School’s Move to Donated Site Caps 2 Dreams

They were the unlikeliest of renegades: two mild-mannered Los Angeles public school teachers who shed the bonds of convention and union affiliation to start their own tiny school in a church social hall.

Three years of hard work later, Kevin Sved and Johnathan Williams are getting a reward of phenomenal proportions: Clothing designer Carole Little and her estranged husband and business partner, Leonard Rabinowitz, are giving their $6.8-million former headquarters and warehouse south of downtown to the 80-student independent charter school.

The donation, believed to be the largest ever to a local public school, means that come fall The Accelerated School can move three blocks from its cramped quarters on East 37th Street, where teachers have had to pack up their classrooms every week to make way for Sunday school.

Their new accommodations are luxurious by public school standards, replete with with glass-block walls, built-in shelving, mature palm trees and even a stainless steel cafeteria. Twin offices once occupied by Little and Rabinowitz will be nerve central for the two 30-year-old teachers, who call themselves “co-directors.”

And the property at Main Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard is only the start. A panel including wealthy benefactors Rabinowitz and Lynda Guber, wife of film producer Peter Guber, has promised to raise $50 million over the next two years to add a high school, install cutting-edge technology and establish an endowment fund for the campus.

At the complex deal’s core is a friendship between Guber and Rabinowitz, which connected two dreams first dreamed in 1992: the schoolteachers’ dream of expansion and the clothing manufacturer’s dream of giving back to a community that protected his property during the Los Angeles riots.

“Kevin and Johnathan were doing this great work, but [the donation happened because] people at high levels knew each other personally,” said Deborah Claesgens, who coordinates the school’s partnership with Cal State L.A. “It’s one of the great things about this town: When things connect, they really work.”

The magnitude of the donation would be overwhelming for such a small enterprise--despite the tenacity of the two teachers--were it not for the school’s extensive safety net of educational advisors and financial backers. Although proud of their accomplishments, Sved and Williams are quick to factor in the vagaries of luck.

“If you believe in destiny, this is a good example of it,” Sved said. “It’s really a matter of being in the right place at the right time with the right ideas.”

Early on, even matchmaker Guber was skeptical. Though the former president of nonprofit EDUCATION FIRST! eventually threw her wholehearted support behind the charter school, on meeting the teachers, she recalls thinking: “You’ve got to be kidding! How are these guys going to do it?”’

“But, you know, they’ve really risen to the occasion,” she added. “There’s nothing more powerful than passion and dedication.”

Rabinowitz and Little, for their part, were intrigued that, as a public charter campus, the school could change more quickly and create more freely than a regular school restricted by state and local regulations.

They also were intrigued by The Accelerated School philosophy, developed by a Stanford University professor, which strives to treat each student as if he or she were gifted and relies heavily on hands-on instruction and parent involvement.

They were comforted by the oversight of the school of education at Cal State L.A., which furnishes assistance ranging from training teachers to fund-raising.

But most of all, they were impressed by the children--the current and prospective students they met during discussion groups organized by Guber.

“Most of our friends send their kids to private schools and they’re proud of how active they are in those schools,” Rabinowitz said. “Then you look at the public schools and how rundown they are. . . . These are good kids that want to be in school and they are totally left out.”

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In 1992, Williams and Sved had been teaching less than two years apiece, all at South-Central’s 99th Street School, when the state Legislature agreed to allow 100 public schools to operate outside of normal channels. The eager UCLA graduates immediately caught the independence bug and began talking up its possibilities. Maybe 99th Street, which had embraced The Accelerated School methods, could join the experiment.

For them, the urgency only increased after the teachers union reluctantly agreed to a 10% districtwide pay cut. For most 99th Street teachers, the cut knocked the wind out of any charter fantasies, particularly once they learned that Sved and Williams hoped to tie teachers’ salaries to student achievement.

A schoolwide vote found only six teachers willing to try a fully independent charter, so the two decided to strike out on their own.

“There was a lack of confidence in our limited experience, which was legitimate,” Williams said.

From the beginning, their plans were grandiose: to change the face of education.

Vowing to become as much like a private school as possible under charter law, they sought full control of their budget from day one and became the only charter in Los Angeles to opt out of the teachers’ union. They hoped to one day run a school that would accommodate children from their first day of school to their last--preschool through 12th grade.

But they settled on starting small, proposing a kindergarten through fourth grade that would grow by about one grade level a year.

By spring 1994, they had met with Rabinowitz and therefore limited their search for accommodations to the area surrounding the factory, so students would not be inconvenienced should his donation materialize.

With seed money from Wells Fargo Bank, they leased space from St. Stephen’s Hungarian Catholic Church. Then they spent weeks knocking on doors of nearby houses, churches and community centers to recruit students, snaring 52 enrollees for the first year--half of them Latino, half African American, all poor.

