The Los Angeles Unified School District is\u2014once again\u2014in search of a leader.\u00a0 There have been nine superintendents in the last two decades, much more turnover and change in direction than a thriving organization can withstand.<\/p>\n
The school board is rightly concerned with more instability.\u00a0 In recent days, the notoriously fractious LAUSD board has been making nice, using words like \u201cunanimous choice\u201d and \u201cpartnership.\u201d\u00a0 There\u2019s a strong instinct to rush toward naming a permanent superintendent who can keep a steady hand on the tiller. \u00a0But it\u2019s the wrong instinct.<\/p>\n
Before the nation\u2019s second largest school district can create stability in its leadership ranks, the school board needs to create the conditions that will attract top talent and allow it to be successful. \u00a0Conciliatory words are not enough.<\/p>\n
The first prerequisite for making the next superintendent successful is to stop the trench warfare over charter schools. \u00a0The superintendent should not have to mediate between the rival factions as Michelle King was forced to do.<\/p>\n
As long as the school board divides into pro and anti-charter school voting blocks, it will be unable to attract the talent it needs.\u00a0 Only a fool or someone with a messiah complex would accept a superintendency in a district where the board majority is likely to change after each election.<\/p>\n
The back and forth board divisions are a clear signal of dysfunctional and toxic politics.\u00a0 School board races have become personal, petty, and very pricey: $114 a vote in one of last spring\u2019s contests.\u00a0 These bitter elections spill over into low trust day-to-day relationships among members.<\/p>\n
Board members may think that continuing the fight is to their political benefit.\u00a0 One might assume the interest groups that supported them will finance their next campaign.\u00a0 Don\u2019t be too sure.\u00a0 LAUSD is not the federal government.\u00a0 Here, continuing displays of dysfunction are likely to be punished in a \u201cthrow all the clowns out\u201d election campaign.<\/p>\n
I believe there is a way to end the fight and claim the huge peace dividend of a redesigned public school system.\u00a0 Oddly enough, stopping the fight and claiming the peace dividend can be accomplished with the same three policies, all of which can be put in place by the board without the permission of state or national governments.<\/p>\n
First, \u00a0start the peace offensive by organizing the district around autonomous schools.\u00a0 Both charters and most LAUSD reform efforts in the last four decades have sought to move decision making closer to students, parents, teachers, and principals.\u00a0 It\u2019s one area in which both charters and the district are moving in the same direction.<\/p>\n
In 2016-2017, there were 225 independent charter schools. There were also 54 affiliated charters, in which teachers and principals remain district employees and part of union bargaining units.\u00a0 Together, they enrolled 154,000 students, the largest charter school enrollment in the country.<\/p>\n
In addition, the district has three brands of semi-autonomous schools: 49 Pilot schools, 24 Extended School Based Management schools, and 21 Local School Initiative schools.\u00a0 There are also 23 Magnet schools.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a lot of movement toward autonomy.\u00a0 Indeed, charter schools in Los Angeles would constitute the second largest school district in California and would be the 17th\u00a0largest school district in the United States, about the same size as the Dallas (Texas) Independent School District.<\/p>\n
Suppose this trend continues.\u00a0 What would LAUSD become if most or all district schools gradually became affiliated charters? \u00a0LAUSD would still be the public school district for Los Angeles and the other municipalities where its schools are located, but it would operate more as a coordinating institution than a conventional school district.<\/p>\n
Experience in Newark, New Jersey, and Washington, DC, suggests a strong continuing need for \u201cbig tent\u201d organization to create systemic coherence.\u00a0 Even in New Orleans, where virtually all schools have charter status, the school district is rebuilding itself to carry out needed central functions such as accountability and enrollment management.<\/p>\n
If the LAUSD school board could create autonomy for all schools, it could then tackle two additional initiatives that could create a truly modern, distinguished school system.<\/p>\n
Second, create good neighborhood schools. \u00a0Before opening any kind of specialty or magnet school, make sure that every neighborhood in Los Angeles had at least one good school. \u00a0Regardless of who runs it\u2014charters, districts, partnerships\u2014every student in the district should have a right to go to a top-flight school near his or her home.\u00a0 Creating \u201cfirst choice\u201d neighborhood schools throughout LAUSD won\u2019t happen without a district-coordinated effort.<\/p>\n
Charter school rhetoric is built around choice\u2014using competition to push back against the ZIP Code destiny that consigns poor kids to poor schools.\u00a0 But charter operators get to pick when and where they open schools.\u00a0 In Los Angeles, they have often picked out some tough neighborhoods and offered children from families capable of going through the enrollment process a degree of choice.\u00a0 Not complete choice, of course, because students usually face lottery selections to gain admission to charters and magnet schools that have created good reputations.<\/p>\n
The obvious flaw in this system lies in the fact that choice doesn\u2019t replace the neighborhood school\u2014the one that must take all students including the ones whose families don\u2019t have the ability or will to exercise choice. \u00a0The LAUSD board has a \u201cfirst duty\u201d to designate good schools in every locale as the neighborhood school, and it has a duty to carefully examine charters and other partnership arrangements to see that they are supporting the notion of good schools close to home.<\/p>\n
Third, LAUSD should reclaim the leadership role that urban school districts once had as an incubator of new schools and educational practices.\u00a0 LAUSD isn\u2019t a failed school system or an unchanging monolith.\u00a0 But it is struggling to move beyond early 20th<\/sup> Century assumptions about how to organize teaching and learning.<\/p>\n The basic \u201cproduction system\u201d for schooling hasn\u2019t changed much in a century. \u00a0\u00a0If education were software, it would be Learning 1.0, a batch processing system creating age-graded schools, a scope-and-sequence curriculum, and the enduring Carnegie Unit system of counting credits toward high school graduation.\u00a0 Most everything else followed: standards, tests, school rankings.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n But the batch processing system has severe design limitations.\u00a0 Tough luck if you learn slower or faster than most students, or if the standard curriculum doesn’t excite you.<\/p>\n Given its location, talent, and fiscal capacity, Los Angeles\u2019 public schools should create Learning 2.0 and become the world leader in personalization, adaptivity, and delivering powerful pedagogy directly to students.<\/p>\n Radical personalization brings \u201cchoice\u201d down to the student level.\u00a0 Instead of packing off to another school to get the tailored education he or she needs, students should have an array of challenging, well designed choices at their fingertips.<\/p>\n LAUSD needs a new superintendent, but before the school board appoints one, it needs to get its own house in order and stop the charter wars so that a new leader can help the district claim the peace dividend.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Los Angeles Unified School District is\u2014once again\u2014in search of a leader.\u00a0 There have been nine superintendents in the last two decades, much more turnover and change in direction than a thriving organization can withstand. The school board is rightly concerned with more instability.\u00a0 In recent days, the notoriously fractious LAUSD board has been making […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,143,98],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1346"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1346"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1346\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1348,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1346\/revisions\/1348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}