A School Flails in a Sea of Chaos

Dolores Torres, a 40-year-old bank teller, sat among about 150 parents in the auditorium of John C. Fremont High School, desperate to ask the man from the state about her son.

The boy sitting next to her, 15-year-old Ray Torres, dreamed of going to college and becoming a computer programmer. But he was stuck in this floundering Los Angeles high school, where most students don’t even reach their senior year, let alone collect a diploma. Test scores had been so consistently abysmal that the state had sent a “SWAT team” of auditors to figure out what, if anything, could be done to raise them.

On this November night, the state’s chief emissary, Gordon Jackson, stood at the front of the room, listening as parent after parent rose to complain: Why wasn’t this school giving them homework? Why wasn’t it teaching them to read? Where were all the books?

Torres wanted answers too. Actually, she wanted to stop feeling, every morning as she dropped off Ray, “like I was throwing him to the wolves.”

When her turn came to speak, she managed to share just a fraction of her frustration. So, as the meeting wound down, she and Ray approached Jackson privately.

Ray began by telling Jackson, in soft but enthusiastic tones, of his plans for studying computers at USC. Then Dolores jumped in. What about his geometry class? He’s not learning anything. He’s getting all A’s, but he has no homework, and the counselors won’t help me. What can you do?

Jackson wondered what he could do--not just about Ray, but about this school, one of 13 in California and 10 in the Los Angeles Unified School District whose performance was so dismal that the state had dispatched monitors like him. During this first weeklong visit, he had told teachers, counselors, administrators and now, parents, that the mission of his seven-member team was narrow--to find some way to raise test scores that hadn’t budged from the basement in five years.

Over the next 18 months, he had explained, the auditors would negotiate a road map for improvement with L.A. Unified. After that, if scores didn’t rise enough, the state might try to run the school directly or impose other sanctions.

The state, prompted partly by federal pressure to turn around failing schools, had never involved itself so intimately in the affairs of individual campuses. Already, though, Jackson could see that everyone associated with Fremont wanted--and needed--far more than his team was offering.

Beyond the dismal test scores loomed widespread illiteracy, overwhelming truancy, poor teacher training and morale, staff infighting and an often-rudderless administration.

“You say you don’t have a magic wand,” one counselor told Jackson during a gripe session that first week. “But to us, you are the magic wand.”

Jackson saw this less as a measure of optimism than of desperation. Short of shutting down the place, he thought, “it would take--oh, my God--a lot to fix this.”

On the night of the parents meeting, he couldn’t summon the reassurances Dolores Torres and her son were seeking.

If I were you, he told Dolores, I’d be saying to myself, “I have to make a change. I can’t risk Ray’s future.”

Maybe Ray and Fremont, he said, “are not a match.”

Dolores Torres began looking for a new school for her son the following day.

Hundreds of ‘Dropout Factories’

In a nation whose president has vowed to “leave no child behind,” Fremont High is filled with students who have been left, or soon will be.

It is among 300 or so high schools nationally that Robert Balfanz, a Johns Hopkins University education researcher, refers to as “dropout factories.” More than two-thirds of Fremont ninth-graders leave before reaching 12th grade.

The school ranks in the lowest decile on the state’s academic performance index. About 80% of the almost entirely Latino and black student body comes from what the state refers to as socio-economically disadvantaged families. Most are poor; many aren’t proficient in English; most of their parents haven’t graduated from high school.

On paper, Fremont is failing. Jackson, a 46-year-old retired principal, went to the campus in November to judge for himself.

Early one Monday, his first day on campus, the tall visitor observed from the back of Room 312 as teacher Diane Adomian wrapped up what appeared to be a standard first-grade lesson.

“Al has a pal,” Adomian read from a sheaf of papers, urging her students to repeat after her.

“Al has a pal,” the 17 students intoned. “The pal has a tan hat,” Adomian continued. The students parroted her.

These youngsters were 14- and 15-year-old ninth-graders. This was their “humanities” class.

A pony-tailed girl wearing two earrings in her left ear turned to Jackson.

“This is all we do,” she said. “I don’t like this class. I’m serious. I don’t feel like I’m learning anything. It’s just a waste of time.”

Of Fremont High’s many problems, Jackson and his team learned quickly that reading topped the list. Nearly a third of the school’s 2,300 freshmen read no better than third-graders. And test scores suggested that 70% of Fremont’s 4,600 students didn’t understand what they read.

