Decentralization at the Los Angeles unified school district.

The LAUSD is the largest school district in the State and is charged with the responsibility of educating over one-fifth of the children in California. Taken individually, each of the LAUSD\u27s eleven local districts would rank in the top twenty in the State in terms of student population. The District is LA County\u27s second largest employer, and with an annual operating and capital budget of over nine billion dollars, it brings together a diverse range of active and dynamic stakeholders. In 2000 the LAUSD found itself at a crossroads. In response to growing criticism and the threat of a State-mandated break-up due to the poor performance of their schools, the District created eleven mini-districts to improve accountability and take instructional programs closer to the people who use them. This paper provides background on the LAUSD\u27s decentralization effort and power sharing aspects of the District\u27s self-imposed break-up, and recommendations for addressing these issues are postulated

Distributive justice in northern Mexico and the U. S.: A cross-cultural comparison.

A comparison of distributive justice strategies was made between a collectivistic culture, i.e., Mexico, and an individualistic culture, i.e., the United States. This study is the first to include the effect of ingroup/outgroup on the distribution strategies as Fischer and Smith (2003) called for in their extensive meta-analysis of the topic. Distributive justice was operationalized as the monetary rewards given by Northern Mexicans and American in sixteen different allocation vignettes. The results showed that the two groups were significantly different in only one of the allocation vignettes. These results indicate a convergence between the cultures of the northern maquiladora region of Mexico and of the United States. Northern Mexicans and Americans were not significantly different in their distributive justice strategies