Few issues are more important to local communities than the quality
of their schools. Polls suggest that education ranks at the top
of Americans' concerns about their future. Political rhetoric
at all levels is rich with references to the importance of education
in creating individual opportunity, establishing civic culture,
and maintaining economic prosperity. Yet at the same time, in
many communities, the path to educational improvement seems hopelessly
overgrown. A tangled thicket rises between parents and cityizens
who want safer schools, higher quality curriculum, evidence of increased
student learning, and the interlocking governance systems charged with
bringing these about. Cutting through this thicket can be
a frustrating experience for even the most seasoned and politically
savvy reformer. To those without experience or political clout,
this thicket becomes an impenetrable wall of bureaucratic stone.
In combination, the high demand for educational improvement and
the lack of responsiveness from educational authorities has produced
an acute level of frustration on both sides. Calls from communities
to "do more, faster," are met with the response from
educators that "We are moving as fast as we can." This
is precisely the problem.
Indeed, what is most significant about the current conversation
about school improvement is the sense that the current structures
by which decisions about education are made are incapable of embracing
change at the pace demanded by important constituencies, including
parents, business leaders, and community organizations. In contrast,
previous debates over schooling, including those initiated by
the 1983 Nation at Risk report, focused not on the structure
of decision-making, but on the internal mechanisms of schooling
including educational processes (curriculum and assessment), personnel
(the quality of the teaching force), and specific policies (length
of the school day and school year). In these earlier reform debates,
decision makers were called on to make different decisions, to
lengthen the school day, to beef up the math curriculum, or to
create career ladders for teachers, to mention a few examples.
In the present debate, however, calls are heard to alter decision-making
itself, to trim back or root out the thicket of bureaucratic controls
that seem to thwart the progress of educational change. In the
place of large bureaucratic systems, reformers from across a wide
political spectrum call for smaller, more nimble, accessible,
and responsive mechanisms of decision making and control.
At the heart of this new call for structural reform is America's
battle with bigness.[1] In the last fifteen years we have as a nation become frustrated
with bigness as we have
come to see the diminishing returns to growth, particularly in
human systems. In industry
after industry, and even in the federal government, authority
and decision-making have been decentralized, and responsiveness
to constituencies, clients, and customers, have become the watchwords
of modern enterprise. The restructuring of IBM into autonomous
'enterprises' and the development of the Saturn division within
General Motors, important changes in two companies that represented
the American drive for size and reach, are emblematic of this
shift to organizations of smaller size, empowered to make decisions
on behalf of their own clientele. In the process, this kind of
local control has become synonymous with responsiveness, whether
at Digital Equipment, whose ads end with the line "Whatever
it takes," or at Starbuck's Coffee, where employees are encouraged
to learn the names of their patrons.
In education, the disenchantment with large structures plays itself out in three basic ways:
Regulatory Relief
Within the structure of decision making, efforts at varying levels
of seriousness have been made to prune back the thicket of regulation
and interlocking governance structures. In Washington, the revision
of Chapter I regulations and the development of block grants are
examples of this kind of effort. The Clinton administration's
call for a set of national tests likewise is an attempt to set
outcome standards for schools, with the hope of allowing schools
and communities to devise locally appropriate mechanisms for achieving
specified goals. At the state level, in addition to ongoing attempts
to develop state-level performance standards, proposals to revise
and simplify the education codes aim at reducing the complexity
of running school systems with the ultimate goal of making it
easier for schools and districts to respond to the articulated
demands of their various constituencies.
Local Autonomy within Central Systems.
Just as large corporations like IBM and General Motors have created
semi-autonomous units within an overarching corporate identity,
school districts and states have created mechanisms whereby local
schools are granted varying degrees of freedom from day to day
control. Early examples, including magnet schools, and site based
decision-making schools (SBM) were freed only to develop specialized
curriculum. More recently, the charter school movement has created
the means for schools and groups of schools to create side agreements
with districts that free them from day to day control in exchange
for stipulating in formal terms (a "charter") plans
for organization, goals, and performance guarantees. Several
states, including California, have embraced charter school legislation
and charter schools themselves are operating by the hundreds across
the nation.
Other reforms seek to establish smaller governing units operating
within the context of control of a larger district structure.
