SCHOOLS IN CRISIS : GOOD SCHOOLS IN BAD TIMES : WITH IMAGINATION, DISCIPLINE AND INVOLVED PARENTS, SOME L.A. TEACHERS CREATE ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS THAT SHINE

November was unseasonably warm. In thousands of Los Angeles classrooms decorated with paper cutout turkeys, children sweated it out in classrooms that, by noontime, felt like furnaces. With the Los Angeles Unified School District dealing with budget cuts of more than a quarter of a billion dollars, air conditioning, like adequate supplies of chalk and textbooks, had become a luxury.

Around the Coke machines in their lounges, teachers were talking about another strike, the second in 2 1/2 years. They were angry at the just-announced 3% pay cut and the two unpaid days off, a Christmastime bag of coal from a school board that, having cut back everything else--$276 million was chopped from this year’s budget--now demanded sacrifices from those who are expected to make literate citizens out of the 30 or more kids who crowd into each L.A. classroom. Generally the new students are young immigrants from homes where, if children are read to by their parents, it’s in Spanish or Tagalog or Russian, not English.

But, despite the sorry plight of most L.A. schools, there are some elementary schools scattered across the city that manage to offer their pupils a true education. Measured by the standard metric of California’s reading and math tests, these schools are doing at least decently--and certainly better than they have in the past. Their real successes, though, are measured by subtler criteria: students’ growing self-confidence, their evident pleasure in being in school, their engagement with ideas in real books--”Charlotte’s Web,” even Shakespeare in fourth grade--and in writing that clears a pathway to their imaginations. At a time when negotiating the trip to school may mean finding a corridor free from gang warfare, when being a 12-year-old can mean taking over as the head of the family, many of the children in these schools are, astonishingly, flourishing.

The hope in public education is always to identify the magic bullet--”the one best system,” as turn-of-the-century pedagogues called it. That’s why the surf’s always up in the schools, as waves of reform roll in, only to crash against the far shore as new waves appear. In fact, while there are some good ideas worth sharing among lots of schools, deep and enduring reform doesn’t happen wholesale. Downtown L.A. school district headquarters, Sacramento, Washington: All could help by trimming rules that bury innovations in paper, more good counsel, challenging textbooks and better benchmarks of progress, and more dollars, too. Some of this is happening. In California, for instance, State Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig has pushed through stiffer intellectual standards and demanded more challenging texts. But what makes a good school is mostly the special alchemy of its principal and teachers, students and parents. Particularly in elementary schools--where I spent a number of days crouching in classrooms to get a child’s-eye view of things, then talked with the grown-ups who work there--the specifics of what’s taught really matter less than children’s intuition that they are known and valued and loved.

MANDALAS AND MADE-UP CITIES

Consider the Open School, a public school for 385 first- through sixth-graders housed in bungalows adjoining Crescent Heights Elementary School, just off La Cienega a mile or so south of Wilshire. Students volunteer for this magnet school, one of 86 in Los Angeles, from every corner of the 708-square-mile district, some spending as long as two hours each way to get there and home again. The waiting list numbers in the hundreds, and by the district’s rule no more than 40% of the students at any magnet school are white; at the Open School, the rest, selected by a computer, happen to be about evenly divided among blacks, Asians and Latinos.

Though it was founded in 1977, the heyday of the back-to-basics era, this school has taken a very different approach. The child’s own natural curiosity is the centerpiece of the teaching process; everything that goes on in the school is meant to pique, then to focus, that curiosity. At any given moment, there will be students working on the garden that they’ve built for themselves, while others sit at computer terminals, devising a program to chart the breathing patterns of a whale.

For the visitor who remembers classrooms as places where students sit in fixed rows, facing a teacher who runs the show with unquestioned authority, even an hour spent in Barbara Moreno and Mona Sheppard’s combined fifth- and sixth-grade class means sensory overload--like going straight from a silent movie to “Star Wars.” Each of the seven classrooms is made up of two trailers that are yoked together. About 60 kids group and un-group themselves, while the two teachers, along with a teacher’s aide and often a parent volunteer, meet with small clusters. During the day, the entire class will occasionally come together, perhaps to get instructions on how to start a project. But then it’s back to designing a mandala on the computer, or a solitary walk outside.

