COLUMN ONE : Lessons in School Reform : A coalition of L.A. civic and education leaders plans to overhaul the city’s beleaguered district by giving more power to principals, teachers and parents. But the radical blueprint needs funding.

Mike Roos, the Sacramento powerbroker turned school reformer, describes the daunting task of remaking Los Angeles’ public schools with a tale about a woman who rubbed a magic lamp.

The woman’s first wish was for peace in the Middle East. She handed the genie a map of the new political boundaries she had in mind, but the genie refused it, saying: “I am a genie, not God.”

So the woman made a second wish: “I live in Los Angeles and I wish for you to fix the public schools.” The genie threw up his hands. “Let me see that map again,” he said.

When Roos tells the story, as he has countless times over the past year, he elicits laughter and sympathy for the challenge he has taken on as president of LEARN, a coalition of business, civic and education activists formed two years ago to overhaul the mammoth Los Angeles Unified School District.

By most accounts, LEARN, whose acronym stands for Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now, offers the last and best hope to redeem a school system that is crippled by financial problems, threatened with breakup by parents and politicians, and in danger of being torn apart by internal strife.

Last fall, after studying reform efforts nationwide, LEARN’s 625 trustees approved a plan to fix the Los Angeles school system by radically redistributing power to principals and teachers, adding on-campus social services, holding school staffs accountable for student performance, and giving parents more control over which schools their children attend.

Now, for LEARN to turn those abstractions into reality, it must win scores of small battles and enlist thousands of citizens in a decade-long crusade whose success, proponents say, will mean prosperity for the city as a whole.

To do that, Roos must harness public opinion to persuade feuding labor unions and district bureaucrats to shelve their disputes, convince state legislators to stabilize school funding and force district officials to give the city’s failing schools more incentives to succeed.

And, perhaps most important, Roos must sell a jaded public on paying more for education, either through higher taxes or cuts in other parts of the bleeding state budget.

“We are now where the rubber meets the road,” said former school board member Jackie Goldberg, who co-chaired one of LEARN’s seven task forces. “If anybody believes all of this (reform) can take place without additional funding, they’re doing a pie-in-the-sky, feel-good thing--and that’s not what LEARN is about.”

Although many of LEARN’s proposed changes are merely bureaucratic, some of the most significant improvements are expensive--particularly a system of teacher training and mentoring, including a training academy for new and veteran teachers.

If the school district--which has been forced to cut more than $1 billion from its $3.9-billion budget over the last three years--cannot find the money to fund those innovations, many of the improvements that LEARN envisions cannot be implemented.

LEARN’s ideas are largely non-controversial. They are modeled on a collection of respected educational reforms that have been adopted throughout the country in varying degrees during the past two decades.

LEARN paints a picture of a public school with the character of a private school--a semiautonomous campus with more parent support and teacher creativity. It is the kind of school rarely found in the centrally controlled, 640,000-student Los Angeles district, and the kind thousands of parents have sought as they pulled their children out of public school.

In LEARN’s vision, parents, teachers and staff would have enough clout to get a principal fired, or a teacher disciplined or transferred. Teachers could alter their method of instruction to fit each class and not be bound by a districtwide lesson plan. Student testing would measure individual comprehension more realistically than today’s standardized exams. Academic subjects would be linked to real-world experiences, and apprenticeships would abound. Vacant office buildings could provide space to relieve overcrowded classrooms. Poor or abused students and their parents would have access to on-campus social services.

As the school board prepares to vote on the LEARN reforms this month, Roos is trying to get 200,000 copies of the group’s 163-page plan--printed in six languages--into the public’s hands. He is planning radio spots to generate pressure for quick adoption and implementation, and has persuaded Farmers Insurance and Ticketmaster to include inserts promoting LEARN in their mailings to hundreds of thousands of customers.

Roos knows that selling LEARN is complicated by the difficulty of selling education in a city in which two-thirds of the 1.4-million households have no school-age children.

So for months, Roos has been rushing from one community forum to another, warning that “another time bomb” will explode here, as it did in last year’s riots, if Los Angeles fails to prepare its students to learn and work.

He would like to see the reforms tested in a few dozen of the district’s 700 schools beginning in August.

Politics is at least partially dictating that sense of urgency.

The June, 1994, state ballot will include an initiative that would, for the first time, give parents $2,500 state vouchers to pay tuition at private or parochial schools. That historic change would likely siphon more children--and millions of dollars--away from the Los Angeles district.

LEARN proponents hope that by 1994 they can point to enough changes in the district to persuade voters to oppose the voucher measure and head off proposed state legislation that would allow the district to be broken up into smaller units. In a gesture of support for the concept of school choice, LEARN proposes allowing parents to send their children to almost any of the district’s schools.

