Delay LAUSD’s Plan for Local Districts

The school board is scheduled to vote today on a proposal by interim Supt. Ramon C. Cortines to dramatically restructure the Los Angeles Unified School District. The plan, which was prepared in a short period of time, is significantly incomplete.

The peril comes from Cortines’ breathtaking timetable--less than three months--to fully implement the plan. If the board votes to let Cortines, who leaves the district in July, race forward on this unrealistic timetable, it will strap the incoming superintendent to a neutron bomb rather than provide an opportunity to exercise vision and leadership.

Cortines proposes an administrative restructuring that would create 11 local districts--designed to serve a manageable number of students. In practice, enrollment in these local districts would be as high as 77,000 students, which is larger than all but three other school districts in California.

The local districts are intended to be largely autonomous, using a streamlined central administration for cost-effective support services. But the Cortines plan calls for the central administration to also set instructional policy, allocate financial resources, monitor compliance, negotiate labor contracts and build schools. This division of responsibilities will produce local districts that have little independent authority.

The self-imposed deadline of July 1 for implementing the plan leaves little time for crucial personnel and policy decisions. LAUSD’s new superintendent will not be selected for some time and as a result won’t have a meaningful role in choosing superintendents for the local districts. To build the strongest team of leaders for the new organization, LAUSD needs to diligently recruit from both inside and outside the district. The short timetable makes it unlikely that LAUSD can look seriously beyond current employees. The selection criteria in the Cortines plan also disqualifies all candidates who have not been school principals from being hired as local superintendents. This unfortunately excludes private sector candidates.

The implementation schedule doesn’t allow enough time to build support from teachers and administrators or to negotiate the kind of multiyear labor contracts that would be essential to make the restructuring work. The Cortines plan is painfully short of detail about how teachers, principals and other staff would carry out their responsibilities. In the absence of a clear and specific blueprint for implementing change, the hard-working people of the LAUSD will be left to do things in much the same way as before the reorganization.

Opportunities for innovation have been overlooked. The local districts proposed in the Cortines plan are created from preexisting regional administrative units. This approach locks in harmful imbalances in the distribution of instructional resources and perpetuates the demoralizing use of racial profiling as shorthand for student performance.

With more time and input, creative approaches could be pursued that would transform the local district concept from an organizational plan into a robust system for motivating and tracking academic performance.

Somewhat misleadingly, the executive summary of Cortines’ plan states that the reorganization will save tens of millions of dollars. Deeper within, the report cautions that the exact amount of savings realized through the reconstitution of the central offices cannot be calculated until all of the changes have been implemented and reviews of budgets and personnel completed.

Under any plausible scenario, savings from restructuring are likely to be modest in relationship to the LAUSD’s $7-billion budget.

The most important outcome of major reform will be how it influences what happens in classrooms. This impact cannot be known until a more complete reorganization plan is developed.

It would be a mistake for the board to adopt Cortines’ plan now or in its current form. But don’t throw out the plan.

The board should take the opportunity of its deliberations to show vision, wisdom and patience by choosing an alternate course that recognizes the hard work that went into this effort; embraces, in concept, the three fundamental changes proposed regarding streamlining central administration, creating performance-oriented local districts and focusing the curriculum; defers completion and implementation of the restructuring plan until the new superintendent has been appointed; postpones entering into new multiyear labor contracts for one year so they can be structured to support the new goals; and finalizes the restructuring plan in a manner that incorporates feedback and builds support with parents, teachers, administrators, state and local leaders and the community.