Why Our Schools Are Failing

L.A. Times Archives

May 17, 1998 12 AM PT

“If a majority of students are failing,” a young teacher agonizes aloud, “is it their fault, or is it mine?”

It’s Monday morning, 8:05 a.m. Another week is just beginning in California’s public schools. But already the frustration is building in a dusty, bare-walled classroom, Room 173, at Los Angeles’ Manual Arts High School, where a dozen teachers are hashing out school goals.

“It’s not about us failing the kids,” a second teacher retorts. “They’re failing themselves.”

A third launches into a rant about students who play hooky, students who sleep in class and students who only want to get to their jobs at fast-food restaurants.

“You can’t blame teachers,” she says. “It’s a failure of the entire system.”

How bad are our schools? Who is to blame? How do we fix them?

Such questions rumble throughout the state’s system of public education. For good reason.

At Manual Arts, teachers routinely help students take tests--actually sit beside them and walk them through each question--because 80% read below grade level.

At Anaheim’s Katella High, tattoo magazines and superhero comics pass as acceptable material for the ritual “silent reading” at the start of class.

At Kern County’s Taft Union High, teachers have students copy lessons off the blackboard because they won’t study at home.

Even at Arcadia High School, an academic star in the San Gabriel Valley, the English department is ordering grammar books because too many students stumble over the mechanics of good writing.

These are the daily realities behind the dismal numbers that produce front-page headlines every few months:

California’s fourth-graders tie for last, with Louisiana, in reading. In math, they surpass only the fourth-graders of Mississippi.

In science, eighth-graders lag a full year behind counterparts nationally.

High school students? Half of those who go on to California State University--meaning they are among the top third of all graduates--require remedial help in math or English. PacBell has to screen seven applicants to find one high school graduate with the math and reading skills needed to be a telephone operator.

And California’s teachers? More than 31,000 classrooms are presided over by men and women who do not have a teaching certificate--who are still learning their craft. Almost half of high school math classes are led by teachers who never even minored in the subject.

Given all that, not many people are shocked when California’s main gubernatorial contenders admit--at least one, proudly--that they send their own children to private schools.

Education has risen high on the public’s agenda. According to a Times poll, nearly one out of three Californians see it as the state’s most important problem--ahead of immigration and just behind crime.

Thirty years ago, California was fifth in the nation in per-pupil spending, and its schools were admired for their innovations. Although it was never quite the “golden age” some graybeards recall, even the Los Angeles Unified School District once provided free summer school for all who wanted it, and 300,000 students signed up.

Since the tax-cutting crusades of the late 1970s, however, California’s per-student expenditures have remained stagnant at best, while nearly every other state’s has grown by double digits. So there’s a bookcase in Room 173 at Manual Arts High--with hardly any books in it.

But perhaps the greatest failure of California’s officials has been their mishandling of the demographic tide that swept over the state’s schools.

California now has 45% of the nation’s immigrant students. The number of youngsters not proficient in English exceeds the total enrollment in the public schools of 38 other states.

Yet more than 1,000 schools did not advance a single such child to English fluency last year.

Meanwhile, achievement has flagged across the board--not only, as stereotypes suggest, among minorities, the poor and immigrants. Whites and the children of college graduates, long thought immune to bad schooling, trail their counterparts across the country as well.

“No one population or school setting is responsible for the problem in California,” says Marshall S. Smith, acting deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Education.

In California, Smith concludes, “there is a problem with the overall quality of schools.”

Seeking answers to the perplexing questions fueling the current debate over public education, The Times spent six months peering inside California’s schools.

A three-pronged Times poll explored the perceptions and experiences of students, teachers and parents statewide. UCLA education experts and Times computer specialists analyzed dozens of databases--test scores, teacher qualifications, course-taking patterns, student backgrounds and much more--covering all 8,000 public schools in the state.

Finally, a crew of reporters was sent to education’s front lines, observing a week in the life of seven high schools, from one in a middle-class white suburb of Sacramento to an immigrant-rich, inner-city campus in San Diego.

To be sure, there’s much good news in an education system that again produced the nation’s Academic Decathlon champion, the runner-up in the Science Bowl and hundreds of “AP scholars,” students who ace eight or more Advanced Placement exams.

One encouraging trend is how many more poor and minority students are taking tests like that, along with the classes--English literature to calculus--required for college admissions.

But even that raises a troubling question: If students are completing rigorous high school work, why are so many found lacking when they reach college? At some high schools, all the graduates who went on to the elite University of California system failed a basic writing exam.

Of course, there is no single reality in California’s “system” of elementary and secondary schools. A week at seven high schools finds a mind-boggling diversity of cultures, communities and values.

At Oakmont High in Roseville, outside Sacramento, two sisters carry backpacks bulging with texts, one weighing 20 pounds.

At Hoover High in San Diego, scores of children show up daily bearing not a single book.

At Katella High, in the shadow of Disneyland, administrators struggle to keep students from dropping out, enticing them with a panoply of clubs and electives in animation.

But at Arcadia High, the challenge is to keep the students from taking too many of the honors and Advanced Placement classes that make college applications shine.

Something binds all these schools together, however: an undertow of concern, a recurrent self-doubt, self-examination.

At Arcadia, the worry is about competition from the private schooling offered all over suburbia. So the faculty churns out new courses--25 in a single year, like Mandarin 5 or virtual geography--to make sure they “keep kids at Arcadia High.”

A world away, at inner-city Manual Arts, all of Monday has been set aside for the staff to talk things over, as at the gathering in Room 173, where teacher Ady Sukkar drops the question “is it me or is it them?”

