L.A.'s mayor is latest to tackle school reform

"L.A. has a messy size and geographical problem that will not be easily solved," says Michael Kirst, director of Policy Analysis for California Education.

One challenge, say Mr. Kirst and others, is determining the kind of power change up for consideration. Villaraigosa has put forward no specific plan. Instead, he wants a dialogue to hammer out details, which might include dividing the LAUSD into smaller units and examining teacher standards, tenure, hiring, and facilities. An advisory board is already looking at how other city services - from buses to personal safety to healthcare - can support better school attendance.

"This is an extraordinarily complicated pathway to get governance change," says Tom Saenz, the mayor's legal and education adviser. On the table, he says, is everything between the two basic models - centralized control in the mayor's office versus more diffuse accountability via board elections within subdistricts. "We want to involve the critical stakeholders," he says.

Mayors in Detroit, the District of Columbia, Harrisburg, Pa., and Oakland, Calif., have split the difference - appointing about half of school board members and bowing to direct election for the other half, Kirst says. Results, he says, have been ineffectiveness and inaction.

In Chicago, Cleveland, and New York, where mayors now exert greater power, results are better, as measured by student achievement tests. Today, for the first time since 1990, more than half of New York's elementary and middle school students are performing at or above grade level, and a record number of fourth-graders there are meeting state reading and writing standards.

Superintendents and teachers unions, not surprisingly, often resist what they see as a mayoral power grab. Indeed, teachers unions and school board members in L.A. are mounting a campaign to challenge Villaraigosa.

"This is a bad idea. I am opposed to mayoral takeover," says A.J. Duffy, president of United Teachers Los Angeles. "I fail to see where replacing one kind of bureaucracy with another is going to help the classroom teacher on the site."

Mr. Duffy and others say Villaraigosa is overstating his case for a takeover. The LAUSD has made strides in the past five years - though primarily among elementary school students - and more changes are coming, they say.

Others worry the debate is focused too much on who controls the LAUSD and not enough on new teaching methods that would improve scores. They are also concerned about changing the charter to hand power to the current mayor, and then being buffeted later by a change of administrations.

"I am not so concerned about Antonio but who comes after him, and whether that person will use the appointment of school board members as a means of political largess," says Duffy. This has already happened in New York, he says, where people in key positions have "no background in education and have created a rift between the city bureaucracy and the classroom teachers."

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