Joining a coterie of big-city mayors, Antonio Villaraigosa, Los Angeles's new chief executive, is moving to assert more control over troubled city schools.

Citing perennially low test scores and high dropout rates, Mayor Villaraigosa has repeated calls for a stronger mayoral role in school reform, including the idea of ending school-board elections in favor of appointing board members himself.

His bid follows mayor-driven shake-ups of public schools in recent years in Chicago, New York, Cleveland, and Detroit.

In challenging the status quo at the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), now led by an elected seven-member board, Villaraigosa takes on one of the thorniest issues of urban America - and one that is likely to pit his new administration against some of its natural allies, such as teachers unions.

"I intend to lead the case for reform of public education," the mayor said at a recent gathering of business leaders and parents. He cited three goals that he says will make public schools more accountable: push down dropout rates, raise test scores to meet federal and state standards, and ease parents' frustrations with the LAUSD.

"Look at us, how could we do worse?" Villaraigosa said, pointing to a recent Harvard University study that shows roughly half of black and Latino boys in the LAUSD drop out before graduating. At 27 high schools, fewer than 25 percent of all students showed proficiency in recent state English exams. Both are unacceptable for a city that wants to be world-class, said the mayor. "We need to make a governance change," he said. "I will not be deterred in this."

His comments echo a sentiment in other cities that autonomous school systems could benefit from restructuring and more accountable, top-down governance.

"What you are seeing in Los Angeles might be the wave of the future, because city school districts everywhere are desperate for new answers, new governance," says Russlyn Ali of The Education Trust-West, a nonprofit group dedicated to closing the achievement gap separating poor and minority students from other young Californians. "It is becoming ... obvious that fixing education is not something that can be done within the existing structure but needs to come from outside. L.A. is pushing that conversation forward."

Each city's concerns are unique, experts say, and problems in Los Angeles are more complicated than most. In addition to a $5.7 billion budget (roughly equal to the city's own), LAUSD educates 727,000 students spread out across 29 municipalities. (Some of these communities are part of Los Angeles, and others have contracts with the district.) The district has far higher percentages of poor and non-English-speaking students than the state average.

The mayor currently has no power over the school system - and obtaining it would require a change in the city charter and possibly additional state legislation.

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