Final Exam

While the sun shone brilliantly on a recent Friday afternoon, J. Jerome Harris sat in his office in the headquarters of the Compton school system with the curtains drawn and his driver-bodyguard outside.

It was the day the children of the troubled 28,000-student school district were commemorating Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, and Harris had spent the last few hours inspecting his schools, showing up unannounced in more than a dozen classrooms. In one, students sat silently at their desks, watching film footage of King’s best-known speech. In another, a youngster asked by his teacher to identify King responded that he was “that man who was shot.”

After state lawmakers voted to take over the financially and academically flatlined district in 1993, they called on Harris, a seasoned educator and onetime civil rights activist, to resuscitate it. Since taking the reins in early 1994, he has rewritten the district’s academic program and staunched its fiscal hemorrhage. But amid the shake-up, he has drawn the ire of a district culture that resents him and the state takeover he symbolizes.

“I don’t sit in here with my curtains open,” said Harris, who displays photos of King and Malcolm X in his office. “You learn to live with an air of realism.”

Harris’ reality is this: The announcement that he would head the district came the day after someone fired five bullets at his predecessor as he walked to a school board meeting.

His efforts have had mixed results, with test scores up and teacher morale down. With Harris set to leave at the end of the school year, tensions over who should run the district are heating up, and the state’s record in Compton has come under heightened scrutiny.

Compton Unified School District’s reality is this: It is the only school system ever taken over to repair academic and financial collapse. Its teachers are underpaid but are expected to receive a small raise this year--the first since 1990-91. Its schools are dilapidated (46 years old on average), although work crews are preparing a $12-million modernization blitz. And although lack of statewide standardized testing makes comparisons with other districts difficult, its students have shown improvement on local tests.

Nobody seems able to agree on what, if anything, has truly changed since the takeover. But everyone--Harris included--agrees that it isn’t enough.

One teacher likened the district’s environment to “battlefield conditions.” And even amid the back-and-forth rhetoric, both sides admit that the children are the ones who get caught in the cross-fire. The district’s elected school board, frustrated with its role as an advisory panel to Harris, contends that the state’s chance to improve things has come and gone. Four members have filed a lawsuit seeking return of local control.

“I don’t believe that someone in Sacramento cares more for our children than we do locally,” said Board President Saul E. Lankster. “It’s clear to everybody here that this is not working.”

*

Board members, City Council members and other critics assert that state control has not made a difference. Books and other materials are still in short supply. Classrooms, locker rooms and school buildings are still in disrepair. The rise in test scores, said Mayor Omar Bradley, “is fractional. . . . Nothing has changed.”

Others charge that Harris has failed to substantially increase Latino representation in the district administration or show improvement in English language skills. Nor, they say, has he reined in the district’s legal bills, which have increased from $908,000 in 1992-93 to $1.5 million last year, in part because of a jump in layoff-related claims.

Many also complain that state officials never fully defined the conditions under which the board can regain its power. Harris, who came to Compton with a reputation as a bare-knuckled reformer with little patience, says his only real friend these days is his driver, Sid. But he sees evidence that his management style and ideas have worked.

He sees it in Dorothy Emery’s kindergarten class at Laurel Street Elementary, where a student named Manuel could only sign his name with two diagonal lines in September. On Friday, Harris walked into Emery’s room, one which he frequently showcases, and held up a recent sign-in poster on which Manuel had written his full name in red crayon. And he sees it on blackboards, where teachers had laid out their classes’ daily objectives, such as map making or quiz preparation.

But on the same tour, he saw loose electrical wires hanging from a ceiling and ran across a woman who complained that there was no heat in the library. Still, he insists that things are different.

Harris and state officials remember the Compton Unified they absorbed in 1993 as a “cash cow,” the city’s largest employer, a mini-fiefdom ruled by a school board that repaid its constituents by finding jobs for them in the district bureaucracy. Now, Harris is preparing to lay out what he sees as his accomplishments at a meeting in Compton later this month with the school board and his Sacramento bosses.

State officials say the takeover was necessary and that Harris has made progress, particularly with the district’s finances. “They’re a lot healthier than they were,” said Assistant Supt. Patrick Keegan. “The question is whether they can sustain that.”

