School Breakup Plan Breaks New Ground

At the heart of the uncertainties surrounding the breakup of Los Angeles schools lies one simple fact: Nothing like it has ever been done before.

Although “decentralization” has been a watchword of educational reform for years, no large urban school district in America has ever been split into smaller ones with the complete autonomy envisioned by proponents of the breakup of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

In a computer analysis published Sunday, The Times showed that those plans could displace thousands of students, force many more into overcrowded classrooms and redistribute wealth mostly away from the better-off campuses.

In response to The Times’ analysis, some educators suggested that any breakup be directed either by a superagency created to oversee the new, smaller districts or by the state.

Similar arrangements have been used in other large cities to ease the dismantling of large school bureaucracies, but the verdict on their success is mixed, experts said.

Since the 1960s, school systems in New York, Chicago and Detroit have all undergone radical decentralization. New York now has 32 school boards with budgetary control over elementary and middle schools. Chicago has community councils that hire and fire principals at all its 550 schools.

But these plans differ from the Los Angeles breakup model because each retained a large central authority that shared responsibilities with the smaller boards or councils.

Chicago has a five-member board and a systemwide chief executive officer selected by the city mayor, said Kay Kirkpatrick, director of communications for the Consortium for Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago. In New York, the chancellor, who answers to a seven-member board appointed by New York’s mayor and elected borough presidents, has the power to select superintendents for each of the 32 districts and can step in if a local board runs into trouble.

Experts said the closest analogy to the Los Angeles proposal is the Inner London Education Authority. Once the world’s largest school system, it was divided in 1987 into 13 new districts matching London’s inner boroughs.

Today, “there is no big city school district” in London, said Charles T. Kerchner, a professor of education at Claremont Graduate School.

But even in London, the method of change looked nothing like the grass-roots movement involving local elections in Los Angeles. An act of Parliament broke up the London schools, and with it came rules and prescriptions setting management standards for the local districts, Kerchner said.

Aside from these few high-profile examples of large districts dividing, the prevailing change in school district organization in the United States has been just the opposite.

“In the ‘40s and ‘50s, a move to consolidate radically reduced the number of school districts,” said Harvard University professor and desegregation expert Gary Orfield. “State legislatures adopted policies that put lots of resources behind consolidating school districts.”

Since the California Legislature adopted unification laws in 1963, the number of districts in the state has dropped from 1,535 to 999, and next year there will be five fewer still, said Dan Reibson, a state Department of Education official who handles school reorganizations.

While consolidations follow well-defined procedures, breakups tend to be upheavals, driven by widespread discontent.

In Chicago the catalyst was a funding crisis capped by a message from the U.S. secretary of education that the city’s schools had been judged the worst in the nation, said Kirkpatrick of the Consortium for Chicago School Research.

Given the expectation that a breakup should improve performance, educators find it difficult to grade those so far in effect.

“Some of them did good things, but none solved the underlying problems of student learning,” said Kerchner.

Though the state legislation that broke up the Chicago schools required improved test scores in five years, “clearly everybody believes that’s not enough time for change,” Kirkpatrick said.

Last year in its first major study of decentralization, the consortium didn’t even bother to compare test scores, instead examining the perceptions of parents, teachers and administrators. It found that a third of the schools appear to be improving, a third had mixed progress and a third were just as bad as before.

“It’s not a fast solution by any means,” Kirkpatrick said.

New York’s public school system was decentralized in 1969 in response to a community empowerment movement and a “general dissatisfaction with central control,” said education policy scholar Robert Berne, the vice president for academic development at New York University.

But chronic corruption and patronage scandals in the poorest of the 32 districts led to a legislative revamping that this year strengthened the hand of the systemwide chancellor.

“Most people regard it as a disaster, but I don’t think that most people know what they want instead,” said David Menefee-Libey, associate professor of politics at Pomona College.

The nation’s most upbeat example of school breakup comes from the city of Wilmington, Del.

As a part of the court-ordered settlement of a desegregation lawsuit, 11 suburban and urban school districts were consolidated in 1978, creating one 50,000-student district that immediately struck community leaders as being too large.

Three years later, under court supervision, they divided it in four, like a pie, maintaining equal portions of the urban and suburban neighborhoods within each district.

Gail J. Ames, director of assessment and school improvement for the Red Clay District, said the goals of desegregation remain elusive: On standardized tests, minority students still score 20 points behind non-minorities.

But no one blames breakup, said John Holton, public information officer for the Christina School District. “We’re too small to have a district that big,” Holton said. “I think people have been a lot happier having districts that are more closely related to communities.”