Lessons of Chicago, New York Reforms : Schools: Nation’s other largest systems employ different methods aimed at encouraging more autonomy. Both approaches have had problems but may suggest ideas for L.A. Unified.

The Los Angeles school district is struggling with ways to revamp itself, but the nation’s two other giant public education systems years ago settled on quite different roads to reform, with less-than-satisfactory results.

Still, the New York City and Chicago school systems--respectively, No. 1 and No. 3 in size nationally--have some lessons for Los Angeles, where controversial efforts are under way in the Legislature to carve the 640,000-student district into several smaller ones.

More than two decades ago the New York Legislature, in concert with the governor and the mayor, splintered the nation’s biggest school system into 32 semiautonomous districts, each with its own elected board and appointed superintendent, to run the district’s elementary and junior high schools. A seven-member board appointed by the mayor and five borough presidents hires a chancellor who runs the high schools and has general legal authority over the 995,000-student system.

Joseph A. Fernandez, a strong administrator who helped steer Dade County (Miami) schools through a nationally acclaimed restructuring before taking over the New York City Public Schools in 1990, has spent much of his time battling corruption and bureaucracy and fighting for some control over the Byzantine system that grew out of the 1970 decentralization legislation.

“My recommendation to Los Angeles is certainly not to look to New York for examples,” Fernandez told a recent forum in Los Angeles that had assembled to debate the breakup of the Los Angeles district. Amid struggles over control and curriculum and the publication of Fernandez’s autobiography, which was unflattering to some board members, the central board refused to renew his contract, and he will leave at the end of the school year.

A range of proposals to fix the system, from giving more authority to the central board to abolishing it and granting more power to local boards or to individual schools, have been floated over the years.

Robert Berne, a New York University associate dean who headed a recent state commission to recommend changes in the city school system’s governance structure, said the legislation was a flawed response to demands for more community control.

“It was an administrative decentralization instead of community control, and it was in large measure unworkable,” he said. “It created a system that is ambiguous and complex, a system where conflict over power and patronage is the mode. We’ve had 20 years of fits and starts. Some chancellors get eaten alive by the thing, and the students have been just kind of bumping along.”

Turnouts for local school board elections are typically low, ranging between 7% and 10%, Fernandez noted in his Los Angeles talk. He urged would-be reformers to involve business and community groups, colleges and universities, and parents and students in whatever reorganization path they choose and to give individual schools a lot of say in day-to-day operations and agenda-setting.

In the 412,000-student Chicago system, individual councils of parents and teachers have run each of the district’s 551 schools since the fall of 1989. After a bumpy start--including the fallout from a wave of principal firings when the local councils first took over--most council members and teachers say the reform program has worked in making the schools safer for children and more open to parents.

But test scores have remained low--about 75% of Chicago students scored below national norms on standardized tests--and, over four years, more than half of the 1991 class had dropped out before graduation. (In New York, by contrast, more than half the students scored above national norms, and the four-year dropout rate has been reduced to 17.2%, which district officials attribute to school-run dropout prevention programs. Los Angeles falls somewhere between New York and Chicago in test scores and dropout rate.)

Critics of the Chicago program say not enough attention has been paid to what goes on in the classroom and to teacher and principal training. But its defenders say they expect improvements in student achievement to follow the increased parent and staff involvement, and they note that the efforts have attracted other reform programs and resources to individual campuses.

Advocates of small districts say the problems in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago make a strong case for breaking up the mammoth school systems.

“When it comes to reform, the popular thing is to decentralize. But it does not seem to have worked. . . . It just means another layer of bureaucracy,” said Herbert J. Walberg, a University of Illinois at Chicago researcher who has studied district size and academic achievement.

But Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, a coalition of large urban districts, said a new Los Angeles reform program, which he described as similar to Chicago’s effort but designed “considerably more thoughtfully,” holds more promise than does carving up the district.

He referred to a business-backed, communitywide reform effort known as the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now (LEARN). It seeks to keep the district intact but improve student achievement by giving individual schools--and parents, principals and teachers--more freedom to do what they think best.

“There are ways for a single, centralized district to decentralize parts of its curriculum and parts of its instructional decision-making without wrecking the integrity of the school system itself,” Casserly said.

Top 10 School Districts

Here are the 10 biggest public school systems in the country. Shown are kindergarten-through-12th grade enrollments for 1992-93. New York City: 995,000 Los Angeles Unified: 641,206 City of Chicago Schools: 411,582 Dade County, Fla.: 298,000 Philadelphia City: 201,496 Houston: 198,209 Broward County, Fla.: 180,000 Hawaii Dept. of Education: 176,923 Detroit City: 175,036 Dallas: 134,558 Source: districts listed

Compiled by researcher Tracy Thomas