2 Inglewood Schools Defy Odds, Achieve Excellence : Education: Students match, even exceed counterparts in wealthier areas. Principals win high praise.

When researchers from the Los Angeles Unified School District went looking for success stories among elementary schools serving low-income minority areas, they ended up at two campuses in Inglewood where high test scores seemed to defy the odds.

Schools run by Principals Marjorie Thompson and Nancy Ichinaga have allowed minority children to match and even exceed their counterparts in wealthier areas.

With no extra money or fancy enrichment programs, they have geared their scarce resources to the youngest children, adopted programs that focus on reading and fostered an atmosphere that stresses academic excellence.

Bennett-Kew Elementary School’s Ichinaga acts as the crossing guard because there is no money for one and she does not want her teachers spending their time doing the job.

At Thompson’s William Kelso Elementary School, 35% of students are from welfare families. But their sixth-grade scores on state achievement tests are higher than scores at 96% of the California schools with similar student populations.

James Baker, a Los Angeles police officer, liked Kelso so much that he bypassed private schools for his two daughters. They did so well that when they reached junior high school their teachers kept asking: “What private school did you come from?”

At Bennett-Kew, where the staff gives out college savings bonds each year to the brightest graduating sixth-graders, two-thirds of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. Third-grade reading scores, though, are higher than at 75% of all elementary schools, rich or poor.

Christine McAfee did not even mind when her 7-year-old son had to repeat the first grade.

“If this was anywhere else, he would have just been passed along,” McAfee said. “I have friends and their kids’ homework is not nearly as advanced as the homework my kids bring home.”

Sandra Schieldge, a Bennett-Kew kindergarten teacher, recalled how indignant Ichinaga was when she arrived at the school 17 years ago and saw the low test scores.

“I’m not running a school for dishwashers,” Schieldge said, mimicking Ichinaga talking to the teachers. “(These kids) will go to college.”

Thompson and Ichinaga attribute their success to decisions they have made about what is important to teach--phonics-based reading--and what is not--bilingual education.

But the credit, many educators say, must go to Thompson and Ichinaga.

Despite distinct differences in style and background, the two women personify what many educators say is the most important factor in a high-achieving school--a dynamic principal.

Ichinaga is so involved with her school that she “knows the name of every child and probably their birth weight,” said Ellen Cox, a teacher.

Thompson, a former counselor and learning disabilities specialist, tests every child who comes to Kelso to determine the pupil’s academic level.

“She works harder than the teachers,” said one student, Mary O’Donnell. “She’s my idol.”

Thompson came to Kelso 17 years ago. Because of a court desegregation order, it was in the midst of adding the fourth-, fifth- and sixth-grades to the school. But it had no sixth-grade reading books.

“They sent me the kids but no books,” Thompson said. “It took me two, three, four years to get that reading program going.”

Despite her obvious delight in the children, Thompson insists that school is not supposed to be fun. Academics is the focus. This is not a school that has a lot of parties and candy sales, parents said.

Kelso and Bennett-Kew shine under various academic lights, said William Padia, director of the state education department’s program evaluation and research division.

“Not only are these schools getting high scores,” he said, “but both . . . are improving faster than the state (average.) That’s very impressive.”

State test scores have been rising an average of 8.5 points a year, Padia said. At Kelso and Bennett-Kew, they have risen about 11.5 points a year.

“When you walk into those schools, you know that student achievement is the focus,” said Ruth Johnson, a Cal State Los Angeles education professor who worked on the Los Angeles Unified study. Only one inner-city school in Los Angeles was found that matched the successes in Inglewood.

Thompson and Ichinaga put their strongest teachers and the few classroom aides they have at primary-grade levels, emphasizing the importance of early academic success.

Neither school spends its supplemental federal money on extracurricular activities or remedial classes. Instead, they strengthen basic curriculum at the kindergarten and first-grade levels.

Ichinaga created special classes for children who have had a year of kindergarten but are not ready for first grade. It gives children “the gift of time to learn,” she said.

Thompson’s school is year-round, so she created classes between terms for children who need extra help with basic skills or English.

There is no bilingual education at either school, in part, Thompson and Ichinaga said, because parents do not want it. That was fine with the two principals because they believe the approach does not work.

“Our goal is not to teach them Spanish,” Ichinaga said. “Our goal is to make them English literate.”

