School Takeover Views Mixed

One day last week, at 2:39 p.m., a horn signifying the end of another day at Jordan High School echoed across Watts, past the carcasses of trucks in a defunct warehouse, across a vacant lot littered with abandoned sofas, past the tired-looking man selling oranges on the corner.

Nearly 2,000 students tumbled out, virtually all of them poor and dark-skinned. Among them were the faces of a school doing its best with the hand it’s been dealt: the boy who tests water quality in a nearby creek as part of an urban ecology project, the girl with college plans and a shy smile carrying a dog-eared literature textbook.

But among them too were reminders that throughout Los Angeles, the hallmarks of public education are often high dropout rates and pitiful test scores. A police officer asked one boy why he had ditched school earlier that week; the boy just shrugged. Another student, no more than 4 1/2 feet tall, exited with a notebook under his arm and a T-shirt that read: “I’m rich, Bitch.”

If Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is going to assemble the political will to seize control of public schools, it’s likely to start here, in the city’s lower-income communities.

In wealthier neighborhoods and at higher-performing schools, interviews with parents, students and educators reveal a response to Villaraigosa’s plan that is tempered and skeptical, even, at some schools, hostile. There, the plan is often seen as excessive, a power grab, the replacement of a bloated bureaucracy with an even bigger one.

“I think we’re on the right track,” said Linda Ross, president of the 31st District Parent Teacher Student Assn. in the San Fernando Valley. “I don’t think that we need to make such a radical move.”

In the halls of power too -- in the teachers union, where there are fears that Villaraigosa would become too powerful, and in the offices of the Los Angeles Board of Education, where administrators say they have made significant gains in recent years -- the mayor’s plan has been assailed as downright undemocratic.

But at some of the area’s worst schools -- in South and East L.A., in the Boyle Heights neighborhood where the mayor was born -- the plan has been met, if not with a firm endorsement, with a chorus of: “Why not?”

“We need to try something,” said Deborah Anderson, 39, a South Los Angeles resident. “These schools are failing us.”

Anderson goes to work each day, dropping off and picking up students at Jordan High, a hulking fortress on East 103rd Street where more than 2,300 students are enrolled. In 2004-05, there were 743 suspensions there, and the state has given Jordan its lowest ranking -- a 1 on a scale of 1 to 10 -- when comparing its academic performance to that of other schools in the state.

Anderson’s daughter, 8-year-old Whisper, attends nearby 99th Street Elementary School.

Five decades after the U.S. Supreme Court banned racial segregation in public schools, 99th Street has not had a white student in at least five years, according to district statistics.

Nineteen percent of its students met the “proficient” or “advanced” levels in the California Standards English-language arts test last year -- about half of the state average, though the state gave the school’s academic performance a rating of 7 out of 10 in 2004 when compared with other schools with similar demographics.

Even as her grades have remained decent, Whisper has become increasingly recalcitrant. She frequently lashes out in anger, Anderson said, and sometimes just walks out of school when she “doesn’t want to listen anymore.” For that, Anderson said she lays the blame squarely at the feet of the school district, which she said is widely viewed in her neighborhood as slack and out of touch.

“I was raised old-fashioned, where you go to school to learn, not to play,” she said. “They need more of that today. I want some tough love back in these schools.”

On Tuesday, in his first State of the City address, Villaraigosa announced that he would ask the state Legislature for the right to take the helm of the Los Angeles Unified School District, which includes more than 850 campuses and 727,000 students.

If the proposal were approved -- by no means a sure thing -- he would become the dominant force on a “council of mayors” that would oversee the school district, hire and fire the superintendent, and help oversee the district’s $13-billion total budget.

In poor neighborhoods, many parents say school administrators have taken the easy way out by giving up on their children, by declaring students unable to learn and unsuited for college. As a result, perhaps, many of the details of Villaraigosa’s proposal have resonated there.