Even as the Manual Arts crew lets off steam, much the same is going on south in San Diego. What gets the juices flowing at Monday’s teachers meeting at Hoover High is an offer by a millionaire philanthropist, the founder of the Price Club, to bring in university experts to boost test scores.

“We’ve had too many new ideas and programs imposed on us over the years,” special ed teacher Alan Marshall complains to colleagues, “so many things that last two years--and then are discontinued.”

His reaction to this latest plan to overhaul the school?

“Skeptical.”

It’s a wobbly start for another week in the trenches of California schools.

Monday: Room 305 at Hoover High

The students pour past El Cajon Boulevard’s busy strip malls, tire stores and tamale factory, and by a billboard for “Jammin’ Z-90 Nonstop Hip Hop and R & B.” Then they go through the metal gates, past the security guards and onto the campus named for the 31st president of the United States, whose face--incredibly white and round and stern--still peers down from a portrait in the library of San Diego’s Herbert Hoover High School.

Today is a tardy sweep day, so they scurry in before the bell rings, the gate closes and counselors escort stragglers to the cafeteria for punishment--the Andrews Sisters crooning “Want Some Seafood, Mama.” Amid the boys in baggy pants and Raiders jackets and T-shirts with outlandish sayings come Somali girls in colorful African gowns, flowing from head to ankle.

A boy heads for the principal’s office to explain, in Spanish, how he had to go back to Mexico and missed the last three years of school, why he has no transcripts, and why his English--what little he knew--has faded.

A Vietnamese teenager treads in his Nikes to the English-as-a-second-language class of Rita El Wardi, who begins looking through students’ essays. Most bungle verbs, syntax and other intricacies of English. Then she gets to his paper, and reads aloud his poignant image: “I felt very worried like a blind bird in a jungle.”

Amazed, El Wardi remarks, “You won’t get that kind of language from too many students born in San Diego.”

Welcome to the new reality in California public education. Now wander to Room 305.

Here, 12 seats are occupied by students who are new to the country.

Three others hold students with serious learning handicaps.

One girl has a mother in prison. She has written a poem to her: “I hope I can stop hating you soon. . . .”

Another has a swelling belly, pregnant by a man almost twice her age.

A boy has dozed off, worn out from his after-school job washing cars.

“Wake up!” teacher Lee Mongrue admonishes. “Home is for sleeping, not school.”

When Hoover opened in 1930, the area was nearly all white and middle-class. The jobs were in the military and manufacturing, the early airplane industry. Baseball legend Ted Williams went to school here.

Of Hoover’s 1,901 students today, roughly 50% are Latino, 20% Asian American, 20% African American. Only about 5% are white.

The majority are so poor that they qualify for free school lunches and welfare.

Hoover reflects the explosive changes that have challenged California like nowhere else in the country.

Between 1988 and 1996, the proportion of the state’s high schools that are predominantly minority has increased by more than half, to 16%, according to a UCLA analysis.

Today, nearly 60% of all the state’s public high schools are at least one-third black and Latino.

But far more significant is how the poverty rate among students has more than doubled--to 28%--since 1969.

The devastating impact of poverty is well documented. But when researchers at the UCLA-based Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing examined the available data on California’s high schools, they were startled by the degree to which students’ economic standing, something “outside the control of the school,” seemed to dictate their success, whether measured by SAT scores or how many complete college prep classes.

It’s like the link between smoking and cancer, only stronger--44% of the difference between two schools’ scores on the college entrance exams could be explained by the poverty rate of the students. “It’s not insurmountable,” concludes UCLA researcher Richard Brown, “but it’s certainly a steep climb to overcome.”

Then add in how many students move from school to school: California’s students have the highest mobility rate in the country. About 75% change schools at least once before the 12th grade, and 33% change three or more times--for reasons other than normal promotion. And the more a student moves, the lower his or her chance of graduating from high school, according to UC Santa Barbara education professor Russell Rumberger, who analyzed records of 13,000 U.S. students.

At Hoover, also add the practical challenge of having students who speak 29 languages, from Tagalog to Swahili.

In a nod to such diversity, next month’s graduation ceremony will be delivered in 10 languages.

The soccer team is mainly black and Latino, the badminton team nearly all Southeast Asian. The swim team has two Africans, a Filipino, a Mexican, a Guatemalan and a white.

The football team is a miniature United Nations too, but the victories of earlier eras elude the ragtag crew. “It’s hard to compete,” a coach says, “when your front line is all named Nguyen.”

Such signs of change abound in the six other high schools as well.

At Katella High in Orange County, so many students return to Mexico or Guatemala or follow parents from job to job, that a third of the 2,000 disappear before the school year is up.

Arcadia High, where almost 60% of the student body is Asian, has taken on a new flavor. The cafeteria menu is as likely to feature stir-fried beef as burgers.

Not even Granada Hills High in the San Fernando Valley--once Los Angeles’ bastion of whiteness--is untouched by currents of change. Filipino and Korean students crouch by the front gate over games of pusoy dos, poker with an Asian twist.

And although the school still is nearly 40% white, “white” at Granada Hills doesn’t necessarily mean made in the USA.

It could mean a student born in Israel, Lebanon or Pakistan. It could mean someone like 17-year-old Amy Hassan, an Egyptian immigrant with olive skin, black hair and deep brown eyes.

“We are Caucasians,” says Amy, whose parents speak Arabic at home, “but you can’t say we’re white.”

Californians are divided as to whether this changing face of public education has been good or bad. One-third of the adults polled by The Times said that immigrants have had a positive impact on schools; 37% said the impact is negative.

White parents, whose children represent 39.5% of the state’s enrollment from kindergarten through high school, are most pessimistic: 51% said immigrant children have hurt schools, compared with 39% of black parents, 36% of Latinos and 14% of Asian Americans.

