John Hyland

Year-round school is seldom popular. Converting to such a calendar is almost always controversial. But controversial doesn’t come close to describing the Los Angeles Unified School District’s decision last spring to put North Hollywood High School on a year-round schedule.

Known for its highly gifted magnet and Advanced Placement scholars, North Hollywood ranks as one of the top high schools in the country. Parents and students protested the new schedule vehemently, saying it would spell the end of the school’s impressive record of achievements. But district officials decreed that a multitrack, year-round schedule was the only way to accommodate the area’s booming enrollment.

So in July, North Hollywood went year-round. Students are divided into three tracks, two of which are in session at any given time. Total enrollment is up from about 3,500 to almost 3,900, and by next July is expected to reach the new calendar’s 4,500-student capacity.

Like many parents and students, Principal John Hyland originally resisted the year-round calendar. He proposed using mini-academies or “schools within a school” instead to enroll more students. Now he’s counting on the academies to make the year-round calendar work, to retain North Hollywood’s high-achieving students as well as to reach those who aren’t living up to their potential.

Academies are similar to North Hollywood’s successful zoo magnet in that they have a specialized curriculum organized around a distinct theme. But unlike a magnet, which has entrance exams and draws students from throughout the district, the academies enroll students from within North Hollywood High.

Four academies are in place or being developed--a transportation careers academy, a bilingual education careers academy, a naturalist academy and a social justice academy. Hyland envisions a total of 12, including academies emphasizing careers in the entertainment industry and in computers.

Valley Edition Editorial Page Editor Mary Engel talked with Hyland recently about how the school and the new academies are faring five months into the year-round calendar.

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Q: When people talk about North Hollywood High School, they tend to focus on the highly gifted magnet program. How many attend the magnet?

A: Until this year, we had 244 students drawn from all over the city. As a result of the year-round controversy we expanded the magnet, so there are 334 kids now. That’s out of a student population of more than 3,500, so around 10%.

These kids play a great role in the life of the school. Last year, 192 highly gifted kids took Advanced Placement exams. But in the school as a whole, we had 500 kids who took AP courses, so it is a great mythology that they are the only kids involved in this high-achieving learning.

Q: What about the rest of your students?

A: The fact is that the majority of the kids at the high school don’t do very well. I’m not talking about the kids with serious problems, who need counseling or who are involved in serious interpersonal or family issues. I’m talking about the kids in the middle, who go to their classes, are very quiet, try to do their studies, have difficulties and are unnoticed. One of the outcomes of the year-round controversy for me was to really bring to heart this problem of the kids in the middle, the kids who could do well but aren’t doing well. That is our interest at the high school now, how to help these kids, because I believe they could be highly successful.

Q: How can North Hollywood’s small academies or schools within school help these middle students?

A: Families would be able to come to the school, and they’d have 12 academies and they could make a choice. Kids are still a part of North Hollywood High School, but they have an anchor, they have a place they can call home, with a team of teachers focusing on the same body of kids.

Q: Can you talk about the new school for social justice, to give readers an idea of what a school within a school is?

A: When I came to North Hollywood [in 1996], the thing that struck me was the enormous poverty. If you go along Lankershim Boulevard, below Magnolia [Boulevard], you run into this belt of apartments and crowded neighborhoods and very difficult situations. Part of our belief at North Hollywood High is [that] public school students need to contribute to the life of the community. That’s a part of being in a democratic society.

One way to assist that happening was to create this new school for social justice, where the focus is on neighborhood organizing and development. How do we understand our neighborhoods? What are the careers--sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, community developers--where a person can leave high school, go to a university and then come back to a neighborhood and help it?

Undergirding that is the idea that we can determine our lives. We don’t have to say we’re going to live in a poor neighborhood without good services and there’s nothing we can do. We can organize, we can develop ourselves, we can educate ourselves.

Q: This team of teachers within this school, every course--math, English, science--has some relation to this theme?

A: Precisely. You use academics and the knowledge base as a way to gain understanding of how to improve neighborhoods.

Q: Is your goal to eventually have every student at North Hollywood in a school within a school?

A: Yes. In my mind there will be 12 schools within school, and they will cover a range of themes so that kids with different temperaments and different interests will be able to anchor themselves to a particular theme that they feel good about. But the idea is not that they wouldn’t learn their algebra, their calculus. They would study science and chemistry, all of that, but it would be couched in a thematic approach.

Q: One reason the zoo magnet works is because the more motivated students self-select for it. Once you try to address the harder to reach students, will it be as successful?

A: We’re trying to build in some of the same motivation. There is research that shows that wherever young adults have a unified program, where the teachers, the participating adults, know one another and talk to one another and where there’s a common ethos of understanding, kids do better. It’s not to say it won’t be difficult. It is difficult.

Another aspect of schools within schools is developing the relationship between the parents and the school. Historically, high schools have not had a very close relationship with parents. They come to parent conferences, but the whole question of how parents should be involved in the life of the school has never really been worked out.

We’re trying to make the Parents’ Center [an office in the administration building set aside for parents] a central feature of the school. We’ve increased the number of volunteers who assist parents with what is needed to have a successful learning environment at home.

Q: What percentage of students at North Hollywood come from homes where English isn’t the first language?

A: The vast majority of the kids come from families whose first language is not English. Seventy percent of the kids qualify for the federal lunch program, and in general I’d say those families are not English-speaking families.

Q: How does poverty affect the learning process?

A: Clearly there’s an impact of poverty and living conditions. I visited a home in which there were five or six families in a home built for one family, and for a kid to study calculus, that’s pretty tough. And if a family doesn’t have a computer at home, and they aren’t on the Internet, then they are severely handicapped because they are competing with students who can go online, can solve problems together, can ask each other questions. This is an enormous problem for many poor families.

