WestEd, 2003
The California-based regional lab named WestEd was commissioned by the Los Angeles Alliance for Student Achievement to help rethink the structure and governance of public education in America's second largest city. The result is a surprisingly hard-hitting report on the many ways that LAUSD's current structure and governance interfere with needed improvements in the city's schools and an impressively bold set of recommendations for birthing a "new charter system" in Los Angeles. WestEd would do this via the California charter school law, both to create needed educational capacity and to demonstrate how public education can be delivered in very different ways. The report is coy about how large such a charter network should be - news reports mention 50,000 youngsters and 100 schools - but it's otherwise comprehensive and well thought out. Will California's fiscal crisis allow something this ambitious to be undertaken in the next few years? We should hope so. There's an original and promising model for urban-education reform visible in these pages. Perhaps less promising - albeit sensible enough - is the section of the report that lays out a quintet of policy and governance changes for the larger LAUSD system itself. You can download a copy (it's 52 pages long) at http://www.wested.org/online_pubs/LA-Alliance-Report.pdf.