The idea that this classroom is spinning out of control is just the misconception of a linear-minded adult. When you ask them, these kids explain how the story they’re writing and illustrating relates to the experiment they’re conducting. They can show you, among other things, how the “taming” of the American West is seen from the perspectives of the frontiersman (and woman) and the Native American, drawing on texts, artwork and narratives spun out by a highly sophisticated computer program developed by Apple Computer, which relies on the school to try out its latest ideas. It’s noisy at the Open School, but it’s the good noise of people of several generations who have blurred the line between play and work. While the school has its share of problems--among them the lack of teachers to help students whose home language is neither English nor Spanish, and the tendency of some kids to test the limits of freedom--these seem manageable.

Hanging on the wall of Principal Roberta Blatt’s office are two taped-together sheets of paper, developed collectively, which chart the intellectual flow. There’s a rationale for the sequence of subjects, which begins with the children’s immediate environment and proceeds, year-by-year, through the building of a city to the world as a community. Some kids, Blatt tells me, seem to have a magnet in their bellies that hooks them to the computer. There are some natural politicians as well, such as the assistant mayor of the combined fourth- and fifth-grade class (the day I’m visiting, the mayor is out having her tonsils removed), who guides me around the classroom, showing off the city landscape and the charter of the new town.

The Open School’s performance on the California reading and math tests is everything that the most anxious parent could hope for. Scores show that the students do better in reading and math than their peers in most Westside schools, despite the school’s having a more racially and economically mixed enrollment--and despite its refusal to teach to the tests shaping the curriculum with an eye to is on them. While Blatt is pleased with the results, particularly the fact that students in the bottom quarter of the class also score higher than their Westside counterparts, she tells me that she hadn’t actually looked at the figures before I inquired. What she has paid attention to are the individual children’s scores for particular skills, such as word-recognition or fractions, since these results will help classroom teachers work individually with youngsters.

“We have to identify which children aren’t making it and develop programs for them, “ she says.

The open-school philosophy dates back nearly a century to John Dewey, but this is the only public school in Los Angeles that has adopted it. Yet school officials elsewhere in the district are beginning to borrow ideas that have been used for years at the school, such as team teaching, reading real books, involving parents in all aspects of school life. It’s not clear, however, how long the district will maintain schools like this one. The extras cost money, of course, and those dollars mostly come from California’s desegregation funds--$50 per student per year. But if Sacramento, pleading poverty, doesn’t keep contributing so generously to magnet schools, will anyone pick up the slack?

ON THE BEACH

While Beth Ojena, principal of the Coeur D’Alene Elementary School in Venice, has known her share of 8-year-old poets and computer whizzes, she also has seen a different side of children’s lives. “He was doin’ it to my girlfriend,” said one 8-year-old girl, explaining to Ojena why she was so angry, as the principal struggled to keep a shocked look off her face. “Gee, I was only dry-humpin’ her,” the boy indignantly replied.

As young as they are, Ojena knows, these kids have lived many more years than she has. So have many of the 300 children attending Coeur D’Alene, a school as diverse in its enrollment as any place in America.

About a quarter of the children come from working-class families, who live in the bungalows well away from the Venice beach. Thirty or so live in Marina del Rey, where a starter home can run upward of half a million dollars. A sizable contingent of kids, many bused from the overcrowded Mid-Wilshire/Hollywood area, start out barely able to say “hello” in English. Such children have become a familiar presence in a school system where, in educationese, almost all the public schools are “PHBAO schools”--places whose enrollment is predominantly Latino, black, Asian and other nonwhites.

What’s astonishing is that nearly a quarter of the students at Coeur D’Alene are homeless--far more than in any other Los Angeles school. The good life of the Santa Monica and Venice beaches has attracted the very poorest as well as the very richest--and as many as three in 10 of the county’s homeless are children. The luckier ones sleep on the pine church pews or in the jampacked apartments of the Bible Tabernacle Shelter, Los Angeles’ biggest shelter for homeless families.

