Learning from New York

IT’S A GRIM LITANY familiar to too many urban school systems: Failing students who are passed from one grade to the next. Crime-ridden schools frightening to students and teachers alike. An ineffective bureaucracy. A politicized school board. A community fractured between uninvolved parents and others ready to help if only someone asked them.

All these features, to varying degrees, are present in the nation’s two largest school districts, Los Angeles and New York City. And though neither district has solved any of these problems, New York has made more progress than Los Angeles, in part because in New York, the mayor controls the schools.

During the mayoral campaign, Antonio Villaraigosa promised to assume “ultimate control and oversight” of the schools. Yet he has been lukewarm to a proposal in Sacramento that would do just that. To overcome his hesitation, he may want to look at the record of his New York counterpart, Michael R. Bloomberg.

Comparisons between New York and Los Angeles are always imperfect. The New York system spends about 50% more per student than L.A. does, and is about half again as large (it has about 1.1 million students to about 760,000 in L.A.). And it would take years, even if the legislation in Sacramento were to pass, for Villaraigosa to get the kind of control Bloomberg has now. That said, it’s useful to examine what Bloomberg did once he gained control in January 2002 -- and to ask whether mayoral control would allow Villaraigosa to do something similar.

One of Bloomberg’s first initiatives was to cut the system’s bureaucracy, freeing up more than $200 million. He also launched a fundraising effort that brought in $270 million. Among the initiatives the money was used for, three are notable: reducing class sizes, hiring 1,200 parent coordinators to get parents more involved and creating a principal-training academy. Bloomberg also increased the police presence at more than a dozen schools where crime and violence were major problems.

There were missteps. Rules about how teachers conduct their classrooms were so rigid in some schools that teachers were given egg timers to measure how long they spent on certain activities; administrators have vowed to be more reasonable. Some critics contend that, under Bloomberg, the system discourages independent research into its results.

Overall, though, Bloomberg has shown how quickly the nation’s largest school system can progress under determined leadership.

He proved this most dramatically with a policy prohibiting the promotion of third-, fifth- and, most recently, seventh-graders who were failing reading and math, a program that was so fiercely opposed that he was forced to remove members of his appointed school policy board to win its approval. Once it was, the students were enrolled in remedial Saturday classes to bring them up to par. On the most recent state and city exams, elementary and middle school students turned in record performances. Meanwhile, the number of students held back a grade dropped from where it had been before the mandate.

Not all of Bloomberg’s policies work so well. But even when they fail, he has an answer for his critics: I have responsibility for the schools, so I have to do what I think is right -- and voters can put me out of office if I fail. It is hard to argue with such reasoning.

There are steps Villaraigosa could take to help the L.A. schools without gaining Bloomberg-style control. He could increase police presence at the most troubled schools, for instance. But deeper change won’t happen without mayoral governance, and although Villaraigosa says he is committed to mayoral control, he cannot afford to move slowly.

The district has reduced some administrative bloat, but it won’t restructure itself to put more money into campuses. L.A. schools Supt. Roy Romer has identified better-trained principals as one of the district’s greatest needs; L.A. could certainly use an academy like New York’s, but it’s unlikely to get one under the current structure.

Meanwhile, too few people vote in (or even notice) school board elections. Many parents feel powerless, but the district lacks the resources to involve them more deeply in their children’s education. And private money, which L.A. has in as much abundance as New York, won’t flow into the schools in any volume without visible and accountable leadership.

New York models some possibilities for L.A., and L.A. voters are clearly intrigued. The Legislature should allow L.A. to follow in New York’s footsteps and give the city’s mayor the power to improve the school system.