BREAKING UP DISTRICT WON'T HELP EVERYBODY.

Byline: EARL O. HUTCHINSON

ON first thought, it's awfully tempting to agree that the plan by the group Finally Restoring Excellence in Education to break up the Los Angeles Unified School District is the best way to rescue city schools from near-terminal decay.

FREE wants to split from the LAUSD and create two new Valley school districts. They have raised 30,000 signatures to jump-start the process. If the signatures are valid, the next step is to hold public hearings on the feasibility of the group's plan.

It is easy to see why FREE was able to gather thousands of signatures to break up the Los Angeles city schools. Student test scores in reading and math are mired near the bottom of the national averages; more parents and politicians than ever are ecstatic about school vouchers; more white students than ever have fled the city schools; according to a survey by the U.S. Education Dept., a majority of public school teachers say they are ill prepared to teach in classrooms; overcrowding is a monumental nightmare and the snail's pace of new school construction will make it even more of a nightmare with thousands of new students jamming district schools in the next decade.

The state's Little Hoover Commission is so disgusted with the nonperformance of the city schools that it called the LAUSD dysfunctional in its report, and flatly concluded that the district should be broken up.

Then there's the recent foolish, racially polarizing and politically destructive assault mounted by some self-serving African-American and Latino politicians to keep L.A. school Superintendent Ruben Zacarias on the job. The board is still trying to shake off its disastrous effects.

But does the FREE plan offer anything better for the Los Angeles city schools, and especially schools in South Central Los Angeles?

The answer is probably no and for these reasons:

Smaller district. There's no golden rule that smaller is necessarily better. It's just smaller. Multinational corporations have thousands of employees and far-flung global offices and operations. Most operate with precision efficiency because of competent management, solid organization and careful planning.

At one time the Chicago public school system was nearly as big, and in far worse shape, than the L.A. schools. It has made a spectacular turnaround in improving student performance and school operations. The mayor and a new school board reduced waste, dumped many of the old comatose, inefficient bureaucrats, hired an experienced, dedicated superintendent and gave him full authority to remake the schools.

Resource drain. Much of the $7 billion LAUSD budget comes from state and federal funds. This pays for books, equipment, goods, services, teacher and administrator salaries and training. Much of this money is spent on the heavily minority schools in South Central Los Angeles. A new district or districts would drain dollars from the neediest schools with no way to replace the money.

Two-tiered system. The huge funding hit from a new district will almost certainly guarantee that a middle-class, whiter, and well-heeled school district will sit side-by-side with a poorer, more minority-populated school district.

School Reforms. Los Angeles school board President Genethia Hayes, whose district takes in the schools in South Central Los Angeles, is right when she says that school secessionists are selfish and unfair in their refusal to give the new board a chance to put its promised reforms in place.

Those reforms must include:

A bare-knuckled onslaught on bureaucratic inertia, waste and mismanagement; the removal of incompetent teachers; teacher pay increases tied directly to classroom performance; crash programs to increase and improve texts and equipment; a full-throttle effort to improve teacher training and reduce the number of uncredentialed teachers in the poorest and most underserved schools; and a fast-track program to build dozens of new schools.

The board also must move quickly to hand over decision-making power on curriculum, teacher selection, texts and equipment and budget management to teachers, parents and administrators within the local schools.

But even these reforms are not enough. The board must beg, borrow and steal programs that other school districts have used to make spectacular leaps in student achievement. These programs have several things in common. They require teachers, administrators, and parents to relentlessly challenge the students to learn by setting specific goals, emphasizing mandatory homework assignments, providing positive reinforcement to students and encouraging participation of the students and parents in class and homework assignments, stressing clarity of class and continually monitoring their classroom progress.

Most importantly, they demand that teachers and administrators do everything in their power to inspire and push poor and minority students to be the best students that they can be.

Yes, it's true that the Los Angeles city schools are still in rotten shape. But Valley school secessionists have not told us how they will make things any better for students who attend schools in South Central Los Angeles. Until they do, we must think hard about breaking up the L.A. city schools.