Supersize That Education for You?

The Los Angeles Unified School District is really, really, really big.

So big that when its books were off by 5%, as they were this month, it discovered it had an extra $228 million on hand. So big that when its students’ answer sheets were turned in late, the entire state had to delay the release of test results, lest they be hopelessly skewed.

When the state offered school districts $450 million in construction funds this year, L.A. Unified applied for the whole pot and then some--$916 million. Pity poor Tustin Unified, which stood at the front of that application line, only to get shoved aside by the 800-pound gorilla.

“How does a district of 18,000 kids come up against a district with nearly 800,000 kids?” asked Brock Wagner, Tustin Unified’s business officer.

While L.A. Unified marshaled a cadre of lobbyists and lawyers to persuade the state to change the funding rules in its favor, Tustin had “just me,” Wagner said. “We’re not even in the same game as those guys.”

Few are. With 748,000 children and 159,000 adult students, and a $9.8-billion budget--comparable to the gross national product of Costa Rica--L.A. Unified is the second-largest school district in the nation, behind New York City.

It uses its heft to advantage, buying its paper from the mill and its apples by the orchard. But for all its advantages, the district’s girth often hinders reform and inhibits public involvement.

With seven powerful labor unions and hundreds of middle managers and school principals vying for resources, the district is rife with schisms and political intrigues. L.A. schools Supt. Roy Romer has commented on how his experience as a state governor and Democratic Party operative left him unprepared for Los Angeles Unified’s internecine political wars.

Being superintendent “is a more difficult job by quite a ways,” Romer said earlier this year. “I never knew politics until I got here.”

It is all the more difficult to run the district because there is no reliable way to track how resources are being used. Several audits have found that the district’s data systems are so antiquated that it would take years, and millions of dollars, to bring them up to date.

“The LAUSD does not know how many employees it has working in what positions at any given time, or how much they get paid,” according to a 1999 L&L; Fuller Inc. audit.

The problem has not yet been solved, district officials say.

The district has more than 50 discrete computer databases--and offices full of student records on paper and microfiche that never have been computerized, said Megan Klee, the district’s chief technology official.

L.A. Unified’s payroll system is so outdated that every pay period, each of the district’s 85,000 employees must fill out paper time sheets, longhand, and correct them with white-out.

Relying on Estimates

The district can’t track all of its supplies, or its 6,000 financial accounts, in real time. It is only able to nail down actual expenses once every quarter, said Romer, forcing the district to rely on estimates based on financial trends.

“This is a large, complex organization, and we don’t calculate week-by-week savings,” he said. “We have to add it up every three months.”

That is how budget officials discovered only this month that there was an extra $228 million from the fiscal year ending in June spread over hundreds of district accounts. That’s only about 5% of L.A. Unified’s operating budget--close enough at most districts. But 5% of L.A. Unified’s general fund amounts to nearly half the operating budget of Long Beach Unified.

Those who would like to see the district split up say that any entity so large is bound to be a bureaucratic basket case. Some parents feel alienated in a bureaucracy that can bounce them from functionary to functionary without ever giving them a straight answer.

“I want L.A. [Unified] to be more accessible and accountable, and the only way to do that is to make it smaller--not dinky, but smaller than it is now,” said Stephanie Carter, who is co-chair of a group that supports a separate San Fernando Valley district and whose daughter just graduated from high school.

A measure on November’s ballot to allow the San Fernando Valley to secede from Los Angeles has received support from some residents who believe--mistakenly--that it would break up the district.

In fact, no area has split off from L.A. Unified since Torrance in 1948. Last November, Carson residents defeated a proposal to form a separate district after an anti-secession blitz by the teachers union, United Teachers-Los Angeles. A month later, the state Board of Education voted 10 to 0 against a proposal to create a separate San Fernando Valley school district, finding it unworkable.

The separatist movements did, however, spur the giant district to form 11 subdistricts two years ago. The creation of the mini-districts was meant to make L.A. Unified more responsive, but some parents and legislators say the district’s central bureaucracy has been loath to cede authority--or money--to regional offices.

