Despite Reorganization, Central Office Rules

When interim Supt. Ramon C. Cortines said he sees “a need to . . . give local communities more control over their schools,” he apparently didn’t envision a larger role for parents and schools. His district-reorganization plan, adopted unanimously by the L.A. School Board last week, virtually leaves them out of the improvement campaign. Regrettably, this omission has become habitual with Cortines and the school board.

The move also defies Cortines’ own criticism of L.A. Unified, that its central office has “too much authority.” By reorganizing the district into 11 subdistricts, each with a deputy superintendent, the superintendent is granting the bureaucracy in the central and regional offices vast new powers at the expense of local schools.

This is an ominous development. Sustainable improvement in student performance is impossible if it is not produced in a school. Effective schooling is not a commodity that a central or regional office can package and ship out to schools. Rather, it is a capacity-building experience involving the development of new institutional attitudes, missions, teamwork, skills, programs and partnerships. To work, it must operate at every elementary, middle and high school.

If parental involvement at schools was truly valued, Cortines’ reorganization would have provided the 11 new superintendents with direct feedback links to school-site councils, parents, principals, teachers and students. Yes, students. One modest, but refreshing feature of school board meetings these days is the presence of students. When, for example, a bureaucrat confidently reports that all district students have textbooks, the students in attendance correct the record.

When Cortines first announced his plan, he said he would make sure that the new superintendents had the power and resources to make a difference in school quality. At the same time, he froze all professional-development funds and mandated that money only be spent on reading and math instruction. But professional development is a key tool to improving schools. If schools and deputy superintendents are prohibited from exercising power over these programs, they are, in effect, powerless.

Furthermore, Cortines’ mandate is shortsighted. A large portion of faculty in underperforming schools are inexperienced teachers. If deputy superintendents and principals can’t spend money to train teachers who desperately need more effective teaching skills, their capacity to improve achievement is unnecessarily limited.

The disconnect between downtown and the classroom is hardly new, unfortunately. Last week, members of the North Hollywood High School community traveled downtown to work with the superintendent and school board on avoiding the need to reduce their instructional year by 16 days. They had a plan and were willing to entertain alternatives. Yet, they discovered what many schools already knew. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to work with the central office. Their effort was rejected.

The central-office instruction unit recently forced most schools to abandon their reading programs and adopt ones it mandated. This was done without first evaluating the effectiveness of the rejected or mandated programs. As a result, it is likely that some effective programs were discarded for less effective ones.

More disturbingly, the superintendent, school board and instruction unit made this decision without the involvement of schools. Being excluded from such decisions convinces parents, principals and teachers that reorganization is little more than a new bureaucratic layer between them and real power--the superintendent, school board and central office.

Such actions echo previous struggles. Almost a decade ago, the Los Angeles Education Alliance for Restructuring Now, or LEARN, school-site reform came into existence. It forced a reluctant superintendent and central office to pay lip service to the role of the school in student improvement. LEARN envisioned a powerful school-based partnership among principals, teachers and parents.

Fifteen years earlier, the California School Improvement Program, which still exists in most schools, tried to do the same thing. It mandated school-site councils as the engines of improvement. But both SIP and LEARN failed to loosen the grip the central office exerts over school resources and decision-making.

In the last decade, even when schools lacked funds to buy needed textbooks, clean bathrooms or fund art and music programs, the central office always seemed able to find unaccounted millions of dollars for high-priced consultants, luxurious offices and other costly schemes for itself. It wasted, amid underfunded schools, hundreds of millions of dollars.

Cortines is ending this practice as he focuses on improvement and decentralization. At the same time, the long-standing power struggle between an imperious central office and schools draws to a close: The bureaucrats have won. School improvement will increasingly become a top-down, central- and regional-office production. Unfortunately, just telling principals, teachers and parents what to do doesn’t produce much improvement. Over the last three decades, there has not been a single successful example of top-down school change in the nation. Reorganization, in and of itself, is not school improvement.

Top-down management, while thoroughly consistent with the district’s history, runs counter to prevailing strategies on how to improve complex, decentralized organizations, in which quality is determined by thousands of daily, individual actions that take place far from the purview of a central office. Schooling is, perhaps, the most decentralized work experience in society.

Research on school improvement indicates that producing higher levels of student achievement requires difficult-to-achieve changes at the school and classroom levels and that these can best be attained through the actions of teachers and principals. Organizationally, the means for generating this change is: principal and teacher leadership; team building; a shared school mission to achieve success with every child; faculty development of school-wide instruction programs; collegial staff development; and an active partnership among parents, principals, teachers and students.

L.A. schools have never had all these qualities in the right proportion. Now, they are being further stripped of them. Why? Because a majority on the school board, along with the interim superintendent, is impatient with mediocrity, inadequate student achievement and inaction and wants to stir things up to free the district from the organizational inertia that grips it. It doubts schools can act quickly and decisively. Thus, in the irony of ironies, it turned to the source of the paralysis, the central-office bureaucracy.

As part of its improvement strategy, the district wants to hold teachers and principals more accountable for student achievement. It proposes linking their salaries to student achievement. Yet, if the role of principal and teacher is to be limited to carrying out central- and regional-office mandates, schools can only be legitimately held responsible for program implementation, not for achievement. *