As teachers would explain to the auditors over and over, youngsters who can’t read can’t learn at a high school level. So many classes at Fremont--even honors classes--sidestepped reading by relying on drills, oral reports, movies, picture books or art projects such as collage- and poster-making.

Teachers who arrived with high expectations learned to lower them. Wendy Basgall, an English teacher and former attorney, came to Fremont to “make a difference.” But, in class, she couldn’t expect her students to actually read selections from Nathaniel Hawthorne and 18th century preacher Jonathan Edwards. So she read aloud to them. Afterward, she had them make posters of the authors’ fiery images.

“We have to make do,” Basgall said. “As my grandmother used to say, ‘We have to cut our coat to fit our cloth.’ ”

That suited some Fremont students just fine. “It’s easy,” sophomore football player Stanley Claiborne told a reporter after attending an English class where, as soothing classical music played in the background, students paged through picture books. “I get an A.”

The auditors found many other youngsters to be disengaged, unable or unwilling to pay attention, do homework or even show up for class.

In Adomian’s humanities class, for example, nearly half of those enrolled were absent the day Jackson visited. Auditors were told that overall, on any given day, 700 to 800 students--about a sixth of those enrolled--didn’t show up for classes. Many milled about campus.

Some students attributed their boredom to a dreaded ritual in many Fremont classes known as “giving notes.” It essentially means that students copy what teachers write on the board.

“If they’d be more interesting, kids would start going,” Adrian de la Cruz, 15, said of such courses.

Later, Adrian, who was on campus but ditching his classes, admitted his biggest problem to a reporter: He can’t really read.

“Giving notes” was how teachers made do with students like him.

A member of Jackson’s team caught a glimpse of the technique in Gary Taylor’s 10th-grade world history class. Taylor told the students to copy sentences related to “how scientific discoveries led to new theories about the universe.”

The challenge was to fill in the blanks. To help, Taylor told the class the first letter of the word he wanted them to fill in. Then he told them what page in their textbooks the word was on. Then what column on the page.

Within minutes, the auditor, Laurie Wiebold, had seen enough and left the room.

Taylor trotted after her. Only a handful of students can read the textbooks, he explained; he has to find alternatives.

“Yet we’re supposed to get them ready for college,” he said. “Sounds like mission impossible.”

Fremont’s campus sprawls across a city block, between San Pedro Street and Avalon Boulevard in South-Central Los Angeles. It is a neighborhood fortress, its perimeter protected by an 8-foot steel fence topped by spikes, its windows shielded from gunfire by thick screens.

Inside the gates, a hodgepodge of buildings is clustered around a shaded courtyard. At one end, on the gymnasium wall, is a mural of the school’s namesake, explorer John C. Fremont, boasting of “Pathfinder Pride.” The mural is marred by gang graffiti.

Many Surprises Await School’s New Principal

Officially, it is Principal Margaret Roland’s job to help this school find a path to pride, or at least a path out of failure.

She never expected to be in this position. Roland, who has been at Fremont two years, was passed over for promotion to principal numerous times during her 17 years as an assistant principal at various Los Angeles schools. She was surprised when the district asked her to apply for the top job at Fremont, and even more surprised when she got it.

Still more surprises awaited her.

She learned upon arrival that she had 34 teaching vacancies out of 250 positions and that nearly half the school’s teachers weren’t fully licensed. She also learned, gradually, of the school’s turbulent history--of student marches over the years protesting a lack of books and advanced classes, and of long-standing discontent among staff and teachers union members.

“I hadn’t paid attention to the walkouts or to anything else,” she recently recalled.

She hadn’t been told that the school was on a state “watch list” for four years because of stubbornly low test scores. And so she wasn’t prepared for the news last fall that the school would be audited by the state.

“I’m still trying to learn the names of teachers,” Roland told a reporter at the start of the audit. Jackson’s team “will come up with some things that I didn’t know and wouldn’t have known for a long time.”

First, however, Jackson wanted to know what she thought. “It would be absurd for us to think that you were just waiting for us to come help you,” he told her during their first sit-down meeting. What is your vision for Fremont? What’s in the works?

Roland took a few minutes to detail the school’s many problems, then paused. “I don’t know exactly where we’re going,” she said. “Whatever it is you would have us do, our goal this year is to do it.”

