“I would never get on a plane with a pilot who just announced that they’re going to try something different,” says Alberto Carvalho, superintendent at the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest in the country. He believes the same principle applies to the superintendency: Your community flock won’t buy into “pilot programs.” They want to see actionable reform that follows a certain, strategic cadence. And that’s exactly how he began his journey at LAUSD in February 2022.
“We started out with a very aggressive 100-day plan, which really laid the foundation for what would be the strategic plan,” he says. During that time, Carvalho and his team engaged with nearly 6,000 stakeholders throughout the district to develop a deeper understanding of what priorities need to be met to support students and close gaps.
Similar to his ambitions for Miami-Dade where he previously served, the strategic plan focuses heavily on several overarching goals, including literacy, numeracy, graduation rates, postsecondary success and stabilization through the improvement of the social-emotional well-being of students.
“That’s it. That’s what we’re shooting for,” he says. “Those goals are ambitious. They’re a stretched goal. Every one of them. In the minds of some, almost unreasonable. But I don’t think they are. They’re going to force us to reinvent ourselves to really pivot away from the way business and the work were done into a new reality of education.”
Those first 100 days marked a “momentous” start to his transition leading LAUSD, he adds. But now, more than a year since his arrival, everything they do is tied to the strategic plan, including how they budget.
“We reinvented the concept of zero-based, values-based budgeting, meaning everything needs to have a strong, strict connection to the strategic plan that’s verifiable, measurable and implementable within a certain timeline or it is defunded, or the funding is reduced and recalibrated,” he says.
This strategy was something very new and bold that the community had never seen before, he explains. In some instances, it raised a great deal of controversy.
“There is no entity beloved more than the status quo,” he says. “It’s what we know and what we take comfort in, whether it is proven to be effective or not, whether it’s scaleable or not or fundable long term.”
But he knew coming in how impactful careful, strategic budgeting is on a district his size. Because come September 2024 when ESSER funds are no longer available, every district, including LAUSD, must ensure they’re not forced to reverse overestimated financial decisions.
“We knew that coming in,” he says. “Every decision we make takes into account the scalability and the fundability of initiatives, taking into account what will disappear come September 2024.”
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To that end, Carvalho says he believes in addressing the needs of the district that are the most profound and grave. And shortly after analyzing the district’s academic profile, he says the inequities became clear.
“There are about 40,000 students in Los Angeles spread out through about 100 schools that represent the most extreme conditions of academic fragility, which is side-by-side with home insecurity, food insecurity, disability, English language-learner profiles, homelessness or foster care conditions,” he says. “We decided to make our biggest, most dramatic investments there.”
They created the “Educational Transformation Office,” a practice he says has been declared by the Department of Education for a number of years dating back to “Race to the Top” as one of the “highest-producing innovations in the country,” Carvalho says.
“We are concentrating on three major themes. Number one: clear analysis, additional accountability, additional support and disproportionate investment all driven by data, which led us to the creation of data elements and dashboards for performance for these 100 schools.”
This puts him directly in charge at the apex of accountability for these schools. Part of that responsibility involves meeting with the principals and his cabinet members five times a year for three days uninterrupted.
“There is this detailed analysis of performance based on inter-assessment data with critical incidents,” he says. “Staff and student absenteeism rates, reclassification rates for students who are English-language learners as well as a host of other performance indicators. And then we speak strategy. The principal leads that conversation at the table with my cabinet.”
This gives their peers the opportunity to listen in on best practices and learn innovative strategies that are being used in other schools throughout the district.
“The beauty here is that the entire weight of the system gets concentrated in real time on addressing a critical issue,” he says. “We have successfully implemented that, and it’s going well for us.”
Looking ahead to this summer, he says they’re focusing on bringing students back for their annual summer school program, one of the most successful additional “time-on-task” initiatives in the district. Last year, over 100,000 students attended.
“We’re going to replicate that starting June 25 through July 26 of this year,” he says. “We’re shooting for about 120,000 students. We hope to capture 80% of those students being the ones that absolutely need to be there.”
But it’s not simply going to be an event that emphasized literacy and numeracy, he explains. Although it is, it’s an opportunity for enrichment focusing on the arts and music.
“We launched a cultural arts passport democratizing availability and access to high-quality arts and music programs where students in an age-appropriate way via partnerships with all of the big providers—The Getty Museum, The Broad Museum, performing arts venues—access that is age-appropriate allowing students to navigate this universe of arts and music opportunities throughout our community,” Carvalho says.
These examples are but a mere sample of the numerous innovative strategies Carvalho has brought to the district since his arrival just over one year ago. Through these initiatives, he says they’ve laid the foundation for the district’s success in the coming years.
“We are in a good position,” he says. “I think we have built the necessary systems to bring the strategic coherence to the entire district.”
