Realty Firm Joins With LEARN to Promote Schools

The school reform group LEARN launched a partnership with a real estate giant Monday under which agents are to provide information about the group to all prospective home buyers.

The Prudential-Jon Douglas Company has agreed to educate its 2,700 sales agents about LEARN and have them distribute brochures that describe how parents can get involved in the reform effort, which has spread to about a third of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s 660 campuses.

LEARN--the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now--advocates having many school decisions made at the campus level by a panel of teachers, parents and staff.

Mike Roos, LEARN’s president, said he became interested in the liaison after realizing that people get their first information about neighborhood schools from their real estate agents. “Within the first five minutes they’ll say, ‘It’s a good neighborhood, the elementary school is OK, the middle school is bad, the high school is terrible,”’ Roos said. “Now they’ll say, ‘This school is involved in reform.’ ”