In New York City, smaller borough districts operated until this
year within the larger frame of the New York City Public Schools.
In Chicago, reform legislation of 1989 made each school an autonomous
governing unit and created hundreds of school boards, one for
each school, with hiring and firing responsibility.
In Los Angeles, the LEARN reform framework, designed by community
leaders and ratified by the Board of Education, promises all schools
"charter like" autonomy within a five year time-frame.
Within LEARN, school communities are to gain control over personnel,
curricular, and budgetary decisions within the overall structure
of the Los Angeles Unified School District. LEARN/LAUSD's IBM-like
move to create semi-autonomous school communities under a district
umbrella represents one of the most aggressive elaborations of
the idea of local control within a central decision-making structure.
Vouchers and Choice
Vouchers, which provide some or all families with "vouchers"
that can be exchanged at will for educational services, are not
a new concept. Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill wrote approvingly
of vouchers in the eighteenth century and Milton Friedman proposed
vouchers as a solution to the ills of education in the middle
decade of our century. Despite this venerable heritage, it has
been in connection with the present battle with bigness that vouchers
have emerged as a real public policy option. Perhaps the ultimate
expression of the broad community frustration at the seeming intransigence
of the education establishment, vouchers and choice programs seek
to disestablish or circumvent all authority systems above the
local school. Both give parents and children the opportunity
to choose a school best suited to their needs. This process of
choosing creates a market in which schools have to compete for
students. By extension, local schools will be forced, proponents
argue, to become responsive to constituent demands.
None of these three basic strategies has been without its critics.
In fact each has sparked controversy and spurred research into
the costs and benefits of various ways of reforming the governance
of school systems. These criticisms are of three basic types.
First, observers question the ability of these strategies to achieve,
by themselves, the desired goals of increasing responsiveness
and improving the education of children. It is unclear, for example,
whether schools of choice are more responsive to clients' needs
than are schools governed by traditional mechanisms. Likewise,
the creation of local districts in New York did little to improve
student performance or parent satisfaction. Second, some have
begun to ask important questions about what is lost in radical
moves to local control. Centralized systems and complex systems
of control have grown, in part, as means of guaranteeing access
and equal opportunity to members of our communities who were disadvantaged
in prior iterations of local control. It is reasonable to fear
that uncritical decentralization could result in a set of schools
that exacerbate inequality. Finally, and most importantly, many
reformers and students of the educational process question the
inevitability of the assumed relationship between autonomously
governed schools and high quality education. At best, we can
say that small size and an open relationship with the community
can help create an environment for positive change.
District Breakup
Those of us who have been studying the possible breakup of the
Los Angeles Unified School District believe that knowledge of
this larger context is an important precursor to understanding
particular proposals and claims made about such proposals. It
is clear that, in an educational context, proposals to break up
the district are part of the family of proposals identified above;
they battle bigness in an effort to make schools more responsive
and more successful. As such, the proposals suffer from one major
logical flaw, simply that there is no evidence, empirical or anecdotal,
that small districts function more effectively or more efficiently
than do large districts. Indeed, for every large dysfunctional
behemoth, one might name another modestly sized district suffering
from like ills. This is not, nor should it be construed to be,
conclusive evidence that LAUSD should not be separated into smaller
districts, nor that governance structures, whatever their size,
should not be encouraged through the mechanisms of public policy
to become more responsive to their communities. The aim here
is simply to say clearly and at the outset that creating six,
eight, or fifteen smaller districts from LAUSD will not, by itself,
do anything to improve the responsiveness of schools to their
communities nor will it, by itself, do anything to improve the
education of children.
It was with this caution in mind that we accepted the commission
of Mayor Riordan to attempt to help the communities of Los Angeles
better understand the potential pluses and minuses of a breakup
of LAUSD. Our attempt here is to clarify the issues involved,
not to make a recommendation either in favor of any breakup plan
nor opposed to it. Thus we will disappoint readers who seek in
these pages a bold recommendation for restructuring the LAUSD.
On the other hand, we have tried to address the question of the
breakup constructively, asking first, what are the major policy
impediments to various kinds of breakup and, second, what factors
should any breakup proposal address in order not only to succeed
in making smaller districts but also to succeed in improving educational
opportunities and outcomes for the children of Los Angeles.
