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UCLA management professor William Ouchi spoke to a group of principals and administrators at LaGuardia High School yesterday.

A talk to principals yesterday by one of the earliest supporters of the Bloomberg administration’s school reforms raised a question: Would Bloomberg’s changes to the public schools survive under a new mayor?

The change that most concerns the supporter, William Ouchi, a management professor of UCLA, is the administration’s effort to push power away from a central school system and into the hands of principals.

In a talk to principals gathered at LaGuardia High School in Manhattan, Ouchi warned that other school districts have seen gains eroded when a new administration re-centralizes authority. He said he hopes that would not happen in New York. “The DNA of this idea will continue to circulate,” he said.

But speaking privately before the address, he confessed concern. “The problem is sustaining the governance,” he told GothamSchools. “I’m really scared that at the end of 12 years, the next person could wash it all away.”

Ouchi, who served as an adviser to Chancellor Joel Klein in 2002, hinges his argument for principal empowerment on a slightly different argument than Klein has provided. He focuses on a factor known as “total student load” or TSL, the number of students that each teacher is responsible for educating. His research, including a new book published this month, concludes that decentralization in New York City has led to a significant decline in TSL. (more…)

Mayor Villaraigosa of Los Angeles is sending his new education team to New York City this week (via Flickr)

Yesterday, sitting at the Broad Prize lunch, I met Marshall Tuck, who, fresh off being Steve Barr’s partner at Green Dot, is heading up a new effort by Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to take control of some public schools. (Villaraigosa tried to get control of all the schools, but he failed.) Turns out the MoMA lunch was just stop one on a whirlwind tour that Tuck and his team are taking around the city. Their main destination is Tweed Courthouse, where they are meeting with at least seven top Department of Education officials.

Tuck’s trip is an example of the “edu-tourism” that UCLA professor William Ouchi talked about earlier this school year at a CEI-PEA lunch. I just got off the phone with one of the people Tuck already met with, Eric Nadelstern, the CEO of the Empowerment network. Nadelstern told me that already this year Tweed has hosted visitors from Sao Paolo, Brazil; Guatemala; San Francisco, and Clark County, Nevada. He said the stream suggests DOE is “asking the right questions,” but not necessarily that they have all the answers. “In a school system where four out of 10 kids aren’t graduating, we can’t get too complacent,” he said.

An interesting part of the schedule, which I’ve reproduced below the jump, is what isn’t on it. Tuck is checking out a Rolodex of major initiatives (school support organizations, the accountability office, the Leadership Academy, Fair Student Funding), but he has not been scheduled for a briefing on the $80 million ARIS project to connect every classroom and parent with student test score data.

UPDATE: Department of Education spokesman Andrew Jacob wrote to say that ARIS was a sub-topic in the tour; Jim Leibman discussed it as part of his accountability presentation, Jacob said.

(more…)