Door Opens on Plan to Revamp L.A. Schools : Education: Alliance proposals would shift more power to local campuses and provide incentives for greater parental involvement.

After almost a year of closed-door meetings, a high-powered group of business, civic and education leaders has begun to hammer out the tenets of a public school reform plan that it hopes will turn around the embattled Los Angeles Unified School District.

More than 200 representatives of labor unions, churches, universities, political and civic organizations, major corporations and community groups joined the leaders of the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now (LEARN) Thursday to outline the beginnings of what many feel represents a last-ditch effort to revive the city’s troubled schools.

“We are not looking for more studies,” Robert Wycoff, chief operating officer of Arco and chairman of LEARN, said at a downtown Los Angeles news conference announcing the expansion of LEARN’s campaign. “The studies have been done and they’ve all come up with the same conclusion. Now, we’re looking for action.”

On the drawing board are a wide-ranging series of proposals that would dilute the authority of the district’s central bureaucracy and shift more power to local schools, provide incentives to increase parental involvement, allow the district to more quickly and cheaply find classroom space to ease overcrowding, and develop better methods to measure student achievement and judge the performance of teachers and principals.

The group’s board includes Los Angeles school district Supt. Bill Anton and teachers union President Helen Bernstein--both of whom would have to concede considerable power for some of the proposed reforms to take place.

A poll commissioned by LEARN last summer found that the public has little confidence that the Los Angeles system--beset by money woes, falling test scores and rising dropout rates--can adequately educate its 640,000 students without a major overhaul.

Some critics are trying to tap into that dissatisfaction with an effort to place on the November ballot a statewide initiative that would allow parents to use public funds to pay for private school. In addition, community groups and legislators continue to propose breaking up the huge district as the only way to bring about substantial improvement.

But LEARN is hoping to derail those efforts by putting its reform package before the Los Angeles school board this summer in the hope that some changes can be enacted in the coming school year.

Specifics of the proposals will be unveiled in February and committees of community leaders will revise them over the next six months.

Significant changes in the way the district operates would require school board approval, but Mike Roos, a former state legislator who is now president of LEARN, said his coalition will press its agenda in Sacramento if district officials resist.

“We recognize it is a complicated process,” Roos said Thursday. “This is not a few people sitting in a smoke-filled room, writing an initiative and cramming it down everybody’s throats.

“We will shape our plan through community leaders who represent the breadth and depth of this entire community.”

The privately funded nonprofit coalition was created last spring to spearhead reforms in the nation’s second largest school district. It has built on the efforts of earlier community-based pressure groups, but has taken a more cooperative approach by involving district officials in the process.

At Thursday’s news conference, Anton expressed support for LEARN’s agenda, but cautioned that “restructuring alone will not solve all our problems.” He said the district, which in the last three years alone has been forced to make budget cuts totaling $630 million, is badly underfunded and may not be able to afford the group’s proposals.

LEARN intends to pattern its reform campaign after heralded programs in Rochester, N.Y., and Edmonton, Canada, city schools.

The 33,000-student Rochester district overhauled its system in 1987 by boosting teacher pay, allowing schools the flexibility to design their own curriculum, attracting financial support from local businesses and requiring teachers to keep closer tabs on troubled students.

While the reform effort has moved forward in fits and starts and, so far, has not produced a measurable increase in student achievement, Rochester teachers union President Adam Urbanski pointed to a lower dropout rate, a decrease in student suspensions and an increase in the number of high school graduates who go on to college as evidence that the plan has begun to have a positive impact.

Urbanski, who is widely regarded as a national leader of the school reform effort, was in Los Angeles Thursday to boost LEARN’s efforts, cautioning the group’s newest members that they may experience many “false starts, wrong turns, negative findings and a lot of pain” as they attempt to revamp schools. “The key is patience and cooperation,” he said.

Edmonton schools Supt. Michael Strembitsky--who also appeared with LEARN’s leaders Thursday--praised the group’s efforts, which have drawn heavily from his 12-year-old reform program. A key feature of the Edmonton plan gives principals of the system’s 190 schools total authority over allocation of campus budgets.

Although his district adopted school-based management primarily to improve employee morale and eliminate central control, American school systems that have piloted the Canadian approach have reported gains in student achievement.

Some Los Angeles officials, including Anton and board member Mark Slavkin, have already initiated efforts to transfer more budget authority to local schools, but principals have not had the kind of broad authority the Edmonton system provides.