Urgently Needed: Better Ways to Govern L.A. Schools

The following is excerpted from a report released on Thursday by a group of business and civic leaders led by community activist Harold Williams and Roy A. Anderson, chairman emeritus of the Lockheed Corp.

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A school board can further or hinder the achievement of educational goals. Basically, the board’s role is to establish a direction for the schools by specifying student achievement goals and endorsing strategic plans for achieving them. The board must empower the superintendent to execute the strategy and achieve the goals. This means it must give the superintendent the sole power and responsibility to run the school district. Then the board must get out of the superintendent’s way. By the same token, the board is responsible for appointing a superintendent capable of managing the district, and when a superintendent does not perform adequately, the board’s response should be to replace that individual and not attempt to manage the district itself.

An analogy can help clarify the board’s role and, by comparison, the superintendent’s. It is as if the superintendent is an expert pilot hired by the board to fly a complicated aircraft on a long and difficult journey. The board should make clear the destination for the trip, the time allotted to complete it, and some guidelines for navigating around major obstacles that may arise. But the pilot must be the single commander. The pilot alone must select the crew, give them instructions, address their concerns, provide leadership and manage all decision-making in flight to ensure the right destination is reached safely and on time.

Now, imagine seven board members crammed into the cockpit, and imagine they have not agreed among themselves on where to go first or how to get there. They are shouting conflicting directions to the pilot, asking the crew to explain indicator lights, grabbing the controls, and reassigning crew members. They might even be responding to individual passengers’ requests. Given such interference, the pilot would be hampered in flying the plane, the crew would be confused as to who was in charge, and the flight--off course, late, and wasting fuel--will fail in its mission. Who, then, is responsible? And how can accountability be assessed in such a situation?

The LAUSD board members are in the cockpit; they are in the crew’s quarters and the passenger cabin as well. But seven people cannot fly a plane. And they cannot take a hands-on approach to governing a district of nearly 700,000 students and more than 600 schools. To govern a system this large, they must delegate; and they must hold accountable those to whom they delegate.

The way the LAUSD board conducts the district’s affairs is a reason our students receive a substandard education. The board’s practices undermine the authority of the superintendent, principals, and teachers; cause confusion and needless disputes about how to use money; and lead to great inefficiency and, often, to unfairness.

In recent years, the LAUSD board and superintendent have adopted a number of sweeping reform efforts and major strategic initiatives. To achieve the ambitious goals set forth in any one of these reform plans, the board would have had to first fully consider and debate the plan, vote on it, then agree to support the majority decision. Finally, the board would have had to delegate to the superintendent the authority and responsibility to implement the plan.

Instead, board members sometimes adopt a plan before they sufficiently consider it. In many cases, individual members have made public comments critical of an adopted plan. Others have been drawn into disputes at local schools over specific implementation methods. These actions send mixed messages to principals, teachers, and staff at schools working hard to embrace the reforms. They leave the superintendent and his staff without the full support they need to fully implement a given plan. As a result, many principals, teachers and parents have said they believe that neither the board nor the superintendent has shown a serious commitment to reform.

These misdirected efforts have produced a cascade of negative consequences. They have given comfort to those “naysayers” at every school who resist change. They have led many others to feel that change will never be possible --that new reform efforts or special projects will never be completed. And compounding this pessimism is the large number of programs that have been initiated, often without reference to one another and certainly without reference to an overarching, integrative plan. Among these many programs are LEARN, Call to Action, L.A. Systemic Initiative, Hundred Low Performing Schools, Early Literacy and standards-based promotion. Many of these programs are clearly targeted at improving student achievement. However, the failure to integrate them into a coherent strategy creates the perception that programs are instituted on a “flavor of the month” basis. They appear to be adopted with great fanfare one month and abandoned the next.

The board has embraced so many improvement programs that it has lost focus; it has no clear priorities because it has so many. Unless it changes its way of operating, we have no reason to hope that new attempts to improve student achievement can succeed.

We have a tradition of electing members of our community to govern our local schools in a manner that ensures our public schools are responsive to our community’s needs. We elect board members to give voice to the goals and aspirations of the larger community and to help ensure that professional educators are provided the necessary resources and are held accountable for achieving those goals.

LAUSD board members are operating under a mistaken, though well-intentioned, understanding of how to be responsible to the community. Board members tend to see their primary role as satisfying the day-to-day requests of individual constituents rather than representing the community’s long-term needs. The board must turn away from inappropriate activities, such as responding to parents’ requests to change their children’s class schedules, and being overly responsive to special interest groups that are influential in their election. Such behavior perpetuates the district’s dysfunctional culture, depriving students of a system that works. Instead, the board must focus on the policy needs of the entire community. Board members should be understood as policymakers, whose proper role is to ensure a well functioning and accountable district.

Both board members and the public need to understand how effective boards, constituted by such policymakers, conduct their affairs.