Chartering New Course for Schools

Despite some recent, impressive gains by elementary school students, it’s hard to find much evidence of the waves of education reform that have swept through the Los Angeles Unified School District in the last decade.

Some schools still display the green and white banner of LEARN, an ambitious attempt to spur innovation and team-building by giving power to schools, parents and teachers to operate outside the gravitation-like pull of the giant district’s death-star bureaucracy.

Then came LAAMP. Fueled with $110 million in private funds and contributions of time and expertise, that effort focused on linking elementary, middle and high schools to foster common expectations and teacher professionalism.

Various superintendents launched their own initiatives, only to see them evaporate with hardly a trace. Does anyone remember the list of 100 low-performing schools drawn up with great fanfare by short-timer schools Supt. Ruben Zacarias?

The cumulative effect of all that activity inside the district is what policy analysts from WestEd, a nonprofit education research lab, call “reform fatigue.”

After studying the L.A. school system for more than a year and talking to leading experts across the country, WestEd is recommending a radical break from that past. In a new report, the lab urges the creation of a shadow district of 100 charter schools. That would triple the number of such schools in Los Angeles and add to pressure on the district to change.

Not incidentally, such a network would give about 50,000 students in Los Angeles’ most ill-served areas an alternative to being bused far from home or attending the huge, chaotic and academically undemanding schools in their neighborhoods.

But before anyone jumps to the conclusion that this is an assault that would leave the rest of the district’s nearly 750,000 students in the lurch, it’s clear that such a network also holds great promise for the system itself.

Charter schools are publicly funded but operate independently of school districts, with the idea that more freedom will lead to innovation and excellence. The first such charter opened in 1991 in St. Paul, Minn.; this year, there are 2,700 charter schools in 38 states serving nearly 700,000 students.

So far, the charter school record is mixed, as one would expect from a reform meant to foster innovation and eclecticism. And teacher unions and school boards nationally continue to work to block the movement’s advance.

But prominent civic leaders in Los Angeles, organized into the Alliance for Student Achievement, are taking a different route. The alliance wants to run a network of schools that would be far smaller than the massive, impersonal institutions typical of Los Angeles.

Instead of 4,000 students, alliance high schools would have 400. With fewer students (and no football team), these schools could set up shop in existing buildings or in new structures built on far smaller parcels, easing the district’s space crunch.

Civic, political and labor leaders in L.A. should rally behind this idea of establishing a large-scale system of charter schools to both compete and cooperate with the existing district. The mayor’s office should help find sites for new schools and work to smooth over any zoning problems.

The Los Angeles Board of Education, which has made clear it is receptive to charter schools, should hack away red tape and not shirk its responsibility to hold the charters accountable for performance.

The United Teachers-Los Angeles should not make it difficult for union members to sign up to work in the charters, if they desire, without risking benefits.

And local politicians should do their best in Sacramento to ensure any future charter school regulations do not undermine the L.A. system’s chances of success.

Reform fatigue is understandable, given the limited results of past efforts to improve L.A. Unified. But this bold idea should invigorate the community to put its collective shoulder to the wheel one more time.

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Richard Lee Colvin, a former education writer for the Los Angeles Times, is deputy director of the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York.