A Promising Report on LEARN Progress

The Los Angeles Unified School District has received an important independent report on LEARN, its primary academic reform program. This preliminary information provides welcome and long-awaited indications of whether the efforts of LEARN--the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now--are bearing fruit.

LEARN is a novel approach to education, and it’s clearly needed by Los Angeles. Its mission is improvement, and its technique has been to turn key decisions over to the individual campuses, putting academic plans into the hands of parents, staff members and teachers. The report is a scorecard of how LEARN is doing, based on student testing.

The great news is that students at the elementary schools that have had the longest involvement in the LEARN program (three years) are performing substantially better than those at non-LEARN schools.

However, the report also points to difficulties that Latino students face in the transition from Spanish to English in the classroom. The standard used to rate LEARN schools against their regular district counterparts was the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills, employed by all schools, and its Spanish-language parallel, Aprenda.

The test group was composed of fourth-graders. At that level, very few LAUSD Latino students have moved out of bilingual programs. When those students in the LEARN schools took the English-only CTBS tests, the results showed stagnancy or decline. On the Spanish-language Aprenda, however, Latino students in LEARN schools performed better than their non-LEARN counterparts. The fact that they showed less improvement than Asian or African American students may be attributable to language or the prior quality of education some students received.

Parents and the public need to have the insights of the LAUSD on this and other matters, but the district has been unconscionably slow in publishing information on the LEARN study. Some of this information has been available to the district since late April. Last week, the report was still being reviewed behind closed doors, like a bad quarterly report before a stockholders meeting. Most school board members hadn’t seen it.

A spokesman for LAUSD Supt. Sid Thompson offered many excuses, saying that the district was merely waiting, prudently, until its officials understood all of the report and could fully answer questions about it. Further, the LAUSD’s assistant superintendent of LEARN, Judy Burton, said it was essential to first ensure that the data were “categorized properly. We had given them [the officials] very raw data.”

Among the possible findings? The schools spent their first year getting involved in the LEARN program and their second in developing a plan; the LEARN schools that showed improvement on the test were those that were a year beyond that, with plans fully in place. Angelenos hope to hear more about that and other important matters in the LEARN analysis--and soon.