Search On for School Reform Leader : Education: Ambitious countywide project is funded by a $53-million challenge grant from the Annenberg Foundation. LAMP board hopes to fill the job by the end of January.

The person chosen to carry the lamp lit by the Los Angeles Metropolitan Project--the ambitious new effort to promote countywide school reform that was announced Wednesday--will wear many hats.

This future leader must be a down-to-earth practitioner comfortable with the often abstract debates that drive school reform; a compelling after-dinner speaker who can glad-hand corporate executives and parents with equal sincerity, and, perhaps most important, a fierce believer in the mission of improving the quality of education received by children in more than 1,700 schools countywide.

Moreover, the person who agrees to become, in effect, the county czar of school reform has to get off to a quick start and form a fully functioning organization from scratch in less than six months.

Finding and hiring that person will be the first job of the Board of Governors of LAMP, which seeks to create a framework that will consolidate and boost the efforts of the various school reform efforts countywide. The project is funded by a $53-million challenge grant from the Annenberg Foundation that has to be matched dollar for dollar with funds from local foundations, corporations and governmental bodies, including school districts.

“The most important job is to select good staff people,” said Virgil Roberts, the record company executive who chairs the organization’s board. “That will make my job and the job of the board a lot easier.”

Although the search for a leader with a marquee name is being conducted nationally, whoever gets the nod also will need an intimate knowledge of the political and ethnic complexities of Los Angeles, said Ira W. Krinsky, a managing vice president for Korn/Ferry International, who is conducting the search pro bono.

Krinsky is nationally known as a recruiter of top executives for universities and school districts. He conducted the searches that led to Blenda J. Wilson becoming the president of Cal State Northridge, and to Neal Yoneji becoming chancellor of the Los Angeles Community College District in September.

“The board wants to have a process that gives good people an opportunity,” Krinsky said.

He said he began the search about 10 days ago and hopes to have candidates in for confidential interviews by the middle of January. Roberts said the board hopes to fill the job by the end of January.

The person selected will need credibility with a wide variety of groups, including unions, legislators and corporate executives. Most of all, the director will have to be able to work directly with teachers.

“It has to be someone who sees teachers as part of the solution instead of as the problem,” he said.

Krinsky said there is no “short list” of candidates. But one name that has been widely discussed is that of Helen J. Bernstein, the feisty executive director of United Teachers--Los Angeles.

One thing in Bernstein’s favor is that she was an early backer of LEARN, the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Reform Now. Schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District that want to join LAMP have to first join LEARN, which seeks to hold teachers and principals accountable for student achievement while giving them the power and freedom to fulfill those expectations.

Bernstein has a year left on her union contract but said she would be interested in the LAMP job. “Given the opportunity to have a real impact on school reform and systemic reform I certainly wouldn’t shy away from that, because those opportunities don’t come along all that often,” she said.

Bernstein has heard other names discussed but counters: “I’m as good as any of those people.”

The director’s first task after hiring a small staff of associate directors will be to help schools that have not started down the reform path prepare applications to become part of LAMP.

Other responsibilities will include setting up working groups to help those schools with challenges such as how to apply the state’s curriculum framework for mathematics in the classroom, how to provide teachers with incentives to stay at one campus, and how to reorganize teaching schedules to allow them more time for planning meetings with other faculty members.

The director also will have to work with school districts to help them develop ways of being more supportive of school campuses and classroom teachers.

The hiring of the director “will be a major signal as to how this thing will look,” said Guilbert C. Hentschke, dean of the School of Education at USC. “I just hope we get someone who can handle all these different tasks.”