A Q&A with outgoing Los Angeles schools superintendent Austin Beutner on how technology, data, federal funding — and Hollywood — are helping to revitalize the country’s second-largest public school district.
This is one of a series of interviews by Bloomberg Opinion columnists on how to solve the world’s most pressing policy challenges. It has been edited for length and clarity. Virginia Postrel: After a career in investment banking, diplomacy and newspaper publishing, you’ve just finished a three-year tenure as superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second largest district in the country. The pandemic has been a huge shock to the whole educational system and it would be easy to focus on the negatives. Do you see any positive changes for the future that might come out of the pandemic experience? Austin Beutner, former superintendent, Los Angeles Unified School District: Yes. The work we did to be a safety net for the families and students we serve has renewed a sense of mission for those who work in schools and a sense of collaboration, trust and support with the overall community in Los Angeles. We provided 140 million meals. No other organization in the country did that. We made sure half a million kids had a computer and Internet access. No other government agency in California did that. We provided Covid testing and access to vaccines for students, staff and families. We’ve built an app with Microsoft called the Daily Pass, where we can keep track of whether you’re healthy or not, whether you have a fever or not, if you’ve been Covid tested and whether you’ve been vaccinated. All that has provided a foundation of trust, support and interest in public education — and I believe it will be part of the foundation for school-based health services in the future. One of the things that I’ve tried to do is bring the community back into public education. Los Angeles is the heartbeat of the fifth-largest economy in the world. We have gifted storytellers and technologists. And since the start of the pandemic we’ve moved light years ahead in terms of how we measure and understand the need to keep students engaged and interested in the work. So we formed a book club with Snapchat, in which we had Alicia Keys talk about the book she was reading — not me, not the teacher, but Alicia Keys — and we found a way to raise money so children could receive the book for free. We worked with Fender to provide 7,500 free guitars to middle-school students, who probably struggled the most the most socially and emotionally during all of this, so they could engage with others. We created courses with Illumination, the creators of “Despicable Me,” on how to animate. We got James Cameron to help us tell the story of the voyage of the Titanic with literacy, math, and critical thinking woven in. I believe this will stay with us, in that we think more about making sure the offering to students is of interest to students. And we now have data and information on how students are doing in real time. Think of middle-school students taking math. Before the pandemic, we didn’t have students one-to-one with computers. So if you took a test you had to write on a piece of paper and the teacher had to grade it and you’d get it back the next day or two days later. Now, say you have students taking a five-minute diagnostic test online. If 18 out of 24 students get it and six don’t, and then you see two groups out of the six in which three struggled with this part and three struggled with something else – the teacher can immediately keep the bigger group going and have breakout groups for the two smaller groups. The ability to do real-time diagnostics and individualize the instruction for students, that’s like the Holy Grail. And we’re doing it at all levels. VP: And that comes out of the fact that because of the pandemic, you got everybody computers? AB: Computers and Internet access. The core of the students we serve don’t have Internet access because families can’t afford it. So now that we’re all connected, we can share information, whether you are at school or at home. For the first time ever, we introduced online tutoring for students as a supplement.
