Thompson to Offer Plan for Struggling Schools

As his parting gesture to the Los Angeles Unified School District, retiring Supt. Sid Thompson will announce at a special school board meeting today the formation of intervention teams to target struggling campuses.

The $1.5-million plan, subject to school board approval, calls for up to 20 teachers and 20 administrators to be trained how to dig into schools that are failing in areas ranging from student test scores to staff turnover. The first few schools could be visited as early as this fall by four-person teams pulled from those ranks.

“We’ve taken action on schools prior to this . . . but I don’t believe there was ever enough done to look at the whole school’s problems,” said Thompson, who is retiring in late June. “It was more an administrator did something wrong and we took action against them.”

It also represents an unusual marriage--some say a marriage of convenience--between the unions that represent teachers and administrators--two bodies often at odds. United Teachers-Los Angeles President Day Higuchi described it as a preemptive strike against more punitive measures over which the union would have little or no control.

“Sure, it’s a risk--it’s a lot easier to say you’re never going to let yourself be looked at,” Higuchi said. “But if we don’t take any responsibility, we’re going to lose public education.”

Such intervention programs are becoming increasingly popular across the nation, and in other school systems unions usually were not on board at the start and soon became the plans’ harshest critics.

Higuchi said his UTLA predecessor, the recently deceased Helen Bernstein, originally brought the idea to district headquarters.

But to some extent, the catalyst for the teams was fear of the growing call for accountability in public schools. Specifically, changes in federal laws governing the distribution of Title I funds--money for poorer schools granted to the majority of L.A. Unified campuses--require that improvement be shown at those schools--or else.

Or else, those federal funds can be pulled. Or else, the state can take over the school. Or else, the district can fire the school’s entire staff and start from scratch.

The measure for that improvement, a statewide test, is still at least two years off, but Thompson said the district did not want to wait until it was forced to change its ways. It was the first time he could recall in his four-year tenure as superintendent that the teachers and administrators unions eagerly agreed to sit at the same table.

While he predicts some resistance by targeted schools, Thompson said he hopes that the prospects of potentially dire consequences under the federal laws will help schools accept the comparatively milder intervention.

“What we’re trying to say to them is: This isn’t an off-with-your-head situation to begin with--it’s a chance to figure out together what’s wrong,” Thompson said, declining to identify which schools might come first.

Similar interventions have been tried in other cities, often without the full buy-in of unions and usually with the threat of a significant punishment, such as the firing of full staffs, known as “reconstitution.”

In San Francisco, eight schools have been reconstituted since 1994, with mixed results. In Boston, teams of educators sent into the worst schools led to the firing of seven principals last year. Two months ago in Denver, the school board approved a plan that includes some options not yet afforded in Los Angeles: imposing a longer school year or day, adding extra staff or turning schools over to the private nonprofit Edison Corp.

Los Angeles’ plan is leaner, partly to ensure the participation of the unions, partly to leave it more flexible to the diversity of problems and solutions in a 661-school district.

It begins with identifying needy schools through a variety of indicators that could be raised by the superintendent, by the unions or by a regional administrator. If the superintendent and the two unions agree help is needed, the four-person team will be sent to observe the school in action, joined there by a teacher and administrator from the campus.

From there, an improvement plan is to be developed by the six interveners, with a specific timeline for compliance that Thompson said would never be more than a year.

If the recommendations are not followed and things do not improve, the district could take stronger action up to and including reconstitution, but those actions have not yet been spelled out.

“We’re trying not to go in with preconceived answers,” Higuchi said. But that, he emphasized, does not mean the team members will go easy on their colleagues, adding, “If you ever let students grade each other, you know they’re merciless.”