A Worrisome Rush to Create 11 L.A. Unified Spinoffs

Americans love big. Big stores, big burgers, big SUVs.

But we trust small. Small business, small towns, small claims court.

So, this plan by the very big Los Angeles Unified School District to divide itself into 11 smaller subdistricts has us in a real quandary.

And I, for one, have big questions to put to the LAUSD board:

Will creating the L.A. Eleven simply spin off a bigger bureaucracy?

Will the L.A. Eleven really make it 11 times easier for teachers and parents and students to get things done? Or does breaking up one big district into 11 smaller parts merely create 11 smaller moving targets that are harder for critics to hit?

And wait, what about--?

Well, there goes the school board. Don’t slow ‘em down with questions. They want all this accomplished by July, about the time that interim Supt. Ramon C. Cortines will be leaving.

Look, we’re all sick of years of dithering and shilly-shallying, especially by this board’s predecessors, who seemed at times to expend more ingenuity on crafting excuses than remedies.

But July? I can’t repaint my living room by July, and the school board wants to wrap up its most momentous change since court-ordered busing?

A July deadline makes the LAUSD board look sweaty and a little desperate, like a boxer on the ropes.

Here’s just a bit of what partitioning will entail:

Finding 11 new superintendents, one for each new mini-district of 50,000 or 60,000 students. That is a chore on the order of simultaneously hiring leaders for the school districts of Sacramento, Long Beach, San Francisco, Oakland, Fresno, Garden Grove, Oakland, San Diego and three others of like size.

All by July.

It took a citizens committee, a national search and about a year to choose Ruben Zacarias as uber-superintendent, and there is still no permanent replacement for him, many months after he was fired.

What are the odds of finding 11 in 90 days? Fielding an 11-man pro football offensive lineup at the L.A. Coliseum would be likelier.

Someone less charitably minded than I might suspect a setup: So tight a time frame almost guarantees that, gosh darn it, the LAUSD will just have to recruit those new superintendettes from within the district’s ranks.

Maybe there are indeed 11 inspired, energetic men and women who’ve been waiting for just this chance to slip the surly bonds of ossified district politics, to run their own shops as schools ought to be run.

But maybe we will wind up with well-intentioned LAUSD clones who--whatever their potential once--have been bent and trimmed and dwarfed into bonsai bureaucrats, transplanted onto a landscape that cries out for sequoias.

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In nature, a cell that divides replicates more versions of itself, and the last thing anyone wants is 11 more LAUSDs. Before the Great Divides take effect, Angelenos deserve pledges about motives and commitment:

* That this is not an illusion of local autonomy while invisible strings are still being pulled from The Hill, the district’s headquarters downtown; little will change if all this does is administer the same rules from more ZIP Codes.

* That the breakup is not just desperate political sleight-of-hand to cure the secession fever that has broken out in cities and school districts.

* And that expectations for an L.A. Eleven are rational ones. Gov. Jerry Brown once beat the gong for E.F. Shumacher’s “small is beautiful” philosophy. Beautiful, small may be, but is it workable?

Common sense would conclude that smaller districts perform better, QED. Yet smaller districts are often in prosperous suburbs whose students have a head start in, oh, not having to walk past winos and dopers to get to school, not having to study at night in noisy, crowded apartments, not having parents who work too many hours or whose own education is too sparse to help the kids with homework.

And as for the small-is-better management mantra, there is the example of Compton, whose small school district was so poorly run that the state took it over, and whose small Police Department is being disbanded in favor of the Sheriff’s Department of one of the nation’s largest counties.

And the same government that this week approved a sale creating the world’s second-largest oil company decided last week that Microsoft is too big for its britches and for our good.

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The last breakaway district from the LAUSD was Torrance--in 1948.

We can wait a little longer, if it guarantees we get something better in return.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.