LEARN Begins Long Road to New Approach

The meeting on class scheduling began with the group of teachers and administrators standing in a circle and keeping a balloon in the air without using their hands. The discussion dragged on longer than expected, and the decision at the end wasn’t exactly a great leap forward.

But Fernangeles School Principal Elisabeth Douglass pronounced herself pleased.

“People said what they wanted to say, and that’s a big accomplishment for this staff,” she said. “It’s going to take a while for people to learn to trust . . . especially with a group of people who aren’t used to functioning that way.”

Such small lessons in cultivating mutual respect, building consensus and making group decisions are the first “baby steps” being taken by Fernangeles and 34 other schools this year as they embark on the vaunted LEARN reform project, an ambitious experiment viewed by many as the last hope for resuscitating the ailing Los Angeles Unified School District.

LEARN, or Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now, incorporates a sweeping set of changes to raise student achievement by shifting decision-making to local campuses. Developed over the course of a year by a coalition of 600 business leaders, educators and community activists, the Board of Education approved the plan in March in the face of a determined campaign to dismantle the district and a statewide ballot initiative that would grant parents vouchers to send their children to private schools.

“LEARN has given us the road map and vision that will help turn the district around,” school board member Mark Slavkin said. “If LEARN did not exist . . . the district would have very little credibility in the attacks against us, whether from the breakup or the voucher (initiative).”

The LEARN coalition has spent $1 million--and received far more in in-kind donations--to implement its reforms, which will be in place at all the district’s 650 schools within five years.

By year’s end, administrators, teachers, parents and community members at Fernangeles and the other LEARN pioneer schools will be in charge of their own budgets, personnel and curriculum--aspects of campus operation formerly reserved for district bureaucrats.

If they eventually succeed in improving student achievement, the LEARN plan will almost certainly be held up as a national model for urban school systems.

But between now and then is a long road, full of stops and starts and barriers to overcome, as Douglass and her crew at Fernangeles in Sun Valley are learning.

The deeply entrenched educational culture has used a top-down style of management for decades. Many teachers are hostile, still smarting from a cumulative 10% pay cut, toward a district that they say has repeatedly broken promises over similar reform efforts in the past.

“We expect conflict,” said Mary Chambers, vice president of LEARN.

“The nature of this whole effort is that everyone on the school site is supposed to be brought in to collaborate, so there will be conflict. But the new thing is that it will be addressed and resolved and there will be consensus.”

Tuesday’s faculty meeting at Fernangeles provided a case in point.

It was the first chance for Douglass to apply some of the techniques she and teacher Robin Movich absorbed during two intensive management training sessions sponsored by LEARN and UCLA this summer.

To foster a sense of collegiality, they had the group perform icebreaker activities, such as the balloon-in-the-air exercise. Strips of butcher paper covered with writing in alternating colors hung from a chalkboard so everyone could see the meeting agenda.

Juice and cookies lay on a nearby table. “Real consensus is built around food,” one teacher cracked.

The group then set ground rules for the meeting, demanding that everyone pay attention, attack issues--not each other--and stick to the subject: Should they retool the school schedule to allow teachers extra time each week to work together and plan ahead?

Discussion lasted for more than an hour. Some raised their hands, others their voices.

“Especially as a LEARN school, we’re really going to need a solid block of time to look at some of these issues,” such as budgeting, teacher Bill Cinnamon said.

A colleague said she felt Douglass was pushing them to change the schedule, while others declared they did not know enough about scheduling--an issue usually decided for schools by the district--to come to a conclusion.

In the end, the group agreed to find out if and how other schools have adjusted their hours.

Several teachers said afterward that part of their hesitation sprang from concern that the rescheduling might make them work longer for less money. It is a suspicion many harbor toward the entire LEARN process, which demands heavy involvement by teachers to succeed.

“Nobody has ever told me what exactly LEARN is supposed to do,” said Joyce Denise, a fifth-grade instructor. “Teachers are in fear that it’s a clever way to get teachers to do what administrators, what Board of Education members are paid to do.”

Richard Mottern, who has taught at Fernangeles longer than anyone, said teachers see the need for a change and want more of a say, but “not in lieu of having weekends, or (by) having longer meetings, or more work for less pay.”

Concern over extra duties was partly why leaders of the Los Angeles teachers union opposed the LEARN plan earlier this year and forbade campuses from participating unless 75% of each school’s faculty supported the move.

Union stewards also believed that too much power would be handed to principals--a fear magnified at Fernangeles, where Douglass arrived only last February to replace a principal whose autocratic style severely strained relationships with teachers.

“They don’t trust me. Some of them do, but some of them don’t,” Douglass said. “I’m still getting to know them and they’re still getting to know me.”

Douglass predicted that a spirit of cooperation will come in time, especially as the staff moves from school scheduling to tackling more difficult issues, such as writing the school’s mission, setting its budget and designing a curriculum to help improve the achievements of the school’s 1,100 students, whose standardized test scores have lagged behind the national median.

“It’s like a flavor, an odor permeating everything,” Douglas said of the LEARN reforms. “And as we begin to build steam, as we learn to have a common vision, we’ll learn to build the trust for others to make decisions.”