Mayor’s Lesson Plan Faces Big Test

SACRAMENTO —  In engineering his school control plan, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has portrayed himself as the one person who would be accountable for the success of the massive Los Angeles Unified School District.

But the bill that emerged from the Legislature on Tuesday presents the mayor with a blueprint that in many ways makes running the district more complex than ever.

Villaraigosa has achieved, in essence, a power-sharing arrangement with the school board and a new Council of Mayors that he will dominate, but not absolutely control. The mayor also will have direct authority over three low-performing high schools -- as yet unnamed -- and their feeder elementary and middle schools.

It’s an untried system to begin with, but there are numerous other uncertainties introduced by the legislation.

Among other things, Villaraigosa’s bill raises questions about the role of teachers in deciding curriculum, stirs constitutional questions about his right to oversee schools and may even impede what many consider to be the district’s most successful endeavor -- the construction of schools.

The bill may be, as Villaraigosa has argued, the best that he could extract from a wary Legislature. Indeed, it took an afternoon of heavy lobbying Tuesday to ensure the bill’s passage after an initial scare that the mayor might not have the votes.

But will his many compromises -- and the rapid-fire speed with which he drove his bill through Sacramento -- undermine his goal of raising student achievement and lowering dropout rates in a district where change often moves glacially?

“This is completely unprecedented. It’s risky,” Stanford education professor Mike Kirst said of the mayor’s plan to share power with the elected school board and the mayors of other cities served by the school district. That is an approach that diverges sharply from other big cities where mayors have gained more complete control over their school systems.

Villaraigosa and his aides downplay or dismiss the various criticisms. They say his school reform bill -- AB 1381 -- will foster new cooperation with the school board, teachers and parents and that it will fundamentally reshape and invigorate a lethargic bureaucracy that has underserved generations of students.

As for the specifics of how he would improve schools, Villaraigosa has repeatedly told skeptics that he will deliver them once his measure clears the Legislature. On Tuesday, that moment arrived.

Now the mayor will confront the challenge of improving a school system that has stymied the best intentions of many who have come before.

Villaraigosa said that success would depend not only on his leadership but on the contributions of his district partners -- including school board members who have weathered his blistering criticism over the last year.

“This is without question a radical departure from where we’ve been in the past,” Villaraigosa said.

He spoke with the tone of a politician who did whatever it took to win a hard-fought campaign and was now prepared to let bygones be bygones: “Without question, this is an opportunity for a partnership between parents and teachers and local schools, collaborative principals, the mayor, the Council of Mayors, cities [and] the school board working together.”

Yet even those who admire Villaraigosa’s willingness to take on the politically volatile issue of the city’s public schools have reservations about the resulting legislation.

For one thing, the bill’s final form suffered from his adversarial relationship with the district.

“I’m disappointed that you didn’t have the same dialogue with the school board that you extended” to the teachers unions, Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg (D-Los Angeles) told Villaraigosa during a hearing early Tuesday before the Assembly Education Committee, which she chairs. Goldberg did not vote on the legislation, saying that she had a conflict because she was a candidate for L.A. schools superintendent.

The mayor’s hostilities with the board also present another imminent problem. The bill probably will face an immediate legal challenge.

District officials have talked about pursuing a lawsuit on the grounds that the bill violates the state Constitution’s requirement that schools remain within the education system. An opinion from the state legislative counsel suggests that the district has a case. The mayor’s team asserts that the bill will survive such a challenge.

Beyond the legal unknowns, Villaraigosa’s legislation creates logistical hurdles. At the very least, the bill’s language has resulted in confusion and conflicting interpretations.

District officials and lawmakers who considered the bill Tuesday stumbled over the bill’s language on curriculum.

The bill permits principals, teachers and parents at individual schools to “develop a plan for implementing curriculum that meets the individual needs of its pupils.”

Critics -- and even some supporters -- worry that such language will hand teachers too much authority over instruction.

Villaraigosa’s aides insist that the bill simply gives teachers and schools the ability to supplement and enhance the district’s prescribed curriculum.

The president of United Teachers Los Angeles, which worked closely with the mayor on crafting the legislation, concurred. A.J. Duffy said that the union had failed to achieve influence over curriculum, and that it will continue to work toward that end.

“The bottom line is that the bill begins to allow us to do business in a different way in public education in Los Angeles,” Duffy said. “We feel there’s language in there that we can hang our hats on that will allow us to begin the necessary process of dismantling this bureaucracy.”

Duffy acknowledged that the bill adds bureaucracy, namely, the Council of Mayors and Villaraigosa’s oversight of three high schools and their feeder schools. “Where bureaucracy becomes evil,” he said, “is the way the district does it.”

As of Jan. 1, this bureaucracy comes into play in the hiring or firing of the superintendent. A prospective schools chief would first get the school board’s OK, and then need 90% support from the Council of Mayors. Villaraigosa would count for 80% because his city makes up about that proportion of the school district.

For now, the school board is using the old system -- where it alone makes the choice -- in finding a replacement for retiring Supt. Roy Romer. This too will prove complicated if the board signs a contract before January with someone the mayor does not support.

One tool that Villaraigosa’s reforms lacks is any power to renegotiate employee contracts, alter work rules that benefit teachers or reconstitute low-performing schools as charter schools. Mayors in other cities have used such powers.

“It could help to have the ability to transfer teachers and, for example, to pay new teachers more if that was needed to increase the supply of qualified teachers,” said New York University professor Pedro Noguera who specializes in urban school reform.

Among other issues, school district officials have complained that including the Council of Mayors in major financial decisions creates impossible budget-approval deadlines.

District officials also assert that new required waiting periods in the contracting process will slow the school system’s $19-billion school construction program, adding $150 million to $200 million in costs -- the equivalent of two high schools or four elementary schools.

But Villaraigosa’s top legal advisor, Thomas Saenz, accused critics of “grasping at straws.” He said the notification requirements and waiting periods were added to address an earlier district complaint: that the bill lacked so-called sunshine provisions to ensure the open and honest awarding of contracts. He said subsequent legislation could correct any alleged flaws.

Saenz said the Council of Mayors, which includes representatives of 27 cities and some of the five county supervisors, could meet as often as needed.

What would the quorum be for such meetings? Would Villaraigosa be a quorum all by himself because he represents 80% of district students?

Saenz wasn’t sure.

It was just one more unknown in the new, uncharted landscape of the school district.

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Blume reported from Los Angeles and Helfand from Sacramento.