In Carson, Teachers Say No Thanks to Grant

In the cash-strapped world of urban public high schools, million-dollar gifts -- even ones with strings attached -- walk in the door about as often as star athletes with perfect SAT scores.

Even less common is for one to be turned down.

But that is what happened at Carson High School this year, when teachers voted down a highly touted reform program that came with a $1.5-million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Depending on who’s asked, it was either a case study of union power run amok or of high-handed, top-down management.

Almost certainly, it was an example of how hard it can be to bring about reform in a school system as large, complex and politically stratified as the Los Angeles Unified School District.

At first blush, it seemed like a perfect fit. Last year, the Gates Foundation, which has become a major philanthropic force in public education, was looking for schools in the Los Angeles district to adopt the Talent Development model of school reform. Talent Development, created by researchers from Johns Hopkins University, had shown strong promise at reducing dropout rates and raising student achievement at schools in Philadelphia, Boston, Louisiana and elsewhere.

The foundation had invested mostly in other school districts, and Los Angeles Unified officials were growing eager for its help. Gates was willing to back the program with $3 million at two schools.

Talent Development officials met with district administrators last year, looked at the landscape, and thought Carson and Jordan High were especially ripe for their program. Jordan, one of the lowest-performing schools in the district, was more in line with the kind of school that Talent Development was looking for. “Gates ... wants a focus on those schools that are in the most trouble,” said Tara Madden, the Western regional coordinator for Talent Development.

Carson students weren’t doing a lot better, at least judging by standardized test scores. In the Academic Performance Index, which ranks schools from one to 10 (with 10 being the best), Jordan was a one and Carson was a two. Jordan students fared a little better at math. But a higher percentage of Carson’s students were graduating, and a significant percentage of those were going to college.

Still, Doug Weybright, then principal of Carson High, believed the school should be doing much, much better, and had been looking for outside help to boost his struggling students.

“We felt like this [Talent Development program] was our next logical step,” recalled Weybright, who has since been promoted to a district administrative job. “If it came with additional resources, it would be the right way to go. A million dollars a year -- that’s good money.”

Each year, he said, the school would begin with about 1,200 ninth-graders and wind up with a graduating class of around 550. Among those were students going to the University of California and to Ivy League schools. But the majority were not making it.

“Now, of those kids who did not get through, most of them were African American or Latino or Pacific Islander,” Weybright said. “I think our job as an educational institution is to get kids through our institution, to graduate them.... If we were making laptop computers and we’re only selling 50% of them, we’re out of business.”

By all accounts, Jordan’s problems were worse. For years it was on the list of the poorest performing schools in the district, both for its failing test scores and dismal graduation rate. But Madden said the school’s younger teaching staff -- who were more open to change -- were eager for reform programs aimed at helping their students.

The concept of Talent Development rests largely on two pillars. One is a special ninth-grade “academy” that focuses extra attention on freshmen, who are at the highest risk of dropping out. Once students make it to 10th grade, the odds are strong that they will graduate.

The other pillar involves a different way of scheduling classes. Known as the “four-by-four block schedule,” it breaks the school year into quarters, and the school day into four 90-minute classes. The idea is to make each course more intensive, collapsing a semester’s work into 10 weeks. It also gives students the opportunity to take more courses over a school year -- 16, compared with 12 in a typical schedule. If a student flunks a class, there are more opportunities to make it up.

John Francis Polytechnic High School in Sun Valley adopted the four-by-four schedule in 2004, along with other aspects of the Talent Development program. Last June, 92% of its ninth-graders had enough credits to move up to 10th grade, about one-third more than the previous year.

Carson already had a ninth-grade academy, and it had a different form of block scheduling, in which classes last 110 minutes but meet only on alternating days. (Students still generally take six classes, and they are on the traditional semester system.) So adopting Talent Development -- which also offers a specialized curriculum in some courses -- would be less of a stretch than it would be for most schools.

At least, that’s the way it appeared to Weybright and to Madden.

Teachers, for the most part, had an entirely different view -- one that caught administrators off guard. They didn’t like the four-by-four schedule. They didn’t want an outside organization telling them how to teach. And they didn’t think Carson was one of the low-performing schools for which Talent Development was created.

“They would come in and reorganize our school around their model, and we didn’t like their model,” said Kary Harger, a social studies teacher who chairs the Carson chapter of United Teachers Los Angeles, the teachers union. “Their model is basically geared toward a Fremont or a Locke [High School], where you have lower graduation rates and not that many kids are going to college.

“We didn’t see the advantage,” she said. “We didn’t want the change.”

Not even for $1.5 million? “If I thought we were actually going to see any of it, I might have gone for it,” Harger said. But the money, she said, would go to Talent Development to hire people to administer the program -- or, as she put it, “to tell us what to do.”

If that sounds cynical -- well, Harger said, Los Angeles teachers have reason to be a bit cynical about reform programs handed down from above. “No sooner do you start something than they try something different,” she said. “They never let it play out, and they never listen to us.”

This time, the district would have no choice. The teachers’ contract with Los Angeles Unified gives them the right to vote on any schedule change. They would have the last say.

By last fall, Weybright was gone, succeeded by a new principal, Ken Keener. Keener supported Talent Development, but not at the cost of staff warfare. Madden, the Talent Development official, said Keener “wasn’t as sold on it as Mr. Weybright.”

In the weeks leading up to the January vote, Madden said, she battled a campaign against Talent Development by the teachers who were opposed to it. “There was a lot of misinformation,” she said. “Teachers -- it amazes me how they can remain so ignorant.... I worked in New York City, Philadelphia ... and I haven’t encountered resistance quite like that anywhere else.”

She couldn’t understand why the teachers were so opposed to the four-by-four schedule. “It’s not some wild, crazy thing,” she said.

Harger said the Talent Development team was arrogant. They “came in with an attitude,” she said. “They basically said, if you don’t want our program, you don’t want change.

“Their experience up to that point,” she added, “had been in schools in places ... where teachers have no union ... and they just compliantly went along with what Talent Development wanted. We’re a little more -- well, you have to convince us.”

In the end, the teachers voted against the new schedule by a margin of about 3 to 1. There would be no Talent Development program at Carson High.

Madden concluded that the Carson teachers were complacent. “They’re comfortable doing what they’re doing,” she said. “They service a small number of their students very well, and they feel that’s sufficient.”

Weybright summed up the experience this way: “Change is a very difficult thing for some people to embrace, and we have structures in place that prevent those changes.... I think we need to take some risks, think further outside the box, to make sure we’re doing something to help everybody’s kid.”

Harger agreed, to a point. “Yeah,” she said, “teachers are human beings, and change is scary.... But for the most part, if we can see the value in it, we’ll do it. We don’t want our kids to fail.” And, she said, most teachers support the concept, now being pushed by the district, of breaking large schools such as Carson into smaller, semiautonomous units. “We’re not opposed to reform,” she said.

Los Angeles Unified Supt. Roy Romer drew a slightly different lesson from the Carson experience.

“It is obvious I don’t have an easy time of change here,” he said. “It’s like playing an organ. Every once in a while, you’re going to get a sour note.”

Jordan High School is going ahead with Talent Development, one of three reform programs being promoted by the Gates Foundation in Los Angeles Unified schools. It is expected to be phased in, beginning this fall.

The district is expected to announce soon that it has found a second high school to try out Talent Development.

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Times staff writer Jean Merl contributed to this report.