Clearly, though, the demographic upheaval has changed the way teachers teach.

In Lee Mongrue’s class at Hoover, today is a big day. Although this is advanced humanities, the ninth-graders are tackling their first test of the school year. In March.

Doris Alvarez, Hoover’s principal, doubts the validity of traditional paper and pencil tests for immigrants, minorities and low-income students. So her teachers are encouraged to have students create portfolios of their best work. Then they give oral “exhibitions” and answer questions in a process called portfolio defense.

Report cards have been redesigned to grade students not only in traditional subjects, like math and history, but in “inquiry, “technology,” “organization,” “communication” and “collaboration.”

Such innovations helped win Hoover the title New Urban High School by the U.S. Department of Education. And last year Alvarez was national Principal of the Year.

But the San Diego Board of Education is not so impressed: It has Hoover on a list of five campuses targeted for closure if test scores don’t improve. More than 80% of Hoover’s 10th-graders rank below the 50th percentile on a standardized reading test, and more than 50% score that poorly in math.

Indeed, the school’s philosophy runs against California’s current tide. Gov. Pete Wilson has pushed for standardized testing of every student in every school. No exemption for poor children. None for language handicaps. No excuses.

“The day for arguing about tests is over,” says San Diego school board President Ron Ottinger. He wants Hoover to teach test-taking skills and remedial reading.

“Basically, the middle class is bypassing Hoover,” says Ottinger, worried that those families--mostly white and Asian American--will continue to flee the area or send their children to private schools.

“We’ve got to change that. We do not want Hoover to be only a school for new immigrants and the poor.”

Mongrue, the teacher, could have fled too. About 60% of his colleagues have bolted over the past four years, most to suburban schools where for the same pay the challenges are less daunting.

One reason he remains is that it’s convenient--he lives nearby. But mostly, he says, he feels needed.

“I know it sounds trite, but you can make a difference at Hoover.”

If that means bending the conventions of schooling, he’s all for it.

So he eases his class into the test.

“Listen carefully,” he tells them. “I’m going to cut a deal with you--you know what that means?”

His part: “I will give you 10 minutes max for you to review with your buddies.” Their part: “You do your best on this test.”

It’s an essay question about the sub-Saharan section of Africa.

As they scribble, he watches for signs of frustration. After a few minutes, he’s encouraged.

“They’re still engaged,” he says. “They haven’t quit on me. I’m pleased.”

Tuesday: Even White Kids Sing the Blues

It’s Tuesday, a day like any other on the quad.

At Arcadia High, the longhairs loll under the shady trees, cheerleaders near the lawn.

At Granada Hills, the black kids fill the benches while a few shaved-head Mexicans in baggy pants hug the area by the mural . . . of a Scottish highlander wearing a kilt.

At Katella, early birds cluster by a map of the world, etched in the concrete. Buses pull up minutes before the 8 a.m. bell, disgorging classmates from apartments and motels near Disneyland, home to the work force for the Magic Kingdom.

Meanwhile, in the town of Taft, up near Bakersfield, the preppies gather under the old wisteria vines. And the band kids--a smart and outgoing bunch--occupy the loudest table in the cafeteria, knocking the school dress code (“no backless shoes . . . no exposed bellies”) and making cracks about the students who slouch on the sidewalk across the street.

Those are the stoners or slackers, a ragtag group in leather jackets, flannel shirts, boots, chains and tattoos.

Unmotivated? Yes. Anti-school? Almost always. Big goals for the future? Why bother. “Smoke cigarettes, have fun,” says one, summing up the stoner life.

It’s a credo of disengagement, particularly from academics. It’s also a fitting metaphor for the general problem at Taft Union, where, in too many classrooms, students doze or doodle.

Many people may want to believe that low expectations--and poor performance--are the scourge only of inner-city schools or of poor, minority youths. But those problems thrive here too, in a small-town high school where 86% of the students are white.

Junior Jerry Rowe is repeating sophomore English. Rowe admits that he doesn’t care for studying, rarely participates in class, yet somehow expects to attend college and catch up then.

“They’ll run that through me again--English,” he says with alarming nonchalance.

California’s white students, as a whole, aren’t holding their own. Compelling evidence comes from the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Nationally, 33% of white fourth-graders read below the basic level in 1994. In California, 44% tested that poorly--14 points worse than their counterparts in Texas, a state with a similar demographic profile.

The proportion of white fourth-graders who read proficiently in California actually shrank from 1992 to 1994, by seven points, to 20%.

Even high-end students--those with parents who graduated from college--have lost ground: Only half were reading at or above the basic level in 1994.

The students at Taft are not high-end. This isn’t Palo Alto or Pacific Palisades. Most are the sons and daughters of roustabouts and roughnecks who work the surrounding oil fields and live in clapboard shanties around the arid San Joaquin Valley community. Many are the descendants of another generation’s poor immigrants--the Okies of Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.”

Yet at Taft, students don’t have to contend with gangs or violence or substandard facilities. “This is like going back to 1950,” English teacher Steve Shinn says. “It is a wonderful, clean, quiet place.”

Here, it’s hard to blame educational problems on money. For years, the school was the beneficiary of taxes from the oil beneath the foothills. There are no graffiti or mounds of trash. It has modern classrooms equipped with computers wired to the Internet. Teachers have ample textbooks.

Taft also has tight community bonds going for it. Nearly every class has the son or daughter of a teacher. The principal--a refugee from Los Angeles--loans his pickup to students who need a ride.

Scholastically, however, Taft is not even average.

