Business-Style Operation of Schools Urged

A group of Los Angeles business and civic leaders delivered a stinging critique of the Los Angeles Board of Education on Wednesday as it launched a campaign to overhaul the way the board governs the massive Los Angeles Unified School District.

Five years of frustrating experience with grass-roots school reform has led the 26 members of the Committee on Effective School Governance to conclude that the school board is responsible for the substandard education of children in the Los Angeles schools, said the group’s co-chairman, Harold Williams, president emeritus of the J. Paul Getty Trust.

“Bottom-up reform will never realize its full potential unless the system is also fixed from the top down,” Williams said.

In a manifesto for change, the committee calls on board members and candidates to commit to making the district function more like a corporation, with a powerful chief administrative officer and a board of directors that is removed from day-to-day management.

The committee said the seven-member board should establish a five-year strategic plan, set narrow goals and policies and empower the superintendent to make all personnel decisions and execute collective bargaining.

Board members should stay out of decisions on small expenditures and individual disciplinary matters and should handle their business in no more than one meeting per month, the paper said.

Leaders of the committee plan to hold forums for candidates in the April 13 school board elections so that voters can hear which candidates for the four contested seats subscribe to their program.

But hoping to avoid political fallout from Mayor Richard Riordan’s campaign to unseat three board members, the committee will not endorse any candidates, Williams said.

Most of the proposals have been disclosed in the past by committee members. But the report, which will be released at 10 a.m. today at the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, cites detailed examples of board actions that the committee members judge harmful to the educational system.

The committee blasts the board for changing priorities so often that “the district and its staff have no sense of direction.” As an example, it cites the board’s decision to reopen the teachers union contract despite Supt. Ruben Zacarias’ objections.

Also misguided, it says, is the board’s role in the assignment of principals and administrators, its involvement in expenditures as small as one-thousandth of the district’s budget and excessive attention to issues outside the district’s purview, such as the use of land mines in other countries.

Like Riordan, the committee’s overriding complaint against the board is its tendency to involve itself in virtually every decision, large and small.

“If you’ve got seven board members trying to run a bureaucracy of $6.5 billion, it means nobody is in charge,” Williams said.

As an example of the best practice in setting goals, the committee cited the Philadelphia School District, which established a few specific, measurable goals for test scores, attendance rates, grade retention and graduation rates.

By contrast, it said, Los Angeles has adopted more than 20 main priorities, so many that it “really means having none.”

Although the corporate model it espouses is based on a strong chief executive who would be held accountable by the elected board, the committee refrained from comment on whether Zacarias is the right person for the job.

Its recommendations said the board should hire a superintendent “capable of designing and executing a long-term strategy.”

The committee consists of representatives from business and public-interest organizations who have been involved in reform efforts such as LEARN and the Los Angeles Annenberg Metropolitan Project.

Among them are Roy A. Anderson, chairman emeritus of Lockheed Corp.; Roger Benjamin, director of Rand Education; Robert F. Erburu, retired chairman of Times Mirror Co.; David Fleming, chairman of the Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley; John W. Mack, president of the Los Angeles Urban League; Virgil Roberts, chairman of LAAMP; Steven Sample, president of USC, and Charles Young, UCLA chancellor emeritus.

Committee members acknowledged that it will be easier to get board members to endorse their sweeping reform plan than to carry it out. They said their are placing their faith in the public’s dissatisfaction with the public schools to keep the pressure on.