Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Unified School Board named long-time LAUSD employee Michelle King as the new superintendent.
The move came after a lengthy, nation-wide search. Leading the nation's second largest school district is a tough job— with lagging student achievement, dwindling enrollment and funding problems.
How can anyone begin to turn a district like this around?
Joining Take Two to discuss:
- John Rogers, professor of education at UCLA and director of UCLA's Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access (IDEA)
- David Plank, Stanford University professor and executive director of Policy Analysis for California Education
Interview highlights:
On the choice of an insider like Michelle King to head up LAUSD
"My take is that it was a very wise choice and a very prudent choice. School boards often look to a new superintendent to magically solve the problems of the district, or to set a district off in a brand new direction, to bring some brilliant new idea into the district that will change everything... It never works. That is a recipe for 'short term-ism,' a quick turnover of superintendents. Because when the ideas begin to fail, those who didn't support the ideas begin to go on the attack, and the district is simply whiplashed back and forth between competing visions." -David Plank
On the expectations placed on a new superintendent
"When you look at what's happened with urban superintendents over the last couple decades, you see that the tenure of urban superintendents is very short. You have this churn of superintendents coming in, not meeting expectations, and then new searches going on. This doesn't happen because the people that are filling these positions are somehow inadequate. It happens in large part because we place overreaching expectations on one person to do transformative work when we as a society have not invested sufficiently in our public schools. And probably equally important, have not invested sufficiently in the social and welfare and health services that need to wrap around the schools so that all young people are entering schools ready to learn." -John Rogers
On how important funding is to making a good district
"Funding makes everything easier, it simply greases the wheels of change... It certainly contributes to employee satisfaction in the system, but money really isn't everything.... L.A. has been very fortunate in the last couple of years that California has had great budget years and has provided the district with substantially more money in each year, but that's not going to last forever and the structural deficit really has to be addressed. And that means that money better not be everything, money better not be the solution to this problem, because L.A. is not going to have a lot more money in the next few years." -David Plank
On the movement of families out of the district
"Because we do not provide quality education across the entire region, we accept something like this triage approach to education where we try to provide quality education for a small number of students because we assume that's all that we can serve really really well. And we do that through magnet schools, we allow for escape valves... through small districts, sometimes escape valves come through charter schools. What we need to have is quality education for all students across the entire region so that parents don't feel like they need to move out of their own community or somehow find a way to access a permit out of the district." -John Rogers
To hear the full interview, click the player above.
Series: Good Schools
As part of its Good Schools series, Take Two looks at the education landscape in the Los Angeles area. That includes its public schools, magnets, charters, private institutions and dual-language programs. You’ll hear from parents, academics, teachers, kids and even a couple of TV show producers.
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