Reading scores for the ninth through 12th grades range between the 39th and 48th percentile nationally. Math scores are lower.

Taft’s average SAT was 975 last year; the national average 1016. And of 192 seniors, only 17% even took the college entrance exam.

Although 70% go on to higher education, that usually means the two-year variety--Taft Junior College, right next door.

Education experts have a hard time explaining exactly why California’s students do poorly on measures such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Some say that it’s all those uncredentialed teachers. Or the acceptance of mediocrity that plagues much of American education: 70% of California parents in The Times poll said their children do at most an hour of homework a night--and that’s fine with them.

Others blame the state’s affection for fads: notably the venture into “whole language,” which assumed that students would pick up reading naturally, almost by osmosis, if exposed to good stories.

At Taft, a call to read often is ignored.

Caroline Schoneweis’ basic English class begins with “silent reading,” adopted by many schools to make sure students do some reading, even if they won’t do it on their own at home.

One student pulls out an automotive magazine. Others chatter with classmates. A rebellious-looking girl with a ring in her nose is drawing an intricate design in the web of her thumb. One boy is slumped over his desk.

“You want me to stay awake?” he asks Schoneweis, feigning surprise.

“I think she does,” another student pipes up.

“You guys! One more time--get the books out and read!” urges an exasperated Schoneweis.

Around the state, such scenes are not hard to find.

At Katella High, where the third period includes 18 minutes for independent reading, some students flip through teen magazines. Others go to a classroom magazine rack for a National Geographic, then study the glossy photos, bypassing the text. A few girls pick at their nails or powder their noses.

At Manual Arts, teacher Sukkar--now in her second year--tries to launch a discussion of “Macbeth.” But her seniors haven’t finished Act II, last night’s assignment. And one girl says she just doesn’t understand it.

“Did you try? You’ve got to try!” Sukkar implores.

It sounds eerily similar to a plea Schoneweis makes in her class, when another student bows his head to sleep instead of taking a test on diagraming sentences.

“Just guess,” she begs, “and you’ll get some of these right.”

On days like this, education seems like a battle to reach one student, any student.

When Schoneweis takes her class to the school library late in the day to research periodicals, Kasey Mitchell dutifully gets a Time magazine to read about life in an orphanage.

Kasey is the girl with the nose ring. She hangs with the stoners. “I don’t fit in anywhere else,” she explains.

But she is trying to distance herself from the influence of that crowd or other “low-life people.”

In fact, after several years of drifting--she was kicked out of junior high for fighting and ran away from home--she has begun to turn around. Her GPA is up to 3.9, and she made honor roll this year.

She has a purpose. She wants to keep her grades above 3.0 “so I can save enough money to get out of here and go to beauty school.”

When the last bell rings, the campus empties in minutes.

Some students head to work. A few pick up their babies at a campus child-care center. Jerry Rowe plans to “go home and sit around.”

And many, like David Keyes, go cruising.

For 30 minutes, he and two Taft pals, Simon and Puni Maui, drive along streets lined by Depression-era bungalows, hungry for action.

They try Snob Hill--nothing. Then the main drag--bingo.

A classmate in a pickup pulls beside them. Keyes floors his $400 Oldsmobile. Engines roar.

In moments, it’s over. The pickup speeds ahead, victorious.

“We ate it really bad,” Simon Maui says.

The school week is two days through.

Wednesday: Progress and Illusion at Manual Arts

The boys are decked out in tuxedos, the girls in floor-length satin gowns. And the 36 members of the Taft Union concert band are facing down the jitters--they’re about to enter their first competition, at Wasco High, 45 miles away. Just past 9 a.m., they bow their heads . . . and pray.

At Arcadia, it’s a big day too--900 sophomores have to choose next year’s classes. Counselor Peggy Bott trundles boxes of transcripts from one classroom to another, patiently answering questions like, “Why can’t I take four Advanced Placement classes?”

Up at Oakmont, the thermometer has reached the mid-60s, and snow caps the Sierra Nevada. But the daily bulletin brings bad news: Two Mr. Viking contestants have been suspended, so the contest--for male bathing beauties--is postponed. And the basketball team? Trounced in last night’s playoffs.

In Los Angeles, students at Manual Arts have basketball on their minds too. But, unlike at Oakmont, their team is still alive.

“Go hard, go hard, pick it up!” coach Randolph Simpson yells to senior Ricky Duff, 6-foot-6 with the bulging muscles of a stevedore. Each time he jams the ball, the gym fills with a “Yeah!”

On Friday, the Toilers face Westchester for the city title.

But it’s not only in athletics that Westchester is a threat. Located in a middle-class neighborhood near the airport, it snares many of Manual Arts’ black students, who regard it as a better school.

These days, Manual Arts is trying to overcome a history of low academic performance, and--like Hoover--reconcile two clashing distinctions.

One is captured in a banner in the main hall. “California Distinguished School,” it reads.

That honor, bestowed by the state in 1996, recognized its improvements: suspensions down; attendance most improved of all Los Angeles Unified’s 49 high schools; and grants for a raft of new computers and to start “academies” in finance and the humanities.

It’s a safe campus too, contrary to horror stories about the inner-city. Principal Wendell Greer Jr. boasts that no student has been killed at or on the way to school since he took over four years ago. He posts deans near the gates every morning to clamp down on any attire that could be remotely gang-inspired--monkey face insignias, even hair ribbons dyed blue, the Crips’ color.

But Manual Arts also is on the list drawn up by Supt. Ruben Zacarias--of Los Angeles’ 100 worst schools. It’s 17th from the bottom.

The reason: test scores. Its ninth-graders are in the 17th percentile in reading and the 20th in math. The average SAT score is about 700, 300 points below the national average.

