Learning Assistance Paying Off

After a year of testing and tutoring at nine of the northeast Valley’s poorest elementary schools, the number of students reading at or above grade level tripled to 33% last year, officials of a public-private endeavor to send more children to college announced Wednesday.

The number of sixth-graders reading at or above grade level quadrupled at four middle schools in the same area--though it still remains at a dismally low 16.9%.

Those announcements were the highlights of a one-year progress report to activists, school officials and business leaders by the innovative Project GRAD (Graduation Really Achieves Dreams) at the Skirball Cultural Center.

Project GRAD started last year with 15 Los Angeles Unified schools and more than 25,000 students in the impoverished and largely Latino northeast Valley, aimed at improving reading and math skills. Thirteen of the 15 schools use the reading program.

Despite these improvements, Cheryl Mabey, executive director of Project GRAD Los Angeles, said the situation in the northeast Valley remains dire. “It is very sobering when you look at the low level of academic achievement,” she said. “We are dissatisfied with the current gains. It is very clear we have a long way to go.”

Officials also emphasized it is still far too early to predict long-term effects of the program--which aims to boost reading and math scores, reduce dropout rates, and drastically increase the number of students going to college. But they said they hoped aspects of the program would spread.

“We want to see more Project GRAD-like programs out there,” Mabey said. “But not in the schools that are already successful, or borderline successful. We want to go into the lowest-achieving schools in Los Angeles.”

Of the 25,000 students in the 15 Project GRAD schools, all of which feed into San Fernando High School, more than 93% are Latino and about 4% are African American. More than 60% of the students speak limited English, and more than 90% participate in free or reduced-price lunch programs.

In addition, more than 42% of the teachers in participating schools have emergency credentials.

The Los Angeles program will cost $40 million for four years, and is funded by $14.5 million in federal money, as well as contributions from the school district, the Ford Foundation and other private groups and businesses. It cost $6.6 million in its first year.

A centerpiece of the program is the reading curriculum, called “Success for All.” Each teacher follows a timed script, and students are retested every eight weeks to see if they are ready for the next reading level. If they are, they advance to a new group. If not, they repeat the same level and get additional tutoring.

Other components of Project GRAD include at least 105 hours of teacher training, full-time social workers who can address problems such as truancy, and a math program that introduces algebra into elementary grades.

The program has also offered San Fernando High School’s class of 2003 college scholarships of $6,000 each to students who achieve a minimum 2.5 grade-point average and take college prep classes. That financial incentive will continue to be offered to each of the following graduation classes.

Project GRAD was founded in 1993 by Jim Ketelson, retired CEO of Houston-based Tenneco Inc. At the program’s inception, only 20% of students in Houston’s underserved communities were reading and performing at grade level, according to a Texas state assessment.

Seven years later, 72% of students are testing at grade level in math and 74% are reading at grade level in kindergarten through sixth grade. Middle school students experienced similar increases, and at high schools the graduation rate quadrupled.

Besides Houston and Los Angeles, Project GRAD is in Atlanta; Nashville; Columbus, Ohio; and Newark, N.J.

One of Project GRAD Los Angeles’ goals is to quickly raise the rate of San Fernando High students attending four-year colleges to 50%. The school now has the lowest college participation rate of any L.A. Unified School District high school, according to the state Department of Education. Only 9.8% of its students go on to four-year colleges.

“We want to create a college-bound culture in our schools,” Mabey said. “Currently, it is the exception rather than the rule.”

Mabey said she hopes a tidal wave of college-bound kids surging into the high school will force change in the curriculum. In some LAUSD schools, up to a third of students are enrolled in advanced placement or honors math courses, she said. At San Fernando High, by comparison, just 3% of the students are enrolled in calculus or statistics, the only advanced math classes offered.

LAUSD will provide its own oversight of the program, said Judy Ivie Burton, who heads Subdistrict B, where all 15 Project GRAD schools are located.

The participating schools are Maclay Primary Center; Beachy Avenue, Broadous, Haddon Avenue, Morningside, O’Melveny, Osceola Street, Pacoima, Sharp Avenue and Telfair Avenue elementary schools; Community Charter, Maclay, Pacoima and San Fernando middle schools; and San Fernando High School.

The district is monitoring the implementation of the reading program, Burton said, and Subdistrict B will compare third-grade literacy rates at Project GRAD schools to non-Project GRAD schools. Those comparisons are not yet complete, she said.

Burton said Wednesday she was impressed with the program’s focused work and plans to take the results to the Board of Education.

“We can’t lose sight of the fact that we have some very low-achieving students,” she said. “This creates a sense of urgency.”

Improvement in Reading

Project GRAD has been in place for a year at 15 elementary schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Program officials say that at those schools, the percentage of students reading at or above grade level has tripled. Among sixth-graders, the percentage nearly quadrupled, but is still only 16.9%.

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Source: Project GRAD