Yvonne Chan : Education First, Partitioning the District Second, Says Charter Reformer

Perhaps nobody stands out as a symbol of success in the Los Angeles Unified School District as much as Yvonne Chan.

As principal of the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center, she has won accolades for turning a lackluster elementary school into a powerhouse educational facility. She has become a national spokeswoman for school charter reform while at the same time earning the respect--and sometimes enmity--of fellow educators for being a tireless booster of her own campus.

Vaughn is one of the handful of charter schools in the district. Such campuses set their own educational agendas and enjoy a large degree of freedom. Chan has used that freedom to develop an innovative school that has drawn interest from educational reformers and even First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, who visited the campus in 1996.

Yet despite her success working within the district system, Chan has joined a new coalition called the All-District Alliance for School Reorganization made up of more than 100 community leaders, parents, teachers and politicians from throughout Los Angeles. Their common goal: dismantling the 710,000-student district.

The Times talked to Chan about her role in the alliance and her vision of the future of education in Los Angeles.

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Question: Criticism of the Los Angeles school district has increased dramatically along with calls for a breakup effort. Do you feel this criticism is justified?

Answer: Yes. The concerns have always been there, for the last 30 years. The district has tried to reorganize, sort of like bending without breaking. But this is the time that we really have to look at some very serious, workable reorganization. The district is really too big to decentralize and be effective in monitoring and training and providing the resources for clusters, zones, school-based management. Yet, on the other hand, it’s too big to re-centralize and be able to provide equity for more than 800 schools. And it is just too heavy, meaning it has too much baggage, such as lawsuits, and too many people who are motivated by self interest. The district has a hard time focusing on teaching and learning. And it cannot discipline itself to stay focused on any one reform.

Q: What should be done?

A: First, the community should put forth a plan that includes how we can really focus on teaching and learning and standards as well as accountability. And that plan should be given to the new school board. I have confidence in them. But they’re not insiders, and they don’t run schools. They do not know what the schools need. But I think that while members of the new school board are looking into how they can activate this reform movement, how they can refocus on teaching and learning, how they can get rid of some of the weight that they have, the community should present a plan that states very clearly what educational opportunities there are and what the absolute realistic “doables” are. This will allow the new school board to look at these opportunities for kids and what the community wants. The second thing is, we need to keep the pressure on.

Q: Do you advocate a separate district for the Valley?

A: The reason I joined this movement is to keep people focused on education and opportunities for kids. I am not here to say you break the district into 12 pieces, 10 pieces, four pieces. The plan should say how you do staff development, how you solve overcrowding, how you can provide better compensation, recruit better teachers. The education part should come first. How we are going to partition the district to get what we want should be part two.

Q: What else would your plan involve?

A: Using our experience, our plan would show that all schools can follow the state testing standards, and then we would also add another periodic testing so that we don’t wait until the end of the year. We’re looking at a preschool through high school continuous articulation of skills. We’re looking at staff development where you can really rework the school calendar better to reduce all these scattered schedules so you can promote better teamwork, you can provide one-on-one mentoring, you can collaborate with the teacher training institutions, and you can provide better staff compensation. You can definitely help the teachers with out-of-school barriers by having health services and social services on campus. You can shift preschool teachers into kindergarten. They’re all fully credentialed, and that’s 800 teachers available. You’ve got to look at the internal resources.

Q: What would all this cost?

A: It is doable within the existing budget. That’s my bottom line. I’ve done all of this.

Q: Getting back to a breakup of the district, do you think this is the eventual solution to the district’s problems?

A: In order for all of this teaching and learning to happen that I talked about, the short-term goal will be to work with this newly elected board to seek immediate help for students. The long-term goal is to look at the various options. Here are some possibilities: One, you can look at four or five districts. For example, the San Fernando Valley could be one. The advantages in this plan are that you have maintained identity, community and cultural unity. It can offer more programs, you keep the magnets, you have open enrollment, you have lobbying power, you can still continue with the desegregation and the busing. You also can [connect with] a major teacher training university such as Cal State Northridge. What are the disadvantages? It may be still too big, it can still be bureaucratic. But knowing these disadvantages is like going to the fortuneteller. You know this ahead of time, so stop it. Therefore, we can look at how we can decentralize and form community-based clusters. These clusters have to have full personnel and fiscal authority. If I were one of those board members, I would definitely try to petition the legislators to give a lot more flexibility to this new district to eliminate or reduce a lot of those bureaucratic rules that LAUSD board members always complain about.

That’s just one way of looking at how you can break it up. Other people have suggested that we align districts with the community colleges. In that case, the advantage is more accessibility for parents when you have more districts. You can maintain a better sense of a community neighborhood. The disadvantage is that because it becomes so fragmented, you don’t have the fiscal resources for lobbying power. That might be solved by forming a joint effort consortium for purchasing, for operation, for busing and so forth. Another way continues the 27 clusters that we have now.

Q: Which of these do you favor?

A: I think that we should put about five or six options up. Then we will discuss what the advantages are, what the disadvantages are and come up with solutions. The solutions will then be the driving force.

Q: How soon do you think you would need a plan in place?

A: The urgency is not because the whole group working on it has no confidence in this reform-minded board. They do, because we elected them. But the board also needs help. We want to see this as a possible win-win situation. We want to have a plan in place so that the new board will know what the community wants. And we want this plan to give them information that they don’t necessarily ever get.

This plan will be a clearly school-based type of plan because reform has to start at a school base. The school board can give me all kinds of external accountability, but when external accountability knocks, no one is home. But this plan shows internal accountability: what the principal’s leadership is supposed to do, what are the responsibilities of the parents and families, what are the staffs’ and the teachers’ responsibility. A school can set up internal accountability with incentives and consequences.

Q: Do you plan on taking an active role in the movement?

A: Yes, I will take an active role in the educational portion and help people to focus on teaching and learning. This is what school is about. But once political issues come up, I will have no part of it.

Q: Are you optimistic that something concrete and positive can be done in the next year or so?

A: Yes. This whole alliance can really have a plan in place that’s showing what are the possibilities and opportunities that are actually doable with the current resources.

Within the year before a new superintendent comes in, the board and the interim chief can certainly take some drastic action that will affect the schools. I know they are doing all kinds of management changes in the district office, and that is definitely needed. But it has to come down to the 800 schools. This whole reform movement is not going to work if it does not take root at the local level.

Bob Rector is opinion editor for the San Fernando Valley and Ventura County editions of The Times.