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LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- As the mayor prepares to assume some control over the nation's second-largest school district, experts where similar experiments have been launched said he might want to lower his expectations.
The state Assembly on Tuesday approved a plan that gives Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa a say in selecting a superintendent and allows him to directly manage the city's 36 worst-performing schools.
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is expected to sign the measure, although some Los Angeles Unified School District leaders have said they might tie up the proposal.
While mayoral takeovers in major cities like Chicago and New York have met with a measure of success, they've by no means been a cure-all, experts said.
Chicago's more than 600 schools have been under Mayor Richard Daley's direct control for 11 years. During that time, elementary school test scores have risen along with high school graduation rates, said John Easton of the Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago.
"I think for the most part, it's been a pretty successful run," Easton said. "By consolidating responsibility, it's clearly led to improvements in the school district."
Not everyone agrees.
Donald Moore, the executive director of the reform advocacy group Designs for Change in Chicago, said Daley's control did little to help schools that were already making gains or were on the bottom of the list. Thousands of low-income students have been displaced and schools have closed with little community or parental input.
"Ironically, it's the schools where the mayor interfered the least where the gains were made," he said.
In New York, the verdict is still out on Mayor Michael Bloomberg's 2002 takeover, according to Norman Fruchter, director of the Institution for Education and Social Policy at New York University.
The district's massive bureaucracy has been downsized while elementary test scores have risen. But middle school scores remain flat and the dropout rate all too high.
The elimination of local school boards, meanwhile, has given parents and the community fewer avenues to participate. "There is almost no input at all," Fruchter said. "All you do is alienate the public that you need to have supporting you."
Bargaining over power
For his part, Villaraigosa has had much more difficulty getting support for more control than other big-city mayors, forcing him to bargain away some of the power he wanted, said Michael Kirst, a Stanford University education professor.
As such, he would have far less authority than mayors in New York, Chicago and Boston.
For starters, Villaraigosa would share his authority with 26 other mayors served by the district, representatives from the county board of supervisors and seven elected school board members.
In contrast, mayors in other cities completely took over and reduced their school boards to advisory boards with members hand-picked by the mayor.
Additionally, the school board would retain final authority over the district's spending, giving it ultimate control over education priorities.
For Villaraigosa, even watered-down reforms are better than the status quo. He accuses the school administration of stonewalling reform, thereby cheating students out of a decent education.
"There have been some examples of progress in the elementary grades," Villaraigosa has said. "But the district has avoided the transparency and commitment to education reform that are essential to improving achievement."
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