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By Duke Helfand
Times Staff Writer
The Los Angeles Times April 19, 2004—
He has never been elected to public office and he holds no official
title in state government.
But UCLA management professor William G. Ouchi is
emerging as a pivotal figure in the future of California public
education.
Ouchi has teamed up with his golfing buddy and former
City Hall boss, state Education Secretary Richard Riordan, in a
quest to reinvent the state's 8,000 schools.
 Riordan
is the official face of this two-man offensive, the connection to
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Ouchi, the author of popular books about
teamwork in corporate America, is the behind-the-scenes idea man
who argues for turning principals into entrepreneurs, giving campuses
new control over their budgets and prodding schools to compete for
students.
"No one should have the power to tell people
at a school how they are going to run their school. It doesn't make
sense," said the Hawaii-born Ouchi, 60, who comes from a family
of teachers who felt stifled by out-of-touch bureaucrats.
That kind of talk is radical in a state where the
governor and Legislature have kept an iron grip on education policies
and funding, and where school boards and teachers unions jealously
guard their fiefdoms.
Critics call Ouchi's approach simplistic and misguided.
They remember how Ouchi, Riordan and other civic leaders sponsored
a similar reform plan for Los Angeles schools a decade ago that
fizzled as public support waned and campuses bickered.
That experience left many embittered about the prospects
for change statewide. But Riordan and Ouchi never lost the belief
that better management was the key to improving schools.
Ouchi wound up writing a book about empowering principals
and their campuses, "Making Schools Work," which was published
in September. Perhaps as a symbol of how far Ouchi's star has risen
in California, Schwarzenegger gave copies of the book as Christmas
presents last year.
Schwarzenegger, who as a candidate championed the
idea of local school control, tapped Ouchi to write an initial draft
of his education platform during his gubernatorial campaign. Ouchi
also co-chaired a Schwarzenegger education summit with Riordan last
fall.
"Bill's research and insight were invaluable
to me during the campaign and transition," Schwarzenegger said
in a statement provided by his staff. "He has been a tremendous
asset to the education community."
It remains to be seen whether Schwarzenegger will
push the Ouchi-Riordan reforms through the Legislature this year,
as the two hope. The governor is concerned about pressing ahead
too quickly without enough support from school districts, teachers
and the public, say those familiar with his thinking.
But that hasn't stopped Ouchi and Riordan from applying
a full-court press on lawmakers, school superintendents, union leaders
and anyone else who will listen.
"It's going to be interesting to watch how these
two guys impact the education system of California," said Los
Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who as a member of the
Los Angeles City Council in the 1990s dealt closely with Riordan
when he was mayor and Ouchi was his chief of staff.
"As usual with Riordan and Ouchi, their agenda
appears to be overly ambitious," Yaroslavsky said. "But
I wouldn't underestimate either one of them."
Once known in the corporate world for management books
with titles like "Theory Z" and "The M-Form Society,"
the plain-spoken and impeccably polite Ouchi is now immersed in
a universe of teachers, textbooks and test scores.
Among other things, he is serving as an unpaid education
consultant to the governor of Hawaii, where he grew up surfing at
Waikiki Beach and attended a prestigious private school in Honolulu.
Ouchi's father was a dentist. His mother taught high
school English and journalism. His older sister taught elementary
school.
Ouchi remembers his mother and sister venting about
their jobs. That sparked his thinking that public schools could
perform better if they had freedom from centralized control.
"They were so unhappy when they were victimized
by this gigantic bureaucracy that just rolled reforms down on them
at will," Ouchi recalled of his mother and sister.
"If only they had an organization and a management
above them that lived to motivate them, to help them, to thank them
and enable them to be successful, then we wouldn't have any problems
at our schools."
Ouchi delivers that same message to audiences around
the country and to school districts — including those in Oakland
and San Diego — that are studying his ideas and adopting some
aspects of them.
On a recent day, Ouchi gave a lunchtime talk about
school reform to a group of philanthropists from the California
Community Foundation in downtown Los Angeles. Dressed in a sharp
blue suit and burgundy tie, he spoke without notes for nearly an
hour, effortlessly ticking off statistics about school spending
in Los Angeles and other districts.
Afterward, several members of the audience eagerly
approached him, some handing him their business cards or asking
him to autograph copies of his book.
"Dr. Ouchi, I just want to shake your hand,"
one woman said. "I'm going to buy your book."
To research the book, Ouchi and a team of researchers
visited 223 schools in six cities, comparing large bureaucratic
school districts in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago with others
in Houston, Seattle and Edmonton, Canada, that give schools more
independence.
Ouchi said the decentralized districts performed best,
offering, in his eyes, a lesson for California.
"We're going to have a real genuine basis on
which to hold principals accountable, and nobody is going to argue
with that," said Ouchi, whose three grown children attended
public elementary school in Santa Monica before moving to private
schools for junior high and high school.
Ouchi has no bigger fan than Riordan, who sounds as
if he is cribbing from "Making Schools Work" when he gives
speeches to education groups.
The two have been friends for a quarter century and
sponsored each other's memberships at the Los Angeles Country Club,
where they play golf together a couple of times a month.
"Bill has had a monumental effect on my thinking,"
Riordan said. "There is no one in the country who understands
these concepts better."
