TV Reviews : KCET Journal Looks at the Reform Struggle Within L.A. Schools

The central question raised by “KCET Journal’s” hourlong report, “Under New Management” (at 8 tonight on Channel 28), is as starkly simple as its answer is complex: Can the Los Angeles city school system be saved?

It didn’t seem likely when the teachers’ union, the United Teachers of Los Angeles, began its brief but effective strike in May, 1989. The headlines focused on pay demands. But what one USC professor termed “a revolution” was another demand that the union won: a proposal to shift some decision-making powers from the downtown headquarters of the Los Angeles Unified School District to individual schools.

The plan is known by what has become a magic phrase that many think represents the district’s life preserver: School-based management. “Under New Management,” with Joseph Benti lucidly narrating an ultra-knotty issue, documents how two schools--Manual Arts High and Hale Junior High--and the district as a whole cope as they literally remake themselves.

The idea is for each school to author a plan for taking over its own administrative and curriculum decision-making tasks from the downtown bureaucrats, and to attempt to establish a balanced triumvirate between teachers, principal and parents. At Manual Arts, we see how a strong teacher-led group sells changes to other faculty and administration, with parents conspicuously absent. At Hale, principal Richard Bell is the power, with the teachers trying to catch up.

Each school’s restructuring plan reflects its different political structures: Whereas Manual Arts’ proposal balances business and classroom priorities, Hale’s is mostly administrative. Not surprisingly, the school board approves the former, and sends the latter back to the drawing board.

Writer-producer Nancy Salter’s report lays out this reform struggle rather than analyzing it, and “Under New Management” could do with a follow-up round-table discussion. What Salter wisely does is observe how one school outside the Los Angeles district--Santa Monica’s Lincoln Middle School (seventh through ninth grades)--successfully uses school-based management techniques to create a dynamic, participatory classroom situation. If this is the future, as the report suggests, our schools may have found their life saver.