Three years later, they have a waiting list of 300 and plan to open at the new site with 140 students in kindergarten through sixth grade.

That’s welcome news for Helen Clement, who had been trying to get her two children into the school for more than a year. Come September, 8-year-old August and 6-year-old John will trade a long commute to a parochial school for a short walk to Accelerated.

“I was kind of desperate to get them out of private school,” Clement said. “But I was not interested in putting them in a regular public school.”

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The accelerated approach was created 12 years ago for two San Francisco Bay Area schools by Stanford professor Henry Levin. It has since spread to more than 1,000 schools across the country, relying in each case on the same basic expectations: that parents will join governing “cadres” and that slower learners will be introduced to the same material as gifted students.

At Los Angeles’ Accelerated School, parents have taken their charge seriously, voting to require school uniforms, to expand the after-school program and to send stern warnings of potential student expulsion to parents who do not complete their three volunteer hours monthly.

Their children have been taught to manage personal bank accounts, using play money earned from good homework and attendance records to buy school supplies and toys at the student store. Fourth-graders studied the history of flight and aerodynamics, then built model airplanes. Second-graders researched the shape and size of dinosaurs, then chalked full-scale versions on the school playground.

Though publications produced by the school describe students’ scholastic improvement as dramatic, standardized test results in fact have been mixed, with large gains seen in the first year never since matched. The district’s newest test ranked the students at the 32nd percentile nationally, meaning that two-thirds of U.S. students scored higher.

Patience is advocated by professor Allen Mori, who monitors the school’s progress as dean of Cal State’s Charter School of Education. Mori said the school has all the building blocks for future academic success: high student attendance, parent participation and teacher involvement.

With help from Mori’s development staff, financial contributors have flocked to the school. Wells Fargo is the largest cash donor to date, committing $660,000. Several prestigious education reform organizations also have chipped in, including The Weingart Foundation and the Los Angeles Annenberg Metropolitan Project.

Teacher Ana Ponce shares the donors’ confidence that Accelerated’s students will thrive.

Ponce was among Sved and Williams’ supporters at 99th Street School, but then left the state to get a master’s degree. When she heard they had actually pulled it off, she turned down a teaching post back East to return as one of the charter school’s founding teachers.

To Ponce, freedom from the teachers union was not a detriment, but actually one of the charter’s strongest draws. At 99th Street, she said, she came to resent union seniority rules.

“Being a young teacher, I felt I had to conform to what was there, but . . . it bothered me that people were getting paid more, getting more opportunities because they’d been there longer, not because they were getting results.”

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With just a month until the first day of school, construction crews are busily modifying part of the 175,000-square-foot site to better accommodate schoolchildren, at a cost of about $150,000. Cavernous sewing and pattern-cutting rooms are being divvied up into classrooms, a former art room is being opened to the alleyway to serve as a main entrance and one former office is being turned into a nursing station. Some Accelerated School parents are spending afternoons as volunteers prying bricks from a damaged patio.

Industrial real estate experts say the property never was listed for sale but could have fetched at least $5 million in the current market. The Internal Revenue Service valued it at $6.8 million, including the vacant lot across the street, allowing the Carole Little company to write it off as a charitable contribution.

Rabinowitz shrugs when asked whether committing to raise the additional $50 million is overly optimistic, saying that large corporations and philanthropic individuals want to give to the inner-city, but just don’t know how.

His own desire to help was sparked by the 1992 riots, when one wing of the design center went up in flames, but the rest escaped damage because neighbors voluntarily guarded it.

Out of gratitude, he decided he would pay to keep surrounding public schools open longer hours, giving local children a place to play and stay out of trouble. But his offer was met with what he describes as a lukewarm--and worse--reception from principals and administrators.

Not long after that, Rabinowitz decided that the Carole Little company needed more space. Already fed up with the public school system, he thought of recruiting someone to turn the King and Main site into a private vocational school for South-Central Los Angeles youths.

Then, during a February 1994 EDUCATION FIRST! ski benefit in Aspen, Colo.--near the adjacent ranches owned by Guber and Rabinowitz/Little--an alternate plan emerged.

As Rabinowitz remembers it, he and Little were conversing with a group of people who shared their interest in education--and knew a whole lot more about it.

“Lo and behold, they were talking about trying to do something to make education work better,” he said. “They wanted a school with a CEO, not a principal. Where? We don’t know. Well, we said, we’ve got this terrific place.”

Guber, a former Brooklyn public school teacher, had been discussing with Cal State L.A. ways to hand off the energy generated by her organization during six years of mounting an annual media campaign for education. Expanding The Accelerated School had been a large part of those discussions.

What Guber recalls about the dinner in Aspen is a sense of “Eureka!” when Rabinowitz talked of wanting to turn his property into a vocational school.

“I told him, ‘Oh, wait! You can’t do anything until you talk to me,” she said. “‘I have the most incredible dream. I can go so much beyond that.’ ”