LAUSD, Open Your Doors--and Minds--to Parents

When I became superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District 2 1/2 years ago, I said: “Children and parents at every school have a right to expect the principal and the staff to focus on improvement, no matter where they are on the achievement scale. And they have a right to hold us accountable.”

Now that a newly elected majority of the board of education has decided that my job should go to someone else, I am obligated to speak to those to whom I owe a great measure of accountability, the primary stakeholders of our schools: the children and their parents.

In too much of public education, those stakeholders are ignored or neutralized by those who seem to believe that they and they alone know what is best for our schools and those they serve. Among the powerful are the elected, appointed and self-appointed leaders and experts who march to a variety of tunes that only they seem to hear. Most of the time, in their view, success can only be measured in one form of achievement--how well students or schools perform on mandated tests that critics often charge do not fairly or accurately measure a child’s real knowledge or abilities.

Those who labor in the schools to educate young people find themselves headed first in one direction and then another as they are whipsawed by the demands of the moment or the latest hoped-for outcomes, higher scores being the most common.

In such an environment, many lose hope and, too often, faith in public education.

I have proposed one solution: to break the LAUSD into a dozen smaller, mini-districts. My successor, interim Supt. Ramon Cortines, sees merit in that possibility and is proposing 11 such groups. Others demand that we break up the district entirely, letting the pieces come together in districts determined by larger geopolitical realities than those I proposed, but smaller than the current LAUSD.

Changing the configuration of the district will help all parties to focus more attention on accountability. However, regardless of the changes, whether they result in one-room schoolhouses administered by teacher-principals, a dozen or so mini-districts or a vast district like the current $7-billion giant administered by a chief executive and his assistants, I fear that, again, the smallest voices, the ones most often ignored or paid lip service to, will be those of the children and their parents.

Those familiar with my service know that after focusing on student achievement and accountability, I emphasized serving and empowering parents. I had hoped that parents would find a welcoming place at the LAUSD table. By that, I did not mean attending “back-to-school” nights or occasional PTA meetings. There are simply too many in education, at all levels, who resist bringing parents into the process in a meaningful way. Educators must accept that parents bring a special power to every school: They have the most access to our students. As one example, if our young people’s rate of literacy is at abysmal levels, let’s consider that they spend 35 hours a week with television--more time than they spend in their classrooms. Who other than a parent can be an integral part of the process for changing such student behavior and helping us to improve academic achievement?

No plan for the future of the LAUSD can continue to ignore full parental involvement and empowerment, even if it means special training for the board of education, principals and teachers to better understand the power that parents can bring to the process.

Despite the dangerous and huge shortfall in qualified classroom teachers, regardless of the sometimes oppressive weight of mandated obligations directed by the courts, Washington, Sacramento and our own school board, and no matter how complex the suggested cures for what is ailing education, unless the stakeholders, especially the parents, are given primary consideration, more say in the day-to-day process of education and more responsibility for its success, we educators will continue to founder and fail those we labor to serve.