One further disclaimer is in order. There is no doubt that schools
and school governance exist within a complex web of political
processes and structures. Changes in structure not only require
political action, they also set the boundaries and the ground
rules for future political action. It is impossible at any time
to divorce education from politics, and it is especially impossible
when the status quo is threatened, as it is now. At the same
time, it is possible, we believe, to divorce the political aims
of and fallout from changes in school governance from the educational
aims and outcomes. We have attempted, in what follows, to do just
that. There is no doubt, for example, that there are important
and laudable political aims that may be achieved through one or
another proposal to divide the LAUSD. While we are aware of many
of these through our conversations with community leaders from
across the city, they are outside the scope of our concern here,
which is and remains the successful education of the city's children.
Our work has taken several paths. First, we have met with community
leaders who are working on plans to secede from the District,
one, but certainly not the only kind of breakup. Second, we have
met with District officials and former District officials to better
understand their perspective. Third, we have spent time with
officials from the State Department of Education, the Department
of Finance, and the County Office of Education learning better
the set of regulatory and fiduciary relationships that would require
restructuring in any breakup. Fourth, we have worked with officials
of United Teachers Los Angeles, and the California Teachers Association
as well as the California Department of Labor to understand the
labor/management issues involved in any possible dissolution of
present contracts. Finally, we have worked to assemble the best
research available on issues relating to the breakup. From these
five strands of work we have distilled an essential set of principles
that we believe should guide the development of any plan to restructure
LAUSD. If met, we believe they would serve to create an educational
environment that protects equity and access, creates responsive
governance mechanisms of human scale, and establishes the preconditions
for substantial educational improvement. As you will see, as
hopeful as this is, the principles themselves are not easily turned
into plans, and will require stamina, vision, and political will.
Our basic commitment must be to create structures within the context
of a comprehensive plan for systematic change that will support
high quality learning for each child in Los Angeles; that will
mitigate against fragmentation among children, families and communities;
that will be flexible and responsive to new or shifting challenges
within and among school communities; and that will be acceptable
to parents and other community constituents.
The following principles for structural design underlie this commitment.
They incorporate the variety of complex factors that must be
addressed in order to achieve this goal.
Continuity
Structures should enhance the creation and maintenance of stable
learning communities - constancy and stability of student population,
faculty and administration at school sites; continuity, coordination
and ease of student transition within and among schools
High Standards
Structures should reinforce high, consistent expectations and
standards for all students and schools
Accountability
Structures should be designed to reflect a commitment to assessment
based on commonly understood measures of student achievement and
school performance
Fairness
Structures should facilitate environments in which every child
will have the opportunity to engage in a broad spectrum of intellectually
challenging learning activities and curriculum, and in which each
student will have the opportunity to achieve his or her potential
Autonomy
Structures should be designed to rest decision-making authority
for those issues most directly affecting student learning and
learning environments with those closest to the students and the
schools
Efficiency
Structures should be designed to foster, where appropriate, economies
of scale and sharing of services and expertise, in ways that support
and facilitate the operation of individual schools and/or groups
of schools
Orderliness
Structures should facilitate an atmosphere in which schools are
felt to be, and are in fact, comfortable and secure environments
for students and adults
Enfranchisement
Structures should be designed to insure that parents of children
who attend schools outside the District in which they reside have
the opportunity to vote for members of the Board of Education
of the District in which their child attends school
Employees' Rights and Privileges
Structures should be designed to protect rights and privileges
of employees by maintaining conditions of all collective bargaining
agreements until their expirations
Protections
Structures should be designed to meet the following conditions:
socioeconomic diversity; equity of resource distribution; compliance
with Crawford v. Board of Education and the terms of the consent
decree in Rodriguez v. Los Angeles Unified School District; compliance
with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act; compliance
with the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, (42 U.S.C. Sec. 1971),
as amended; maintenance of current minority protections
Economic Viability
Structures should be designed in a manner that will demonstrate
and insure the economic viability and financial stability required
to meet the operational and educational needs of schools, employees
and students
The papers that follow provide the evidentiary background from which these principles were derived and explain in more depth some of the particularly knotty problems attending any potential breakup of the district.
Return to LAUSD Study Page.
UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies