Even among the nation’s notoriously woeful urban public-school systems, the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) has long stood out for its pervasive academic failure and bureaucratic intransigence. Well-known across the nation as the backdrop for such blood-soaked Hollywood dramas as 187, the nation’s second-largest school district has one of the highest concentrations of dropout factories in America; a mere 57 percent of eighth-graders entering high school in 2004 graduated within five years, according to data from the U.S. Department of Education and the California Department of Education. Despite this record of failure, LAUSD has successfully resisted the reform efforts of parents, activists, and politicians.
But these days, the district is embracing the kind of school-choice and systemic-overhaul measures long touted by elements of the nation’s school-reform movement.
Last week, LAUSD finished soliciting bids to hand over control of twelve of its schools to private managers. Among the bidders is Green Dot Schools, one of the nation’s most successful charter-school operators and a longtime foe of the district; two years ago, it managed the spectacular feat of forcing the district to hand over control of one of its high schools. Another 186 of LAUSD’s schools will be placed into private hands within the next three years.
LAUSD is also reversing its longstanding opposition to charter schools — the publicly funded but privately run entities that are part of Pres. Barack Obama’s own school-reform agenda. The district authorized 30 new charters last year and will approve the startup of 50 more by the 2011–2012 school year. This means some 200 charters will eventually operate in the district, making the City of Angels as much a bastion of school choice as Indianapolis, Milwaukee, or New Orleans.
An even more important win for choice advocates came earlier this month, when LAUSD enacted rules allowing parents to remove principals and teaching staffs in the district’s worst-performing schools. The district can lose control of a school altogether if 51 percent of parents petition for charter conversion. None of America’s foremost charter-friendly school systems — New York City’s Department of Education, D.C. Public Schools, and Chicago Public Schools — currently give parents this power. A state law enacted last month as part of a series of reform measures will allow the district’s students to ditch LAUSD’s worst schools for better-performing ones in surrounding districts.
Certainly, these victories can be short-lived. The measures have already earned the wrath of — and threats of lawsuits from — United Teachers Los Angeles, an affiliate of the National Education Association renowned for its bellicose behavior. The teachers’ union’s supporters are adopting nastier tactics. At one school last week, flyers appeared claiming that Latino-immigrant parents would end up being deported if they supported charter conversion.
LAUSD itself has a history of heavy-handed disdain toward parents, politicians, and citizens alike. From tearing down such landmarks such as the Ambassador Hotel (a former Tinseltown hotspot and the scene of Robert Kennedy’s assassination) to epic bungles such as the Edward R. Roybal Learning Center (which took 20 years to build, cost taxpayers $1 billion, and has been partly torn down at least once amid concerns about toxic-waste exposure and earthquakes), the district has long paid no regard to public opposition.
LAUSD has been particularly unwilling to embrace any kind of innovation. It once employed famed math teacher Jaime Escalante, whose success in reversing the low achievement of poor, mostly-Latino students at gritty Garfield High School inspired the 1988 film Stand and Deliver. But by 1991, district bureaucrats forced Escalante to leave for greener pastures. The district also adroitly pits the interests of L.A. leaders against those in the 27 other cities in which it serves. Three years ago, L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (a former California state-assembly speaker) watched the state legislature water down his own proposed takeover of the school district amid opposition from district officials, teachers’-union bosses, and rival politicians. State courts put the kibosh on the plan altogether.
But in the last two years, LAUSD has found itself bested by Steve Barr, an unlikely convert to choice who chairs Green Dot Schools. The cofounder of the liberal voter-registration group Rock the Vote, Barr founded Green Dot in 1999 in response to concerns from poor and lower-middle-class parents tired of sending their children to LAUSD schools. Since then, Barr has succeeded where the district has failed spectacularly: improving the academic achievement of struggling Latino students, most of whom come from immigrant and first-generation American homes. In Green Dot’s class of 2008, 73 percent of Latino freshmen graduated four years later versus 39 percent of Latinos who attended LAUSD.
After one LAUSD high school, Thomas Jefferson, was wracked by a series of riots, Barr worked with parents there to take advantage of a clause in a state law that allows for school districts to convert their schools into charters. Ultimately, Barr collected 10,000 signatures demanding the district hand over the school to private hands. When LAUSD refused, Barr organized what is now Parent Revolution and began efforts to convert other LAUSD schools into charters. He won state approval to open as many Green Dot charters within the district as he wanted.
This rivalry from charter schools, along with the successful move by Villaraigosa to elect a reform-minded majority to the LAUSD Board, forced the district to be more attentive to parents. By 2007, Barr forced LAUSD to hand over one of its schools, Locke High, to Green Dot. At the same time, the district began experimenting with concepts such as the Belmont Zone of Choice, a pilot program in which parents in L.A.’s North Hollywood neighborhoods could choose from a number of existing and independently run “pilot schools.” This past summer, as Barr began mobilizing new protests, LAUSD superintendent Ramon Cortines (an adviser to Villaraigosa who once ran New York City’s public schools) responded with new school-choice plans.
Parents have already shown their support for choice. Some 60,643 students now attend charter schools, a 19 percent increase over enrollment for the previous school year; LAUSD enrollment, meanwhile, declined by 3 percent.
The district has of course hemmed and hawed as to the extent to which it will accede to parent demands for charter conversion. But if successful, LAUSD’s moves could spur similar efforts elsewhere. It may serve as a sterling example of how a traditional public-school district can overhaul its operations and improve student achievement. Declares Gabe Rose, an activist with Parent Revolution: “It’s exciting to see LAUSD, one of the slowest major urban districts to reform, finally bringing about innovative policies to give parents power.”
For L.A.’s children — and other urban communities’ — this experiment in choice may be the first step toward wider options and better lives.
– RiShawn Biddle, editor of Dropout Nation, is author of a recent report on education-reform efforts sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.