Being on the dubious list naturally irks many here.

“We’re making some major moves at this school,” protests English teacher C.C. Ryder, Manual’s union chair. “That’s why it’s such a contradiction for us to be on the 100 schools list.”

Its contradictions, though, make Manual Arts typical of much of what is happening in California.

On the one hand, schools are doing many of the things policymakers want.

Dropout rates are scandalous? They’re now tracking down the bodies. Wood shops are out of date? Everyone offers computer animation. Students need to learn problem-solving in groups? Bring on team projects. Students need literature about people like them? Everyone’s reading Toni Morrison and RudolfoAnaya.

And minority students aren’t taking enough demanding courses? Well, look at the numbers now.

Statewide, the percentage of black students who have completed the roster of college prep courses has soared, increasing 56% just since the 1994-95 school year. And Manual Arts, 80% Latino, is among the top 30 schools in California in graduating students who complete the course work recommended for admission to the state colleges, a Times analysis showed.

An impressive 68% of Manual Arts’ graduates finish the college prep program, placing it in the same league as elite suburban schools such as San Marino.

On the other hand, here’s what happens when Manual students arrive at college:

Five graduates enrolled at University of California campuses last fall. All failed UC’s basic writing exam.

The school sent 18 graduates to Cal State campuses: 17 had to take remedial math and 16 remedial English.

Clearly, taking the college prep courses has not adequately prepared these students for the rigors of college.

It’s similar around the state. At eight other Los Angeles County high schools, every one of the graduates entering UC also failed the writing exam. And 54% of all the high school graduates entering the CSU system need remedial help in math, 47% in English.

Nor have those college prep classes paid off another way: in higher SAT scores. In fact, SAT scores dropped in the last decade among what should be California’s best students--those getting A’s on the college prep courses.

And in the era of grade inflation, there are plenty of such students. The percentage of test-takers with A grades rose 3 to 4 points.

What is going on? How can more students be completing and getting A’s in college prep programs--which typically require them to read more books, write more essays and absorb more difficult concepts--yet founder on basic skills tests after they finally begin their university careers?

The answer is really not a secret. Visit the schools and the teachers tell you: Too many college prep classes in California are college prep in name only. They are watered down to accommodate the marginal skills of the students.

Take a look at Wilson Yee’s biology course or Rich Moody’s advanced physical science class at Manual Arts. Either would bolster a UC or Cal State application.

But Yee figures most of his students cannot comprehend a 10th-grade text’s discussion of parasitic nematodes, so he simplifies the main points on the chalkboard. Then they copy the notes. “We’re using class time for instruction that should be done at home,” he says.

The students might point out that there aren’t enough texts for them to take home. Yee assumes that even if there were, they wouldn’t do the work.

As for Moody, his advanced science class--beginning a three week unit on fossils--was meant for students who could handle trigonometry. But most of his 11th-graders are still trying to pass algebra. So the former petroleum engineer avoids lab experiments that require too much math.

Usually it comes back to reading and writing.

That’s why Sukkar--the “is it their fault, or is it mine?” teacher--has her students run through five drafts of autobiographical essays until the spelling and grammar are right. And why she sits with them while they take tests to help them understand the questions.

She figures they read at fourth- or fifth-grade level.

“My objective is that they learn,” she says. “It’s not to trip them up on a test question.”

Is it wrong to lower standards for students whose skills are lacking? Are these bad teachers for doing so?

To answer no, as many at Manual would, goes against the tide today, when the mantra is standards, standards, standards--setting the same high requirements for learning math, English and science for all students, regardless of background.

It also runs against public opinion. The Times poll found that almost two-thirds of Californians believe that raising academic standards, rather than increased funding, is the best way to improve schools.

“I don’t frankly care if students come to us poor or dysfunctional or in wheelchairs,” state Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin said in a recent address to Pasadena teachers. “We set one standard for them all.”

The issue is complex, though, and wrenching.

At Manual Arts, some ponder whether high schools should teach basic phonics that should have been covered in the first grade. But it’s hard to forget how students at a school like this, which opened in 1910 to help youths learn a trade, would have been routinely relegated to dead-end remedial classes.

Why not instead place then in classes labeled college prep and at least expose them to “Siddhartha” or “Of Mice and Men”?

“We’re kind of fooling ourselves,” says English teacher Curt Ullman.

So the meetings continue: over whether to require vocabulary drills or have all teachers file course descriptions on the school’s Internet site.

The principal, Greer, wants the latter so parents can sign on to see what the school expects their children to learn. He also wants to determine if the school is teaching the material covered on the SAT and Los Angeles’ new standardized exam. You can’t raise scores if students aren’t learning what the tests demand.

But this idea runs into choppy waters at an English teachers gathering.

“It’s busy work!” veteran Josephine Zarro declares. “The day they start telling me what to teach, and how, is the day I quit.”

Thursday: ‘High School Should Be Fun. . . . You’re Only 15 Once’

8:42 a.m. Gooood moooorning, Granada!

It’s time for Granada Hills High’s P.A. follies, better known as the daily bulletin.

“There will be a Chinese club meeting in Room B-2 today,” student publicity chief Mike Rofe says, broadcasting from a booth decorated with a “Wayne’s World” poster.

“If anyone owns a boat, talk to Karen Fung,” says a chipper Karen Fung, the senior class vice president.

“Yeah, if anyone owns a boat,” Rofe quips.

“I’m serious about that,” Fung says. “I need to borrow a life preserver.”

More announcements to the student body, listening on intercoms all over campus: Support our baseball team at Thousand Oaks High. . . . Don’t forget to sign up for the SAT practice session. . . .

Then, more goofiness.

