Give Reform a Chance in L.A. Schools

We all heaved a collective sigh of relief when it was announced that the school board had come to an agreement on the future management of the Los Angeles Unified School District. The board must now find a way to deal effectively with the management transition. Also confronting the board is the Little Hoover Commission’s recent scathing report suggesting that the district be taken over by the state and perhaps broken up.

Certainly, the LAUSD and its management need a major overhaul, but a state takeover or the breakup of the district would be a premature step down the wrong path. Exchanging one bureaucracy for another bureaucracy 400 miles away is not the answer.

Nor is slicing up the district into several pieces a panacea. Some contend that an organization with a $7-billion budget cannot be managed efficiently. The fact is that scores of organizations with budgets that size and larger are managed with excellence. Their success teaches us two important lessons. One is that size can be an asset in a decentralized structure that provides autonomy to managers but requires a strong measure of accountability. The other is that they tend to operate within a framework of intense competition to spur performance.

A new board of education committed to reform has been in place only a few months. Although it has clearly made some mistakes, it also has demonstrated a long-overdue willingness to address tough issues.

At the same time, the school board must be steadfast. The district’s problems took a generation to develop, and they are not going to be solved quickly. With the current turmoil, it’s easy to overlook the fact that some of the best solutions to the district’s educational challenges can be found within the district itself.

The district agreed--under strong pressure from a broad, ethnically diverse coalition--to accept the basic reform championed by the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now, or LEARN, several years ago. Since then, it has been a long journey to improved student achievement. Yet the evidence strongly suggests that reforms--when implemented--have worked.

The fundamental principles that have produced success in corporate settings and have been embraced by LEARN, charter schools, school-based management campuses and others remain valid:

* Decentralizing decision-making;

* Assigning more responsibility to school “stakeholders”;

* Demanding accountability for results;

* Competing choice of schools;

* Greater community participation.

A comprehensive study conducted this year on behalf of LEARN at UCLA found that LEARN schools and other campuses with active reforms generally outperformed schools with no reforms in place. The study was based on scores from the 1997 and 1998 Stanford 9 tests. The study also found that schools with multiple reforms in place perform even better.

For more specific proof that this approach works, consider the James A. Foshay Learning Center, a LEARN complex that includes an elementary school, a middle school and a 700-student high school. A decade ago, Foshay was an inner-city educational wasteland. Yet strong school site leadership, along with hard work by teachers, support staff, parents, students, community members and others, turned the campus into a model of educational excellence. This year, 98% of its high school students qualified for college entrance, and 70% were accepted into four-year colleges.

These reform efforts have begun to change the district’s culture from a top-down bureaucracy to one more open to bottom-up solutions to improving student achievement. If the district more closely adheres to these principles, it can deliver the results our children deserve. Ultimately, the solutions must come from the campus and the community, not from district headquarters or Sacramento.