School Power-Sharing Plan Falls Far Short of Goals : Education: Experiment has produced innovations on a few L.A. campuses but no broad reforms, officials concede.

Three years ago, Los Angeles educators heralded it as a revolution, a new way of doing business that would breathe life into the city’s deteriorating public schools.

Called school-based management, the program aimed to shift control of campus operations--from budgeting to teaching methods--to elected councils of teachers, parents and administrators.

The experiment was designed to raise student achievement in the nation’s second-largest school district and was launched with a swiftness and on a scale unprecedented in similar reform efforts across the United States.

But the power-sharing plan--born of a bitter nine-day teachers strike--has fallen far short of expectations, leaving most of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s 700 schools operating as they always have, with decision-making still firmly in the hands of the sluggish central bureaucracy.

“It’s been a fight every step of the way to try to make this work, and I suppose some people could look at it and say we failed,” said Helen Bernstein, president of United Teachers-Los Angeles and one of the biggest backers of the effort.

In its three years, school-based management has produced some inspiring examples of innovation on a handful of campuses. Bernstein praises it for leading to a philosophical shift that will pave the way for future reforms. She and others concede, however, that the program--now on its last legs--has not produced the bold, systemic changes its promoters envisioned.

A variety of obstacles have hobbled its progress:

* The district allocated no funds directly to schools to help them develop or implement restructuring plans, and school councils lacked authority over shrinking campus budgets.

* Pay cuts, coupled with bigger classes and fewer classroom supplies, have sapped teachers of the enthusiasm and energy needed to make school-based management succeed.

* Continued animosity between teachers and administrators from the 1989 strike has stymied the collaboration necessary for change.

* Parent participation has been low, especially in schools where many parents do not speak English or where children are bused from distant neighborhoods.

Teachers and others in the schools remain skeptical that the school board and district bureaucrats will ever relinquish enough control to make the program work.

* Many administrators, teachers and parents are unaware of the latest innovations in education, leading them to concentrate on operational issues--such as who can use the copying machine--and “administrative trivia,” rather than on improving instruction and curricula.

Patterned after reform efforts around the country, the plan was to shift power away from the central administration and school principals on the theory that education would be more responsive to children if decisions were made closer to the classroom.

Ninety-two schools have now moved past the initial stage of the districtwide program and are carrying out reform plans that allow them to do such things as reorganize the school day, select their own principals and adopt new teaching approaches.

Yet only a handful of those schools have used the program to reshape classroom instruction--a disappointing outcome to some district and union officials.

In fact, a study soon to be released by USC has found that, although people at school-based management campuses have a more positive attitude about their schools and tend to be more involved, there is no evidence that the program produced those feelings or led to measurable gains in student achievement--the goal at the heart of the effort.

Critics of the plan contend that real education reforms remain stymied by a towering central bureaucracy, whose approval is still required for many changes.

Schools wishing to make a change as minor as revising their schedules to budget time for extra courses or teacher preparation must request waivers from district officials, who often take months to decide.

“I have just been terribly frustrated at how incremental and how piecemeal the process has been,” said Los Angeles school board member Mark Slavkin.

“On the one hand we’re saying, ‘Go for it, be different, take chances.’ On the other hand we’re saying, ‘Check with us on every little item.’ ”

Some teachers and principals give the process high marks for pushing them to scrutinize their educational goals and find new ways of reaching children left behind by traditional teaching methods.

“School-based management is good in the fact that it forces you to sit down and analyze some of the things that you do, so you don’t do the same bad things over and over,” said Albert (Hasty) Arnold, principal at Santa Monica Boulevard Elementary School in Hollywood. His school used the program to create 12 mixed-grade classrooms, which combine children of different ages.

‘The drawback is, you spend a lot of time talking about other than important things.”

That drawback has characterized the reform experiment in districts across the country.

“To be truthful, the problems with this process outnumber the advantages,” said Adam Urbanski, president of the teachers union in Rochester, N.Y., which pioneered the concept of school-site decision-making four years ago.

“The intent was to affect instruction. The reality became that schools now were managed by committees,” said Urbanski.

“Even in schools where it works, teachers and parents and administrators tell me the cure is worse than the disease. In order to really make it work, it takes a pound of flesh. It ties them up in endless meetings, takes away from direct contact with students. There’s a heavy price to pay.”

Because the school-based management process has proved so burdensome, some Los Angeles schools have opted to bypass it and make changes on their own.

At Northridge Middle School, touted by the district as a model of innovation, Principal Beryl Ward and a cadre of teachers and parents set out two years ago to reshape their curriculum, emphasizing interdisciplinary studies, clustering teachers in teams and assigning every youngster to an adult adviser for guidance on everything from romance to study habits.

