Riordan Ally Ouchi Is New LEARN Chief

Business professor and informal mayoral advisor William G. Ouchi took over the chairmanship of LEARN on Wednesday from the group’s founding chairman, Robert E. Wycoff, and signaled a shift in the group’s role in local school reform.

The nonprofit Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now will focus less on the nitty-gritty of helping move control of schools from the district administration to individual campuses, Ouchi said, and more on lobbying at the state and federal levels for greater school-spending flexibility.

“We want to train our primary artillery on Sacramento and Washington, which will give some incentive to the district staff, make them feel that we are on their side,” said Ouchi, vice dean at UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management. “We will keep the attention on them, but there is no reason to bash them. They’re working with what they’ve got.”

Such advocacy for tolerance may seem surprising to those who know Ouchi’s background, which includes a long-standing relationship with Mayor Richard Riordan, who is one of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s harshest critics.

But LAUSD Deputy Supt. Ruben Zacarias described Ouchi as “fair-minded” and praised his knowledge of organizational reform, which he said could be helpful to the district.

Ouchi, who took on a formal role as Riordan’s chief of staff for one year, ending in July 1995, once said the breakup of the massive district was inevitable, and that Riordan was right to try to influence it. But today Ouchi says he is pretty sure that the breakup will not happen--nor should it.

“I don’t think it’s likely, at this point,” he said. “And even if you broke LAUSD up into five units, each one would be huge. You would still have the problems we have today: How do we decentralize? How do we manage?”

LEARN was proposed in 1992 by business, education and political leaders--including Ouchi and Riordan--who called their panel the LEARN Working Group. A year later, it was adopted by the school board as a districtwide reform plan, though only about a third of the 660 schools have agreed to embrace it.

The reform offered a seemingly straightforward deal: The district would promise schools control of their own budgets if they completed the hard work of changing traditional school governance to set up decision-making panels of teachers, parents and the principal. The working group would be there to provide support and advice--and to fuel the public heat.

In many ways, what Ouchi outlined Wednesday is a return to those origins.

“We’re going to refocus ourselves where we were when we began, on mobilizing broad-based public support for school reform,” he said.

But the LEARN landscape is different now than it was five years ago, with the chronic delays in transferring power and money to schools causing even some loyal LEARN teachers to join critics in questioning whether the district was ever really committed to reform and, more important, whether it is worth all the effort.

Two studies completed during the past year by an outside consultant showed a slight improvement in student test scores at the first generation of LEARN schools but also highlighted chronic delays in providing essential data to schools--such as up-to-date budget information.

Now, with this year’s application deadline approaching (it was recently extended two months to May), interest in LEARN appears to be at an all-time low.

“We are certainly in a different zone here,” said LEARN President Mike Roos. “We’re encountering a lot of people who are resistant to change.”

Part of the struggle is simply that the most eager schools joined during the first three years, Roos said. Another part is that some school communities are skeptical that the reward of fiscal autonomy will ever materialize.

But Roos and the rest of the working group agree with Ouchi that fixing those problems requires them to distance themselves from the district.

The past practice of diving into the job of implementing LEARN by forming working group committees to work alongside district administrators has made it more difficult to cultivate outside pressure.

“Our feeling is that if you get into the implementation business, then you are to some degree diminishing your ability to stand back and demand change,” Ouchi said.

“Our job is principally to stand back and demand change.”