First Lady Visits a Page From Her Book

What was billed as Hillary Rodham Clinton observing a noted Los Angeles charter school was more precisely a school observing Clinton on Thursday as the first lady dipped into Los Angeles on her national book tour.

At the Vaughn Next Century Learning Center, children pressed their faces against classroom security screens and yelled “Hola, Mrs. Clinton!” Students in a kindergarten computer lab--one of two classes she briefly visited--had to be reminded to concentrate on their work when they began pounding out random letters instead of words as she stopped to watch them.

Clinton was greeted by a standing ovation from school staff and community members when she entered the Pacoima elementary school’s auditorium for a question-and-answer session.

“In education, unlike anything else we do, often innovation is penalized, success is not rewarded,” Clinton told the handpicked audience. “We, together, have to change the attitude in the public at large about what our schools should be doing.”

Clinton’s choice of Vaughn over 662 other local campuses was a predictable one--the school combines elements of her community health care initiatives and her husband’s charter school platform with a “We Are the World” ethnicity. It forms the nucleus of the very kind of urban village she describes in her book, “It Takes a Village and Other Lessons Children Teach Us.”

It is also a school primed for publicity, where the effervescent principal has received such widespread attention and kudos that one fan joked she had virtually installed a helipad on the playground.

Yet the truth is that Vaughn was not the first of six semi-independent charter schools in Los Angeles, nor is it the largest, the most innovative or even the most successful in terms of boosting student performance.

“We’re just a normal place. We have our problems,” said Principal Yvonne Chan, who has become a national spokeswoman for the charter school movement.

On Thursday, the Pacoima school’s spit and polish, smiling faces and carefully worded questions didn’t reveal those struggles behind the scenes, struggles that have brought mixed results.

Under Chan’s leadership, Vaughn has toiled with great success to salve racial tensions among educators, parents and sometimes students. It has fought to victory for its budgetary due from the Los Angeles Unified School District and used some of that money to build 14 classrooms.

However, the school’s work to woo parents to school committee meetings has been less effective: Chan acknowledges that only about half of the 49 parent members show up consistently.

Its attempt to prove its worth in the currency of standardized test scores has also faltered of late, with Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills scores dropping for the first time last year.

After years of boasting about the gradual rise in student test results, Chan was faced with explaining the opposite. She said she believes the decline in the key fourth-grade year resulted from her insistence that all pupils be tested, even special education students.

But the dip in test scores was a reminder that fame can also be a trial, Chan maintains. When word of the results leaked out, some of her detractors could barely conceal their glee. They said that they never wanted her to fail--which would be a black eye for all charters--but that they did welcome the reality check on her rhetoric.

Clinton, who has faced difficult questions from the media lately, seemed to commiserate.

“There is so much talk about what doesn’t work in America . . . so many negative press stories,” she said. “You are solving some . . . problems at Vaughn. Let’s look at what does work and then build out from there.”

Each of the other five charter schools in Los Angeles also has a unique character. For the others--and for hundreds of additional schools that are making significant changes under the district’s reform movement, known as LEARN--it is hard not to be envious of Vaughn’s attention.

“Sometimes we feel like, ‘Let’s not use Vaughn so much. . . . Let’s look at other models,’ ” said Johnathan Williams, co-director of the Accelerated School in South-Central Los Angeles, a two-room schoolhouse that opened in 1994 and has since redesigned everything from report cards to teaching methods.

Chan is also a thorn in the side of the Los Angeles Unified School District, taking her complaints to the press when she cannot get the results she wants. She even adopted a motto for herself and the school: “The Little Engine That Could.”

“She gives me gray hairs,” said one district official, who asked not to be named.

Yet the fact is that in many ways, Vaughn could be a page torn directly from Clinton’s book, in which she asks:

“Are parents ready to become partners with schools again, for the benefit of their own--and other--children? And how about other members of the village, those whose children have passed school age? Are they--are all of us--ready to join this partnership?”

As if anticipating Clinton’s questions, over the past few years Vaughn has reached out beyond its cyclone fences into the surrounding low-income neighborhood.

The effort started with the 1992 opening of an on-campus family service center, which Clinton mentioned in her remarks, but was unable to visit because of security concerns.

The center now provides more than 400 families a month with everything from clothing to prenatal health care. It is financially supported by major agencies--especially the Los Angeles Educational Partnership and United Way--but relies heavily on parent volunteers, and parents make up half of its governing board.

Charter school status came three years ago--after passage of a law allowing 100 schools statewide to operate free from most government mandates. It requires parent involvement in all decision-making committees.

What has since emerged is a symbiotic relationship in which service center counselors feel comfortable telling teachers about problems their students are facing at home and teachers freely referring students and their families to the center for help.