Lesson From the Heartland

The finding this week that half of the Los Angeles school district’s students are not ready to move up a grade is another bucket of bad news, part of a torrent of it in the troubled district. Combine the predicted failure rate, based on district test scores, with next year’s deadline to begin stopping social promotion and disaster looms. It doesn’t have to be that way.

The lesson of the Chicago schools’ decisive campaign against social promotion, the practice of sending academically unqualified students to the next grade, is that with enough commitment by school leaders, students headed for failure can be brought up to snuff.

In 1995, Chicago schools were in worse shape than those of Los Angeles are now. Mayor Richard M. Daley took control of the district and, with a tough new schools chief, began attacking fiscal abuses and low academic achievement.

Over the past three years, social promotion has been ended in selected grades. Students on the verge of failure are required to go to summer school. The Legislature has been generous with funding, and there are cautious declarations of success. One telling statistic: The number of third-graders who have flunked twice dropped from 1,226 last year to 672 this year. Test scores are up overall.

Schools with the poorest records were put on a tough probation program, and some dramatically improved. There’s even an inventive program to test failing students’ eyes and provide eyeglasses when necessary. Los Angeles has a similar but small pilot program.

The standards and tests in Chicago are different from those in Los Angeles, making comparison difficult. Even so, Chicago’s hard-won successes point sharply to the need here for leadership, effort and money.

The Los Angeles school board and its new top executives, Ramon Cortines and Howard Miller, seem to grasp the enormity of the job. But the $72 million a year budgeted for all forms of academic intervention might fall short, given that the smaller Chicago district spends $30 million just on after-school assistance. If the L.A. Unified School District can present a well-considered and sensible plan, the Legislature should be open to a boost in funding aimed at preventing further failure.