Q: What about cultural differences?

A: There are enormous differences. Certain families have a certain kind of etiquette: the shaking of hands is important, the way you say hello is important, how you sit at a table together. Here things happen fast, things have to be settled quickly, like the overcrowding issue. People don’t sit down and chitchat for a long time about whether their youngster should be in a physics class or another class. It’s tough for parents.

Q: Did North Hollywood lose any students because of going year-round?

A: I’m sure we lost a few. I think enrollment will build back up if the quality and commitment of faculty and staff remains the same.

Q: One of your hopes was that in setting up these academies, North Hollywood would be able to go back to a regular schedule.

A: In principle, I think it’s possible, yes. But if we don’t, I don’t see it as a big problem. My personal view is that the year-round schedule is not educationally healthy for young adults, but we must make the best of a serious situation. We are moving forward. The smaller learning communities concept is a beneficial outcome of the year-round debate.

Q: Have statewide reforms or district reforms such as restructuring the LAUSD into 11 mini-districts helped?

A: Most of what you read in the newspaper has very little bearing on a high school. Who the superintendent is historically has had little impact on a local school site. Having norm-referenced tests [such as the Stanford 9] has had very little bearing on the classroom.

It has to do with what you might call a category problem. Leaders at the district, county and state levels, whether in education or in government, do not take into account the needs that exist at the local school site because the information that they receive is so highly decontextualized. As you go up the line, at every step you have to begin to generalize: You have to say, well, I have five high schools, so what do these five high schools have in common? Then you go to the level of a district, and I have 49 high schools, and then you end up in the [state] Legislature. Frankly what they’re talking about at that level has little to do with what’s going on in a high school.

A good example is the fact that the Legislature defines the school year in terms of minutes, something like 65,000 minutes. We developed a viable morning / afternoon class schedule that would have provided courses on a traditional school calendar. But we could not quite match the number of minutes. An innovation that would have worked at our school site was not considered because it could not fit a general rule.

Q: What’s the most helpful thing, then, that the LAUSD administration could do for your school?

A: We need the administration to give some vitality to the process of renovating school buildings. That’s crucial. Our school has enough land to create a multistory classroom building, but it’s been difficult to break the logjam and get the process moving.

And we should conceptualize a school as pre-K through 12 that just happens to be at different sites. So you have North Hollywood High School, Reed and Sun Valley middle schools and the associated elementary schools looked at as a single school. All the data should be analyzed and shared. There needs to be an intense collaboration between school leaders.

Q: Does that happen now?

In the North Hollywood complex, we’ve done some pioneering work. We have collaborated on a number of projects. We need to do more of that. You could have some teachers going down from the high school to the kindergarten and sitting down with the students and telling them, “I’m a high school teacher and I’m going to be your chemistry teacher,” so kids became socialized to the fact that they’re part of North Hollywood school. If that more personalized bonding occurred across all grade levels, I think you’d have enormous impact on student achievement.

Q: Who could make that happen?

A: I think Judy [Ivie] Burton [superintendent of District B, the mini-district that includes North Hollywood High] could make that happen. I think she would be very amenable to it.

Q: Is this an argument for smaller school districts, for decisions being made at the lowest possible level?

A: It’s not the size of the district that’s a problem. A large school district gets economies of scale, different kinds of benefits. The kids who go to our highly gifted magnet are drawn from all over the city. If you look at many small school districts, they’re not doing any better than the large school districts. If you talk to students, there’s a pretty pervasive sense of alienation and discontent among the actual clients.

Q: Is that just a byproduct of adolescence or does it have to do with the way high school is structured?

A: I think it has a lot to do with how high school is structured. Adolescents do a great service for society. Part of their mission is to warn us where we’re going wrong. High school kids are a barometer of the quality of our society. When kids cut themselves, disfigure themselves, it’s a warning sign of the health of society. When youngsters disdain voting, I know that they’re telling us something.

Q: What are they telling us?

A: Particularly at the high school level, students have not been given enough of a voice. If you talk to most teachers, very little time is given to asking kids, “How is it going in here? Do you understand what I’m teaching here?” It’s just not built into the system. The only way there can be a transformation is if the student consciously engages himself in the learning effort. But they have to be alerted to how to do that--they have to be able to take notes, to listen, to ask questions. Surprisingly very little attention is paid to these matters in school.

What people are looking for is human beings who can collaborate, who can cooperate, who can work as a part of a team, who can stick to a task for extended periods of time and not give up. None of these outcomes are addressed by the achievement measures that are used by our schools today. I think that’s a serious flaw.

Q: You’ve said that kids like to hear lofty things, that they want to be inspired.

A: That gets back to the idea of what’s the point of public schooling. If you select a denominator like preparing for a career, which is important, that is not as compelling as what the Quakers call growing into goodness. Kids want someone to guide them, to give them direction.

Fundamentally, why have a public high school in the first place? It’s through what they learn in high school that young adults have access to what you might call the soul of a democratic society. We [should] elevate our commitment to education along those lines, not only along the lines of the Stanford 9 test, but along the lines of “it’s valuable that you’re here as a student. We look to you becoming a vibrant member of a democratic society.” We never talk about those things except in a very perfunctory manner. But the evidence is very clear. Less than 25% of those who can vote, vote.

People could acquire the beginning of problem-solving skills in high school. The idea of America is this continuous improvement of society. We have addressed issues of race, ethnicity, religious differences. We haven’t resolved them. We have a serious ways to go. But the high school ought to be playing a significant role in all of that.