Initial approval of the LEARN reforms seems likely from a school board that is desperate to increase its credibility and rebuild the image of the battered district.

“With vouchers a year away, we really don’t have a choice,” said Board of Education President Leticia Quezada. “We have one year to prove the L.A. district is really interested in changing itself, revamping itself.”

With its broad base of support--including corporations, community groups and school system insiders--LEARN “is the best chance we have to make (reform) work,” Quezada said. “If we fail at this, I think all hope will be lost.”

At the core of LEARN’s mission is its quest to win back the hearts of middle-class families, who have defected in droves from the city’s public schools. Their support at the ballot box will be needed to provide a financial base from which the beleaguered system can rebuild.

“It’s not an issue of getting them to return (to public schools), but convincing them that the district is an attractive place to invest their tax dollars, so they’ll approve the bond issues and support the kinds of things we’ll need to get on track,” Quezada said.

To woo those voters, the district must find ways to market itself as a font of excellence for middle-class children while serving an enrollment that is increasingly Spanish-speaking and poor.

Roos, formerly a high-ranking Democratic member of the state Assembly, quit the Legislature in March, 1991, to head the education reform group. He signed on for three years, at an annual salary of more than $100,000, which is paid by LEARN’s corporate backers.

Roos has not yet put a price tag on LEARN’s reform package, but has promised that the corporate sponsors--ranging from Arco to Lockheed Corp. to the Times Mirror Co.--will bankroll start-up costs at the initial LEARN schools. He will produce a financial projection of long-term costs before asking for the school board’s endorsement this month, he said.

While LEARN seeks to make the most fundamental changes in the nation’s second-largest school system, the proposals are mild compared to a wave of reform that has swept through a number of other school districts.

In Chicago, a coalition of business leaders, educators and parents persuaded the Illinois Legislature to pass a school reform law in 1988 that requires schools to meet strict student performance requirements or face quick intervention, and gives elected councils at each of the city’s 540 public schools the right to fire the principal every four years.

In Cincinnati, officials followed the recommendations of a panel of business leaders last year and eliminated more than half of the district’s central administration, toughened graduation requirements and discipline policies, and reorganized to give teachers and principals more authority over the system’s 80 schools.

And in Edmonton, Canada, school principals have been given almost total authority over the allocation of campus budgets. That approach, used for 13 years in Edmonton’s 190 schools, has led to gains in student achievement there and in smaller systems that have piloted the method in this country.

These and other reform campaigns were studied by the team of professional consultants who developed the first draft of the LEARN proposals more than a year ago, drawing on the “best practices” employed in other districts. Those proposals were debated and refined by seven task forces of LEARN volunteers.

The proposals are laden with jargon, a kind of upbeat, highbrow vocabulary in which parents, teachers and students are stakeholders; principals are decision leaders ; LEARN members are trustees who work out the details of reform by consensus. And schools are told they need a culture of innovation.

The guiding principle of the proposals is the belief that all students, regardless of background and circumstances, can learn, given a school structure that supports that goal.

In essence, LEARN attempts to instill in public education the values that a small but growing number of U.S. businesses have learned while competing against Japanese and Western European companies.

The main lesson: In an age of shrinking resources, quality can be achieved at a low cost only when front-line workers--in the case of a school, the teachers--are given far more responsibility, discretion and accountability in the way they accomplish company goals.

Companies that follow this ethic are able to shed layers of middle managers--in this case, district administrators in central and regional offices--whose presence generally kept employees in line but stifled innovation and dampened worker morale.

Based on the experiences of other districts, the LEARN reforms would likely take five years to provide proof of success, and as long as 10 years to spread through the district.

The success of the reform campaign rests as much on LEARN’s ability to cut deals as to sell philosophy:

* The most critical deal lies in the state Legislature, where the school district must shed its reputation as a bloated, strife-infested institution to persuade lawmakers and Gov. Pete Wilson to increase school funding. If LEARN schools perform well enough--either by raising test scores or increasing student and parent participation--the Legislature might be willing to increase statewide aid to education or change the state’s funding formula to favor urban districts, which is one of LEARN’s recommendations.

* LEARN must also maintain the support of the district’s employee unions, particularly the teachers union, which is apt to oppose some recommendations that dilute tenure rights and tie teacher pay to student performance. To encourage innovation, LEARN also asks teachers to accept increased authority of principals in exchange for more classroom autonomy.

* Businesses must be persuaded to invest in public schools to make up for diminishing state funding, which is almost $1,000 per student less than the national average. California public schools receive about $4,200 per student each year, compared to more than $9,000 in states such as New York and New Jersey. LEARN would also ask local companies to create a network of partnerships with schools to provide internships and apprenticeships in a wide variety of academic areas.

