Thompson Sets Ambitious Goals for L.A. Schools : Proposal: Superintendent vows improvements in reading and math and changes in bilingual education.

The head of the Los Angeles Unified School District announced a series of ambitious goals for the coming years Thursday, in a thinly veiled attempt to upstage those critics who would divide the giant district.

In his own version of the national Goals 2000, Supt. Sid Thompson told the Board of Education that by the end of this century, all the district’s students will read independently in third grade and complete algebra in middle school, and most will take at least three college prep classes each semester in high school.

He also vowed to improve bilingual education so that non-English-speaking students will make the transition to English within five years, and to cut dropout rates so that at least three out of four high school students graduate.

It will clearly be a reach for the beleaguered school district. The high school dropout rate--currently 41%--would have to be cut nearly in half, and enrollment in middle school algebra would have to increase threefold, from 27% to 100%.

But Thompson realizes that the 630,000-student system may be living on borrowed time if it cannot demonstrate improvement soon, particularly in the wake of recent state legislation that makes it easier to dismantle the giant school district.

“What all this boils down to is that in the next five years, this school system and the people in it will have to work smarter and harder,” he said.

And he added a warning clearly aimed at those working to split the district: “Only with a unified effort can we meet the monumental educational challenge we have laid before ourselves.”

Teachers union President Helen Bernstein attacked the goals, saying they lacked the insight that would make them attainable because they were set without consulting teachers.

District officials “confuse goals with dictates,” she said. “They never came to us, they never talked to us, they never asked us how this might be implemented. . . . If there’s nothing in place to get you from where you are to where you want to be, it’s just a piece of paper.”

Thompson set his first goals in June, 1994--required by the school board as part of his annual performance review. Although some improvements followed, the district failed to hit all of the more modest targets. For instance, Thompson promised then:

* To raise scores on statewide standardized tests by one percentage point. Instead, middle school scores declined. This year he has pledged that district scores will match the national average by 2000--which would require improvements of between 2 and 26 percentage points in the various subjects tested.

* To improve student attendance. Many of the district’s campuses did register improvements this year, but only a handful of the 650 schools met the 2000 goal of 95% attendance.

* To move more students from bilingual to English-only classes. This year, fewer than half of the district’s regional school groupings, known as clusters, met goals they had established for teaching English to immigrant students.

Board member David Tokofsky warned Thursday that setting such long-term goals could backfire--lending more fuel to breakup proponents--because the proof of improvement lies so far in the future.

And, he said, Thompson’s initiative is unlikely to be well-received in the schools.

“The local schools are going to say it’s a bean-counting approach, rather than a realistic way of improving achievement,” he said.

As with many plans to improve education, the means used to reach the desired end will be key, education experts said.

“How is the rollout going to start now with the principals and how are they going to carry it down through their buildings?” asked Chris Pipho, a spokesman for the Education Commission of the States, a nonprofit agency that supplies education information to state policy-makers.

Similar initiatives in other urban areas have succeeded only when they were followed by a concrete plan of action and a “real accountability hook,” Pipho said.

So far, the only tangible teeth to Thompson’s initiative are a new school-by-school progress report to be developed in the next month and issued annually, and a still-to-be- determined system for intervening at schools that fail to reach the new standards.

One possibility being considered is the creation of “intervention teams,” which would be dispatched from district headquarters to identify problems and provide guidance, ranging from additional teacher training to leadership training for principals.

“Our objective is not to dynamite them,” Thompson said. “We want to go in there and find out what the problems are.”

Board members, who generally applauded the goals, said they want more specifics on intervention measures before they vote on the plan next month.

Among the most ambitious of the goals is one that may defy intervention: folding all 650 schools into the reform program known as LEARN.

Originally, all schools were to have begun the transition to the school-based control system promised by LEARN by the end of next year.

Instead, about a third of the schools have done so. Thompson’s new deadline is 1998-99.

Because LEARN is based on a model of decision-making at the campus level, district officials have allowed individual schools to decide whether and when to sign on to the reform program.

And they acknowledge that some may not be interested in--or capable of--managing themselves or implementing the LEARN reforms.

But full participation in LEARN has also been jeopardized by the district’s centralized management system.

An outside study completed last year warned that the district is moving too slowly to solve bookkeeping and other problems that have created obstacles for schools that are trying to take control of their budgets.