Annenberg Group Gives School Grant

The freshman class that arrives at Santa Monica High School every fall is really made up of two classes that will nonetheless find themselves attending some of the same courses, school dances and football games.

But the two classes are quite different. The members of each come from a variety of ethnic, economic and geographic backgrounds, but one group is more likely to be affluent and white or Asian American and is headed toward four-year colleges. For them, school is a place of success, good grades and praise from teachers.

The members of the other class, who are more likely to be Latino or African American and poorer, have struggled throughout their academic careers. They may enroll in community college after graduation, but a high percentage of them won’t finish.

Today, the 10,500-student Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District will announce receipt of a $500,000 grant from the Los Angeles Annenberg Metropolitan Project to support its efforts to begin working in elementary schools to wipe out the differences between the two groups.

The grant is only the second in the 13 months since former Ambassador Walter Annenberg gave $53 million to fund a five-year school reform project in Los Angeles County. The other, a $5-million annual commitment to the Los Angeles Unified School District, has yet to be disbursed and is awaiting finalization of a contract between the project and district officials.

Fifteen other very diverse districts around the county, including Pasadena, South Pasadena, Baldwin Park, Temple City, Compton and Beverly Hills, are preparing applications for Annenberg project money.

The organization took another major step this week when it reached an agreement with Rand Corp., the Santa Monica-based public policy think tank, to evaluate the impact of the projects on students.

The Santa Monica grant is important because it offers the first concrete example of the kind of efforts the money will support.

“Even in a district like ours, even in elementary schools, it’s like there are two schools,” said Santa Monica Supt. Neil Schmidt. “There are those who are very successful in a traditional way, and those who are beginning, even in kindergarten and the first grade, to be characterized as unsuccessful.”

In the past, he said, districts have hired extra aides, reduced class sizes, promoted parental involvement and tried other tactics to help those who fall. But all of that has had little lasting effect.

Now, he said, the district is embarking on a more open-ended inquiry process, supported in part by the money from the LAAMP Annenberg project. The district must set high academic standards and continue serving students who have done well in the past, making the high school one of the top feeder schools in the state to UCLA. But it also must help students who have not done well get a better shot at college, Schmidt said.

The district has not decided what tactics it will use to achieve that goal. But one idea being examined would engage the district with a mother as soon as she finds out she is pregnant.

“A letter would go out from the principal and the superintendent and the PTA president and the mayor, welcoming them to our schools . . . and saying, here are a number of things available to support you as a parent,” Schmidt said.

A district worker then would visit the mother-to-be to offer help so that parents “have multiple opportunities to create a healthy learning environment for their children.”

Among other things, the Annenberg money will pay for substitutes and summer sessions for teachers to meet to talk about these issues and to share information about individual students.

A sixth-grade teacher, for example, will know far more about the students who show up for the first day of class in September than in the past and be better prepared to help them with their weaknesses and build on their strengths.

Usually, he said, school districts have little time to tackle such problems. “It’s like the pilot and crew of a B-47 redesigning the airplane in mid-flight,” he said. “We believe that if teachers had quality time to rethink their practices . . . we’ll be more successful,” he said.

The district hopes those efforts will produce improvement by traditional measurements such as a lowered dropout rate, improved test scores and higher enrollment of minority students in advanced courses.

Maria Casillas, LAAMP’s president, praised Santa Monica’s proposal for involving teachers from the beginning and for seeking to get to the heart of one of the most challenging issues in education. She said Santa Monica had begun work on improving the performance of its students even before her organization came into existence.

She said the new grant “will keep the discussion going rather than stimulate it” in the first place. And she said that other districts, including Los Angeles, will be able to learn from Santa Monica’s experience.

Mark Slavkin, president of the Los Angeles Board of Education, said he expected the contract between LAAMP and the district to be worked out soon. “We’re pretty close,” he said. “We’re not agreeing or disagreeing. We’re working out some of the details.”

Among the sticking points is the language of the contract that describes what the district promises to deliver, in return for the money. As a legal contract, the organization could ask that the money be returned if the promises are not kept.