Crenshaw Teacher Training Academy Is in a Class by Itself : Unusual Magnet School Succeeds Despite Odds

At 17, Gail Flowers has already experienced some of the rewards of what she plans to make her lifelong profession--teaching in elementary school.

“It may sound corny,” she said, “but it’s the feeling that you get when you say something to a child and then, suddenly, a light goes on in his head, and you know that you caused that, you caused that light to go off and what you taught him will never leave him.”

Flowers is one of 54 students graduating in June from Crenshaw High School’s Teacher Training Academy, believed to be the first high school program in the the nation to specialize in training students for teaching careers.

Academic Muscle

The goal of the teaching academy, one of 86 specialized magnet schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District, is to attract young talent, particularly minorities, to the field of education. Another aim has been to add some academic muscle to the predominantly black Crenshaw High School, which has long had a national reputation as a basketball powerhouse, but not an academic one.

In the three years since it was formed, the teaching academy has been described by educators as a model program in the state of California, where it has been estimated that at least 85,000 new teachers will be needed by the mid-1990s.

This year more than 90% of the seniors in the program will go on to college. More than half of the graduates will leave with averages of 3.0 or better. And most have dreams of becoming teachers.

Despite this record of achievement, administrators of the small academy say they are fighting an uphill battle against two deep-seated prejudices: the reluctance among students to choose teaching as a profession and the reluctance of whites and some blacks to go to inner-city schools.

“It doesn’t say much for what people think about the profession, or for what people think of the community,” said Marcella Saunders, who coordinates the program. “I think in both cases they are wrong.”

Recruitment Drive

Saunders said that this year a major push was made to boost the number of students applying to the program. She spoke to more than 1,500 students and sent a letter to about 100 junior high school administrators describing the program. The academy was spotlighted in public service messages on television and in the district bulletin Choices, which describes all the magnet programs. Still, Saunders said, among the thousands of students applying to attend a magnet school next fall, only 48--one white, the rest minorities--included the teacher academy as one of the three choices each applicant is allowed.

Emphasizing the positive, Saunders said she points out to prospective academy applicants that beginning teachers earn an annual salary of about $23,000 in the Los Angeles Unified School District and work only about 180 days a year

The students, however, are influenced by societal attitudes, Saunders said. “Teachers are considered baby-sitters, and they have less respect than doctors and lawyers,” she said. “However, next to parents, a teacher is the most important person in a child’s life. In many ways, they are responsible for the doctors and lawyers.

“But in this era of the ‘me generation,’ it is hard to sell teaching to students who have been socialized against it,” she added. “I appear before classes and ask, ‘Who wants to be a teacher,’ and no one raises his hand, you hear nothing, or you see the teacher whose class you are in standing behind you (grimacing)”

The academy has also been hampered by the inability to attract the integrated mix of students for which the magnet programs are designed. Of the 137 students enrolled in the program, 128 are black and the remaining nine are Latino. Crenshaw has a total enrollment of about 1,700 students.

Among inner-city magnets, however, Crenshaw’s Teaching Academy is not unique. Even though the magnets were set up to promote voluntary integration, most in the inner city have remained overwhelmingly minority. The highly rated King-Drew Medical Magnet High School in Watts has attracted few whites, as have magnet programs at Dorsey, Jordan, Manual Arts and elsewhere in the inner city.

Saunders said the counselor at one Westside junior high school where she wanted to recruit students, asked her, “What is the point? You know the white students are not going to go there, and the black students (who are being bused to outside schools for integration) have already left and they are not going back.” Saunders said the counselor promised to let her know when she could come by and talk to the students, but the counselor never called back.

Crenshaw’s principal, Jewell R. Boutte, said that up to 50% of the students living within the high school’s boundaries are either bused out for integration or attend private schools.

