Building an Effective LAUSD

The Eight Principles

• Prioritize student achievement, especially for students with the greatest need

  Major decisions should start with how they will shape students’ daily learning. Financial and operational choices always carry academic consequences, and those consequences are often felt most in classrooms serving students with the greatest need.

• Acknowledge that students may need different inputs to achieve the same positive outcome

  Holding every student to the same high expectations can require different levels of staffing, funding, or flexibility across schools. Leaders should be explicit about who benefits from a decision, who carries the burden, and why.

• Align resources to need and evidence, not legacy patterns

  Dollars, staff, and supports should follow what students need, guided by evidence of impact instead of historical habit. Where no proven roadmap exists, leaders should be willing to take calculated risks and move away from practices that no longer deliver results.

• Recognize that staff conditions are learning conditions

  Even well-designed policies fall short when teachers, principals, and classified staff lack the time, training, and stability to carry them out. Decisions about staffing and professional learning are also decisions about which students keep stable, well-supported adults in their day.

• Treat compliance as the floor, not the goal

  State and federal mandates set minimum expectations and often leave the district real room to go further. Families with the fewest resources are least able to fill the gaps when the district does only what is required.

• Engage communities meaningfully and respond clearly

  Students, families, and educators see impacts that data alone can miss. Engagement builds trust when communities can see how their input was considered and why a particular path was chosen, especially for families who have historically had less access to decision-making.

• Communicate decisions and trade-offs transparently and take ownership

  Every major decision benefits some groups more than others. Naming those trade-offs directly, separating fixed constraints from deliberate choices, and making clear who is accountable helps even difficult decisions keep their legitimacy.

• Revisit decisions and course-correct in a timely manner

  Decisions should be treated as hypotheses to test. Setting clear indicators and checkpoints from the start lets leaders see when a choice is working for students and adjust when it isn’t.