Long Standing LAUSD Reform Policy: And This Too Shall Pass - Perdaily.com

Long Standing LAUSD Reform Policy: And This Too Shall Pass - Perdaily.com

Long Standing LAUSD Reform Policy: And This Too Shall Pass

by Leonard

Reforming public education at LAUSD or throughout the United States is really not that difficult. While there are heated arguments for and against charter schools, small learning communities, magnet schools, teacher competency, student deficits, and parent involvement, the clear answer without minimizing the difficulty of the task involved is that its not rocket science to give students an excellent public education. As Charles Kerchner points out in his book Learning From L.A. - Institutional Change in American Public Education, there was a clear path to academic excellence pointed out on many occasions during the long history of LAUSD that he discusses. So why didn't it work?

At the beginning of his book, Professor Kerchner talks about the awareness in the mid-1980s that "substantive change was necessary" to address the needs of "disadvantaged children." It was also clear to all reformers, witnessed by the similarity of the plans they proposed, that "the District's failure to educate ... created a crisis."Virtually all these plans proposed the following four pronged approach: decentralization, standards, choice, and grassroots participation. So why didn't it work?
Three factors stand out in my mind that continue to contribute most profoundly to the premeditated thwarting of any meaningful reform of LAUSD:

1. The intelligent and well thought out foundational principles of those who proposed these reforms unrealistically projected their own education and experience onto the much referred to education stakeholders -- parents, teachers, and administrators taking as a given that they possessed the higher levels of thinking described in Bloom's Taxonomy necessary to understand and more importantly implement these reform ideas without being manipulated into just making vacuous slogans out of them.
2. Successful implementation of reform required the politically difficult honest recognition that one could not just