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).