PERSPECTIVE ON L.A. SCHOOLS : How to Reconfigure a Dinosaur : Breaking up is hard to do, but in a fast-changing city as big as Los Angeles, the 140-year-old system no longer works.

Schools should not operate alone in educating children. As the African proverb says, “It takes a village to build a child.” Schools should operate as a part of a community interested in children and families.

Much has changed in Los Angeles in the 140 years since the public education system was established here in 1853. For the past 70 of those years, district boundaries have remained little changed and the system of governance that once served a few hundred students struggles now to educate more than 600,000 of the most culturally and ethnically diverse students in the world.

Today, a feeling of powerlessness is shared by parents from throughout the district, whether they live in South Los Angeles, Lincoln Heights, Hollywood or Pacoima. Too many things seem to be done “for your own good” by a lot of unknown so-called experts from far-away downtown, and it’s not just a problem for parents.

We depend on school principals to inspire, motivate and support our teachers and to be responsive to parents and the community. A principal had a fighting chance to do a good job in the old days when there was one superintendent and perhaps a dozen principals, but today we have more than 630 principals. And gone are the days when the superintendent could even hope to know every principal by first name.

Without that kind of communication, how can the principal be accountable to parents? How can a principal be the parents’ representative and advocate with the district’s top management?

We have a crisis of confidence in this district. It goes beyond the current district budget debacle. It goes beyond the teacher labor contract and the potential strike, and it goes beyond the policy-makers, the administrators, the teachers and the politicians.

It is a structural crisis that can only be resolved with structural reform.

In the past, I have supported half-measures to reform the district, which have not worked. At some point, without total restructuring, the solution compounds the problem. And what we end up doing is trying to save a system of bureaucracy rather than the public schools.

I am introducing legislation to break up the district because we need to create a new structure that gives parents and surrounding communities a more significant role in our schools.

This measure will give the decision-making for creating the new districts to a commission composed of parents and community leaders from throughout Los Angeles, who will be assisted by representatives from the Los Angeles County Board of Education, the state Department of Education and the Parent-Teacher-Student Assn.

Their work will have to meet specific criteria that ensure the equal distribution of resources, provide ethnic and socioeconomic diversity, account for special student needs and geographic boundaries.

Completion of the commission plan would be required within a short timeline and the plan would appear on the next available ballot for a districtwide vote.

A district breakup--and only a district breakup--can make the recommendations of the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now (LEARN) a reality.

LEARN’s fundamental belief is that all students will benefit when our schools adopt clear education standards, strengthen their measures of accountability and empower the entire school community, including parents, administrators, community leaders and teachers.

LEARN believes that school improvement must be allowed to take place at the school, and that each school should have freedom to implement its own methods.

Smaller districts can only make the governing boards and individual schools more accountable for implementing these LEARN reforms. As long as the school district board continues to consolidate power downtown, individual schools will never be given real power to run their affairs.

Dividing the district will not result in an unfair split between rich and poor areas of the city. My legislation will uphold state laws and court decisions that require equalized funding. Last year, in the midst of the longest recession in the state’s history, we were able to keep per-pupil funding at $4,187 and this legislation would not change that allocation. What will change--what must change--is how that money gets spent and who decides.

I am one who believes that our diversity is our strength. New districts, including any districts created in the Valley, will be racially diverse for the simple reason that the city itself is far more diverse, far more integrated than 20 years ago. African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Latino-Americans compose 73% of the elementary school population in the San Fernando Valley. (These numbers are elevated because of busing from the central city. But for several reasons, including the wishes of parents in the new districts, it is reasonable to expect that these numbers will not change much after a breakup.)

What we’re talking about is nothing less than self-determination for our communities, and nothing could do more now to promote long-term healing in our communities than the empowerment that will come with a return to local control in the education of our children. But the most compelling argument for all of us who hate bigotry and intolerance is this: If we cannot restore public confidence in public education, we are going to lose our public schools. We will then lose the greatest weapon we have to defeat discrimination and to make real the promise of equal opportunity.

In a democracy, power is often measured by the value of your participation. In a district the size of LAUSD, where the stakes are our children’s future, a parent’s participation today means far less than it should, far less than it can. Smaller districts, like smaller schoolrooms, mean that everybody counts for more.