To teach well, schools must learn

Everybody wants school reform to work, but what must we endure to make that happen?

That was the question posed by a teacher I featured in my Saturday column after he walked off the job at Manual Arts High last week, frustrated by student discipline problems.

The school is in the midst of an uncommonly chaotic start. It was shifted from year-round operation to a traditional calendar this fall by LA’s Promise, the reform group that runs Manual Arts. The new schedule delivers 22 more teaching days this year, but it also puts a thousand more students on an already overcrowded campus. Classes are overflowing, supplies are short, administrators and teachers are overwhelmed.

The founder of LA’s Promise — a nonprofit that aims “to radically shift the education, health and social outcomes for thousands of youths” in South Los Angeles — considers those problems small change in a multimillion-dollar campaign. “Operational challenges,” Mike McGalliard calls them; a temporary trade-off for rectifying long-standing inequities.

Instructors who are “whining about how bad things are” are focused more on “job comfort” than “student outcomes,” McGalliard wrote on his GettingSchooled blog. That didn’t, as you might imagine, go over well with classroom teachers at Manual Arts.

I know that discipline problems don’t occur only at schools undergoing reform. I heard from dozens of teachers with horror stories over the weekend, from Manhattan Beach, Garden Grove, Santa Ana, Sylmar, West Los Angeles and beyond.

That will be fodder for another column.

But if school leaders can’t or won’t back up teachers struggling with discipline problems, how much confidence will those teachers have in the architects of school reform?

All the curricular changes and interventions and targeted assessment plans won’t add up to much in a classroom where a handful of belligerent students manage to hold learning hostage.

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LA’s Promise calls itself one of the largest “school turnaround organizations” in the country. Launched by two former teachers and a $4-million grant from the bio-tech giant Amgen, it has three schools and 8,000 students under its wing.

It was selected to run Manual Arts in 2009 by teachers desperate to break from Los Angeles Unified and its stifling bureaucracy. “We wanted to have more of a say in decision-making in the school,” said math teacher Ronel Kelmen. “Lots of what’s being reformed is not something new or different. Ultimately the bottom line is quality teaching. That’s what’s going to get our scores up and our students interested.”

There were stumbles and successes at Manual Arts. An LA’s Promise principal was forced out after sexual harassment claims. LA’s Promise’s campus director, Laura Hernandez-Flores, helped organize a ninth-grade academy where small classes and collaboration among teachers improved the performance of hundreds of freshmen.

Many teachers told me they worked harder under LA’s Promise than they had before. For some, the partnership seemed to evolve into a dictatorship.

“LA’s Promise should not be given credit” for raising exit exam pass rates among 10th-graders, one Manual Arts teacher chastised me. That was because of “the hard-working teachers that are dedicated to the success of their students.”

But those hard-working teachers had been at Manual Arts through years of test scores that didn’t budge. LA’s Promise helped develop intervention classes, scripted lessons and focused assessments that pushed teachers and students to do better.

That tendency to fight over who gets the gold star is part of the problem at Manual Arts — and at LA’s Promise. Sniping — on campus and online — has begun to erode respect on both sides.

I understand why some teachers are turned off by what they see as the arrogance of “corporate reformers” like LA’s Promise: the big salaries, prescriptive lessons, demand that test scores rise significantly, and soon.

That perception rankles McGalliard, whose salary topped $170,000 as chief executive officer of LA’s Promise.

“They don’t trust me. I get that,” he said. “But I don’t see these teachers complaining when we’re handing out innovation grants. Where do you think that money comes from? It comes from corporate America, because that’s where most of the money is.

“My job is to take the money from corporate America and give it to the public schools. Does that mean they’re puppet masters, behind the scenes controlling reform? No. But it means they want to see the needle move.

“And that’s our responsibility.”

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McGalliard resigned from LA’s Promise in August. Needed to spend more time with his young family, he said. I suspect he was also discouraged by the resistance he felt from teachers and the slow pace of results from reform.

He knows he’s been a lightning rod for criticism: Think Michelle Rhee — the union-baiting superintendent in Washington, D.C. — but with red hair, skinny ties and a Reed College pedigree.

He’s brash, bordering on arrogant. He’s earnest, impatient and smart enough to realize that there are some things he should have done differently.

I had lunch with McGalliard last month and asked what lessons he’d learned in the eye of the urban school reform storm.

One: When you set out on a community improvement project, you have to involve the community. He might have benefited from the advice of parents, teachers, local activists — people familiar with the problems and invested in the success of a school in their neighborhood. Now LA’s Promise has a community board. “It might have helped,” McGalliard said, “if I’d listened more.”

And two: There are some things about education you can’t know unless you’re in the classroom, with an agenda and a responsibility.

Last semester, McGalliard taught an advisory class every Friday for ninth-graders at West Adams Prep, the other LA’s Promise high school. He assigned the students to write a thank-you note to a visitor who’d gone to the school to talk about career goals.

“There was one boy whose note was so — “ He struggled for a way to describe it. “It was like something an elementary student would write … not even that good.” Indecipherable.

That shocked McGalliard out of the notion that all these kids need are better teachers, higher expectations, more time on task in a well-run classroom. “I had to ask, how did this kid get to the ninth grade? How did he slip through the cracks? How did no one notice that he can’t manage the basics?”

It’s a tragedy for that student, an indictment of the system and an obstacle for even the most committed teacher.

And it’s what LA’s Promise has promised to fix.

sandy.banks@latimes.com