32 Reasons to Oppose a District Breakup

The Times looked recently at what the effects of breaking up the Los Angeles Unified School District would be. The story indicated that in the accompanying loss of funds, students would be out of classroom space in some areas of the city while others would have empty classrooms. Even if the LAUSD was reconfigured into any number of minidistricts, chaos would reign and some of the district’s best programs would be ruined.

Advocates of a breakup here have been oblivious to the fate of other urban school districts that turned to decentralization as a panacea for school problems.

New York City has just reached the end of a 25-year experiment in decentralization. In the late 1960s, New York’s system of 1,000 schools was broken up into 32 community school districts. What happened was nothing like what decentralization supporters had hoped. Instead, over the years, some New York City community school boards became legendary for their corruption and indifference to academics. There were a few successes, but in many districts, boards functioned chiefly as sources of patronage and jobs to relatives and friends and in some cases offered positions for money or drugs.

Finally, last December, the state Legislature granted New York City Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew new powers to govern the local districts, including the ability to appoint superintendents and reassign administrators in poorly performing districts. The legislation basically strips the community school boards of the right to name both district superintendents and school principals.

Chicago had a similar experience. In December 1988, the Illinois Legislature approved a plan to let elected, parent-dominated councils have power to approve educational plans for each school, select principals and spend money as they saw fit. Results varied enormously from school to school. Some of the same types of corruption and patronage rampant on New York surfaced in Chicago. In May 1995, the Legislature passed a bill giving Chicago’s mayor sweeping new powers over the schools. The mayor chose a chief executive officer to run the schools; local school councils retained their powers but the CEO can veto contract renewals for principals.

Despite the failures in New York and Chicago, a number of educators cling to the view that some forms of decentralization could be beneficial. Frank Smith, a professor of education administration at Columbia University’s Teachers College, said it would be a mistake to assume from these two cities that decentralization in any form is a bad thing. The breakup just didn’t go far enough in New York, Smith believes, noting that it created 32 minibureaucracies rather than truly decentralizing the system. Even after the reforms begun in December, a lot of power in New York schools remains at the local level. The authority of the chancellor’s office to monitor finances and operations to weed out corruption or waste was balanced against considerable autonomy over instruction retained by the schools. There are moves toward site-based budget control.

Here in Los Angeles, schools are moving toward more autonomy through LEARN (the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now), school-based management, charter schools and the like. In the 27 school clusters, there is both the danger that they may become little bureaucracies and, if more enlightened leadership prevails, the opportunity for them to evolve into coherent units in a finely tuned, decentralized system.

The Los Angeles school district could become a system of semiautonomous schools overseen by certain essential monitoring, standards-setting and service systems, with the bulk of instructional and educational decisions being made at the school site level. Schools would be directly accountable for the levels of student achievement.

The community districts of New York give us 32 reasons not to break up the Los Angeles Unified School District. But New York and Chicago, in the light of their experiments, also give us two big reasons to persevere on our course toward balanced reform.