A Key for Zacarias: Tapping Sources of Help for Schools

It is now Ruben Zacarias’ turn. The new superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District inherits a troubled, overcrowded district. A veteran of the system for more than 30 years, Zacarias knows the problems intimately. The question is: What can he do about them?

The former deputy superintendent promised a great deal during his campaign for the top LAUSD job. He would raise test scores, turn around the lowest-performing schools, stop passing students who had failed to do the work, improve school safety, speed up bilingual education and hire a business czar to focus on the district’s wide-ranging operations.

Zacarias will need strong support and at least four votes on the seven-member school board to implement his prescriptions for change. Now is not the time for cautious leadership, continuation of the sad status quo or retrenchment. The LAUSD can count on a bigger budget after many lean years, thanks to better economic times in Sacramento and the proceeds from Proposition BB, the $2.4-billion school bond measure passed by the voters in April. The time and fiscal climate are right for transformation.

The district’s worst-performing 100 schools are the new superintendent’s first priority. He has indicated he will require those principals to identify weaknesses and solutions and write specific action plans. He also must stop the informal practice of concentrating low-performing teachers and administrators at schools in certain parts of the city. An analysis by Times staff writers Amy Pyle and Doug Smith found that the worst schools tended to employ more novice teachers, amid obstacles to achievement such as high poverty, low parental literacy and student transiency. Zacarias can’t fix external problems, but he can encourage top-notch teachers, including those who hold advanced degrees, to take on the challenge of working at tough schools in South Los Angeles and elsewhere.

Turning around 100 schools won’t be easy. Zacarias can count on LEARN, the nonprofit school-management reform effort, to assist with teacher training. He will also need the help of the teachers union and the administrators union. The unions are willing to participate in “intervention” teams that can help principals and teachers determine what is wrong, improve their skills and fix problems that interfere with learning. Intervention, which involves sending experts into the schools, is working in New York and some other school districts across the nation. It should be tried in the LAUSD quickly in order to rid schools of bad teaching and lax leadership.

The new superintendent also can count on help from an unlikely quarter: City Hall. Mayor Richard Riordan, in his second-term inaugural speech last Tuesday, promised to improve Los Angeles schools, although neither the mayor nor any other element of city government has any authority in public education. “Schools are everybody’s business,” Riordan said. He is absolutely right; he understands that good public schools attract middle-class families and new businesses to the city. He says he plans to use his bully pulpit, his influence and his deal-making ability to help improve the nation’s second-largest school district. Certainly the city’s schoolchildren can use such friends in high places.

Ruben Zacarias is in charge. He must summon all his years of experience to surprise and inspire, to act with dogged determination to move this district forward. He could fairly be judged even in his first year on whether he hires a competent chief administrator and gives him or her real power; on identifying poorly performing principals and proving he can remove them, and on putting in place a solid plan to improve the lowest 100 schools. Zacarias can find motivation in the challenging knowledge that many, including this newspaper, didn’t think that this longtime insider was the best person to lead a revolution within the LAUSD. In this instance, we would be delighted to be proved wrong.