Some Lessons in Frustration

It was meant to be the blueprint of the future in a city pockmarked with failing, old-style high schools.

The gleaming new South Los Angeles campus would be divided into five small schools within the school. Students would choose one based on their interests and would receive personal attention from teachers. Test scores would improve.

Things, however, have not gone according to plan.

Since the campus opened in July on the old Santee Dairy site, its teachers and administrators have received little or no training in how to run the so-called small learning communities. Staffing shortages have caused students and teachers to bounce among the groups, blurring their supposedly separate identities. Fights and other discipline problems have been common.

“Ideally, everyone should already know what it means to be in a small learning community,” said Principal Brenda Morton. “But the district wanted us to jump right into this. I just wish we had more time to get ready.”

The Los Angeles Unified School District, under pressure to reverse years of low graduation rates and student achievement, has turned to a long-term reform effort aimed at dividing its crowded high schools into smaller, semi-autonomous groups.

But after years of focus on elementary school reform and a massive building program, the district is left scrambling to catch up with other urban districts.

An uneven pace of change in Los Angeles, critics say, is being followed by a poorly defined strategy tightly controlled by a reluctant district leadership. The result, they say, is teachers and principals without the autonomy, resources and support needed to carry out the move toward the smaller learning clusters.

Supt. Roy Romer is unapologetic about the tight grip he has maintained on the reform plan. Caution, he believes, is needed because there are dangers to granting wide-ranging freedom to school leaders in such a large, troubled district.

“I know we’ve got to make this work. But it’s kind of like designing the train as it’s going down the track,” Romer said. “That concerns me very much, because we’re going to make mistakes.... I’m not going to kid anyone that we’re on a bumpy ride, but it’s the only ride we can take.”

In recent decades, major demographic shifts in Los Angeles and other cities have pushed the limits of the traditional high school model. Enrollment at most Los Angeles campuses has swelled to between 2,500 and 5,000 students, many of whom are learning English as a second language.

Teachers, who typically see 175 to 200 faces each day, struggle to remember names, let alone provide personal attention.

“It’s the factory model to a T,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford University professor who has extensively studied the concept of smaller learning centers. “The students come into class in a large group, teachers stamp them with a lesson, and then they move on.”

The strain has taken its toll on learning. At 27 of the district’s 49 comprehensive, or traditional, high schools, fewer than a quarter of the students showed proficiency on state English exams.

State and federal laws are increasing the pressure to improve high schools. The district is required to restructure 19 high schools that have consistently failed to meet performance targets under the federal No Child Left Behind law. And, this year, students are required to pass a mandatory high school exit exam to graduate.

The district is banking on its latest reform. Small learning communities are typically theme- or career-based programs aimed at making school more relevant to teenagers. Classes are clustered along hallways or in separate buildings to keep the students together. The cadre of teachers is expected to meet regularly to link lesson plans across departments and intervene with struggling students. Administrators and teachers have more say than they do in traditional schools over how money is spent.

Although learning communities are not very different from charter schools -- which are independently run, publicly funded smaller campuses -- the idea is a departure for the nation’s second-largest school district, which serves about 156,000 high school students.

But with little coordination or oversight from the district’s central administration, school principals in recent years have been largely left to experiment on their own. The reform program has developed sporadically into a haphazard patchwork in which most of the district’s high schools have only partly converted -- some in name only -- and 18 haven’t started yet.

“There is no time for us to be pointing fingers at why we’re not getting the job done,” said Marlene Canter, school board president. “There is no reason for our children to wait, and they have been waiting.”

The district’s slow pace has left Los Angeles without the large-scale support offered to other urban districts, including New York and Chicago, by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation has given about $700 million to other school districts to aid in the push toward smaller schools.

In 2003, the Gates Foundation awarded Los Angeles Unified a $900,000 grant to kick-start its planning, but since then it has been waiting for the district to present a comprehensive strategy, according to district and foundation officials.

Romer ordered that high schools built as part of the district’s massive construction project be designed for the new smaller arrangements. But 15 of the 35 planned high schools had already been designed in the traditional mold, including Principal Morton’s South L.A. Area New High School No. 1. As a result, these campuses will be imperfect and need to be modified.

That flaw, along with the rush to open the new school, has left several students who transferred from traditional high schools wondering how it’s different.

“It’s just like I’m floating around. It’s the same as before,” said James Mendoza, a junior who attended neighboring Jefferson High last year.

In a common encounter, Morton confronted a tardy student in the cafeteria one day last month. “What is your SLC?” she asked, referring to his small learning community.

The teenager didn’t know. “I think it’s on the third floor.”

Morton consulted a roster and sighed heavily. The student belonged in the fashion and design group on the second floor.

Overhauling the district’s existing schools has also proved challenging. Despite a school board policy calling for all middle and high schools to convert to the mini-schools by 2009, officials have struggled to put together and carry out a cohesive districtwide plan. Romer said he was reluctant to move aggressively until he was confident the district could assess whether the more creative teaching was working.

High schools still “have an obligation to get students to a certain level in algebra, for example.... If they want to combine algebra and music theory, that’s fine.... But we’re still going to require evidence that their students are learning math at a rigorous level.

“Obviously,” he said, “I’ve got to combine autonomy and accountability, and that’s what we’ve got to work out.”

Romer only recently bolstered a meager staff, allowing his executive officer, Liliam Castillo, the authority to hire 14 people who will help guide principals as they redesign their campuses. Late last month, he held his first meeting with senior staff to discuss district-level changes necessary to give campuses the flexibility they need.

Most pressing, officials and several teachers said, is the need to shift how schools receive money from the district so that each group on campus can control much of its own budget. Currently, most of a school’s funding is determined at the district level, leaving administrators with little freedom to hire additional teachers or staff.

Maricela Ramirez, a lead teacher in Roosevelt High School’s technology-themed community, expressed a common frustration: “We’re stuck building a new program within an old bureaucracy,” she said. “It’s not matching.”

Despite the lack of support, Roosevelt, among the district’s lowest-performing and most overcrowded schools, has had some success. Today, three-quarters of its 5,200 students are assigned to one of 12 clusters.

Roosevelt junior Luis Bautista said he had been a “screw-up,” slipping by with mediocre grades, before joining the social awareness and leadership group last year. “I always felt neglected,” he said. “I knew I wasn’t doing great, but I felt like no one cared.”

Social studies teacher Gustavo Reynoso said he and other teachers discussed Bautista in their weekly meetings. He was a smart kid, they agreed, who wasn’t applying himself.

One after the other, they cornered him after classes, hammering him with the same message.

“When they talked to me, it was motivating,” said Luis, who says he now makes A’s and Bs. “Mr. Reynoso told me he knew I was smart. I asked him how he knew and he told me, ‘We’ve been watching you. We know you.’ ”

Teachers at Roosevelt and elsewhere are apprehensive about whether such small victories will be replicated throughout the district.

“It makes me nervous because this could really be a great thing,” said Ramirez, the technology teacher. “But only if the district changes. If they don’t, then what? Was all this just a noble experiment?”