Schools Breakup Master Plan Urged

A team of UCLA educators commissioned by Mayor Richard Riordan to study the possible dismantling of the Los Angeles school system has concluded in a report to be released today that breaking up the district in one coordinated effort would be far better than the series of secessions being proposed.

The report by the UCLA Urban Education Studies Center also suggests that new legislation may be needed to resolve a thicket of unanswered questions concerning school finances, student transfers and the future of existing reform efforts such as magnet and LEARN schools.

Finding the current research on school district size inconclusive, however, the seven-part report makes no recommendation on whether the 667,000-student district should be broken up.

Riordan, who funded the report with $40,000 from his personal foundation, said in a news conference after his inaugural last week that smaller districts are more effective.

An aide said the mayor will continue to study the report as he shapes the educational reforms he has made a cornerstone of his second term but has not taken a stance on specific proposals to break up the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Assistant chief of staff Greg Dawley said Riordan is not sure that the benefits of smallness would be achieved by forming several districts that would then rank among the nation’s largest.

Given the difficulties identified in the report, Dawley said, the mayor is not sure the district could be broken into small enough pieces.

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Theodore R. Mitchell, the UCLA vice chancellor who led the research team and was named Riordan’s education advisor in May, said the study was intended primarily to probe the current debate on the district’s organization rather than to advocate any position.

“I hope it will help the communities think about the complexity of what on the surface may seem like a pretty simple idea,” Mitchell said.

In an opening section, Mitchell defined 11 guiding principles for breakup--among them continuity, fairness, orderliness and economic viability for new districts.

These, he said, would be harder to achieve in the absence of a breakup master plan.

“That is our only policy recommendation,” Mitchell said. “We think the potential downsides for kids are far greater in an unmanaged scenario than in a managed scenario.”

The study parallels a Times computer analysis published in March that showed the potential for severe disruptions in classroom usage, teacher assignments and school funding in an unmanaged breakup. Central to these problems is the daily transfer of 70,000 students to achieve racial integration and relieve overcrowding.

The UCLA researchers concluded that current law does not dictate whether those transfers would have to continue between separate districts. Nor does the law establish which district would pay for the costly transportation if the transfers continued. Also unclear is where money would come from to build classrooms for students who would have to remain in their home district if the transfers to a less crowded district stopped, the report said.

At present, five break-off districts have been formally proposed to the Los Angeles County office of education. Two other proposals are on the drawing boards.

Each must go through a county and state review and could be rejected for failure to comply with the state education code, including amendments sponsored by state Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles) as part of the 1995 legislation that made breakup of the Los Angeles school system politically feasible for the first time.

The Hayden bill set rules designed to ensure equity for students and district employees. They require breakaway districts to maintain socioeconomic diversity, comply with all labor contracts, observe existing protections for minority students and continue policies for magnet, charter and LEARN schools.

The influence of the Hayden legislation has already been seen in the decision of the Valley breakup group this spring to propose only two new Valley districts and to divide the Valley into north and south halves.

The Times analysis showed that an east-west configuration, the traditional way of dividing the Valley, would have yielded widely disparate white enrollments of 40% in the west compared to only 16% in the east. The north-south division dramatically yielded much more balanced enrollments.

Yet, the detachment of the Valley in any configuration would still severely upset the transfer patterns that bring students from more crowded schools in the inner city to less crowded schools in the Valley.

The Valley could lose up to 13,000 students, with a consequent upheaval of funding, unless the immensely complex busing program were maintained though agreements among the new districts.

An analysis of the law by UCLA education professor and lawyer Stuart Biegel concluded that the Hayden bill offers inadequate guidelines on the effects of breakup on such cross-town transfers.

For example, new districts would not be prevented from closing a magnet school that lost enrollment because it no longer received students from outside that district, Biegel said.

The law is even less clear on the 16,000 students who are bused under a program that provides transportation for students who transfer to a different campus to promote desegregation.

Because current policy requires that such students must reside in the Los Angeles district, it is uncertain whether the program could operate among separate districts.

