PERSPECTIVE ON LOS ANGELES SCHOOLS : First, Cut the District Into Pieces : To start a revolution of top-down bureaucracy, create self-governing zones around the city’s 89 high schools.

My job should not exist.

Right now, as a Los Angeles Unified School District board member, I’m expected to help govern an all-powerful central bureaucracy sending memos down an organizational pyramid that places students at the bottom. There’s too much power in the hands of those farthest away from the students. The district is so vast and the structure so autocratic that people at the local school level don’t feel that the central administration is on their side. We more closely resemble the crumbling Soviet system than the traditional American one-room schoolhouse.

We can no longer tinker with reforms of the massive centralized system. We must create a new system.

Like the Soviet Union, the district must be reconstituted as a federation of local entities. In our case, the 49 individual high schools and the neighborhood schools that feed into them should become the units for true local control. These high-school complexes would help restore a sense of connection and involvement at the community level. While each school would have its own council to set school policy, the complex, about the size of the traditional small-town school district, would serve as a clearinghouse for communitywide issues and concerns,

Creating this sort of meaningful structure for community involvement would set the stage for the other changes needed to rebuild our school system. These include:

1) Putting more than lip service behind our expectations for academic achievement. The district has fallen into the trap of lowered expectations; the enormous challenges we face have been turned into excuses. We know the workplace skills necessary for success after high school. Yet the district continues to award high school diplomas to some students who have taken years of basic math without having to learn algebra, thereby evading the supposedly rigorous state and district standards.

2) Granting all schools maximum authority and discretion over their entire local budget. Schools must be free to shape a custom-made plan to best serve their own students. Although “school-based management” is a small step in this direction, it is still an overly regulated, centrally managed process.

3) Allow each student to attend the public school that best meets the student’s needs. As individual schools are truly restructured, parents who, for whatever reason, are not comfortable with the changes must be able to choose another school. To start, we could provide true “open enrollment” to any school in the local high school complex. For a school outside those boundaries, some restrictions would be necessary, like those that now apply to magnet schools.

4) Essential central services that cannot effectively be accomplished at the local level--such as payroll or transportation--need to be rebuilt from the ground up with the consent and involvement of local schools. The legitimacy and the credibility of centralized services can be restored only by creating the most efficient and cost-effective system possible. Schools would then be “taxed” to finance the central services that remain.

In addition to providing support services, the central system should remain responsible for the monitoring and evaluation of local school performance.

5) The trade-off for local school autonomy must be meaningful accountability to parents, taxpayers and the larger community for student achievement. Schools can no longer be measured on mindless compliance with centrally imposed rules that may or may not apply locally. Schools should be measured on their improvement of student achievement.

While additional funding is an absolute necessity, we cannot expect greater taxpayer support until we transform the system. Ultimately, it means abandoning the idea of a central school board to preside over 825 schools. After this revolution, the obstructionist powers of the central system would be gone.

Alternatives could include replacing the elected seven-member board with a single, elected superintendent who could serve with the authority similar to that of a chief executive officer in a private corporation. Each high school complex may end up electing a leadership group of its own. But unless sweeping changes are initiated soon, the enemies of public education will set in motion the destruction of this essential American institution. Their “solutions” so far have been cynical, simplistic, ideological attacks, such as the ill-conceived “voucher initiative.”

The future of Los Angeles rests with our children and their public schools. They won’t survive without positive change--including, eventually, the elimination of my job.