Professor William Ouchi is an education adviser to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Daily Bruin sat down to ask him about his ideas on education in the state.
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Daily Bruin: What is your role in helping the governor reform education in California?
William Ouchi: I had a group of people who researched questions that are raised by the secretary for education (Richard Riordan), and he in turn formulates his recommendations to the governor. During the campaign, I worked directly with the governor and his staff, but now that he is in place and has appointed a secretary of education, my role is to bring the research of the academic world to the secretary.
DB: You wrote a book called “Making Schools Work.” What are the main points you make in the book?
WO: I think the biggest one is that I found that large school districts – like large companies – which I spent more than 30 years studying, always work better if you decentralize decision making down to the local level, which means the principals and teachers at each school. California, over the past 30 years, through a series of charter initiatives, legislative bills and state Supreme Court decisions, has converted what used to be a very decentralized public education system throughout the state into one of the most centralized in the United States. And over that same period, the performance of students in the public schools of California has declined. And I think the reasons for this decline in student performance are that the decisions are no longer made by supervisors and principals – they are now made in Sacramento.
DB: You believe in a weighted student formula. What is that, and how could it help education?
WO: Weighted student formula simply means the money the state already allocates for students from low-income families, students who are learning English, and students who have special education needs, this money is guaranteed to go to benefit these students – and the way it’s done is you give each child a weighting that is based on characteristics that are already decided. … Unfortunately under the current system, the money typically does not reach that child’s school – it usually gets reallocated to the wealthier school in the district. Under weighted student formula, you give the money to the child, and each child is free to pick any public school in their school district, and the money follows that child.
DB: Could a weighted student formula be seen as a form of affirmative action?
WO: No, it’s not affirmative action because race, gender, religion, ethnicity and sexual orientation are not part of the weighting scheme, so there is absolutely nothing about the weighted student formula (that is like affirmative action). (The weighted student formula) … is used, by the way, in many places. … Next September it will be used in San Diego, Oakland and San Francisco. It never has any weighting that has anything to do with race, gender or any other personal attributes of that sort.
DB: How important are demographics in determining the success and failure of a school?
WO: Schools in poor neighborhoods spend about 25 percent as much per student as do schools in wealthy neighborhoods – under weighed student formula, that would be flipped the other way around, which is the way it’s intended by the state. But because of the intricacies of the bureaucracy of the education setup right now, the money intended to help children from poor communities is not reaching their schools – we need to change that.
DB: Many educators and parents worry about “teaching to the test.” Do you see this as a real problem?
WO: Right now, all of the public schools in California are feverously preparing their students for STAR testing – so they are teaching to the test – so they’re shutdown – they’re not doing anything else. We all know testing is a vastly imperfect way to measure student achievement. Unfortunately, it’s the only way we have that allows us to compare one school to another and one school district to another. My feeling is that teaching to the test is necessary, unfortunately, but any teacher with common sense and backbone is going to teach their students more broadly than that, is going to teach their students what they think they should know, and in the process is going to cover what’s on the test.
DB: How difficult would it be to implement these changes in a large district such as LAUSD?
WO: Well, in the large districts that have done this, it takes about two to three years to get the approach fully developed and implemented in all of the schools. In Seattle they only had three years, … and in Seattle the student scores are up. … The public schools have recaptured market share from private schools – that is the ultimate test.
DB: What will UCLA’s role be in helping reform the K-12 school system?
WO: UCLA has an unusually powerful group of faculty in the School of Education, the School of Law, the School of Public Policy and Social Research, in the Anderson School of Management, and teachers elsewhere around the campus have spent many years studying these issues and preparing for the opportunity to get behind a meaningful change. And all of us talk to each other and help each other. And you will see once the governor decides what his direction will be and announces that direction publicly – and I don’t know what it will be – once he does that, we will get behind him and support him, and you will see that there is huge brain power at UCLA devoted to this problem.
Interview conducted by Derek Lazzaro (Bruin senior staff) and Garin Hovannisian (Bruin staff).