“We’ve pretty much found that everything we wanted to do we could do without going through school-based management,” Ward said. “We’ve looked at it and looked at it, and we can’t figure out what would justify the work.”

To implement its new curriculum, the school relied on a modest state grant and a principal responsive to teachers’ ideas.

According to instructors and principals throughout the district, those two elements--money and a cooperative and progressive staff--are critical to successful reform. The school-based management program cannot guarantee either.

Bitterness remains from the 1989 teachers strike that led to the empowerment agreement, preventing many schools from establishing the collegiality essential to the program’s success. Teachers zealously embraced the plan as a way to address years of workplace grievances, raising the hackles of principals who feared that they would be swept aside in the rush for control of the school.

“When you say that school-based management was the result of a strike, then that certainly sends the message that teachers are taking over the school,” said Principal Anne Falotico of Granada Hills High School, where the reform effort has been waylaid by disputes between administrators and teachers.

To help school councils cope, the district and the union joined forces to train parents and teachers how to conduct meetings and build consensus, and the district set up an office in the school system’s downtown headquarters to coordinate the process.

But that office was eliminated this year during budget cutting that shaved $400 million from district spending. Critics note that closing the office saved less than $400,000--a fraction of the district’s $3.9-billion budget.

“When you look at what a tiny part of the budget that is, you have to wonder whether they really intended this to work,” said Barbara Knight, a counselor at Marshall High School in Los Feliz. “I think it’s very clear the district has not provided much support. Now, councils that are having trouble . . . have nowhere to go for help.”

Other realities have also hampered the effort. Facing mushrooming class sizes, severe cutbacks in supplies, a cumulative 12% cut in pay and a strike scheduled for February, morale among teachers has plummeted, leaving them with little energy to devote to a demanding and exasperating reform process.

“Teachers are very angry. Some say let’s just chuck the whole thing,” Knight said. “But they also see school-based management as the last hope.”

Marshall High is widely cited as a leader in the restructuring movement. During the last two years, the campus has won more than $700,000 in outside grants to pursue its innovations, including keeping the school library open into the evening, pairing instructors with mentors and organizing students into “houses” that team small groups of students with teachers.

In the absence of district funding, several Los Angeles schools have turned to outside sources, such as the state Department of Education, which recently awarded six L.A. Unified schools pieces of a five-year, $100-million grant to encourage restructuring.

Absent new money, school councils need to have broad control over their campus budgets to effect significant changes, the experts say--a transfer of authority that has happened in fewer than a dozen Los Angeles schools.

In Miami’s reform effort, “that was our carrot to get schools to buy into the program,” said Dan Tosado, head of the Dade County office that coordinates school reform. Every school that opted into the program was allowed to make many of its own spending decisions, from faculty size to textbook purchasing.

“It gave everybody a chance to participate in real decision-making, not just (deciding) the custodial schedule or who’s going to park where,” Tosado said. “That is critical to getting teachers and parents and everybody to sign on.”

That kind of budget control was envisioned as the final step in the Los Angeles reform effort. But without it, schools found it difficult to sustain the energy and interest among parents and teachers to keep the process going.

In Los Angeles, parent participation has been difficult to attract. From the outset, only a small percentage of parents cast ballots to determine who would serve on their schools’ governing councils, and parents who were elected often believed they had too little clout, outnumbered by teachers who wanted to remedy poor working conditions rather than discuss educational issues.

And although the power-sharing plan gave parents the opportunity to be a strong voice on school councils, many have felt excluded because they cannot speak English or are unfamiliar with educational issues. Transportation and distance are barriers for others, whose children are bused to schools far from their neighborhoods.

“Poor parents especially assume schools know what to do, and we sort of withdraw from entering a dialogue with the schools,” said Vahac Mardirosian, who runs the Parent Institute for Quality Education, which works with Latino parents. “That is very dangerous.”

Both parents and teachers say they have also been hindered by their ignorance of innovative practices, which prevents them from striking directly at instructional and curricular issues.

Urbanski cited the lack of ongoing professional development for teachers as one of the main stumbling blocks to improving student achievement and as a major reason that test scores have not risen in Rochester, Miami and Los Angeles--considered the three showcases of school-site decision-making.

“It’s not that people are holding back. Teachers teach as they were taught,” he said. “If you want people to do things differently, you have to give them access to a new knowledge base, and we have not done that.”

At Marshall High, school-based management “hit a brick wall” when its council tried to take up the issue of instructional change. “When you talk to teachers about how they teach . . . we tend to get really defensive,” said Knight.

