Group Aims to Improve Schools by Parent Power

A grass-roots group with strong, longtime ties in organizing Los Angeles’ urban neighborhoods is turning its attention to raising student achievement by launching a 25-campus initiative that won support Saturday from top city leaders.

Mayor James K. Hahn, Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Roy Romer, City Council President Alex Padilla and school board President Caprice Young stood before a cheering crowd of more than 700 parents and educators to embrace the group’s plan, which calls for empowering parents.

“I really approve of what’s happening here,” Romer said. “We all share common values: All children can learn . . . and the way to get there is through expert teaching and parent involvement.”

Hahn said he “absolutely” supports the group. Young declared, “I am your partner.” Padilla echoed the thought: “I pledge to work with you.”

On Saturday, the new group, calling itself L.A. Metro Strategy, asked Hahn and Romer to support its three-pronged approach to improving public education:

* Allow it to select 25 schools.

* Give it three years to create a “new culture of relational power” between parents and educators.

* Agree to the group’s “criteria for success,” which include an underlying belief that all children can be high achievers.

Under the initiative, parents and staff at the chosen Los Angeles public schools, and smaller clusters in Pasadena and Pomona, will undergo intensive professional training in grass-roots organizing.

Parents will work with teachers, administrators and other staff to design customized projects, whether it’s algebra tutoring or an after-school program that is educational rather than recreational.

Once plans are in place, schools will ask officials for financial support and other resources.

Parent Maria Jimenez of Echo Park said that when it comes to children, she can’t afford to be skeptical about yet another reform program, because this one aims to empower parents.

“We don’t want to be selling cupcakes or nachos,” Jimenez said. “We want to work together with our children’s teachers [and] the principal. But we have to learn how to do it.”

The group has a new name, but its methods of community-based organization are far from novel in Los Angeles. The parents, teachers, union members and religious leaders who presented the education initiative are part of the Industrial Areas Foundation.

Subhed Goes Here and Here

IAF--born in the mid-1970s at Eastside parishes that formed the United Neighborhood Organization, or UNO--has been behind many successful crusades for social change. Its mainly church-based groups in the 1980s included the South Central Organizing Committee, the East Valleys Organization and Valley Organized in Community Efforts.

The groups made headlines mobilizing mainly poor and working-class residents. Starting small, they fought to stop the proliferation of liquor stores. They grew in power and worked to lower Eastside auto insurance rates, then established the Community Youth Gang Services program.

Later, the groups joined together, secured $1 million in Olympic surplus funds and went to Sacramento in 1987 to fight for a major increase in what then was the $3.35 hourly minimum wage.

A key strategy in all their efforts is bringing top leaders--mayors, council members and company executives--before a crowd of hundreds, even thousands, of constituents. Then they publicly ask, and often demand, support.

So as this reconstituted Industrial Areas Foundation group comes knocking on the schoolyard gate, the politicians have taken notice.

Hahn, in his pledge to support the new education focus, recalled how he became involved with the auto insurance and problem liquor store efforts 20 years ago.

L.A. Metro has about 80 member institutions that include churches and synagogues, schools, unions and nonprofit organizations from the Westside to the Pomona Valley.

The education proposal is its first venture into an agenda that in the future will include affordable health insurance and housing, as well as a living wage.

But the most urgent need the people have identified in scores of neighborhood meetings is the education of their children.

It was that issue that brought hundreds to a daylong planning seminar at Occidental College on Saturday. Many of the educators are L.A. Unified veterans, classroom teachers who have been there, done that when it comes to school reform in the last decade.

North Hollywood High School Principal John Hyland, for example, with 30 years’ experience, is still eager to embrace new strategies to improve his 4,000-student campus.

Subhed Goes Here and Here

The IAF staff helped Hyland’s school organize a “Walk for Success” last spring in which students and teachers visited 1,200 homes. For the first time, he said, parents were personally invited to participate in the school.

Hyland described this coming together as a “turning point” for the campus.

In the months that followed, crowds of 200 parents have shown up at meetings. “When I first started here, there were only four parents coming,” he said.

Sonia Hernandez, president and chief executive of the Los Angeles County Alliance for Student Achievement, which oversees two other major reform drives, believes that the L.A. Metro Strategy will be different because it works from the ground up, with parents organizing with teachers and principals.

“This is very different from what we have seen in the past,” Hernandez said. “This group is not saying they need a $100-million grant from a private foundation to save kids.”

The IAF is organizing projects in various parts of the country, and has established a network of schools in Texas similar to what it is aiming for in Los Angeles.

Alliance Schools--as the program is called in Austin and other parts of Texas--is an influential network of 125 campuses.

The schools promote an environment in which principals, teachers, parents and other unionized school workers have a say in educating students.

Alliance Schools has been successful in, among other things, securing millions from the Texas Legislature for programs ranging from training of teachers and parents to after-school activities.

IAF organizers said many low-performing schools in Texas have experienced dramatic turnarounds.

“We have story after story where schools were at the bottom of the ladder,” said Christine Stephens, an IAF organizer in Texas, during a workshop Saturday.

“After a few years, these schools became the premier schools.”