* The county must agree to assign social service workers to campuses, so that schools can double as social services pit stops, with probation officers, child welfare workers and mental health experts offering periodic office hours. While this is being done experimentally on some campuses and need not increase the county’s costs, it does require intricate scheduling compromises with county government.

LEARN trustee Howell Ellerman, executive assistant to the president of Occidental College, said he believes the high amount of attention LEARN devotes to school-based social services and programs for non-English-speaking children makes it virtually impossible for the district to recover the loyalties of more affluent families.

LEARN “doesn’t create a compelling vision for people who have traditional families in which children are well-adjusted, eat hot meals in the morning and are ready to learn,” said Ellerman, the father of a 3-year-old child.

“It perpetuates a two-tier school system. . . . (The district) becomes a social service agency with an educational component . . . As an outsider, it looks like you’re rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” he said. “The reforms that need to occur are beyond the scope the group could undertake.”

But education reform expert Allan Odden said the only way to accomplish the type of reforms LEARN proposes in an urban district such as Los Angeles is to provide the “social supports” that will allow even the most disadvantaged youngsters to succeed.

“If all schools set as their target a high achievement level for all kids, the only way you meet those needs in some schools is to have social supports available,” said Odden, a USC professor who is one of the directors of the education think tank Policy Analysis for California Education.

In fact, some LEARN trustees worry that the plan does not go far enough to address the needs of poor and minority children, and that its performance standards are not rigorous enough to force improvement in inner-city schools.

Still others complain that the plan does not do enough to correct the funding deficiencies that have resulted from Proposition 13’s restrictions on districts’ ability to raise money through tax increases.

Roos chides LEARN’s critics for “waiting for the perfect plan” and insists that “we have to get the genie out of the bottle” and begin testing the reforms before passing judgment on their merit.

Although LEARN has evolved relatively late in the national trend to reform public education, that works to its advantage in many ways. It is able to take advantage of experiences in districts that have broken new ground in movements such as decentralization, school-to-work transition and school-based social services.

One of Wilson’s programs, Operation Healthy Start, is funneling millions of dollars for school counseling services to districts that can match the state aid. And the state Department of Education is in the process of changing the way students are tested--scrapping standardized exams in favor of more in-depth evaluations, another LEARN recommendation.

USC’s Odden said LEARN’s timing works for and against it.

“It’s to the group’s advantage in some ways, waiting a little bit, because they’re able to move beyond the basics, on to a higher level of expectations for what students learn and are able to do,” he said.

“But this is also a pretty tough environment for reform, with unrest at all the high levels (of the district) across all the major actors,” Odden said. “Still, this could be the kind of initiative--if it becomes the glue that attracts support--that moves the system forward.”

LEARN’s Lessons

The LEARN reform plan seeks “substantial and immediate restructuring” in the Los Angeles Unified School District, proposing major changes in eight of the school system’s primary functions. Here are excerpts from its report:

Student Learning and Assessment

“Every student will be expected to master a ‘core of learning’ . . . (which) promotes learning as a thinking, problem-solving process. . . . Instead of regulations and procedures, Los Angeles schools will create a culture that . . . emphasizes successful learning experiences for all students.”

*

Governance and Accountability

“Each school community will develop its own education plan and achievement targets measuring progress toward defined educational outcomes. . . . Budget allocations will be decentralized. . . . The principal will have primary responsibility and ultimate accountability for leadership in the school.”

*

Educator Development

“Teachers will be involved in the selection of all new faculty and administrators for the school. Professional practice also will be strengthened with peer coaching, peer assistance and peer involvement in evaluation procedures.”

*

Parent Involvement

“Each school community, through collaboration of parents, faculty, administration, certificated staff and support services staff, will develop its own parent involvement plan. The plan will include strategies to involve parents of all students . . . in their children’s education in the home, at school and in the community.”

*

Social Services

“Children cannot learn if they are hungry, ill or frightened. . . . Our schools need help from the public agencies and community organizations that touch the lives of students and their families every day.”

*

School-to-Work Transition

“Beginning with preschool and running through the primary grades, career awareness will be part of academic instruction. . . . The public schools will take responsibility for ensuring that all students achieve their education and career goals--including college--when they graduate from high school.”

*

Facilities

“Today’s unprecedented demand for schoolrooms will force Los Angeles Unified to make better use of existing facilities, develop new facilities, improve school maintenance, foster joint development with private organizations and seek legislative solutions to obtain needed flexibility and funds.”

*

Finance

“We need a stable, less fragmented school funding system, a simplified allocation system that provides discretionary resources . . . at every school, and sufficient funds to provide the intense services needed by so many of the district’s students.”