment alternatives), and student mastery of basic skills sufficed to meet societal and workplace expectations.

Times have changed, and it is time that schools changed, too. Students in California and particularly in Los Angeles are different. They now come from a far wider spectrum of home circumstances. The work force is different, too. Women now have many professional opportunities in addition to teaching. Such is also the case for minorities. Perhaps more important, however, societal expectations for schools are changing.

The globalization of the economy now renders trained intelligence--human capital--a nation’s greatest asset. For the United States to be competitive, the work force must be imbued with higher internalized performance standards, an ability to learn new procedures quickly and a willingness to cooperate. Knowledge of science and technical subjects is now needed for both high productivity and good citizenship.

The three R’s alone no longer suffice for students, and neither does the industrial management model for schools.

Failure on the part of the school board to realize that the existing management model is outmoded may be the most powerful determinant of a long and conflict-riddled teachers’ strike. Central office directives, and contractually promulgated work rules, will not enable schools to meet new performance expectations. Quite the opposite. The more proscriptive and precise the central office directives are to teachers, the more likely they will fill with frustration and rage at being treated like bureaucrats and not professionals.

A new model of schooling is emerging. Los Angeles should examine and adapt these components to local circumstances. The new education model, as with new complicated industrial processes, recognizes that remote decision-makers cannot adequately tailor complicated procedures to local circumstances and the needs of individual clients. A high degree of informed discretion on the part of the work force is crucial for added productivity.

Under the new schooling model, board members and top-level administrators are correctly charged with creating a long- range vision, establishing organizational goals, assessing the performance of the system and making course corrections when circumstances dictate. In effect, the job of those at the top is translating societal expectations and applying them to the school setting. Micromanagement of the system from those at the top is to be avoided.

School sites must become the fundamental management unit. School administrators and teachers must be given the discretion as a team to arrange their resources, their workday, their workplace and their procedures in order to meet the objectives established by the school board. It is altogether appropriate for higher-level authorities to establish broad expectations of what should be accomplished by a school. It is highly inappropriate for those authorities to tell the people at a school how to accomplish the objectives.

Simply providing school sites with greater management discretion is not enough. Performance incentives must be altered and a comprehensive and accurate accountability system must be crafted. The current upside-down reward system must end.

Currently, in order to “get ahead,” too many good teachers believe they have to “get out” of the classroom. To reverse this pattern, it should become possible for the best teachers in a school to earn as much as administrators. Only a few central office administrators should be paid more than the highest-salaried teachers in a school system. To do otherwise promotes the wrong message about the significance of teaching.

Giving parents greater discretion in selecting which schools their children attend should be explored as a means of further empowering parents and rendering the schools more sensitive to their expectations. Conversely, permitting consenting groups of teachers to “bud off” and begin a school within a school should be encouraged in order to promote professionalism and to meet parent preferences.

Each school should annually publish a comprehensive performance report, including student test scores, in order to inform its clients and the public of its achievements, or lack of them.

These are all part of a longer list that would transform the currently moribund Los Angeles school bureaucracy into a new education network in which individual schools are the basic management unit, teachers have greater professional discretion and parents are listened to.

Ironically, the current strike, with all its potential for strife and discord, offers an opportunity to begin to design these productive changes.

Those at the bargaining table, on picket lines, in corporate board rooms and in living rooms throughout the district must have bilateral vision. While dealing today with the meat-and-potato issues of a strike, they must simultaneously cast their eyes strategically down the road and begin to cooperate to build the new school network that Los Angeles, and the nation, needs for tomorrow.