“Unlike other countries, teachers here are never asked to think about that sort of thing. You get your degree, then it’s not part of your daily job to think about how you teach, how you might do it better.”

One benefit of school-based management has been a provision that allows schools to apply to the state for eight “pupil-free” days, during which teachers can meet to discuss educational alternatives and new teaching methods.

That provision has proven so popular that the teachers union and district officials have appealed to the Board of Education to make additional pupil-free days available each year to all of the district’s campuses. That would cut down on the time children spend in school, but proponents contend the option would pay valuable dividends by allowing teachers to improve the instructional program.

In fact, what may be the most enduring legacy of the Los Angeles restructuring program is the extension to all district schools of ideas that have been tested on school-based management campuses.

By next school year, program officials hope, all district campuses may be able to adopt such innovations as mixed-grade classrooms and peer review systems, and to exercise more control over their fund-raising revenues and bell schedules--changes that can take place only if the district agrees to drop rules that now forbid them.

Although both district and union officials agree that the present school-based management program will soon be obsolete, they are now gearing up for a frank assessment of its success or failure in the two dozen schools that were the first group to move forward with reforms.

Whatever the outcome, they acknowledge that the trend toward school-site control is irreversible.

“The days of every school having to do things the same way are over,” said Joseph Rao, who headed the district’s school-based management office before it was disbanded this year. “We instituted the process of change (that allows) every school to look different. . . . It broke the mold. That’s the legacy.”

The Process of Change

The Los Angeles Unified School District’s school-based management program was created after the 1989 teachers strike to allow schools greater autonomy and to meet teacher demands for more decision-making authority over instructional issues and campus operations. The power-sharing plan has three phases:

PHASE 1

Shared decision-making. School leadership councils were elected at all 625 campuses. Each council has up to 16 members, half of which is composed of teachers and the other half of parents, community representatives, the school principal and students.

The councils have jurisdiction in five areas: staff development, scheduling of activities, campus discipline, use of school equipment and a limited number of budgetary items, such as school supplies and textbook purchases.

PHASE 2

School-based management. Schools wishing to move into this phase must secure the approval of two-thirds of the faculty, the principal and a majority of parents.

Each school submits a plan outlining a vision for the campus, including the educational goals it wishes to pursue and possible barriers to the goals. The plans are to be overseen by school-based management councils of parents, teachers and administrators.

The councils can make significant curricular and instructional changes and can petition the Board of Education to waive requirements that might hinder those innovations. They also can request the right to select faculty members and administrators and gain more control over school funds, although fewer than a dozen have widened their budgetary powers.

PHASE 3

Schools exercise a large degree of autonomy, broadening their decision-making authority to campus maintenance and operations. The schools work closely with district officials assigned to their regions or grade levels to make the desired changes.

Schools in Transition

Ninety-two schools are in the process of reorganizing under the auspices of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s school-based management program. Here are a few examples of the changes:

NORWOOD ELEMENTARY, LOS ANGELES: The school is being reorganized into four clusters of classrooms, called “corridors,” each devoted to a different theme, such as fine arts, literature and social studies. Teachers will determine methods of instruction and evaluation.

A “parent center” on campus will offer parenting classes, discussion groups and a resource library.

WESTWOOD ELEMENTARY, WESTWOOD: Revamping of the curriculum will provide “hands-on, thematic” instruction. This allows teachers at each grade level to select a theme, such as immigration or survival, and use lessons in every subject to reinforce the theme.

The number of schools busing children to the campus will be cut from eight to one, and weekly school-sponsored social activities and parent conferences at the sending school will maximize parent involvement.

Teachers and parents will be involved in redesigning report cards to more accurately reflect student progress.

HAWAIIAN AVENUE ELEMENTARY, BELL: A newcomers program will help newly arrived immigrant students in upper grades improve language skills and adjust to the campus before they join regular classrooms.

A screening program for incoming kindergartners is planned to identify students at risk of failure. A two-year kindergarten program will be offered for students who need extra help to prepare for first grade.

PORTOLA JUNIOR HIGH, TARZANA: The daily schedule is being reorganized to add an afternoon class period for an enrichment program and tutorial sessions.

JEFFERSON HIGH SCHOOL, SOUTH LOS ANGELES: “Advisory classes” will give students a chance to discuss health, social and community issues in ways that teach conflict resolution and problem-solving skills.

A “hospitality center” with Spanish-language translation and child care services will be established for parents to encourage attendance at meetings and conferences.

Students will be required to perform community service in order to graduate.