District Giving Extra Scrutiny to 14 Schools

The Los Angeles Unified School District is targeting 14 of its lowest performing schools for extra help in a move to boost academic performance and forestall state intervention, officials said Monday.

The effort is underway as the state Department of Education prepares to send audit teams to evaluate 10 other troubled campuses in the district.

All of the schools to be put under new scrutiny serve primarily poor children and receive additional funding through the federal Title I program.

The 14 schools will be analyzed in the coming months by staffers within the school district in much the same way the initial 10 are being reviewed by state-appointed audit teams.

Although the 14 have shown signs of progress, they have failed to meet improvement targets in at least two of the last four years, officials said. If the schools continue to falter, they could face state intervention as well.

“These schools need to change more quickly than they are now,” Supt. Roy Romer said of the 14 campuses. “We want to get ahead of the game.”

The list includes nine high schools: Banning, Bell, Belmont, Crenshaw, Franklin, Hollywood, Manual Arts, Marshall and Washington. Also on the list are Audubon, Drew, Gage and Olive Vista middle schools and Towne Avenue Elementary.

These schools face an array of challenges. Many of their students are not only poor but are still learning English. The campuses also have large numbers of inexperienced teachers. Some are so crowded that they do not have room for extra classes to help struggling students.

“It’s extremely difficult,” said Ignacio Garcia, principal of Belmont High, a campus of nearly 5,000 students where one in two is still learning English.

“If someone has a better idea . . . we have to be open to any innovations that will yield better results.”

L.A. Unified will be dispatching staffers from the central office and the local subdistricts to figure out how best to foster change.

Campus administrators will undergo intensive leadership training, and teachers in math, science and other disciplines will learn strategies for bolstering reading comprehension.

Those techniques are being developed for all L.A. Unified high schools, but Romer and his staff plan to introduce them with added intensity at the 14 campuses.

“The [district] is trying to be proactive and make sure that schools don’t fall through the cracks,” said Associate Supt. Theodore T. Alexander Jr.

Until recently, the district focused its instructional reforms on its elementary schools. Now that elementary scores are rising, it is turning attention to middle schools and high schools, where test results have remained flat or declined.

The 14 schools on the district’s new list represent only a fraction of about 255 Title I campuses that need to raise their test scores or face state intervention. The other schools already have embarked on other state or federal reforms.

District officials said that some of the 14 schools could be taken off the district’s list if their academic performance rises.

Romer would like to avoid the state swooping into the 14 campuses the way it is doing with the initial 10.

“We know that we have to accelerate this change,” Romer said. “We’re doing this because it’s the right thing to do.”