A Tough Assignment : For Teachers at Beleaguered South-Central School, Lofty Goals Take a Back Seat to More Pressing Concerns

Math teacher Derrick Anderson only vaguely remembers the three days last spring when he handed out California’s newest assessment test to his eighth-graders.

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“That math test is not even relevant to the education program here,” Anderson said. “I get 13- and 14-year old kids who don’t know their times tables, who can’t multiply.”

Test scores released this week show the depth of the problem at Samuel Gompers Middle School, where 84% of eighth-graders show limited or no mathematical thinking and understanding, according to the new California Learning Assessment System. It was among the worst math performances in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Gompers, a cluster of squat brown buildings and a towering auditorium at Imperial Highway and Main Street in South-Central Los Angeles, also fell near the bottom of scores in reading and writing.

Across the state, the lowest scores were turned in by students from the poorest neighborhoods who were not fluent in English and whose parents have only limited education.

Gompers is a textbook case of how the complex demographics of Los Angeles come crashing into a classroom, overwhelming teachers who often must explain the difference between a noun and a verb before they can analyze a piece of literature.

About 28% of the students are not fluent in English. About half of Gompers’ 1,720 students are African American and half are Latinos, the two ethnic groups in the district that scored the lowest on the tests designed to compare student performance to high statewide standards.

At other schools, the test scores set educators scrambling to update their training so teachers can impart the latest in critical thinking techniques. At Gompers, the staff is compelled to set other priorities.

The little money available for training teachers last year was used on a classroom management and discipline course. On Tuesday, instead of analyzing the new test scores, the issue dominating talk at a faculty meeting was school crime.

In a neighborhood racked by drive-by shootings and close to some of the city’s most notorious housing projects, keeping children safe is the No. 1 concern, Principal Robert W. Kinsella said Wednesday.

“Obviously in test scores we fail,” Kinsella said. “But as human beings our students are learning to work to their full potential. Our goal is to make sure we provide a safe learning environment so they can fulfill their potential.”

At Gompers, eighth-grade math teacher Donna Quinn, the chairwoman of the department, has only 30 math books for her 150 students. She said that with 37 students in her class, it is impossible to break students into groups for teaching.

“I get eighth-graders who can’t read and I’m giving them a CLAS math test that required them to read and write?” she said in exasperation. “I just don’t feel I can do it all.”

In another building, English teacher Randy Valentine was signing mid-term failure notices for 15 of his 35 students. New vocabulary words filled the chalk-board: caress, pierce, halt, interrogate.

His goal this semester is to teach his eighth-graders how to write an essay off the top of their heads--and worry about the nuances of grammar and punctuation later. The first steps have been learning to construct paragraphs based on class discussions of a book, most recently one on Helen Keller.

A verbatim sample of a student paragraph that received a B-plus:

“At the beginig of the Book I read. And I found out that in the Book their is a yung girl named Helen Keler She has A Father a Mother and I think one of the brothers name is James . . . They send for a person who mite try to teach Helen something’s . . . “

The CLAS test his students took last year required eighth-graders to write in a purposeful, coherent and focused manner and show a variety of sentence structures and good control of grammar, punctuation and capitalization to score in the top levels.

Valentine was angered by the results of CLAS tests showing that 55% of his students can only partially meet the demands of writing assignments and compose disorganized, undeveloped and difficult-to-understand texts.

“These scores portray them as idiots. They are anything but idiots,” Valentine said. “What it indicates is laziness. They don’t have the discipline to take a test like that. They are not any less intelligent. They are in a social condition where they view (the test) apathetically.”

Sepulveda Middle School

* Year Opened: 1960

* Enrollment: 1,800, including 630 students in gifted/high ability magnet.

* Ethnic breakdown: 70% Latino, 14% white, 7% black, 4% Asian, 3% Filipino.

* Limited English proficient: 34%

* Bused students: 630 in magnet

* Teachers: 80

CLASS SCORES * Reading: 46% scored at top three levels

* Writing: 35% scored at top three levels

* Math: 14% scored at top three levels