At Jordan High, students even applauded the mayor’s proposal to require uniforms. Several said percolating tension on campus can boil over just because a student arrives with a piece of white gold jewelry or a new pair of Air Jordan sneakers.

“Some people get jealous of what people have got,” said Jeffrey Gomez, a 14-year-old ninth-grader at Jordan High whose family emigrated from Honduras and landed in Watts. “If they’re in uniform, they’ll all be wearing the same thing.”

But even at schools such as Jordan, support for the mayor’s proposal is by no means universal.

Students, predictably, are not thrilled with his plan to lengthen the school day, and parents worry about that too, wondering about the strain on teenagers who have jobs or are needed at home to take care of siblings.

Renewed gang violence has raged in Watts in recent months. Omar Khan, a retired engineer and a Jordan High chemistry teacher for the last five years, said extending the school day past the afternoon would give rise to practical issues that would be unthinkable in much of the city, such as random gun violence associated with gangs.

“In the winter, it gets dark around 5 o’clock,” he said. “Think about what could happen.”

Khan said parents would be wise to question Villaraigosa’s motivation.

“He is like an ambulance chaser, without really caring,” Khan said. “And the children are going to be the political football.”

Still, at Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights, which has more than 5,000 students, a political revolution doesn’t sound so alarming.

Last spring, 45% of its students failed math, and the dropout rate has been more than two times the state average in recent years. Like Jordan, the school received the state’s lowest score -- a 1 out of 10 -- when its academic performance was compared with other schools in the state.

“The way it is now, nobody cares,” said Lydia Ramirez, 40, who quit her job two years ago solely to help usher her son Juan through Roosevelt. “For all these years, who has been accountable? At last, we’ll have someone.”

Villaraigosa’s sales pitch will be far tougher at the region’s better-performing schools, where progress is seen as slow but steady, benefiting from special-interest “small learning communities,” magnet programs and, in the case of Riverside Drive Elementary School in Sherman Oaks, an army of ferocious parent advocates.

Riverside Drive is, in theory, comparable to schools throughout the region. But 65% of its students met the “proficient” or “advanced” levels in the California Standards math test in 2004-05 and 59% in the Englishlanguage arts test, figures that are well above the state average.

When the school’s copying machine recently began wheezing -- clearly on its last legs -- Principal Pamela Briscoe asked the district for a new one. Officials told her she would have to pay for it out of her own budget.

Unable to afford it, she turned to Jane G. Poole, president of the school’s Parent-Teacher Assn. and a liaison to the school’s booster club, which raises about $90,000 each year to pay for extra teachers’ aides and enrichment programs. But the parents couldn’t afford the $12,000 machine either.

Poole then found out that schools Supt. Roy Romer would be speaking at a Sherman Oaks Chamber of Commerce luncheon. She attended, cornered one of his deputies and went home with assurances that the district would buy the school a new copier.

“Children have no power,” she said. “We’re it, man.”

As Poole talked on a green bench outside the school, children filed in wearing stylish shoulder bags and pink mukluk boots, past large renderings of paintings by Pablo Picasso and Henri Rousseau.

Inside, third-grade teacher Kris Nevills said it was not surprising that the reaction to the mayor’s proposal has been so different in lower-income communities.

“The children from this neighborhood don’t have the same problems,” she said. “They have the right food to eat. They don’t have to lie on the ground at night because of gunfire. It makes a big difference.”

But that doesn’t mean the mayor should take over, not in Watts or Sherman Oaks, Nevills and Poole said.

Among the concerns raised by parents at Riverside Drive: that teachers were not consulted adequately before the mayor’s announcement, that splitting the district into dozens of sub-districts would weaken individual schools and that Villaraigosa would not be the mayor forever -- and no one knows what the next mayor’s educational philosophy would be.

“I believe in this mayor. I like this guy,” Poole said. “And I wish we could save the world with Antonio Villaraigosa. But I don’t think we can.”