State Steps In at 10 Lagging L.A. Schools

The state Department of Education is poised to assume broad decision-making authority at 10 Los Angeles Unified School District campuses that have failed to meet goals for improving their test scores despite four years of warnings.

Only three other schools in the state were targeted by the highly unusual intervention.

Partly in response to his district’s poor showing, Supt. Roy Romer will announce a turnaround plan today to retrain principals and boost reading and math teaching at those and as many as 10 other low-performing schools. He also warned that principals at schools that do not improve rapidly enough could lose their jobs.

“We’ve got to elevate these lowest-performing schools,” Romer said. “We have to have this happen.”

Another reason for urgency, he said, is new figures showing that only 44% of the district’s ninth-graders passed the English-language arts portion of the state’s high school exit exam this year. Only 24% passed the math portion. All students must pass both sections of the test by 2004 in order to earn a diploma. The test was voluntary this year only.

“Our performance is not good, we know it and we’re focusing on changes,” Romer said in an interview.

The schools where the state will intervene include: Avalon Gardens Elementary School; Gompers, Mt. Vernon and Sun Valley middle schools; Mann Junior High School; and Fremont, Locke, Roosevelt, Jefferson and Wilson high schools. Of the three other schools in California coming under state scrutiny for their weak performance, two are in the Visalia Unified School District in the Central Valley: Goshen and Houston elementary schools. The other school is Lower Lake High in the Konocti Unified School District in Lake County.

The schools were first identified based on their test scores on the Stanford 9 test in 1997; each failed every year since then to make improvement targets and did not avail itself of funds from a key state school improvement program.

David Tokofsky, a member of the Los Angeles Board of Education, said the district’s dominance on the target list demonstrates “a failure of instructional urgency.”

Each of the 13 targeted schools will be visited within the next few weeks by a state-appointed scholastic audit team that will recommend a detailed plan for shoring up weaknesses. If the schools do not improve, the state can ultimately convert them into charter schools or authorize students to transfer elsewhere.

The process, never before tried in California, is authorized by the $9-billion federal Title I law serving students who are educationally disadvantaged. The teams of educators are supposed to make sure that schools receiving that money are using it effectively.

But it remains to be seen whether the teams will have enough clout, resources or skill to transform schools plagued by stubborn problems that include large numbers of unprepared teachers, many children not fluent in English and substandard facilities. All but one of the targeted schools in Los Angeles Unified are middle schools or high schools, and principals said their students come to the campuses far behind.

“We have to make up eight years of education in 2 1/2 years and you can’t, you’re struggling all the time,” said Ron Hirosawa, assistant principal of Roosevelt High School, a 5,000-student campus in Boyle Heights.

Roosevelt’s students are poor and working-class Latinos, most of whom are not fluent in English, and about one in four drops out before completing high school. About one in four of the teachers is working under an emergency teaching credential.

“It’s a compliment for teachers in all these schools that they get as much done as they do,” he said. “But I don’t think there’s any teachers here who will say . . . what we’re doing is fine.”

The state quietly launched its oversight efforts last week, sending its audit teams into three schools, including the 1,700-student Samuel Gompers Middle School in Watts. The team visited every classroom to observe instruction and interviewed parents, students and administrators.

As in other targeted schools, the team will negotiate an agreement with school officials that will set explicit quarterly goals through the next 18 months. If the goals aren’t met, the state could take further action to spur improvements.

“I hope they’ll take into consideration all the factors that we as a school have to deal with,” said Gompers’ principal, Willard Love, who has been at the school for six years.

He said about a third of his teachers lack credentials. A third of his students are not fluent in English and two-thirds live in poverty. He said the school’s test scores are improving, although not fast enough to hit the state’s targets.

California schools Supt. Delaine Eastin, who heads the state Education Department, said more such interventions can be expected. Nearly 900 schools in the state are receiving extra money to help them boost their academic performance. But if their methods fail to produce results, the state will be responsible for stepping in and making more dramatic changes.

Eastin said her department does not have the capacity to handle anywhere near that many emergency reform efforts. “It’s one thing to identify 13 teams and it’s another to identify 113 or more,” she said.

The only elementary school on the intervention list in Los Angeles Unified is Avalon Gardens in South Los Angeles. Teachers and the principal said the school had recently brought in a new reading program, started after-school tutoring and began holding assemblies to recognize student achievement.

“We’re going in the right direction, and when the state comes to see us we’re going to explain that to them,” said Principal Eva Ybarro, who has been in charge for a year.

Ann Peterson, a teacher at Avalon Gardens, said she hopes the state recognizes improvements that have been made before taking drastic action, such as removing principals or teachers.

“We just got our new reading program; we just got our new math program,” she said. “How can you base performance on less than one year? You have to give it a chance to build up.”

In Los Angeles, Romer’s focus will be on boosting the pass rate for the high school test. He will recommend that the district increase its investment in teacher training, textbooks and math experts at all high schools to ensure that more students become proficient in algebra.

Recognizing that many students in middle and high school have yet to learn to read well, he also will form “cadres” of teachers who will be specially trained in that area.

But Romer and his advisors have only worked out sketchy details for addressing the schools where Eastin is intervening as well as five or 10 others that Romer has yet to select. He said that the principals and teachers at those schools will receive specialized, intensive training and that principals will be given specific goals.

“If they cannot respond to the leadership demand of the school, eventually we’ll replace them,” he said.

Eloisa Marquez, principal at Mt. Vernon Middle School, agreed that teachers and principals need more assistance, but said taking them out of the classroom to do training may not be the answer. “We’re stretched so much,” she said. “They keep adding more responsibility. I need to be left alone to do the best I can with what I have available at the school.”