Education Reform Lessons from the Trenches By Dr. William Ouchi
Governor Gray Davis recently took a significant first step
toward improving student achievement in California's public
schools by signing into law a four-bill package of education
reforms that increase accountability and strengthen reading
instruction. The important, underlying message in his actions is
that California's public schools can indeed be fixed. For his
efforts to champion education as the centerpiece of his
administration and for taking action quickly to address this
serious issue, Governor Davis deserves high praise. But these
top-down programs can succeed only if they are matched by
similar efforts from the bottom up. At the Los Angeles
Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now (LEARN), we have
learned a number of hard-won lessons over the course of eight
years of efforts to reform the state's largest and perhaps most
bureaucratic school district, the Los Angeles Unified. The
district still faces enormous hurdles in its path to imp