| The Death of Public School Choice |  |  |
| EDUCATION By Charles Taylor Kerchner and Dominic J. Brewer (Posted first at HuffingtonPost.com) T  he Los Angeles Unified School District board, which in August voted 6-1 for a competition between internal and external education providers, did its best to kill it off on last week. A different policy for change is needed. Here's why. The board's Public School Choice resolution subjected 24 new schools and 12 chronically underperforming ones to a request-for-proposal process. This was thought of as a spirited but fair competition that invited participation from a wide swath of organizations.In the heat of summer, the hope was that the resolution would spur the district further on the path of becoming a networked organization, "a system of schools" rather than a massive hierarchy designed in the early 20th Century. It is already well on its way. Of the district's 885 schools, some 155 are charter schools. In addition, 172 magnet schools are freed from some District regulation. Two prototype charter districts are under operation. The Mayor's partnership operates 11 schools. Locke High School is operated by a charter management organization. The public school choice resolution raised the prospect of a rapid acceleration of this approach. In the space of only a few weeks, wondrous things happened. Seventy-nine proposals were written for these schools, 41 from charter schools and other external operators, 4 from the Mayor's partnership, 34 from internal groups of teachers and administrators. Alongside the charters, the most innovative LAUSD administrators were suddenly given the green light to innovate within the district. Teacher groups came forward with ideas that had been brewing for years. Principals of some of the failing schools gained cooperation from their faculties when it was known that an external takeover might be possible. Think of it as a jungle where hundreds of leopards were furiously changing their spots. (The rest of the Kerchner/Brewer article .) |
