Has the Time Come to Break Up the District?

The Los Angeles Unified School District is engulfed in a political firestorm that has aroused ethnic antagonisms and fed the embers of district breakup. Valley VOTE, the driving force behind San Fernando Valley’s secession movement, announced last week that it will study the possibility of creating its own school district as well. Some cities that have worked on past breakaway initiatives are reassessing their opportunities in light of LAUSD’s turmoil.

Over the last 20 years, secession movements in the district never went much beyond the talking stage. One exception has been the small South Bay city of Lomita, which has two elementary schools. In response to Lomita’s breakaway intentions, L.A. Unified insisted that it needs the two schools in Lomita to accommodate students from surrounding communities. The state Board of Education, which is the final arbiter in such matters, sided with LAUSD.

There are three key criteria for assessing the wisdom of dividing up the nation’s second-largest school district: What impact would a breakup have on student achievement? Would it strengthen school-parent partnerships? Would it improve school management?

Extrapolating from local, state and national performance patterns, there is little reason to expect higher student achievement following a breakup of LAUSD. Improving student achievement requires developing new curricula and new instructional strategies, goals that L.A. Unified and other districts are not pursuing. To succeed in school, students need to acquire, to a level of proficiency, certain skills, concepts and personal traits and then apply them academically. Most of these skills are not explicitly taught, and those that are, like reading and writing, are not taught with a goal of achieving proficiency. Consequently, less than 25% of students reach high levels of proficiency. Until this problem is solved, underachievement will be the norm.

To be sure, most school districts believe they are pursuing the goal of proficiency, and they often tinker with their systems in an effort to get closer to it. But decades of tinkering has failed to produce proficient students. What is necessary is sweeping redesign, a step too radical for conventional educators.

Accessibility, school size, language barriers and school culture already impede the development of parent-school relations in LAUSD. These obstacles bear little relationship to district size. Overcrowding and the need to bus children to faraway neighborhoods will continue into the next decade, regardless of how many districts are carved out of LAUSD. Even under the best planning, funding and school-construction schedule, busing is at least an eight-year quagmire. Until new neighborhood schools are built, greater involvement for many parents will be problematic because they live too far from the schools their children attend.

Not surprisingly, large schools produce a level of anonymity more acute than at smaller schools for both students and parents. L.A. Unified’s shortsighted policy of expanding school size has already reduced schools’ capability to relate to parents on a more personal basis. District size would have little impact on such practices, because, bottom line, there are too few schools to accommodate the district’s burgeoning population.

The most important parental-involvement issue is school culture. Traditional school culture implores parents to support schools without the schools assuming any obligations to parents. Parents of children who do well in school are generally comfortable with this arrangement. They believe a good relationship exists between them and their school. Other parents in the same school whose children are having academic problems feel quite differently. Too frequently they discover a system unable to satisfy their child’s learning needs. While they may find an empathetic teacher or principal, they often must deal with an intransigent school system incapable of solving problems.

One of the reasons many parents love Supt. Ruben Zacarias is his mastery of this culture. Every problem, no matter how well-known in general, seems to surprise him. He then eagerly embraces the petitioner’s plight and promises a solution. Parents appreciate such sensitivity. But Zacarias’ problem with the L.A. school board and with parents who persist in seeking his promised solutions is that the superintendent doesn’t deliver.

For example, when a furor recently arose over students lacking textbooks, Zacarias promised the board that he would solve the problem. Subsequently, he assured board members that he had found the books, when, in fact, many students still don’t have textbooks. The story illustrates how Zacarias rolls with the problems rather than solves them.

The most powerful management reason for breaking up L.A. Unified is the sheer number of schools--700--in the district. It is simply impossible for a superintendent to effectively manage 700 principals, and principals are a key to improving school capabilities and student achievement. A new Valley district with more than 100 schools would be equally unmanageable.

So should the district be broken up? Dividing LAUSD into two, three or four districts would only distribute the district’s weaknesses and deficiencies among the new districts, which will still be too large to function effectively. To achieve any reasonable community-based scale of operation, it would be necessary to create districts about the size of Glendale’s, which has 30,000 students. That would mean carving 25 to 30 new districts out of LAUSD.

The resulting problems would be colossal. For example, in some areas, where teachers with lots of seniority have fled to escape inner-city schools, the new district would not have the financial wherewithal to retain their services. Current staffing inequities would come to roost in the enclaves. Would parents and schools develop a closer relationship? Huge schools and student overcrowding will remain a problem until several hundred new schools are built, a task that will take decades to complete.

Two of the most critical problems facing the district are extraordinarily high Latino dropout rates, which it has attempted to hide, and the district’s inability to generate acceptable levels of achievement among most of the students it serves. Zacarias claims he has improved performance, but what he calls improvement is insignificant and, perhaps, even an illusion. The near two-percentile-point improvement on the Stanford 9 that the superintendent repeatedly cites is smaller than the test’s range of measurement error. Even if taken at face value, the rise in scores is most likely a consequence of teaching to the test rather than improving student proficiency.

Latino activists and politicians rightly deplore how the school board stripped Zacarias of his day-to-day control of the district. But they should also recognize that the board’s new majority is firmly committed to improving student performance. Rallying to Zacarias’ defense in the face of overwhelming evidence that the district is broken only serves to promote the kind of divisiveness that gives momentum to district secessionists.

Los Angeles was once celebrated for its coalition politics. It’s again time for its leaders to bring all the city’s communities together around the goal of creating a new, equitable education system.