Learning the Old-Fashioned Way : How reform program can help a school when it goes off course

The LEARN educational reform plan is crucial to the improvement of the area’s schools, and we’re about to tell you why.

LEARN, which stands for Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now, brought together top people in the education, corporate and civic fields to reform public education. It shifts responsibility from the central offices to school campuses, where principals are to lead with the help of teachers and parents.

According to LEARN’s president, Mike Roos, the schools involved are to have a performance plan in place within nine months and there ought to be identifiable results by the midpoint of the second year. That’s the point at which it will be determined whether a school has the tools it needs to make its plan work, if academic performance is stagnant or, worse, declining. By the end of the second year, a continued lack of success would be grounds for considering, among other things, a leadership change at the school.

Under such a scenario, the alarm bells would have already sounded at Northridge Middle School in the San Fernando Valley. Times reporter John Johnson spent a year there and uncovered many disturbing facts. Well into its own reform effort, the school’s standardized test scores are plummeting in comparison to similar schools in the district. Few of its students are rated as adequate or better in their grasp of basic subjects. On average, graduating students are more than two years behind grade level in reading and a year behind in math.

But the school continues to emphasize a “feel good” educational approach in which fun and self-esteem are championed over serious academic progress. It is a school where high academic standards and tough grading are discouraged because they are wrongly thought to be damaging to a large and growing segment of minority youths from disadvantaged or troubled homes.

Students in classrooms where teachers have clearly lost control are still given a stunning percentage of high grades. The principal argues that “there’s nothing standard about standards,” and supporting administrators say: “We go by the smile gauge. We’ll look at the test scores later.” The end result will be students who will face a horrifying shock in their later academic years, when the depth of their unpreparedness is suddenly apparent.

For that reason, the Northridge Middle School story is not an argument for the breakup of a fatally flawed school district or a paean for a voucher plan that would give parents public school monies to pay for private and parochial school tuitions. It is an argument for the LEARN reform program, which, in its essence, would have already brought scrutiny and change to bear on a school whose mission and methods seem to have gone badly awry.