LAUSD Bureaucracy Never Gets the Message

* After reading about the generous gift of $500 million by Walter Annenberg to public education to foster a “standard of excellence,” I then read about the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Millikan Middle School’s attempt to get a new principal, one of their own assistant principals who is seemingly the choice of faculty, students and parents and has been at the school 10 years.

The superintendent and director of middle schools for the LAUSD, however, declared that “it’s not the norm” and went on to pontificate that principals are chosen with “diversity of experience and “familiarity with a school.”

This LAUSD administrator said that “keeping an administrator in one school for an extended period of time is often not the best thing for an administrator of a school.” On his first point, possibly; on the second, absurd!

As a professor of education at a leading Southern California university, I note that all administrative theory, practice and logic take exception to such LAUSD illogic, but then one can never expect logic from the LAUSD bureaucracy, especially those in the central administration of the LAUSD.

Has this superintendent not read anything about such things as “the effective school’s formula,” “school based management,” or even the LEARN proposals? Here is a superintendent who thinks he knows better than the school, faculty, students and community itself!

Here is yet another example of why Sacramento must break up the LAUSD and let local community control prevail. Until reform such as this happens, Annenberg can give away millions more and public school systems such as the LAUSD will continue their steady decline. When will the LAUSD’s bloated bureaucracy ever get the message that business as usual, as the norm, is unacceptable?

ALFRED LIGHTFOOT

Canoga Park