“Now, for the thought of the day,” Rofe announces. “If we eat it hot, why is it called chili?”

Listening from her office near the broadcast booth, Principal Kathy Rattay smiles.

“High school,” she says, “should be fun. You’re only 15 once. They’re building memories.”

That certainly was the case today with 10 new junior varsity cheerleaders undergoing the rites of initiation. Dragged out of bed by their varsity sisters, they were outfitted in helmets, combat boots and blue tutus and stationed by the school’s gates.

“Varsity rules! Jayvees sorry!” the inductees chant as classmates pour by.

You can find such merriment at almost every high school. At Katella High, Sadie Hawkins Day is still a good excuse for a dance. At Arcadia, they plan how to dunk the principal and deans in cold vats of water--as a “unity” event. And at Taft, couples still sneak a kiss and a hug on the quad at noon.

Scenes like these remind us of the “good old days,” when all schools were presumed to be carefree, secure places of learning, untarnished by violence, pitiable test scores or shortages of textbooks and teachers. Rightly or wrongly, much of today’s debate over the direction of public schools is driven by such memories.

It’s not all a fantasy.

Field trips were plentiful. Schools taught art and music along with the three Rs. High schools ran up to seven periods a day.

Band instruments, athletic uniforms and bus transportation to and from school were free. And the people who went into teaching were well educated--including our brightest women and minorities, for whom other professional avenues were foreclosed.

Funding wasn’t a constant worry. In 1964, California ranked fifth in per-pupil spending. And there was the Master Plan for Higher Education, defining the mission of the three systems--UC, Cal State and the community colleges--that made California the first state to guarantee every high school graduate a place in college.

“There really was a much better time. I was a parent. I lived here,” recalls Stanford education professor Michael Kirst, who was president of the State Board of Education from 1977 to 1990.

But not everything was good about the good old days.

Before the 1970s, some school districts in California spent four times what others did because they had richer tax bases. There were underprepared teachers decades ago too--12,000 with emergency credentials.

And although spending was near the top, student achievement wasn’t.

In 1966, the state’s third-graders languished at the 34th percentile in reading. Sixth-graders scored better, but still below average. And 12th-graders hovered around the 50th percentile.

“Nobody has any evidence that the 1960s were a ‘golden age,’ that things were ever that wonderful,” says a veteran California testing official.

Yet even if we avoid glorifying the past, there’s no dispute that many things have gotten worse.

Today, California spends $911 less per student than the national average of $6,495, ranking 37th. It is dead last in the ratio of librarians to students (1 to 6,179), in counselors to students (1 to 1,082) and last in teachers to students (1 to 24).

Summer school has become an option for the few, not the many. Los Angeles Unified last year had summer classes for 70,000 of its 700,000 students, a far cry from the 1970s, when 300,000 were served, whether whizzes or slow learners.

Nowadays, buses are mainly for special education and integration students. Music and art teachers are so scarce that many schools get one only once or twice a year.

Fees for extracurricular activities have become routine. At Katella, many students don’t go out for baseball because they can’t afford the uniforms or the $50 transportation charge.

The resources simply have not kept pace with what we now demand of our schools.

It’s no longer acceptable if tens of thousands of students drop out. We want everybody, not merely the white and wealthy, to become critical thinkers and go to college.

That’s what schools such as Granada Hills strive to do: More than 70% of its seniors now take college prep courses and the SAT. It sent 82% of its graduates to college last year.

But this happy, diverse, most democratic of schools still has much to worry about.

One in eight of its teachers are new to the school. Half of those were hired with emergency permits: They don’t have the training beyond college--in teaching methods--required for a full credential.

Yesterday, Assistant Principal Jim Gwin met with the school’s mentor teachers to discuss problems the novice teachers are having.

It takes just an hour in Ammy Hill’s sophomore English class to see what he means. Hill had only three weeks of student teaching before starting at Granada.

As the period begins, she confiscates a portable cassette player that one student is cradling in his lap. “Gimme that,” she says.

When she tries to explain how to fill out a writing test--fill in the answers--two other students chat about sports. She stops a lesson on alliteration when another starts clowning. She tells him to step outside and “chill out.”

“It’s nine-tenths policeman, one-tenth educational,” Hill, 23, says after class. “It’s hard when you have 40 kids in a room, 40 little fires to put out.”

Over winter break, she debated doing what a third of the new teachers in Los Angeles do within three years--quit.

So new teachers were the subject of yesterday’s meeting. Today: test results.

Gwin, the assistant principal, visits a special class for student council members to seek help.

Although the 10th-graders here outperformed all other Los Angeles Unified high schools on a standardized exam, their scores were only average nationally--at the 53rd percentile.

Now ninth-grade results have come in--below national averages. At the 41st percentile in reading and the 38th in spelling.

“I’d like to see if we can brainstorm about how to lift the scores,” Gwin asks the student leaders. He wants input on how to get the freshmen to “buy into” the test.

The assistant principal alternately nods his approval or gives a quick “I like that” as the students offer ideas.

Idea No. 1: Prepare the freshmen for the test more thoroughly.

Idea No. 2: Reward those who score high.

Idea No. 3: Hold a pep rally.

Friday: Time for the Big Game

Finally, it’s Friday.

At Granada Hills, the junior varsity cheerleaders have cast off their silly outfits for the official uniforms--short, bouncy skirts and sweaters in the school’s trademark green, black and white.

Up at Oakmont, the campus is quieter than usual. Many students have gone to a Shakespeare festival in Oregon, others have high-tailed it to Disneyland.

