Breaking Up Is Hard to Do : Foes of LAUSD face a long, onerous procedure

Many Angelenos say the only way to ensure academic achievement in this town is to divide its huge school district. We think otherwise: It would be shortsighted and irresponsible to divert significant energy and attention to a breakup at this time.

To shift the focus from ongoing school reform would condemn students of the Los Angeles Unified School District to several more years of the empty status quo. It is incumbent on every supporter of public education here to prod the LAUSD and the school board toward improvement and reform now, even if one’s ultimate aim is the dismantling of the district.

WARNING WORDS: We are concerned about the growing sense that breaking up is easy to do. Actually, a bid to split the LAUSD would be one of the most ambitious--and perhaps one of the most time-consuming--public efforts ever undertaken here.

Consider, for example, the words of Joel Kirschenstein, a public policy consultant, and of Laurence Labovitz, a Woodland Hills resident and Los Angeles attorney with experience in creating new districts. “This is a significant, major, aggressive overhaul of a political structure. I have never seen a greater challenge . . . this is no small task,” Kirschenstein said in August at a breakup strategy session. Labovitz added: “Take it out of your mind if you think you can wing it on this one. If you are going to break away, you get your own educational consultant. If you don’t do that, you’re kidding yourself.”

You can’t even start seeking signatures for a petition for a breakup vote until you have a plan in place. And just because many parents are anxious to get rid of the LAUSD, that hardly means they will embrace some vague proposal for setting up new districts.

One realistic alternative to breakup would require neither petitions nor politics. Educators at Palisades High School and at the middle and elementary schools that feed into that secondary school want to form a charter complex--a group of schools that join to improve student achievement. The school board should give this creative approach a chance.

The innovative plan would grant the Westside charter group autonomy from the LAUSD except in fiscal areas. Educators would gain the power to transfer teachers within the schools that make up the complex and the ability to accept students from outside the Palisades and even outside the L.A. school district.

MANY WAYS TO FAIL: Starting a charter complex would be a lot easier than slicing up the LAUSD. To take apart the district would require public hearings, a review of the plan, a recommendation for dissolution and then more hearings by the State Board of Education, which can Just Say No and scuttle the whole business. If the state board does go along, at that point it determines who gets to participate in the breakup ballot vote. Then there is the election, in which dismantlement can be turned down. And besides all this, there are the inevitable legal challenges, which will cause even more delay.

The LAUSD figures to be here for quite a while, and we must continue to work to improve it.