Cortines Seeks 1,000 Staff Cuts

As many as half of the 2,000 administrative and support staff positions in the massive Los Angeles Unified School District would be eliminated under a reorganization plan being developed by Supt. Ramon C. Cortines.

The administrative reduction is part of a do-or-die proposal that the superintendent and Howard Miller, the district’s chief operating officer, see as key to improving student achievement and avoiding breakup of the district.

Drastic changes are necessary, Miller said in an interview with Times editors and reporters, because bureaucrats in some cases are actively impeding quality education.

In some corners of the administration, he said, students would have been better off if the staff had “sat in a room and done nothing at all,” rather than push misguided methods. The problem, he said, “is that they insist on doing something.”

Miller and Cortines also advocated linking teachers’ pay with students’ performance, a proposal that was immediately denounced by the teachers union.

Both men anticipate strong opposition to their plans. “We expect constant and serious obstacles all along the way,” Miller said. “But we expect to surpass them all,” given the dire alternatives.

The self-styled reformers said they will present their plan to the board for adoption on April 11, and they issued an ultimatum.

If the board doesn’t approve the bulk of the plan, Cortines said, “I walk the next day.”

“I walk with him,” Miller said.

School board member Caprice Young said she expects the plan to be embraced by a board majority.

“I don’t think they will have to walk,” she said. “I think the board will be behind them. All of us know there will have to be major changes to ensure our kids are learning.”

Many Administrators Would Be Reassigned

District officials said Wednesday that 800 to 1,000 administrators would retire or be reassigned--some of them to schools as teachers, janitors and secretaries.

Dozens would be dispatched to replace principals with low seniority at low-performing schools. Administrators targeted for possible reassignment must be notified by March 15; tenured administrators have a right to jobs as teachers. Some would probably accept early retirement.

The plan, which is still being forged, also would turn the district’s sprawling headquarters at 450 N. Grand Ave. into a high school and move the headquarters into a new, smaller building, perhaps in the Wilshire Corridor.

The district now rents about 750,000 square feet of space to house 2,000 administrators and their support staffs, Miller said. Once the shake-up is complete, Miller said, he expects the central offices to require about 250,000 square feet.

Essentially, Cortines and Miller aim to force dramatic changes in the district that would leave a clean slate for the new superintendent who replaces Cortines when he steps down in July.

Cortines already had proposed reorganizing the district into 11 “mini-districts” with their own superintendents and budgets.

Cortines recommended this week that three of six separate calendars used in the district be eliminated by July 1 to make it easier to find the time to train teachers and principals.

Reacting to the plan to tie teachers’ pay raises to students’ achievements, Day Higuchi, president of United Teachers-Los Angeles, said it would be a “cold day in hell” before the union would go along.

“Simply giving money to people who are already doing well and taking it away from other people isn’t getting anyone else to work harder or smarter, and most teachers are already working as hard as they can,” Higuchi said.

Miller and Cortines offered a particularly harsh assessment of the district’s instruction office, and one top official said the 600-person division could be reduced to as few as 47 employees.

Liliam L. Castillo, a deputy superintendent, defended the division, saying it had been spread too thin. Over the last three years, the office has taken on a dozen new initiatives, from implementing new state academic standards to ending bilingual education and social promotion.

“The previous superintendent [Ruben Zacarias] wanted to do it all at once,” Castillo said. The new regime, she said, has set a dominant priority: literacy.

Cortines said he has no choice but to push for wholesale changes. “I think the central administration is profoundly disconnected from the mission and purpose of education,” he said. “This system has not focused on anything.”

Miller described the reorganization as part of a campaign to alter the mind-set of teachers and administrators and the very culture of the low-performing district.

“We have created a culture that thinks all barriers are an excuse for failure,” he said. He said he wants to try to replace that mind-set with one in which “overcoming obstacles becomes a point of pride.”

An Overwhelmingly Negative Portrait

Although Cortines and Miller both said they still hope that the Los Angeles public schools can be set back on course, the two men painted an overwhelmingly negative portrait of where the district stands today.

Principals, teachers and support staff members work very hard, they said, but “they are not necessarily doing the right things” to ensure that children learn, and they are not paying sufficient attention to test scores or to schools’ ranking on the state’s academic performance index.

Cortines, who has been in his temporary post for five weeks, ticked off things he finds particularly disturbing: In a second-grade classroom, he saw students coloring shapes on work sheets that did not even have words on them. Elementary schools have libraries, but children are not allowed to check out books. Science instruction is almost entirely missing from elementary schools. Professional development in the district, he said, is “catch as catch can.”

The weak performance of the district was highlighted earlier this year when the state ranked schools for the first time. About one-third of the district’s schools achieved a 1 on a scale of 1 to 10 and more than two-thirds of the schools got a 3 or below.

“There are bigger threats out there,” Miller said, that could cause consequences far more severe than their reorganization proposal.

In years to come, schools that fail to improve their performance face sanctions up to and including takeover by the state.

Disgruntled parents in the San Fernando Valley and elsewhere are seeking to break away and form separate districts. In addition, a ballot measure that would provide parents with tax money they could use to send their children to private schools is gaining ground statewide.

As word of the plans to eliminate administrative jobs has begun to leak out, Miller and Cortines said, they have been receiving 200 letters a week inspired by people’s efforts to save their jobs.

“If there was as much effort going into improving educational achievement,” Cortines said, “children would be far better off.”

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Times education writer Martha Groves contributed to this story.