When candidates for superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District were rejected last year in favor of insider Ruben Zacarias, most of them went back to their previous jobs.
But not William Siart. The former First Interstate Bancorp chairman has launched his own campaign to reform L.A. schools, if not from the inside, then from the outside.
Late last year, he joined the board of the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now (LEARN), the school reform effort launched five years ago by former state Assemblyman Mike Roos.
And early this year, Siart started his own company to provide administrative and maintenance services to charter schools in the L.A. area. The Santa Monica-based company, called Exed LLC, is designed to make it easier for charter schools to operate by taking business matters off their hands so educators can concentrate on teaching children.
Exed has yet to turn a profit, and is being funded out of Siart’s own pocket.
“I am very interested in education,” Siart said last week. “I have come to realize that the kids in L.A. are getting the short end of the stick. Something needs to be done; the system needs competition for the good people to do well and show the way. The people who don’t do well should be forced out of business.”
Speeding up competition to the massive Los Angeles Unified School District is one of Siart’s key goals.
“Charter schools are the key to bringing competition to L.A. public schools,” Siart said. “They are great because they allow parents and teachers to get involved in what students learn. But the parents and teachers are really daunted by the business side: how to balance the books, how to obtain insurance, how to negotiate with contractors.
“That’s where Exed comes in,” he said. “They can outsource the business side to us and concentrate on educating the students.”
Siart said Exed, which has five employees, has yet to receive any payments for its services.
“We are right now spending a lot of time helping people at 10 charter schools. We’re trying to get paid for it, but that’s hard to do since these school budgets are so tight. It’s really in the start-up phase right now,” he said.
“Part of the problem is that we are still figuring out the economics of schools: how much money do they really get and how much do they really spend on an individual basis,” he said. “Before these charter schools, that was nearly impossible because so much of the money went to district headquarters.”
Eventually, Siart said he wants to grow the business by signing up more charter schools. Currently, there are only a dozen charter schools authorized by the state in the LAUSD service area. Siart said he would like to see the state grant charters to another 50 or 60 schools in L.A. That would be the equivalent of 10 percent of the 660 schools in the LAUSD.
“Decentralization of authority is the key to improving LAUSD; it is simply too big to manage,” he said. “However, as in any business when you decentralize, the local people in control must be held responsible for their performance.”
Siart gave a mixed appraisal of Zacarias, who edged him out last year to get the post.
“Zacarias has said a lot of the right things. He has said that test scores have to improve. But we’re now a year later and we’re getting to the point where the principals must be held accountable for their performance.”
Zacarias was unavailable for comment, but his spokesman, Brad Sales, said that Siart was being too quick to pass judgment on school principals.
“The superintendent has identified the 100 lowest-performing schools and has spent this year working with them,” Sales said. “He has made it clear he intends to hold people at the school sites accountable for whether they achieve their goals. Schools that do not achieve their goals this year will be put on probation and will be given more intense scrutiny.”
