Treating schools like Navy fleet

The superintendent of Los Angeles Unified reads the paper. This much I know for sure.

"Steve, this is Adm. Aloof Brewer. Give me a call," he said in a message left on my answering machine last week. "I think we need to sit down and have a chat."

It sounded kind of ominous, but I agreed to meet retired Navy Vice Adm. David L. Brewer for lunch at the Pacific Dining Car. Was he going to dispute my description of him as the aloof, consultant-crazed chief of a flailing administration? Or try to defend his role in the employee payroll debacle and botched handling of an assistant principal accused of sex with girls?

To his credit, the admiral did not order me to give him 100 push-ups or anything like that. He's a big boy, he said, and he can take criticism. But he wanted me to get to know him and to hear about his approach to improving the school district.

The highlight of our 45-minute chat was Brewer's promise that in two to three weeks, 300 to 400 jobs at the Los Angeles Unified School District's headquarters will be eliminated as he decentralizes the district and transfers more responsibility to regional offices and schools. And that's just the beginning, he said. There will be more cuts soon.

But that was about it for specifics on how he was going to improve L.A. Unified. The man's smart, confident and earnest, but when he talks about management strategies and philosophies, you have to remind yourself he's talking about a school district. He might just as well be talking about restructuring IBM or the Pacific fleet.

He's just installed a CEO/COO management model. And he's building infrastructure in a matrix system and implementing vertical as well as horizontal articulation.

About 30 minutes into his spiel, I told him I had not yet heard him mention the 700,000 children he's responsible for. Brewer seemed surprised by the observation, if not a bit regretful.

"Everything I've talked about defers to kids," he said.

Does it?

I can understand why he'd feel more comfortable talking about management, since he doesn't bring any K-12 education experience to the post. Still, he's been in the job for more than a year. It's time to quit spouting how-to-be-a-leader claptrap from the management books he loves to quote, and start figuring out how to do a better job of educating kids.