A’s and Bs -- and the CCC

Alex Gowan leaned against the side of the White Rhino. The bleached workhorse of a bus had strained up a near-vertical fire road to carry him and his fellow members of the California Conservation Corps to this wide, bulldozed bluff in the smoke-shrouded mountains west of Redding.

Gowan was a high school dropout whose quest to finally get a diploma had led him here, to the edge of the Motion Fire, or what remained of it after weeks of firefighting. The same was true for most of the 18 other corps members with him, a weary, slap-happy bunch who had been pulling 16- and even 24-hour shifts working backup behind firefighters from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and the U.S. Forest Service.

In addition to being members of the Cs, as they call the Conservation Corps, many of these young people were students or recent graduates of one of the most unusual schools in California: John Muir Charter, a program that offered a last chance to defy the odds and succeed.

“I got in trouble back in my wilder, younger days” said Gowan, 19, a lanky, laconic guy in dusty green pants. “I just never really liked the whole school situation.” He ticked off the schools in the Redding area that he had attended and left: Foothill, New Tech, Foothill again, Pioneer, North State Adult Education, “and then I sort of dropped off the map.”

Lete Sanchez, also 19, strolled by. Her grin threw dimples onto cheeks caked with dust and grime. Funny and self-assured, with a fondness for Led Zeppelin and chain saws, Sanchez had bounced around, too, until she wound up in “one of those continuation schools -- you know, [where] you can do what you want, they just give you a packet and send you in a corner.”

“It was pretty lame,” she said. So she quit.

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Valuable piece of paper

What brought both of them back was the Conservation Corps and Muir -- and the maturity to see that they were going nowhere without a high school diploma.

“Turns out,” Gowan said, “that piece of paper will get you places.”

John Muir was chartered in 1998, primarily to provide education to participants in the Conservation Corps. The corps had been established more than 20 years earlier by then-Gov. Jerry Brown to turn around wayward youth through projects that would benefit the state’s environment. About half its members are high school dropouts.

Muir now serves about 1,200 students at 43 sites around the state. Most of its programs are associated with the California Conservation Corps, but Muir also works with local conservation corps in Los Angeles and Sacramento, as well as with some other community service programs.

Corps members, who can be 18 to 25, are paid for their work and encouraged to complete school. If they finish a one-year commitment, they can be eligible for scholarships to further their education, either in vocational school or college.

By some measures, Muir sounds like a losing proposition, a school whose own dropout rate actually exceeds its enrollment (a bit of statistical gymnastics made possible by the way the state calculates the rate). When, earlier this year, the California Dropout Research Project at UC Santa Barbara released a ranking of all of the state’s schools by the number of dropouts, Muir was perched on top.

As is so often the case in education, the numbers don’t really tell the story.

On average, students have dropped out of school 2 1/2 times before they enroll at Muir. And once there, many drop out again.

Dean Ravencroft, 21, joined the corps last September and began attending Muir. That ended in February, when he was kicked out of the corps -- and Muir -- for poor attendance. He was allowed back in July, just in time to join hundreds of corps members who were providing support services to firefighters battling the wildfires raging throughout Northern California.

That meant that Ravencroft had contributed to Muir’s dropout rate, even though he was back in school and determined to stick it out. “I feel I’ve matured,” he said, taking a break from his grueling work at a fire base camp in Anderson, just south of Redding. “I have a better head on my shoulders.”

Ravencroft grew up in a foster home in Yreka and didn’t have much use for school. He had a particularly hard time with math, especially algebra. But his teacher at Muir worked closely with him and taught him “little shortcuts that most teachers would never teach you,” he said. Algebra began to make sense.

Still, he said, Muir isn’t for everybody. “It works for people who have the will,” he said. “You can’t just sit there and expect your schoolwork to get done. You’ve got to move your pencil.”

Or, as Elijah Oliver put it: “In order to be in this program, you’ve got to show up. If you don’t show up, you’ll be gone. I’ve seen lots of people go.”

Oliver, 19, who grew up in Compton and moved to Toledo, Ohio, and then Sacramento, was one of four students taking a recent remedial reading class. This was a class for students who came to Muir reading at the fifth-grade level or below. Oliver was among the more advanced students. Two of his classmates, Komal Singh and Joshua Smith, were close to beginning readers, despite having made it most of the way through traditional high schools.

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Small class sizes

Reading out loud during class, Smith struggled to sound out words such as “pushed” and “distance.” A polite, well-spoken 21-year-old who is ordained as a minister of a nondenominational Christian church, he has severe dyslexia and reads at about a second-grade level.

Smith said he was in his fourth year at Natomas High School when he dropped out. How did he ever get that far?

He doesn’t have an answer. “Once I got to high school,” he said, “no one really helped me with the learning disability anymore.”

His teacher, Norma Nailor, has an idea: Before the California High School Exit Exam became a requirement for graduation last year, she believes, schools could pass along students who lacked basic skills. “The exit exam is the first real roadblock that has stopped them from going forward without being able to read,” she said.

Although she doesn’t claim to be a miracle worker, Nailor, working with small groups, said she can move most students through several grade levels of reading in a year. Sometimes she can pinpoint and solve a problem that allows them to speed ahead even faster. Eventually, she said, “most of them will be able to pass the exit exam.”

One of Muir’s biggest advantages is that it has very small classes, so small that it can give students something close to one-on-one attention. It can afford to do this, said executive director Buzz Breedlove, largely because it uses Conservation Corps facilities in Sacramento and doesn’t have to pay for its school sites. That frees up money for teacher salaries, he said.

Breedlove is a former legislative analyst who worked for the Conservation Corps before taking over at Muir in 2003. He’s a statistics guy who constantly crunches numbers to figure out how Muir can do better.

But how do you even judge a school like Muir? It is a significant question, because as a charter school -- a public school that is run independently by a nonprofit corporation -- Muir is expected to show evidence of academic success or face eventual revocation of its charter.

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Meaningless data

The state Department of Education acknowledges that its dropout data don’t do justice to a dropout recovery program. Since Muir deals with students whom no other school could reach, its dropout rate is fairly meaningless. And Breedlove pointed out that because of another statistical anomaly, Muir has just about the best Academic Performance Index ranking in California: 957 out of a possible 1,000. “It’s worthless,” he said. “I even told the Department [of Education] to take it off the Internet, but they didn’t.”

One measure of the school is the number of graduates. In the 2006-07 school year, Muir graduated 306 students -- perhaps a third to a quarter of its enrollment. That might sound low, but some regular California high schools do scarcely better.

Breedlove believes that, ultimately, the only true measure of success for a school like his is the “value added” to an individual student. How many grade levels of reading did a student improve? Did a student learn algebra after years of frustration and failure? Success is measured one student at a time.

“Is a student becoming more civic-minded, more civil, more healthy, mentally and physically? . . . I wish I could find an assessment for that,” he said. “If they’re going to be successful students, they have to be successful at life. I think we’re good at that, but I don’t know how to measure it.”

It may not be measurable, but it is palpable on the fire lines, where students working 16-hour shifts talk about how good it feels to put in a hard day’s work doing something that matters. As they drive through the region, they see hand-lettered signs from homeowners thanking them for saving their property.

“Many of these students didn’t see that bigger purpose, didn’t realize they had the capacity for bigger things,” Breedlove said.

“Then they join the corps and suddenly someone says, ‘You’ve got to go out and save California from burning.’ ”

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mitchell.landsberg @latimes.com