New York City has vacillated, as well, between centralized and decentralized management. Its mega-district first spun off mini-districts in the 1970s, but Mayor Michael Bloomberg has begun to consolidate his office’s authority over the system and its 1.1 million students.

“After a system gets a certain size, you need some kind of regional [mini-district] structure that makes management less unwieldy,” said Beverly Donohue, the chief financial officer for New York City schools.

But even if L.A. Unified’s subdistricts became separate school systems, each of them would rank among the 100 largest in the nation.

Size Matters

For now, the district does everything on an imperial scale. It is the biggest landowner in Los Angeles, with many more schools and educational centers (907) than Starbucks has coffeehouses (250) in Los Angeles County. It is now planning to build 120 more and expand 79 others.

Size can work in L.A. Unified’s favor. If it needs to push its weight around in Sacramento, it can count on a delegation of 22 state legislators, along with a superintendent, Romer, who is a former three-term governor of Colorado.

At the same time, sizable districts like Los Angeles’ and New York City’s can be excellent laboratories for new educational practices.

“If you are doing research around whether a particular program is meaningful or has results, we’re large enough so that we can draw conclusions based on our own practices,” New York’s Donohue said.

Romer said that test scores released Tuesday, for example, provided large-scale validation of the intensive Open Court reading program, implemented in the early grades throughout the district.

USC education professor Lawrence Picus says that, if they are effectively managed, big districts are often more efficient and spend less on administration than many smaller districts, which sometimes spend as much as 10%.

“Essentially, Los Angeles Unified is a very large corporation. But there are a lot of bigger organizations--Exxon, or the U.S. military, for instance,” said Picus, adding that if L.A. Unified were “L.A. Unified Inc.” it would land around the middle of the Fortune 500 list.

Being big allows a district to benefit from economies of scale, said Howard Nelson, a researcher with the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers union.

“Just take a labor union contract: You have one negotiating team whether you have 100,000 teachers or 20 teachers,” he said.

In 1998, labor unions backed a California ballot initiative that would have required California school districts to restrict overhead costs to 5% of their budgets. But the measure was defeated after a state legislative study calculated that of the state’s 994 districts, only 94 would have been able to comply.

Among them was Los Angeles Unified.

Largely because of the need for greater efficiency, school districts have been growing since the 1940s, said Diane Ravitch, a leading education historian.

“At the end of World War II, there were over 100,000 school districts; now there are just 15,000,” she said.

Smaller Schools Favored

As districts have grown, big schools have fallen out of favor with most education experts. Studies show that students perform better on smaller campuses that allow for more individualized attention. Although the biggest schools are often found in the nation’s biggest school districts--Los Angeles schools, for example, account for five of America’s 15 largest campuses--education experts say that doesn’t have to be so.

Some school districts--Houston’s and New York City’s, for example--have experimented with smaller campuses in leased spaces, or even separate “academies” within existing schools. Los Angeles Unified has also created such schools-within-schools at several campuses. Alexander Hamilton High School on the Westside, for example, houses a humanities magnet program, a music academy and a regular school on one large campus.

One of the main purposes of a $3.3-billion school construction bond coming before voters this November is to build schools to ease overcrowding and scale down enrollment at individual campuses.

Said Ravitch: “You could, in theory, have a school with 400 or 500 kids in it, and it wouldn’t matter if the district had 1 million or 5,000 kids.”

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An Imperial Scale

Number of school districts larger than Los Angeles Unified: 1

Number of cities entirely or partially within the district, in addition to Los Angeles: 25

Approximate rank on the Fortune 500, if district’s total budget were counted as revenue: 196

Approximate rank among nations, if district budget were counted as gross national product: 85

Approximate number of employees: 85,000

Square miles covered by the district: 703

Number of students (preschool to adult school): 906,789

Buying in Bulk

(Annual purchases)

Rolls of toilet paper: 1,766,100

Sporks (plastic eating utensils that serve as both forks and spoons): 2,273,900

Boxes of crayons (in packs of 64, 32, 16 or eight): 747,246

Apples (assorted varieties): 5,185,625

Chicken taquitos: 4,337,500

Pints of milk (including chocolate): 51,660,100