But he said Compton Unified’s internal operations, such as personnel management, “are not doing as well as we would like to see them do. . . . On the academic side, he’s gone in there and tried to bring accountability to principals and teachers in the classrooms. Indications are that in local tests they’ve made some progress. You still have a situation with a lot of room for improvement.”

To be sure, say state educators, who have begun networking to find Harris’ successor, there are signs of life: The district, which had to borrow $20 million from the state to cover payroll and other expenses in 1993, made a $900,000 loan payment last year and plans a $3.9-million payment at the end of this school year. Its budget, currently $128 million, has not run a deficit since 1993, district officials said.

Though the number of employees has remained over 2,800 since the state takeover, the bulk of nonteaching jobs are now part-time, resulting in a savings for the school system.

Harris said he was determined to make an immediate impact.

He informed teachers that they would teach standing up. He told them that they would write their classes’ objectives for the day and a list of vocabulary words on the blackboard. He tossed out the academic program and, on the day before school began in the fall, handed out his own curriculum guides, which tell teachers what students need to learn. In teaching reading, Harris shifted the curriculum from a “whole language” approach, in which students focus on the content of literature, to a phonics-based program, in which they study spelling and the sounds of words.

In the spring of 1994, students took achievement tests and posted slightly higher scores. At the elementary school level, the percentage of students who placed above the national average increased 5% in reading and language skills and 9% in math. At the middle school level, the percentage of students who beat the average increased by 1% in reading, 2% in language and 2% in math. At the high school level, the percentage of students who scored above the average in reading and math remained unchanged, but fell 1% in language.

Despite the test scores, many of the problems that plagued the school system in 1993 haven’t evaporated.

Harris has been unable to please Latino teachers and parents who note that the demographics of the student population and the administration remain out of sync. Latino students make up 60% of the district’s 28,000 enrollment. The percentage of students who cannot demonstrate English proficiency has reached 40, and is increasing at all levels.

Latino teachers and parents complain that the district has not hired enough Latino administrators or teachers and does not offer a curriculum that caters to their culture. In the district’s 24 elementary schools and three high schools, there are no Latino principals. In the eight middle schools, there are two. The Compton Education Assn., the teachers union, estimates that there are not enough instructors with credentials to teach bilingual classes. District employees and parents say the disparity comes up constantly in daily life and describe instances where teachers pull Latino students from the halls to act as translators in parent conferences. Other critics say too few schools take note of Cinco de Mayo or show appreciation for Latino culture.

Harris said he has recruited bilingual teachers from Mexico and Spain, adding, “You do what you do. I can’t change the world.”

Compton Unified is also hamstrung by the ongoing exodus of teachers from the district. Hundreds of teachers have quit since the state took over, making it more difficult for a consistent curriculum to find its rhythm. Of the 1,044 teachers on the payroll, 370 are temporary employees with “emergency credentials,” according to district figures.

Harris acknowledges that his style has irritated the teachers union, and says many instructors are easily lured to neighboring districts with higher salaries and the promise of a better work environment.

One 27-year-old Latino teacher who left the district for Pico Rivera a few months after Harris arrived said he and his colleagues at a Compton elementary school had grown so frustrated with the district’s troubles that they could not muster any confidence in the state’s attempted rescue mission.

“It’s sad, but I’m so burned, I don’t care what happens to them,” he said of the Compton district. “The only way to change that place is to totally gut everything. I don’t think it’s possible.”

In his office, Harris appears immaculate but weathered. He says that he will leave California when he leaves this job. Even though he has made some progress in realizing his vision for this school district, he says, sticking around is hardly worth “all this Mickey Mouse stuff.

“If they’d been able to pay their bills, they never would’ve been taken over,” Harris said. “I don’t suspect anybody cares whether poor kids learn.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Profile:

J. Jerome Harris

* Age: 64

* Education: PhD from Claremont Graduate School, where he studied in a program for minority administrators, in 1973.

* Career highlights: Taught in public schools in Los Angeles and New York, became superintendent of Brooklyn public schools in 1974, superintendent of Atlanta schools in 1988 and state administrator of the Compton Unified School District in 1994.

* Quote: “If they want to change the academic problems, they must change the culture of the system.”