Get Los Angeles Unified, the mayor, unions, and universities together to help schools get better? Yeah, we've heard that story before. They've got the attention span of a moth and fly away toward the next political flame.
This time it might be different.
Last month these worthy parties signed something called the LA Compact: A Collaboration to Transform Education in Los Angeles. Shortly thereafter, the school board sent layoff notices to 5,200 teachers, the District got sued, and the feds began to investigate how the schools do or don't teach English language learners. No wonder hardly anyone noticed.
But the LA Compact is worthy of notice and a dollop of hope. Modeled after the Boston Compact, which guided reform there for 20 years, the Los Angeles version tries to create the kind of big issue, unitary politics that gets beyond parochialism and pettiness. It's built around three high sounding goals: Getting all students to graduate from high school, to have access to college and be prepared for it, and to have access and pathways to careers.
The Los Angeles Unified School District is a long way from reaching any of those targets, but the Compact has some interesting characteristics that may allow it to avoid some of the pitfalls of past reforms.
First, there are no unrealistic timelines. Nothing like "first in math and science by 2000," which President Clinton famously declared. Nothing like "everyone proficient by 2014," which is now embedded in the federal No Child Left Behind Act.
Instead, the Compact creates benchmarks and annual progress indicators. By this fall, it pledges to have measurements in place, and some of them are spelled out in the agreement itself.
This anchoring in known and actionable goals makes the Compact vastly different than the soaring language of LEARN and LAAMP, the large scale reforms of the 1990s. Unlike these