A UCLA Anderson School professor recently published a book based
on three years of research that links school success with increased
independence from school districts.
Professor William G. Ouchi, Sigoloff Chair in Corporate Renewal,
says that an essential truth applies to both the operation of
business as well as public schools: Decision making must be
decentralized or it will fail to meet the needs of its
customers.
Decentralization is just one of the “Seven Keys to
Success” offered in Ouchi’s book “Making Schools
Work: A Revolutionary Plan to Get Your Children the Education They
Need,” the result after observing some of the best and worst
school systems in North America.
What began for Ouchi as a civic activity when he embarked on
school reform in 1990 with the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for
Restructuring Now (LEARN), has become his principle work.
Ouchi’s research may be timely for California, whose
eighth graders’ reading scores were the worst in the country
in 2002.
“The real problems in failing education systems are not
the teachers, students or budgets,” Ouchi said. “The
problems lie at the district level.”
Education systems should be entrepreneurial rather than
bureaucratic, he said, stressing that power and money must be
dispersed to individual schools.
Ouchi points to the Edmonton School District in Alberta, Canada
as a prime example of where giving the principal real control over
his budget improved the quality of education and helped student
achievement to soar.
This district, plagued in 1973 by diminishing enrollment and low
achievement, now has students knocking on its door to enroll. In
fact, they have put two private schools out of business, said
Ouchi.
Part, if not all, of this phenomenon may be attributed to a
change, made by a new president, Mike Stromnitsky, which gave the
principals of his schools access to 91.7 percent of their
budgets.
In comparison, principals in the Los Angeles Unified School
District see only 6.7 percent of their budgets.
The difference may reveal itself in the fact that Edmonton is
able to spend 20 cents more of every dollar for use in the
classroom.
Another change made by the Edmonton District was a
“weighted student formula,” Ouchi said.
With this system, students are ranked on a scale of need, from
one to 9.2. A one would be a student with no apparent hardship, and
$2,600 would be devoted to him or her.
A child from a low-income family with severe special needs and
limited English language abilities might be designated a 9.2, which
would merit $24,000.
In California, this money would pass to a central support
office, Ouchi said.
“In the end, it would flow to the wealthy neighborhoods,
where parents have political clout,” he said.
But in the case of the Edmonton District, the student funds
follow the student to whichever school the family chooses for him
or her to attend, thus bringing school accountability and family
school choice into the equation.
“To build a really top-flight school district, you have to
embrace dramatic changes in how things are run,” writes Ouchi
in his book.
“Successful school districts … give teachers and
principals the freedom to be entrepreneurs, to identify and solve
their own problems with their own unique solutions,” he
writes.
Aimee Dorr, professor of education and dean of the Graduate
School of Education and Information Studies, agreed that
bureaucratic mandates of larger school systems can hinder
achievement but stressed that before debating the management of
resources, an adequate resource base must be attained.
“It is crucial that all resources be organized to the kind
of teaching and learning that will assure that all students will
succeed academically,” she said, adding that conclusions on
educational policies should be based on a breadth of studies and
publications from a variety of sources.