An Educated Plea for ‘Smaller Blobs’

A homemade crystal ball sits on the principal’s desk. Inside it is a vision--a map depicting a hunk of the northeast San Fernando Valley, little dots representing the location of schools. “The San Fernando Learning Village,” it’s called.

Educators call it a “cluster”--a little galaxy formed by a high school and its satellites of middle and elementary schools. But the San Fernando Learning Village, the principal was saying, could be more than a cluster. It could be an entire school district.

“Why not?” says Principal Yvonne Chan, adding her respected voice to the movement to dismantle the Los Angeles Unified School District.

We spoke the day after she made her first public comments endorsing the district breakup, during a round-table discussion on KCRW.

“It has to happen,” she told me. “I’m not joining any group. . . . It’s just a professional opinion, having run many schools. I just feel everybody is trapped in a big blob . . .

“Break it up. We need smaller blobs.”

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You know about Yvonne Chan. If you didn’t catch her chatting with Dianne Sawyer, perhaps you saw her picture in Time. She’s the mediagenic educator who guided the transformation of Pacoima’s troubled Vaughn Street Elementary into California’s most celebrated charter school.

The only thing I don’t like about this elementary school is its new, hifalutin’ name. The Vaughn Next Century Learning Center is a mouthful, but since Chan’s arrival five years ago, Vaughn has become a beacon to people eager to revive the notion of quality neighborhood schools.

It started with a family center that has encouraged extraordinary parental involvement. Later came its designation under the state’s charter school program, freeing Vaughn of much of the oversight and direction of LAUSD headquarters.

Vaughn’s ability to win grants and Chan’s financial acumen enabled the school to use $1 million last year to buy adjacent land and build 14 new classrooms in a place Chan says used to be occupied by crack dealers.

These rooms have in turn made it possible for Chan to last week announce Vaughn’s latest achievement--a longer school year. Instead of providing 163 teaching days in a year-round, multi-track schedule, Vaughn will keep every one of its 1,150 students on the same 200-day schedule. Not only is that a big increase over its old schedule, it’s also 20 days more than the statewide standard of 180 days. And the new schedule has won enthusiastic support from parents and teachers.

For many educators, this is a dream come true. America’s tradition of a relatively short school year has long been cited as one reason its youth is lagging academically behind those in Japan, Germany and other countries that are our economic competitors. Assuming Vaughn can sustain its longer schedule, a child who attends grades 1 through 6 there will have essentially received an extra year’s worth of schooling. Vaughn’s test scores, which ticked downward this year after four years of impressive improvement, should go back up.

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All of this is why Yvonne Chan’s voice adds a new worry for people who want to preserve the LAUSD. Unlike politicians and activist parents pushing for the breakup, Chan speaks with the authority and experience of a hands-on educator and a proven reformer.

Chan says she’s believed in the need for smaller districts for several years, but only now is she offering her opinion publicly. A recent unhappy encounter with the district bureaucracy may have been the final provocation.

At issue was the district’s decision to withdraw Vaughn’s application for a $169,000 state grant designed to help overcrowded schools. LAUSD officials decided that Vaughn’s new classrooms and new longer schedule make it ineligible.

Chan recently told Times education writer Richard Lee Colvin that she was resigned to losing this battle, but it seems she has renewed the fight. She showed me an Aug. 28 letter to LAUSD board President Mark Slavkin that forcefully states Vaughn’s case.

Chan points out that Vaughn remains overcrowded by legal definitions and that it should be up to state officials, not the district, to decide whether Vaughn should be rewarded for its creative approach toward overcrowding. What’s more, Chan points out that if Vaughn were to receive the grant, the district, as is customary, would be able to use a large portion of the funds to subsidize programs in other schools. “A win-win situation,” Chan calls it.

What’s going on here? Chan attributes the bureaucrats’ thinking to particular notions of “equity”--an idea in which fairness means treating everybody exactly the same. The problem is, fairness isn’t sameness.

Little wonder that Chan believes in “little blobs”--and little crystal balls.