Lessons in Raising Quality for Los Angeles Schools : Education: Real reform can occur if strong leadership, shared responsibility and patient commitment prevail. But don’t bet on it.

With the appointment of a new superintendent, the Los Angeles Unified School District faces the new school year with an opportunity to correct past mistakes. But the district’s opportunity will translate into real achievement only if good intentions and actions are effectively joined.

The challenges facing the Los Angeles district are well-known: growing numbers of students with educational needs exacerbated by poverty and adjustment to a new country; a high proportion who drop out before high school graduation, unprepared for either productive employment or a satisfying life; a severe shortage of school buildings, and chronic budget uncertainty. These problems, however, are not unique to Los Angeles-all big-city school systems face similar difficulties.

No large district has yet solved these problems; indeed, few have even made serious inroads. But some have taken the initial steps toward producing significant improvements in educational quality. Their experience suggests several lessons for Los Angeles.

Three conditions must be met if a district is to move from the rhetoric of reform to a concrete strategy for systemwide change:

* Strong leadership that focuses attention on the things that matter most to student learning--the resources available to individual schools, how those schools are organized, what they teach and who teaches there. The leadership can come from the school board and the superintendent, or it can come from a coalition of business, political and teacher-union leaders working in concert with the district.

* No matter who plays the primary leadership role, all with a stake in the school system must accept joint responsibility for its improvement. This acceptance stems not just from a sense of altruism, but from a realization that as citizens, employers and parents, their own well-being will be threatened if the community’s schools fail.

* No matter how pressing the need for innovation, its must be understood that producing fundamental change in a system as complex as public education requires time. Administrators, teachers, parents and students must be persuaded to alter longstanding relationships; teachers must be given the opportunity and the resources to implement very different forms of instruction.

Whether Los Angeles Unified can effectively address its problems will depend on whether it can satisfy these three conditions--strong leadership, shared responsibility and patient commitment. At this point, the propects for such an outcome are mixed.

There are certainly reasons for optimism. Not only has a consensus emerged among educators, political and business leaders and the larger community about the problems that must be addressed--there is also a new sense of urgency about identifying and implementing solutions. The messages in a variety of blue-ribbon commission reports and recent Op-Ed articles echo one another: The solutions lie in establishing clear goals for student performance, strengthening the teaching profession, restructuring teaching and administrative roles, involving parents more effectively in their children’s education and supplementing educational services with adequate health and child-development resources.

Private-sector groups such as the Los Angeles Educational Partnership are actively supporting programs that enhance curriculum and encourage teachers to bring new ideas into their classrooms. The new superintendent, William Anton, has long experience working in Los Angeles Unified, is sensitive to its problems and understands its politics. And, as part of efforts to allow the district’s 600 schools to assume greater responsibility for their operations, the school board recently voted to give a handful greater autonomy by relaxing some of the district regulations governing them.

Despite these hopeful signs, Los Angeles must still overcome two obstacles before it can initiate the kind of wholesale changes now being implemented in Miami, San Diego, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.

The school board and previous superintendents have not been able to exercise the kind of strong, visionary leadership seen in other districts, because they have been preoccupied with events over which they have little control. In the 1970s, it was court-ordered desegregation; today, it is the need to build new schools. These are serious problems that cannot be ignored, and the board must play a role in solving them. But the board has often allowed external events to overwhelm it, becoming reactive and less able to shape an independent policy agenda. Now the board needs to take a proactive stance, to forge a plan for long-term educational change that takes account of pressing issues but is not dominated by them.

The implementation of school-based management in Los Angeles Unified illustrates how the board and the new superintendent could take the initiative, transforming a program that was imposed on them and making it the cornerstone of a broader reform agenda.

Other large districts, such as Miami’s, that have implemented forms of school-based management have typically done so after years of productive collaboration between district management and the teachers’ union. School-based management in Los Angeles was a settlement point in a bitter strike. The school board and superintendent have only modestly supported the efforts and have expressed serious concerns about whether the schools’ proposals go far enough to raise achievement and to change the educational experience of minority students. Instead of making a strong, patient commitment, the board has also allowed the initial 27 schools only one year to show increases in student achievement.

Alternatively, the board could take the lead in devising a clear, comprehensive strategy for educational improvement that includes school-based management as a major component. It would also need to give every part of the district, from the central office to individual schools, the time and resources to make the profound changes in curriculum and organization likely to lead to more positive results for students.

The second obstacle to fundamental change has been the failure of major actors to share responsibility for the district’s problems and for implementing solutions. As a recent RAND report notes, “an urban school system can be turned around only if the entire community unites on its behalf.” That has not happened yet in Los Angeles.

District administrators and teacher-union leaders still publicly blame each other for past ills. State and local political leaders are only modestly involved in the schools. Business and philanthropic communities support a variety of educational projects but have not pressed for a broad-based approach to school reform.

In Philadelphia, by contrast, the Pew Charitable Trusts contributed $8.3 million to mount a major planning effort to restructure all the city’s comprehensive high schools. Urban school districts do not have the fiscal slack to plan for major innovation, and helping to provide those resources and expertise is just one way the larger community can take responsibility for educational reform.

Comprehensively addressing even a few of the problems facing Los Angeles Unified will not be easy or quick. Nevertheless, the seeds of opportunity are there if all those with a stake in the system can overcome past hostilities and inertia.