EDITORIAL HALF-HEARTED REFORM LAUSD MINI-DISTRICTS FAILED TO EMPOWER PARENTS, TEACHERS OR PRINCIPALS.

AT a recent meeting of the Los Angeles Unified school board, Superintendent Roy Romer got some valuable, albeit unwelcome, advice from the community.

``The 11 local districts simply cannot be saved,'' parent-teacher association leader Scott Folsom declared. ``Your choice is to do away with them, collapse them or simply pat them on their pointy little heads and say: There, there. Here's some more money try to do better next year.''

While Folsom earned no style points for diplomacy, his point was right on the money - the Los Angeles Unified School District's experiment with 11 ``mini-districts'' has failed miserably.

And at a time when the district is struggling to make ends meet, it makes little sense to perpetuate the failure any longer.

Back in 2000, mini-districts were the LAUSD's attempt to repel popular efforts to break up the district, as well as provide parents and local communities with a say in how their local schools are run. But the execution never lived up to its promise. Instead of opening up the bureaucracy to the public, the districts simply became one more layer on the bureaucracy, one more obstacle between the people and reform.

And an expensive one at that.

Although the LAUSD has never been able to produce conclusive data as to how much the mini-districts really cost, the estimates range from $40 million to many times that. Then, in addition to the personnel, there's the price of renting and operating the facilities that house the bureaucrats throughout the whole of the LAUSD.

Ideally, principals would be given broad latitude to make their campuses laboratories of learning. Working in conjunction with parents and teachers, they would have the necessary autonomy to meet the particular needs of their communities. District officials would provide oversight and guidance, making sure that principals of failing schools are either retrained or fired.

Ideally, principals would run the schools in collaboration with faculty, parents and the local community, not the bureaucrats.

But in the LAUSD, it's the bureaucrats who call the shots. Be it at the mini-district level or in the downtown headquarters, key decisions are made by those with the least personal knowledge or investment in the community.

This is the problem the mini-districts were supposed to fix, not compound.

Although Romer resents hearing the bad news - he claims he was ``victimized'' by Folsom's critique of the mini-districts - it's part of a a bigger message he needs to hear.

It's time to scale back the LAUSD bureaucracy - and mini-districts are just the beginning.

Romer has worked hard to improve instruction and reform elements of the bureaucracy, mainly the facilities and financial divisions. But the army of educational bureaucrats, created out of nepotism and cronyism, remains largely untouched.

Cutting back the bureaucracy and turning authority over to individual schools is a key to educational success and will free up money for training and other important programs that benefit students. Fake decentralization has failed; the time for real decentralization is now.