Auditor Believes That Students Deserve Better

By the end of his first week on campus--and especially after his meeting with Torres and the other parents--Jackson’s team felt “blown away.”

Jackson, who was swarmed at times during the week by unhappy students, believed that they deserved better than this.

His own high school experience had opened up his world, expanded his possibilities. Jackson, who is African American, grew up in Los Angeles’ Crenshaw Village apartments--known as “the Jungle.” But he had arranged to travel across the city, by bus, to attend largely white Fairfax High on the Westside. There, he had run track, acted in plays, grabbed every chance to learn something new.

Fremont seemed to be doing the opposite of what Fairfax did for him--shrinking students’ opportunities and aspirations. School officials, Jackson said, “were faltering right and left.”

Teachers and counselors, however, expected some guidance.

On the Friday of the auditors’ first week, they assembled in the school auditorium, eager to hear Jackson’s preliminary findings.

He captured them on slides, eight in all, which he projected on a screen: The reading program was “fragmented.” Teachers expected little of students. Teaching practices were misguided. The school’s administration was “overwhelmed” and ineffective.

When he finished, the crowd didn’t stir. They seemed stunned to see, summed up neatly in black and white, the problems that had weighed them down so long.

“Would it be wrong for us to anticipate broad, systemic change at Fremont High?” a social studies teacher finally asked.

Jackson said it would not, and the staff burst into applause.

With the start of a new semester in January, Fremont had a plan. But from the perspective of many staff members and students, nothing changed.

Two months after the auditors’ departure, Roland called teachers together in the cafeteria to present the road map for improvement agreed upon by the district and the state.

Rather than inspire, she begged.

“I’m here to beg, plead, whatever,” she said, her voice reedy. “There’s so much to do, I can’t begin to tell you.”

The plan was wide-ranging, requiring teachers to gear classes to state standards and to prepare rigorous weekly lesson plans. They were to be trained in proven techniques and monitored by administrators. Students were to be engaged in “purposeful activities” in language, arts and mathematics.

Attendance was to be taken every period, discipline policies to be revamped. Roland was to be assigned “a mentor.”

The principal admitted to teachers that she had work to do, but insisted that much of what had to be done depended on them. She even added her own requirements--not mentioned in the plan--that teachers, for example, not bring food into classrooms because it attracts rats.

Most of all, she said, teachers needed to stop being naysayers. “We either do it and do it right, or the state will take over,” Roland told them.

Many faculty members felt betrayed: The new remedies seemed ridiculously weak and little different from those tried before. And teachers, once again, appeared to be the scapegoats for the school’s failings.

“I feel like a fool, a total fool,” said librarian Mary Hoover, an unofficial leader among teachers and other staff. “We spilled our guts to these people, and this is what we got.”

Ray Torres wasn’t happy either. His own plans for improvement--inspired by Jackson’s advice--had stalled. His mother still hadn’t been able to get him into another high school.

One day in February, he was headed for his fifth-period geometry class, dreading the prospect. Though he loved math, every hour he spent in this class at Fremont seemed to leave him further behind.

As students filed in, geometry teacher Jeremy Kranz was writing a problem requiring simple arithmetic on the board. Ray went to his seat near the back and copied the problem.

“I need you to look up here like this is the most important thing in the world,” said Kranz, growing frazzled as the buzz of conversation in class grew louder.

“We did this already!” one student protested. Others joined in. Kranz seemed confused. “I don’t think so,” he said tentatively.

Kranz asked for textbooks to be passed out so students could work on their own. The books were only two years old but were marked up throughout by gang symbols.

Though Kranz had enough books for everyone to take home, he almost never assigned homework. He said he knew most students wouldn’t do it.

The noise grew louder.

“Wait! Wait! Wait!” Kranz said. “Stop! Everybody stop! I’m not perfect, but you’ve got to try!”

Ray and a few others were working. One girl was asleep face-down on her desk. A boy with spiked hair was listening to his CD player. Another girl peered into a mirror, plucking her eyebrows. Her cell phone rang, and she answered it.

Ray asked about a problem--how to know whether two triangles are similar--and Kranz answered by writing on the board with little explanation.

Kenyon Brown, a football player sitting up front, badgered Kranz for a hall pass. Eventually, he got it and left the room with a friend. It was only 20 minutes into the period, but they wouldn’t return.