The two schools teach English as a second language, which provides bilingual instructors but has children learning English the moment they enter school.

Thompson and Ichinaga also reject the state’s new “whole language” approach to reading, which stresses comprehension and writing skills over a child’s mastery of such mechanical exercises as spelling and punctuation.

Instead, they stress a phonetic approach to reading--how to sound out words--first.

But they are not rigid when it comes to curriculum. Cox, for example, is allowed to use children’s literature instead of textbooks for her third-graders.

Both principals emphasize reading, calling it the key to every other future academic success.

Low-income children, Thompson said, are “weak in vocabulary and in reading comprehension when they come to us. So, that’s where we focus.”

“I teach first grade,” said Kelso’s Shelly Chaplin. “I have to teach them to read there and if they don’t learn that, they’re going to have trouble all their lives. Push, push, push. We push the kids, but we make it fun to learn.”

On a recent morning, Chaplin and her students were doing a lesson on middle sounds, vowels that appear in the middle of words: snail, night, mole. After sounding the letters out loud as a group, the youngsters would figure out a word’s identity and write it in their notebooks.

“They kind of think this is a game but it’s work,” Chaplin said.

Thompson’s school is so focused that during the first two hours of every day all 700 children do the same thing--read and write.

“You have to do that in prime time,” Thompson said, explaining that children are most alert then.

Excellence is so important at every level, Thompson’s teachers said, that for two years they went without a permanent janitor until she found the perfect person, someone who keeps the campus spotless.

The daughter of a school teacher and a school superintendent, Thompson graduated from the University of Chicago when its students did not declare majors. She went on to earn teaching, school psychology and special education credentials in Arizona and California.

At 64, she is gray-haired and no-nonsense, a woman of intellect and quiet warmth who cares about results, not recognition.

“I’m not the splash type. . . . I don’t do PR,” she said when asked why her success has not been more widely touted.

Ichinaga, 61, was born on a Hawaiian sugar plantation to Japanese laborers. She is a slight, energetic woman, passionate and outspoken.

“So many people in education have so many things in mind, they don’t know how to focus and they don’t prioritize,” she said.

After graduating from the University of Hawaii with a degree in secondary education, she taught school and later earned a master’s degree in education psychology at UCLA before becoming a school psychologist.

“I was not a good teacher, too bossy,” she said, stooping to pick up a stray orange peel on an otherwise immaculate campus.

“I was a miserable teacher for the first five years. I thought kids learned by doing.”

Now she knows better, she said. A self-described behavioral thinker, she said there are certain tasks children must learn in order to make their way successfully in the world.

“We teach our kids how to read from day one, in kindergarten, because we think teaching the kids to become literate is our primary objective,” she said.

Willa Snorton, director of special projects for the Inglewood district, calls both principals “very focused, almost workaholic. They believe that children can learn, that they can excel.”

What is more, Snorton said, they hire teachers who think as they do.

Lynnette Souder, a third-grade Kelso teacher who has worked for both Ichinaga and Thompson, said: “They know a good teacher when they see one.

“They’re really sound in how to reach the children,” Souder said. “They’re willing to get rid of less effective teachers and they’re willing to get in there and help the teachers who are not doing a good job.”

Last year, Chaplin and two other Kelso teachers took jobs at Los Angeles schools because they could earn $5,000 more a year. They are back at Kelso now, they said, because they missed Thompson’s leadership. Teacher Jennifer Heath said what she remembers most about her Los Angeles principal is the reprimand she got for not using the requisite, district-approved colors on her bulletin board.

Roger L. Rasmussen, director of the Los Angeles Unified department that conducted the school study, said some common traits at Kelso and Bennett-Kew can be duplicated elsewhere.

Thompson and Ichinaga each consider themselves the “principal” teacher at their schools. They closely monitor teacher and student performance, and they encourage teachers to watch and learn from one another, rather than leave their classrooms to attend district-sponsored workshops.

Both principals are also devoted to making it possible for teachers to put all of their energy into teaching. In Thompson’s office, children walk back and forth through her work area from a classroom behind her office. The only other access to the classroom is through the teachers’ work room, and she does not want them disturbed.

Cal State’s Johnson said that the most important thing principals such as Thompson and Ichinaga do is set high expectations for teachers and students.

“There is a belief system in those schools about the capacity of the kids to learn,” she said.