A Prod to School Board

Those who care about the quality and the survival of the Los Angeles Unified School District had better listen to the Committee on Effective School Governance, a broad-based group of civic leaders. The group’s common-sense suggestions echo those of many who are familiar with the dysfunctional LAUSD.

Education reforms come and go. The committee members know this because most are veterans of LEARN and the other efforts that have achieved mixed results in a school district so resistant to change.

Their plan urges school board members and the candidates seeking four of the board’s seven seats in the April 13 election to treat the L.A. district more like a business, with a strategic plan and a much stronger superintendent who can demand that all those who work for the schools actually put the educational achievement of children first. That’s certainly different from the way things run now, and the LAUSD has poor test scores in many schools to prove it.

As the committee envisions it, the superintendent would become a powerful chief executive officer who would make decisions without being undermined by board members or thwarted by unions. The school board would take a hands-off approach to governance, meeting monthly, setting policy and addressing major issues. Micro-managing would end. Meddling in school personnel decisions would cease. Protecting favored staff members would stop.

This corporate prescription collides with political realities, strong labor unions and a bureaucratic culture that rewards longevity more than innovation and cronyism more than excellence.

Politics form the highest hurdle to reform. Transforming the LAUSD would require eliminating the primacy of politics from the agenda of school board members, who are required to run for office and thus are obligated to separate and narrow constituencies.

To drum up support for their proposals, members of the Committee on Effective School Governance plan public hearings to allow school board members and challengers to embrace true reform of the LAUSD.

The proposals set forth by the committee are quite valuable. Ultimately, however, only the voters can force school board members to reorder their politics of self-interest and survival. Only the voters can trump the unions that often set the LAUSD agenda because their candidates have long dominated the school board. Only the voters can outlast thebureaucrats-for-life who outmaneuver the board and the superintendent on the basis of whom they know rather than what they know.

A huge voter turnout is needed to cause this sea change. Every constituency in the district, every ethnic and racial group, every section of the city, must come together and decide that the needs of the whole are greater than those of its parts. All parents want well-functioning schools, good teachers and strong principals.

Toward that end, time and patience are running out. The public schools have many caring and powerful allies; the committee is one of them. The district must listen to its friends or those who don’t wish public education well will win the public’s ear.