Boutte has focused much of her attention on convincing area parents that the education offered at Crenshaw is “just as good” as other schools in the district. She said the dramatic improvements that Crenshaw students have made in reading, writing and math scores on the California Assessment Program over the last three years have earned the school $95,000 in state funds given for improved scores.

She said that one of the first priorities has been to dispel the myth that the school is unsafe. When it comes to student behavior, “we have high standards . . . for ourselves, and therefore we expect it of others,” she said. She noted the lack of graffiti on campus as an example. .

The academy gained widespread recognition last year when the National Education Assn., the largest teacher organization in the country with 1.9 million members, approved a resolution urging the creation of schools to train teachers and asked that programs such as Crenshaw’s be examined further. “We know it to be the only school of its kind in the nation to offer such training,” said Roxanne Bradshaw, the association’s secretary-treasurer.

Training Curriculum

A delegation of nine teachers and administrators from the Washington, D.C., school district toured the academy last month with an aim of establishing a similar teacher training school.

“It seemed like the teachers and administrators were so enthusiastic and motivated about the program and we saw that enthusiasm carry over to the children,” said Jennifer J. Gibbs, principal of Calvin Coolidge High School in Washington, D.C.

Students in the academy study child development, teaching methods, classroom management and education philosophy. They receive special lectures from professors from the School of Education at Cal State University, Los Angeles.

In addition to mastering their academic requirements for college, academy students practice making lesson plans, preparing bulletin boards and teaching classes in a local elementary school.

There have been some unexpected payoffs. At the 42nd Street Elementary School, Deborah Jackson, a sixth-grade teacher who has achieved the status of mentor teacher, asked an academy student who was tutoring sixth-graders in her class to talk to one young boy who was visibly upset but would not talk about what was troubling him.

One-on-One

“He just needed someone, a young man, to talk to,” she said. “I could see he was upset about something that happened at home, but I couldn’t get him to talk about it.”

The two students went out to the playground and talked while playing a game of basketball. Jackson’s student managed to vent his frustrations and returned to class without any further problems.

Another academy student, Yeshwua Barnes, 17, said that whether he ultimately decides on teaching as a career, he has already learned a valuable lesson in how to communicate with children.

“I had problems communicating with my younger brother and sister,” he said. “I didn’t know how to get through to them. If I wanted them to do something for me, they would always rebel. Now I know that the quickest way to get them to do something is to make it seem like fun, and they will do it right away.”

Despite the heavy emphasis on teaching, not all students in the academy plan to become teachers.

“I’ll be honest with you. The reason I’m here is because my mother put me here,” said Calvin Ross, a 17-year-old senior who plans to attend college at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. His mother is a teacher, but he intends to major in business. “There is no way that I am going to be a teacher,” he said. “I respect the profession, but I want to make some money.”

Nation at Risk

Crenshaw’s teaching academy was established in 1984, a year after a blue-ribbon commission created by the Reagan Administration released a report, titled “A Nation at Risk,” that urged tougher academic standards and higher salaries to attract more people to the profession.

At the time, Crenshaw High School Principal Boutte said she saw the program as an ideal opportunity to change the image of the school. “I wanted to show that an academic program can excel here just as the sports program has excelled,” she said.

She said that students should be encouraged to become teachers at a young age, in much the same way that society nurtures and encourages gifted athletes.

“Children are a natural resource in our schools,” she said. “They want to be like their teachers, but unfortunately we do very little to develop this resource.”

Echoing that thought, Los Angeles school board member Jackie Goldberg, who is also a teacher, said she did not believe the Crenshaw community was a major factor in the low number of applicants to the academy.

“The issue is not the community,” she said. “It has to do with the prestige that teachers hold in our society. I know a teacher who tells people he sells real estate because he is ashamed to say that he is a teacher.

“People believe the garbage that people become teachers because they can’t make it in the real world. That garbage continues to be recycled.”

Goldberg said that if the academy specialized in science instead of teaching, it would have more than enough applicants. “Parents know that there is income in science.”