PERSPECTIVE ON URBAN AMERICA : Overhaul L.A. Schools : Some could operate on a contract basis by next fall, tailored to various needs, interests. Parents would have a choice.

Nobody is content with the Los Angeles public schools, least of all the people who work in them. Teachers, principals, superintendents, school board members and union leaders--each group thinks it could work more effectively if the others were more disciplined and interfered less. They may all be right.

Is there a way out of this gridlock? A new RAND book, “Urban America: Policy Choices for Los Angeles and the Nation,” suggests one promising route.

Some who believe that the public schools are hopeless would provide parents with other choices by offering them publicly funded tuition vouchers for use at any school, private as well as public.

In theory, vouchers might indeed help parents exercise choice and demand performance. But in practice, it is not clear where the new and better schools will come from. The Catholic and private schools now operating in Los Angeles cannot serve all 600,000 of the school district’s students. Start-ups are expensive and risky. Why should private investors want to launch hundreds of schools in tough inner-city areas?

Parental choice is a good idea, in that it gives school staffs incentives to perform and makes parents and children more committed to the schools they select. But choice needs a supply side. For Los Angeles and other big cities, there is no alternative to providing it within the public school system.

That doesn’t mean the system as it stands. Better schools for Los Angeles can come only from a new kind of public school system in which the primary mission of the school board and superintendent is to supply schools that parents would choose and students want to attend. Like corporations trying to capture a market, the district would create different products to meet different demands, not one homogenized product that is unsatisfactory for all.

The individual schools would operate under contract. The school board would identify a range of school types to fit the needs and preferences of children and parents, then commission groups of teachers to create and run them. Some contracts would resemble those under which many Los Angeles-area public magnet and alternative schools already operate--agreements that a school will pursue a defined mission and receive public support as long as it operates as promised and gets good results. Many schools could also be run under contracts with private organizations. Schools would remain public, funded from tax dollars and operating under contracts that require unbiased admissions, non-discrimination and demonstrated performance. Teachers’ unions would operate as professional craft associations, matchmaking between teachers and schools rather than negotiating, industrial-style, with the central school board.

Most important, the school board would have the ability to replace those schools that fail. The board could fire bad providers and hire proven ones.

There are not enough competent providers to run all 600 Los Angeles schools under contract by next year--or the year after. But enough potential qualifiers are at hand to begin making over the bottom 5% of the district’s schools, measured in terms of dropout and course failure rates. Among them might be school reform organizations like Brown University’s Coalition of Essential Schools; staff members of flourishing local magnet schools who would like to duplicate their success or develop their ideas elsewhere; organizations like the Catholic Archdiocese’s school system, which could contract to run a few non-sectarian schools, and many others. The school system, the union and community groups have already created one potential provider, the Los Angeles Learning Center.

A set of such contracts could lead to the creation of a number of new schools, using existing buildings, by next fall. After one or two years’ experience, the school system would negotiate additional contracts, perhaps 50 or 60 each year, embracing virtually the entire Los Angeles Unified School District within a decade. By that time, the school board’s role would have changed from political deal-maker to portfolio manager. People desiring or opposing a particular curriculum or teaching method could petition for a school that meets their needs rather than the rule that constrains the entire system.

Many school board members, teachers, administrators and unions would find such a change frightening and oppose it. For them, the failed school system they know is better than a potentially effective one that is unfamiliar. For that reason, much of the impetus would have to come from the region’s political, business, higher education, civil-rights and media leaders.

Yes, our public school system can be saved, but only by transforming it.