Now Implement It

The new plan to reorganize the Los Angeles Unified School District into 11 semiautonomous mini-districts is not itself a solution to the many failures of Los Angeles schools. However, the pending decentralized structure could provide a framework that encourages significant improvement.

The Board of Education voted unanimously Tuesday to embrace the sweeping reorganization, which cuts 800 central office jobs and shifts 500 more from headquarters into the field. The goal in cleaning out the district’s black-hole bureaucracy is to flatten the hierarchy and devolve school oversight and budget control to local administrators and parents.

These are good steps. But the true measure of this plan, proposed last month by interim Supt. Ramon C. Cortines, will be whether it helps reverse the district’s long slide in student performance and parental satisfaction. That will depend heavily on implementation. For example, to what extent will seniority rules allow somnolent bureaucrats, rousted from downtown sinecures, to bump good principals and teachers out of a job? How will the district’s $7.4-billion budget be divided among the 11 subdistricts?

The reorganization plan is also counting on support from parent councils, but in some areas that may be more hope than reality.

The focus must stay on the performance of the district’s 711,000 students. That depends on getting trained, committed teachers more of the resources and support they need to do their jobs--and holding them accountable when they don’t. Decentralization could certainly help achieve that end. But if it doesn’t, deep frustration with the district--70% of parents in a recent Los Angeles Times poll rated their local schools as either fair or poor--means that a true breakup into autonomous districts will become much more likely.

Cortines’ ambitious reorganization takes effect July 1. The timetable is punishing, and important details are still sketchy. Cortines has said he will stay on only until July 1, the day after the current teachers’ contract expires. A search for a permanent superintendent is underway, but it’s hard to imagine that a newcomer to the job could be up and running by July. Considering how much is riding on this decentralization plan, Cortines ought to consider staying on a bit longer to help make it a success.