Decentralized School District Plan Praised

Allowing parents to choose their children’s schools has improved academic performance and reduced the number of dropouts, a Northern California school superintendent told a hearing Monday into the possibility of breaking up the giant Los Angeles Unified School District.

Walter L. Marks, superintendent of the Richmond district, the only one in California to allow parents free choice among schools offering different educational programs, spoke to a hearing in Studio City organized by Assemblywoman Marian La Follette (R-Northridge).

It was the fourth and final hearing in the series sponsored by La Follette, who has long advocated breaking up the 610,000-student Los Angeles district and forming separate districts, including a San Fernando Valley district.

Marks said the free-choice system worked well in his 31,000-student district. He suggested that a free-choice system would work in the much larger Los Angeles district if it was inaugurated as an experiment in a portion of the district.

But La Follette said such an approach might not work in Los Angeles, commenting that school district officials and the seven-member Board of Education would probably resist it.

La Follette’s earlier attempts to break up the Los Angeles district, the nation’s second largest, have died in legislative committees. She has argued that smaller districts would improve education by making schools more responsive to parents.

La Follette hopes to persuade the state Board of Education to put the issue before voters in 1991. The Los Angeles County Committee on School District Organization, a state-appointed board, must also approve of such a vote.

This summer La Follette created the Los Angeles Task Force for Better Education, a 10-member advisory committee, to conduct hearings and make a recommendation on the question of breaking up the district to the state board.

The task force is expected to submit its recommendations by early next year, said a spokesman for La Follette.

Critics of the plan, including school board President Jackie Goldberg, argue that breaking up the Los Angeles district into 10 or 15 smaller districts would probably create constitutional challenges that the plan would promote segregation.