Dysfunction and Prozac at the District

Take a casual look at the latest Newsweek and you may be surprised to see that California’s No. 1 ranked high school is not in the shadow of Stanford or UC Berkeley, but a little down the road from Valley College.

North Hollywood High School is, by one measure, the state’s premier school for academics, beating Palo Alto’s Gunn, and No. 11 in the nation. So says an index created by veteran education writer Jay Mathews that heavily weighs student performance on Advanced Placement tests. Last year, in fact, NoHo’s highly gifted magnet program produced four of the country’s top 10 AP students. Meanwhile, two other Los Angeles Unified School District schools also made the AP top 100--the midtown L.A. Center for Enriched Studies (47th) and Van Nuys High (70th).

All of this is more good news for a school district better known for failure than success. El Camino Real High of Woodland Hills didn’t make Mathews’ list, but last week it won its third straight California Academic Decathlon. Perhaps more heartening still was the strong showing by Garfield High and Belmont High, schools from much poorer neighborhoods.

Add ‘em up and maybe that makes six doses of good news.

Now here’s to the hope these aren’t just the public relations equivalent of Prozac.

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David Tokofsky, member of the dysfunctional board that runs the dysfunctional school district, likes to describe the district’s troubles in psychological terms.

“There are places that succeed, places that revive the spirit,” he says, referring to the recent academic success stories. “But the school system, as an institution, can’t get any lower. The system is in a state of deep depression.”

Tokofsky, of all board members, seems the best-qualified to comment on these bright flares of hope amid the gloom and doom of the nation’s second-largest school district. He first made news in 1987 as the Marshall High teacher who coached a team of 12 students to the national title in the Academic Decathlon, the first LAUSD school to take the honor. In 1990, he coached another Marshall squad to the national mock trial championship.

These laurels helped Tokofsky win election to the board in 1995, representing an area that stretches from Sylmar and San Fernando to East L.A. and Monterey Park, while taking a pay cut to $24,000 a year. Being on the Board of Education has been, it seems, an education.

Early on, he learned something of the board’s bunker mentality. Tokofsky says that when he was quoted in newspaper articles criticizing LAUSD practices, then-board president Mark Slavkin would send a copy of the story with word “district” in his quote circled, and an arrow pointing to a telling note: “David-- We are the district.”

Tokofsky seems to prefer the role of maverick, agitating for change within the bureaucracy and via the press. He is criticized for not being able to build coalitions on the board. Then again, Tokofsky says his three years in office have taught him that, as critics have long claimed, the bureaucrats actually wield more power than the board. And this, he suggests, may be one of the many sources of the district’s depression.

“A psychologist will tell you a lot of depression is anger turned inward,” Tokofsky says. “And the people whose mission it is to change the system are angry too.”

And so Tokofsky figures that Los Angeles is left to contemplate four metaphorical options: “Prozac,” “suicide,” “electroshock treatment” and “a 12-step program.”

The hyping of North Hollywood and El Camino Real and other academic achievements, he suggests, works a little like Prozac. What is a wonderful achievement for the students and teachers responsible for the success may, unfortunately, promote an irrational mood of “Don’t worry; be happy.”

Busting up the massive LAUSD into smaller districts, Tokofsky, says, is a form of suicide that would not solve classroom problems. Breakup advocates, he adds, overlook the fact that, in a single generation, California as a whole, not just Los Angeles, has dropped from the nation’s top tier in terms of student funding and performance to the lowest tier. Sacramento would still control the purse strings whether there is one district or five. Such a division would be complex, contentious and painful--and may not “get to the core problems,” Tokofsky says.

Electroshock treatment, in Tokofsky’s construct, has been provided by Mayor Richard Riordan with his declarations of “revolution.” Riordan’s bold rhetoric may shake up the board and the bureaucrats. The problem is, Tokofsky says, the mayor has yet to describe just what he means by revolution. As John Lennon put it: We’d all love to see the plan.

And then there’s the 12-step program, the sort of reform advocated by Tokofsky, a series of incremental steps that would lift the district out of its malaise. LEARN, charter school, the much-in-demand magnet programs--all of these, he suggests, represent worthy steps on the road to recovery. But the district culture remains “so petrified,” he says, that change remains slow--a step forward here, a step backward there.

With tens of thousands of students filing waiting lists for magnet schools, Tokofsky has lately been pushing administrators to introduce 10 or 11 new programs. The problem, he says, is that magnets are typically funded by money earmarked for school desegregation--and that money is used up. The question is whether the officials can find other funding--or would be willing to dip into the district’s general fund.

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“I get told I’m not being a team player when my identity as a teacher was for building teams that win.”

And rather than blissfully contemplating the Prozac effect, Tokofsky says the district as a whole can learn real lessons from schools that score academic triumphs.

One is to insist on high standards, not lowered expectations.

Another, closely related, is to simply work harder. That’s what all the champions do.

Another is the value of keeping score. A district notoriously gunshy about standardized testing should enthusiastically embrace opportunities to measure student and teacher performance.

And finally, Tokofsky says, the Academic Decathlon demonstrates the value of small student-to-teacher ratios. It was a joy, he says, to coach 12 students to a national title at a time when many classes had 38 students. And now that California’s economy is chugging nicely, he says, it’s encouraging to see Sacramento put more money in the schools, making classes smaller.

Money isn’t everything. But it sure helps.

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to him at The Times’ Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth 91311, or via e-mail at scott.harris@latimes.com Please include a phone number.