Six from Mrs. Myles’ world studies course have endured a venture into one of California’s current fads: team projects. They had a month to complete their report on Southeast Asia--a mock newscast--but waited until the last moment to videotape it by the hot tub at one girl’s hillside home. They squabbled, the sound was terrible, they forgot to explain the Vietnam War. (“We didn’t cover that,” one boy shrugs in class.) The teacher notes that they were heavy on facts, light on analysis. The result: a 76.

“If the purpose of this was to learn about Southeast Asia, it was a bust,” admits Paul Cervantes, 15. “But I think that I learned more about group work maybe because there was so much conflict.”

At Taft Union, the library is almost empty. A tall youth with a buzzcut on the side and ponytail in back sits alone, hunched over not his homework but “The Monster Guide.” Welty Cook uses it to find personalities for his lunchtime game of Dungeons and Dragons.

Cook’s goal is to become a kindergarten teacher.

Ask Californians about schools at a distance, nationally and statewide, and they’re critical--71% told The Times poll that the state’s schools are fair or poor.

Ask about the ones in their own backyard and they’re far kinder: 43% say their local schools are excellent or good.

And though 10% of Californians do send their children to private schools, that percentage has remained stable for a decade--and it’s below the national average of 11%.

So goodwill is one thing California’s schools have going for them. There’s a sense that, whatever their schools’ problems, those cheerleaders will survive their day of humiliation, Mrs. Myles’ group will survive its ignorance of Vietnam and Welty Cook his infatuation with dungeons.

But for others, you can’t assume survival. Schools may be their only lifeline, however precarious.

For immigrants such as Marco Medrano, a junior at Katella High, public education still stands for the opportunity to join America on an equal footing.

You’d never know it seeing him in class, because he’s often dozing and his homework is missing.

Here’s why he dozes, he says: He works 30 hours a week for $5.75-an-hour at Del Taco to help his mother pay the rent. On most nights, he gets home after 11 p.m.

Although Marco has a middling grade-point average, he got an A in English. And before he heads to work, he uses a school computer to cruise the Internet, researching a science report on potassium. Three years after arriving from Mexico, he says: “I want to go to college.” He wants to study computer graphics.

With the schools in survival mode, it’s too easy to lose a youngster like Marco--or Ricky Duff.

At Manual Arts, it’s game day. So as the sun goes down, and most of California’s 8,000 schools lock their doors, the week’s not over for Ricky, the 6-foot-6 phenom on the basketball team headed to the Sports Arena to face Westchester for the Los Angeles title.

By all odds, Ricky wouldn’t be here, preparing to blaze up and down the court before thousands of fans. He would be a dropout, a bum on the streets or a murder statistic.

He never knew his father. His mother was a crackhead, school officials say, who renounced her legal rights as a parent when he was 5. He wound up living with his great-grandmother, who also took care of two of his aunts and a mentally impaired uncle in a house near 20th Street and Central Avenue in South L.A.

His educational path was no smoother. In seventh grade, he was held back because he was so far behind.

The next year, the school district jumped him up to the ninth grade and bused him to high school in Woodland Hills. As Ricky tells it, the bus was always full when it got to his stop--so he stopped going.

For a while, he went to a continuation school near his home, in a neighborhood claimed by the 22nd Street Bloods. On his way to class, he recalls, a gun was shoved in his face and he was “sweated.” He stopped going to that school too.

He passed the time at a recreation center near his home. He was hard to ignore, this teenager who eventually would high-jump nearly 7 feet. A supervisor and a social worker called the Manual Arts coach. Soon Ricky was in school and on the team.

In his junior year, his great-grandmother fell ill and he was left to run the house, cook and clean. “I had to do what I had to do,” was how he put it.

When she died of cancer, the other relatives moved out and Ricky, at 17, was on his own.

That’s when the coach took him in. Randolph Simpson already had a son and a daughter, but opened his home to one more.

To those cynical that the man had his eye on wins and losses, it should be noted that Simpson was a coach who long ago began stocking drinks and snacks in the fieldhouse refrigerator for players who might go hungry otherwise.

Simpson says he used to ask Ricky where he saw himself in 10 years. “He’d say, ‘Coach, I don’t see anything. It’s totally black.’ ”

Today, Ricky is carrying a full load of classes and expects to graduate in June. He has a scholarship to go to Cal State Long Beach if he can raise his SAT scores.

Simpson has begun proceedings to adopt him.

The coach is a beefy man of 38, often gruff. But the fatherly affection is clear as the team prepares to leave for the Sports Arena. It’s the first time many of the players have worn ties.

Simpson straightens the one on his star and asks quietly, “You all right, Ricky?”

“I’m cool,” Ricky says, although he looks more like a schoolboy heading off on a first date than a warrior preparing for battle.

For luck today, he carried a basketball with him from class to class.

The players may not have textbooks, but now, on the bus, they have gym bags, shiny uniforms and expensive sneakers--all the gear they need.

Minutes to game time, Ricky is still in his underwear, lost in his thoughts. The other players hug and jostle one another, getting psyched for powerhouse Westchester.

Simpson sees it as more than a game for his underdogs. His squad, like many high school teams, is central to the image of the school. And Manual Arts could use an image boost.

The tougher struggle, of course, is in the classroom--to define Manual’s teachers and students as more than the sum of lowly test scores and a listing among the 100 worst. The first challenge, the principal has said, is simply to “engage the students.”

In the locker room, it’s the coach who struggles to find the right words.

“We need to understand where we’re at, to understand where we’re going,” he says to the players gathered around him.

“Maybe you believe we are not deserving of being here. I can guarantee you, no one, not ever, has worked as hard. We deserve to be here.

“It’s not about winning or losing. It’s about the effort you put into the game. Take what you want in life. Nobody’s going to give it to you.”