When Ojena came to Coeur D’Alene six years ago, the mix of students was combustible. With the help of a technique called assertive discipline, widely practiced in L.A. schools, but nowhere more fully implemented than here, Ojena began to bring things under control. In every classroom, the do’s and don’ts are written out, in a kind of self-determined charter of obligations: “Follow directions,” says one class’s list. “Be on task; keep hands to self; remember to stop, look and listen.”

Breaking these commandments has consequences, such as being benched during recess or having a note sent home. The emphasis, though, is rewarding good behavior. The first thing every Monday morning, all of the children gather on the playground to cheer as certificates are handed out to each classroom’s citizen of the week, as well as to the trash-buster and the most academically improved.

For children who stay awhile, Coeur D’Alene can work small miracles. For the children from Marina del Rey, the school delivers a dose of real Los Angeles. And although kids can be terrible snobs, picking their friends on the basis of who’s got the Chanel sweat shirts, here the egalitarianism of the elders seems to have trickled down. Among the haves and the have-lesses, there’s a potent mixture of genuine love and discipline, with a social worker and a psychologist there at least one day a week to help the homeless kids unknot the tangles of real life. While instruction is more traditional than at the Open School--orderliness and control matter more, spontaneity counts for less--many of the same elements of instruction are in place.

Literature is being read, imaginations are being prodded in frequent writing assignments, an IBM-developed “Write to Read” computer program coaxes 6-year-olds into telling their own stories. Recently, fourth-graders reading “Phantom of the Opera” were asked to write stories about the people living behind their own masks. One black girl wrote in her journal: “People think they can treat me bad because of my color. They don’t take the time to see behind the mask, to know me.”

These innovations are paying off. Schoolwide reading test scores, while not yet up to the Westside average, have improved markedly over the past few years. Every teacher has a cheering story to tell, such as the tale of Ivonne Henriquez from El Salvador, a shy and engaging second-grader who guided me around her classroom. Last year when she began school, Ivonne spoke just a few words of English. By year’s end, she had won a personal computer in a citywide contest for the most improved writer.

It’s the uncertain futures of these children that keep teachers awake nights. “Many of these children want so badly to learn,” says Agnes Stevens, a former nun and volunteer tutor and mother-confessor for the kids from Bible Tabernacle.. They dread the long holidays when they’re out of school. Some kids stay for years, then disappear; others leave after just a few days. More than once, a homeless youngster has been selected as citizen of the week on a Friday, only to move on before picking up the award at the Monday ceremony.

With funds so tight, Ojena has to spend a third of her time writing grant proposals to government agencies, local foundations and private corporations. Outside money pays for the social worker, nurse and psychologist, and the bilingual aides, too. But these grants--which amount to about $70,000 annually--won’t be renewed indefinitely, because foundations regard giving away money as akin to planting seeds that someone else will nurture--in this case, supposedly the L.A. school district. Who knows how much longer Coeur D’Alene can remain a model for reaching out to the poorest kids in society.

GROUND ZERO

The scene at the 112th Street Elementary School could have been lifted from a nostalgic rendering of the American heartland schoolhouse. As I walk into a first-grade classroom with Principal Roberta Benjamin--the Queen, as she jokingly calls herself--20 children, neatly dressed and attentive, chorus, “Good morning, Mrs. Benjamin.”

Yet there’s nothing nostalgic about this setting in the heart of Watts. Despite the visible presence of a tough-looking guard, a couple of teachers have been mugged on the playground in broad daylight. While the adjacent street features trim bungalows with lawns manicured almost to Bel-Air standards, the tranquillity is deceptive. One block away sits the Nickerson Gardens housing project, Ground Zero for the Crips and the Bloods. At night, gunshots are as common as bird song; the odds that a male teen-ager will make it to adulthood are worse than in Bangladesh.

Five years ago, under pressure to settle a longstanding and acrimonious desegregation lawsuit, the school board launched the Ten Schools Program. New money and ideas would be pumped into the 10 grade schools with the worst achievement scores, all located in South-Central Los Angeles. The program brought in new leaders and handpicked staffs. At the 10 schools, the student-teacher ratio, which in other L.A. elementary schools is 30 to 1, is about 20 to 1. The school year runs longer in these schools, and every Saturday there are optional classes in subjects such as chamber music and Spanish playwriting.

