Big institutions, like public education, change slowly but often dramatically. The history of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) over the past five decades reveals an organization pulled up from its early 20th Century Progressive Era roots. Decades of reform efforts have provided a lively audition for what a new institution of public education could look like. But public policy and the surrounding political system have created an atmosphere of continuing crisis rather than a new institutional stability. In this policy brief the author reviews the recent history of LAUSD, drawing from the recent book, "Learning from L.A.: Institutional Change in Public Education". He shows how successive reform efforts have sketched out the design of a more effective educational system, and identifies five policy levers that can help to create a new institutional structure for public education, in LA and beyond. (Contains 25 endnotes.)