His boys move in for a group hug as he says a prayer. Then, someone starts to clap. Clap! Clap! YEAH! Clap! Clap! YEAH!

They file out and take their places in the vast arena. The clock starts, and they’re off.

During practice they jammed with authority. Now they’re tentative, their layups weak. Even Ricky’s.

At halftime, they’re three points down. Then Westchester starts a run.

Minutes into the fourth quarter, it’s clear the game is lost.

Westchester, 78. Manual, 62.

The principal, Greer, joins them in the locker room.

One player is crying. Another limps from a sprain. Ricky sits quietly, showing no emotion.

Greer shakes players’ hands and pats their backs. He tells them they’ll win the next one.

It’s much like what he tells his faculty: This year’s test scores may be grim again, but things will get better.

“Take it, learn from it,” he says. “Next year we’re going to explode on it.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Hoover High

District: San Diego City Unified

Enrollment ‘96-’97: 1,901

Graduation rate ‘95-’96: 82.7%

SAT average scores 1996-1997

School: 788

U.S.: 1016

% of seniors tested: 38.9

Students by ethnic group 1996-1997

White: 5.5%

Asian: 20.6%

Latino: 50.8%

Black: 21.9%

Other: 1.1%

Percent of students in limited English proficiency program

1996-1997: 39.6%

Katella High

District: Anaheim Union

Enrollment ‘96-’97: 1,961

Graduation rate ‘95-’96: 95%

SAT average scores 1996-1997

School: 1028

U.S.: 1016

% of seniors tested: 28.7

Students by ethnic group 1996-1997

White: 30.7%

Asian: 8.0%

Latino: 56.1%

Black: 2.7%

Other: 2.6%

Percent of students in limited English proficiency program

1996-1997: 29.3%

Arcadia High

District: Arcadia Unified

Enrollment ‘96-’97: 3,181

Graduation rate ‘95-’96: 97.8%

SAT average scores 1996-1997

School: 1135

U.S.: 1016

% of seniors tested: 69.1%

Students by ethnic group 1996-1997

White: 34.1%

Asian: 56.2%

Latino: 7.8%

Black: 1.1%

Other: 0.8%

Percent of students in limited English proficiency program

1996-1997: 13.2%

Taft Union High

District: Taft

Enrollment ‘96-’97: 909

Graduation rate ‘95-’96: 84.3%

SAT average scores 1996-1997

School: 975

U.S.: 1016

% of seniors tested: 17.2

Students by ethnic group 1996-1997

White: 83.9%

Latino: 13.2%

Other: 2.9%

Percent of students in limited English proficiency program

1996-1997: 3.2%

Oakmont High

District: Roseville Joint Union

Enrollment ‘96-’97: 1,461

Graduation rate ‘95-’96: 89.7%

SAT average scores 1996-1997

School: 1047

U.S.: 1016

% of seniors tested: 58.1

Students by ethnic group 1996-1997

White: 90.3%

Asian: 2.3%

Latino: 5.2%

Other: 2.2%

Percent of students in limited English proficiency program

1996-1997: 0%

Granada Hills High School

District: Los Angeles Unified

Enrollment ‘96-’97: 3,219

Graduation rate ‘95-’96: 81.1%

SAT average scores 1996-1997

School: 995

U.S.: 1016

% of seniors tested: 73.1%

Students by ethnic group 1996-1997

White: 39.1%

Asian: 27.1%

Latino: 25.4%

Black: 5.7%

Other: 2.7%

Percent of students in limited English proficiency program

1996-1997: 12.3%

Manual Arts High

District: Los Angeles Unified

Enrollment ‘96-’97: 3,846

Graduation rate ‘95-’96: 34%

SAT average scores 1996-1997

School: 744

U.S.: 1016

% of seniors tested: 38.6

Students by ethnic group 1996-1997

Latino: 77.0%

Black: 22.6%

Other: 0.4%

Percent of students in limited English proficiency program

1996-1997: 47.7%

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Education Spending Trends

Per-pupil spending on education has increased in California at roughly the rate of overall inflation. Other states have increased their spending much faster, so California’s national ranking on spending-per-student has plummeted for a generation. The costs of poverty and educating a wave of immigrants have absorbed school funds, leaving the state with fewer teachers, librarians and guidance counselors per student than almost any other state or the District of Columbia.

How money is spent

Teacher salaries: 38.01%

Librarian salaries: 0.19

Guidance counselors: 1.60

Nurses: 0.35

Support staff: 13.61

Benefits: 13.87

Books and supples: 3.99

Reserves: 9.59

Other: 19.04

***

Expenditures per pupil

‘82-’83

U.S. average: $2,960

California: $2,735

‘96-’97

U.S. average: $6,495*

California: $5,584*

* Estimated

***

California per-pupil expenditure national ranking

‘65-’66: 5th

‘97-’98: 37th*

* Estimated

***

Ratio of staff to students

*--*

U.S. Average California Rank** Teachers 1 to 17 1 to 24 51 District officials/ administrators 1 to 909 1 to 2,565 49 School principal & asst. principals 1 to 372 1 to 536 50 Guidance counselors 1 to 512 1 to 1,082 51 Librarians 1 to 882 1 to 6,179 51 Total school staff to students 1 to 9 1 to 12 50

*--*

** Includes District of Columbia

Source: National Center for Education Statistics; California Dept. of Education; California Teacher’s Assn.; National Education Assn.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Changes by Race and Ethnicity

Enrollment in California public schools, by ethnic group

White: 39.5%

Latino: 39.7%

Asian: 11.2%

Black: 8.7%

Other: 9%

Net state population growth, by race