But critics dismiss Ouchi as an ivory tower theorist
whose ideas are better suited to the boardroom than the classroom.
Although well intended, they say, he is naive about
the fractious nature of public schools — places where unions
and management collide on a daily basis, where parents and teachers
feud, where virtually everyone faces pressure to improve test scores
amid the anxieties of budget cuts.
"He's smart, very well read, but he has a very
superficial understanding of what goes on in the real lives of kids
in schools. I think that's where this is going to break down,"
said one influential education analyst in Sacramento who, like others,
agreed to speak candidly about Ouchi only on condition that he not
be named.
Many principals say they do not have the time, training
or inclination to oversee multimillion-dollar budgets on top of
other responsibilities. Teachers object to ceding seniority rights
and other privileges they have won at the negotiating table.
"We have to take this with a great deal of skepticism,"
said John Perez, president of the Los Angeles teachers union. "We
have principals who have very poor personnel skills. What makes
you think that they'll be able to better run the schools after you
give them the money?"
But even Perez and other skeptics say they admire
Ouchi's energy and what they believe is his sincere interest in
improving public education. Ouchi makes his case with a blend of
intellect and wit, a style that many find engaging, but others sometimes
perceive as dismissive.
"He's very unassuming and very low-key. But I
think he's much shrewder and smarter than he presents," said
Angus McBeath, superintendent of the public schools in Alberta's
capital, Edmonton, which provided the model for decentralized power
that Ouchi advocates.
And Ouchi is winning converts in unexpected places.
"There is widespread agreement among those of
us who focus on education that he's on the right track," said
Assemblywoman Jackie Goldberg (D-Los Angeles), the liberal chairwoman
of the Assembly Education Committee who is a former schoolteacher
and is close to the teachers unions.
Educated at Williams College in Massachusetts, Ouchi
found his calling only after he had enrolled at Stanford's graduate
business school. "I fell in love with a course in organizational
behavior," he recalled.
Propelled by the idea of making huge organizations
"human and effective," he later earned a doctorate in
business administration from the University of Chicago. He taught
there and at Stanford before moving to UCLA's Anderson Graduate
School of Management as a 35-year-old tenured professor.
Ouchi worked in relative obscurity until his 1981
book, "Theory Z: How American Business Can Meet the Japanese
Challenge," transformed him into a sought-after speaker and
corporate consultant.
Offering a supportive view of Japanese management
techniques such as consensus-style decision making, "Theory
Z" became a bestseller and was published in 14 foreign editions,
including Chinese, Japanese, Italian and Hebrew.
During that time, Ouchi settled with his wife and
children in a Santa Monica neighborhood where one of his neighbors
was Riordan's law partner, Carl McKinzie.
Ouchi and Riordan, then a venture capitalist and philanthropist,
got to know each other. Eventually, Ouchi persuaded Riordan to contribute
to UCLA; the two men agreed to launch a program to teach minority
high school students about business.
After Riordan was elected Los Angeles mayor in 1993,
Ouchi worked for a year as an off-the-books consultant to him, then
spent another year as Riordan's chief of staff. Ouchi played a key
role in developing a plan to expand the city's police force, and
he brought together a group of business executives who proposed
ways of improving city bill collection.
At the same time, Ouchi and Riordan were part of a
movement to reform the Los Angeles public schools by giving principals,
teachers and parents more control over budgets and hiring. The effort
was known as LEARN — Los Angeles Educational Alliance for
Restructuring Now — and for a time Ouchi served as chairman.
Hundreds of schools embraced the philosophy, hanging
LEARN banners outside their front doors.
But the L.A. Unified Board of Education never made
good on the promise to give schools budget control. Some of the
initial advocates retired or drifted away; teachers union President
Helen Bernstein, one of LEARN's leading proponents, was killed by
a car while crossing a street. Meanwhile, teachers, parents and
principals bickered over control.
"As an organizational reform, LEARN failed in
the conventional sense," said Charles Kerchner, an education
professor at Claremont Graduate University who is writing a history
of school reform in Los Angeles. "They never could move money
or power to the schools."
Ouchi and Riordan acknowledge the failure, and both
blame the school district. Both also believe the new statewide effort
stands a far better chance of success.
This time, they say, schools would have real autonomy
because of a proposed new statewide funding system in which dollars
would follow students to schools, rather than being allocated by
districts' central administrations.
At Riordan's request, Ouchi assembled a group of educators
last fall to develop the plan. Ouchi called the think tank IC/3
— Independent Citizens for California's Children — and
filled the roster with a who's who of education heavyweights, including
billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad, Occidental College President
Theodore Mitchell, San Diego schools Supt. Alan Bersin and California
Teachers Assn. President Barbara Kerr.
The group hammered out a set of ideas for revamping
school funding and empowering principals. But turning ambitious
proposals into education policies is another matter in the meat
grinder of the Legislature.
Ouchi has no interest in talking about roadblocks
as he barrels ahead, crisscrossing the state with his message of
school empowerment — a message he is promoting with equal
fervor at UCLA, where he is teaching a course about reforming public
school systems.
"I've always felt that every major new turn in
ideas begins with one person," he said. "The thought of
participating in something that can change the world in some significant
way just thrills me."
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