The consequences of not receiving such students would be loss of basic state compensation and possibly integration funds.

For the Valley those losses could climb as high as $25 million in basic state funds and $38 million more in integration funds, the Times analysis found.

“If that money would suddenly be taken away, the results would be catastrophic,” Mitchell said.

Another potentially troublesome provision of law could require the state to pay double the basic aid, currently about $3,200 per student for hundreds of thousands of students. Now, when a district breaks away, the state continues to pay the old district for each student it loses for a year while paying the new district as well.

The report also examined school finance, special education, employment issues and division of assets and liabilities.

Though finding the issues in each of these areas complex, it concluded that they could be resolved through mediation and prior agreement, again more easily in a planned process.

One advantage of a master plan, Biegel suggested, is that it would allow for an orderly new law to be adapted to problems that arise.

“In the event of a breakup pursuant to a master plan there is no need to stop at the boundaries of current law,” Biegel said. “Reasonable legislation mandating new and creative approaches to existing problem areas will always remain a possibility.”

Despite its clear signaling of the advantages of a master-planned breakup, the report remained silent on the central question of how that would be accomplished.

Current law provides no mechanism or authority to preside over such a breakup. The final decision on whether any breakup proposal goes to a vote rests with the state Board of Education, whose members are appointed by Gov. Pete Wilson.

The board considers each breakup proposal separately.

State Sen. Hayden dismissed the master-plan proposal as “academic.”

“Unless I’m missing something, you’d have to have legislation that would write the restructuring of the school district in Sacramento,” Hayden said. “That’s what we tried to avoid because that would bog you down in time-consuming hearings far from Los Angeles.”

At least one breakup proponent, however, said he might support a master plan by an outside agency as long as it included the grass-roots groups.

“I would support it only if they don’t try to dictate how to break it up,” said Sylvester T. Hinton, co-chairman of the Inner-City School District Assn.

Hinton said he would agree to a panel from Stanford University to oversee it, but not UCLA.

“They’re too connected with the LEARN program and the board of education,” Hinton said.

Besides its silence on how a master plan would be constructed, the UCLA report offered no guidelines on the optimum size of new districts.

In a section on district size, researcher Sibyll Carnochan concluded that 40 years of studies offered little meaningful information relevant to the giant Los Angeles district.

Though many published reports have found benefits in smaller districts, they dealt almost exclusively with very small districts of only a few thousand students.

“All these studies support the assertion that the context of a given district, its history, politics and geography must be considered when determining the optimal size,” Carnochan wrote.

In that context, there is no analogy to the nation’s second largest district, Mitchell said.

To read the complete ULCA report on Los Angeles school breakup go to the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies Web site at https://www.gseis.ucla.edu/

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

L.A. School Breakup

1. North San Fernando Valley

2. South San Fernando Valley

The two-district proposal announced in April by the group called Finally Restored Excellence in Education has stalled at the Los Angeles County Office of Education. A dispute over the technical requirements of boundary maps has been referred to the state attorney general. The gathering of voter signatures may not begin until next year.

3. Inner-City

A proposal made in March,1996, for an inner-city school district of about 125 schools has also stalled at the county level over the map requirement.

4. Hub-Cities

the cities southeast of downtown Los Angeles are monitoring other breakup proposals with the intent to form a separate district only if the LAUSD begins to break up.

5. Gardena

The Gardena School Reform Movement plans to petition for a separate district and is studying whether to use city boundaries or to include unincorporated parts of Los Angeles County.

6. Carson

The Carson Unified School District Formation Committee received county certification of its map of a separate district based on city boundaries. Once the group has obtained enough signatures on a petition, the next step will be a hearing at the county level.

7. Lomita

This small South Bay city is well ahead of the pack with a proposal to remove its three schools from the LAUSD. A petition to hold a secession election has been certified by the Los Angeles County superintendent of instruction. The proposal awaits review by the state Board of Education.

8. Remainder of LAUSD

Current proposals, if successful, would leave the LAUSD with three nearly noncontiguous areas and one small enclave southeast of downtown.