When Benjamin arrived in 1966, the school had the worst test scores in the city. Kids were out of control, and when parents appeared at school, it was usually to heap abuse on the principal. “You’re little,” one parent told her. “You’re not going to last.”

Now, two homemade posters in the school’s administration office are the first thing a visitor sees. One shows a tombstone labeled “1989-90 (California basic skills test) scores. Rest in Peace.” It memorializes a year when test scores suddenly took a drop. The second, dated 1991, trumpets “Rebirth--the Phoenix Rose from the Ashes!!” The results don’t rate unqualified cheers--across the school district, nine out of 10 second-graders read better than the average 112th Street kid--but the kindergartners’ performance is remarkable. Their reading scores rose 12 percentage points and are now close to the district average. The jump in math is even greater: The children are now performing with the upper third of all L.A. youngsters.

This transformation hasn’t come about easily. Restoring order by relying on the assertive discipline strategy came first on Benjamin’s agenda. Attention is paid to the minutest details of kids’ behavior, producing a level of control that initially seems oppressive to a visitor who longs for the noise of the Open School.

“ Manos atras (hands behind your back),” insists teacher John Cook as he pilots his mostly Spanish-speaking kindergartners, looking as solemn as a class of young novitiates, onto the playground. First-grade teacher Noel Parker is finishing up a lesson and the kids are hanging on his every word. “If you’re talking and not paying attention, you’ll pay one sticker. . . . Those of you who cooperate will have stickers when you come back.” Stickers are awarded for almost everything, and on Fridays, kids who have accumulated 10 stickers get to pick a prize from the grab-bag.

In Robert Pearlman’s fifth-grade class, the students are lined up in teams for a math drill. “English, Espanol, Espanol, English”: Pearlman checks off the lineup of students, confirming which language to use for the multiplication questions. As I walk around the school, teachers point out children who have been sexually abused by foster parents, children whose parents put them to work delivering crack cocaine and children abandoned like yesterday’s newspaper. “This stuff would drive adults around the bend,” says Benjamin. “Yet we expect the kids to cope. And, mostly, they do.”

In such a universe, the school has to do more than educate. It needs to reach out to parents. Parents are asked to sign a pledge to read each day to their children and give them a quiet place to work, and many live up to their promises. Parents also get written reports from the teacher every Tuesday; 70% showed up for this fall’s parent-teacher conferences.

This school also has to heal and comfort children. My sense of the oppressiveness of the discipline fades as I begin to sense the caring that humanizes all the rules. It may be hands behind the back at 112th Street, but there are lots of pats on the back and hugs as well.

From the beginning, the Ten Schools Program has been a political football. With the district’s five-year commitment running out in June, Benjamin and her colleagues are nervous. The $15 million that pays for the extras comes mostly from state and federal aid that is beginning to shrink. Most of the school’s graduates stay in the neighborhood, attending Markham Middle School and then Jordan High. Unaccountably, these schools were never linked to the remade elementary schools and, as several elementary principals said, the light of educational innovation has not shone brightly on them. The newly acquired skills and fragile self-confidence of a 112th Street student often disappear in adolescence, in the impersonal corridors of junior high.

SOME THINGS DON’T change for generations. At the end of Thanksgiving break, the paper Pilgrims are taken down from schoolroom walls, replaced by holly and dreidels.

The real pilgrims, though, are the kids themselves. What they’re seeking--what they surely deserve--is a safe and comforting place, interesting things to learn and grown-ups who believe they can have bright futures--lives played out neither on the streets nor in dead-end jobs.

In distinctive ways, the Open School, Coeur D’Alene and 112th Street deliver all those things. But in these, as in other good public schools, the successes are contingent and problematic, the lion is always waiting just outside the gates. There are lots of lions lurking in Los Angeles these days--lots of reasons to wonder whether, even five years from now, the good schools will be just a memory.