“I skip his class just about every day,” Brown said later. “Mr. Kranz tries, but he just can’t control us.”

Inside the classroom, Kranz told a reporter that he wants the school to look good to the state. Things are better than they used to be, he said.

“The current administration is the best we’ve ever had. We’re all just working under difficult conditions.”

To illustrate, he called on a student. “Jeremy, what’s 10 minus 1/2?”

“Five?” Jeremy replied, uncertain.

“See!” Kranz said, his voice faltering. “This is what we’re dealing with.”

Tears spilled from his eyes. “We’re all trying so hard,” he said. “And yet the state comes in and says we’re not teaching right.”

One Student Seeks Education Elsewhere

By spring, Ray was gone.

Dolores Torres finally had persuaded his former high school, Mark Keppel in Alhambra, to take him back, even though he lived in Los Angeles, outside the school’s boundaries.

It wasn’t that no one at Fremont taught him anything. He would miss Mario Becerra’s English class, for example, where kids competed to be called on and sometimes stayed late to delve a little deeper into the meaning of a short story.

But even Becerra said Keppel would be better for Ray. “We can’t hold him back,” the former bank executive said after learning Ray was leaving.

At his new school, Ray noticed with relief, students lugged backpacks full of books and crammed between classes.

“Here, you can actually hear the teacher speak,” he told a reporter. “And the students actually worry about their grades.”

Ray was worried too. He had fallen behind at Fremont, not just in history and French, but in math, his favorite subject.

At Keppel, the academic bar was far higher. About 120 students were taking Advanced Placement calculus--a course Ray would almost certainly need to be admitted to a top computer science program.

Nine in 10 Keppel students who took the AP exam last year passed it. At Fremont, twice as big a school, no one had passed it--ever.

For now, Ray was focused on geometry. In April, he earned his first A on a quiz. By early June, he was hoping to raise his overall grade to a C-plus.

On the Fremont campus 16 miles away, progress was less certain.

During an April visit, Jackson’s team had found the school lagging behind the state’s expectations in five of six major areas: academic standards, teacher preparation and training, school leadership, security, and parent and community involvement. The school was found to be “progressing satisfactorily” in its improvement of teaching practices.

Since then, the district has announced plans to raise academic standards by moving to a “block schedule” in which classes would meet every other day for an intensive two hours.

But a vocal minority of teachers balked, saying they weren’t consulted.

They organized a student walkout, cursed district administrators to their faces and picketed at the school’s gates.

In May, the district softened somewhat, proposing to phase in the block schedules by September 2003.

In June, Jackson arrived for his final visit of the school year.

The day began inauspiciously, with an explosion.

“It’s the firecrackers,” a teacher told Jackson matter-of-factly. For two weeks, nearly every day, a prankster had been setting them off near a girls bathroom.

Jackson proceeded to drop in on classes, looking hard for signs of improvement.

And he found some.

“That had a nice tone to it!” he said enthusiastically after attending a class in which a young teacher was discussing Shakespearean literary devices.

In an algebra class, the students seemed engaged as a teacher explained the formula for working with parabolas. To Jackson, it “seemed like a real high school class.”

But this was hardly a campus transformed. He observed a history teacher reading a newspaper as students did fill-in-the-blank work sheets. Another instructor gestured and whispered to students during a lesson clearly staged for the auditor’s benefit.

Bands of youngsters continued to wander campus during class time. The school’s tardy policy was not being enforced. Attendance remained poor.

A young drama teacher stopped Jackson in the courtyard. She said she was being pressured by administrators to pass kids who had been absent as many as 18 of 28 days. She had been at Fremont only two months but was ready to quit. Another faculty member reported that a dozen teachers in the English department were thinking of leaving too.

Though only six months into this 18-month rescue effort, Jackson knew Fremont was running short on time. He wasn’t concerned so much about this year’s test scores--the exam had been taken in the spring, just a few months into the audit--but next year’s results were key. The numbers needed to go up.

He tried to remain upbeat. “In an environment like this,” he told teachers he met with near the end of the day, “we need to find five things we can do well .... I think we stand a chance of making some of these things work, if we work together.”

But Hoover, the librarian whom many teachers looked up to, felt that the faculty had made the mistake of hoping for too much.

“This has been very disillusioning,” she said of the state’s involvement in Fremont. “We expected a lot more than we should have, and when we didn’t get it, a lot of us gave up.”