Stop the Schools’ Plunge

Last week at Alain Leroy Locke High in South Los Angeles, 300 students who might have been working to raise their school’s abysmally low test scores instead put their energy into a bloody lunchtime melee. Police arrested six on charges that included weapons possession.

A few weeks earlier, as many as 500 students at the equally underperforming Washington Preparatory High School, also in South L.A., threw cans and chairs at each other and police during a brawl.

Lest anyone blame spring fever, teachers last fall complained that Washington Prep’s 3,800-student campus was “out of control,” with beatings, robberies, open sex acts and drug use. Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Roy Romer replaced the school’s principal and ordered surveillance cameras installed and security officers added.

Good start. But clearly not enough. Time to bring in heavy reinforcements.

The U.S. government sees rebuilding Iraq’s schools as key to promoting peace and democracy. It’s spending $100 million over the next five years on Pakistan’s education system, in part, no doubt, because policymakers know that educated citizens are the foundation of a civil society. Some L.A. Unified campuses are almost as desperate, the neighborhoods that produce their students almost as war-weary, the threat of anarchy almost as real.

Take Washington Prep, which sits in the cross hairs of several gangs. Students and teachers were leaving campus one afternoon in January when the driver of a passing car pulled up and started firing. His target, a 19-year-old who was not a student, died in front of the terrified onlookers. Teachers tell of ice cream vendors who sell crack cocaine on nearby streets. One teacher told a Times reporter that he had filed three child-abuse reports in three weeks.

Yes, ending the chaos outside the school is the work of parents, police officers and business, church, community and political leaders. But it takes good schools to produce those people. For many students, Washington Prep’s respected magnet program and renowned jazz band have been the stairway to responsible adulthood. Too many other students, however, are crammed into classrooms that lack textbooks or even enough desks.

Hence the tragic spiral that spans generations: Bad education leads to campus anarchy that undercuts teacher morale that rots classroom rigor that leads to stupider graduates who become bad parents who send kids to class better equipped to fistfight and disrespect teachers than to understand events in Iraq or grasp the significance of Mohandas Gandhi.

Time for intervention. Time for the city’s adults to demand more money and fresh troops. Time to make at least the commitment the nation makes to kids 10,000 miles away.