Fremont’s magnet likely to survive “reconstitution”
Katie Evarts | 1-5-2010 | Comments |
| Print this Page
Laura Torres didn’t want her daughter to go to Locke High School, long known for campus violence and high dropout rates than academic achievement.
An immigrant from Mexico who values education but was not able to go to school herself, Torres wanted an environment that would help her daughter, also named Laura, focus on her studies and prepare for college. She knew Locke was not that place.
“I didn't like it,” Torres said of Locke through a translator, “because I know people who have their kids there and there are lots of problems. Many fights. I went to the school and I didn't like the area, it didn't look good for my kids.”
Torres knew she could keep her daughter out of Locke by signing her up for the magnet program at Fremont High School. She had done the same for her older son, Miguel, who graduated from the magnet program and is now attending college.
Fremont’s magnet students lead the school in attendance, and 91 percent graduate from the high school and ultimately go to college.
Fremont’s low test scores
But now the success of Fremont’s magnet program is imperiled by an order from Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Ramon Cortines. Despite the magnet’s high graduation rate, the larger Fremont school community has been plagued by low test scores for years, and earlier this month, Cortines ordered the reconstitution of the school, removing its administrators and staffs and reopening with new personnel.
The order wasn’t a surprise. Fremont began the school year under an ultimatum from the superintendent to raise its California Standards Tests scores by a large margin or risk being shut down. The magnet’s math scores on California’s standardized tests have remained flat over the last few years. Out of the 49 magnet programs in LAUSD, Fremont’s ranked last, according to the latest LAUSD test results.
Student protests followed Cortines’ order, but the district hasn’t retreated from its decision.
In many respects, Fremont’s science and technology magnet school represents much of what researchers have long hoped for such special-themed schools. Initially introduced as an alternative to busing to integrate schools – creating more diverse student enrollments in segregated school systems – more recent versions of the magnet school have attacked low student achievement in the nation’s urban schools.
Fremont’s magnet is a kind of school-within-a-school that focuses on science and technology education and has a more rigorous curriculum than the rest of the school. It began in the 1980s as part of a federally funded pilot program intended to integrate African-American and Latino students into a more rigorous academic track. Last year, about 91 percent of its seniors graduated, and almost all of them were headed directly for college, according Jerry Footlick, the magnet science and technology coordinator.
Even if they take some time off after high school, the rest of the graduates “usually go back to college,” Footlick said. “They go to community college, maybe they go to a Cal State or something, but they usually go back.”
That Fremont successfully sends many of its math and science graduates to college but can’t help its students pass the state’s basic math exam speaks, in part, to attitudes about testing among students and even teachers.
Passing AP exams, but failing basic math?
Footlick said it would be shortsighted of LAUSD to shut down the magnet because of the test scores. “Shows we're very good, but weak in one area,” he said. “So do you throw the barrel out because of one rotten apple?”
The students “don't understand numbers,” Footlick said. “It's too easy to plug in a formula or use a calculator. If you don't know what the denominator is, how do you find out where to put the number in the top or the bottom? This is the problem we're finding out.”
Perhaps a more serious problem is that students and teachers have not taken the testing seriously.
“One of the kids took the Scantron...and bubbled his name in as the answers,” Footlick said. “They weren't taking it seriously because…one of the teachers told them it doesn't matter, they can't do anything to you, pass the [California High School Exit Exam] and you're in good shape.”
Footlick is taking pains to instill into the program the seriousness of the testing.
It will take “a different attitude on the teachers' parts,” he said. “They will be taking it seriously from now on…we're really going after it. Everything in math should be raised a minimum of double digits” on the next test.
Joe Vaca, one of the magnet’s math teachers, said that the math scores do not accurately reflect many students’ skills because the test does not cover what they are learning in their advanced classes, along with their apathy about the test.
“There are kids that are passing the AP exams, but are getting basic on the CST scores,” Vaca said.
Still, he agrees that students need to review their fundamentals and that some of them come to him with less-than-stellar math skills. "What I'm personally working on," Vaca said, "is making sure that my underclassmen...are reviewing their basic math skills over vacation."
An eye on the future
Fremont’s administrators have taken measures to make sure the magnet reaches its goal of raising scores. The program, for example, has invested heavily in a big computerized program, Footlick said. It is “geared for every kid to sit down at whatever computer's available on the internet and go and tutor himself and work hard in mathematics to raise his scores.”
Teachers and students worry what will happen to Fremont High School if the magnet program is dismantled. “A lot of students would leave,” Footlick said, “because they’re only here for the magnet program.”
“It's a beacon for what we're doing here at Fremont and in the South Central community,” Vaca said. “We produce great students who go to great universities.”
Laura Torres, now 17 and a senior, is one of those students with an eye on her future. She is not sure where she where she will attend college next year, but she is confident that she will be prepared for the rigors of higher education because of the support she gets in the magnet school.
"The teachers are preparing us to go to college," she said, "as well as what every teacher should doing: pushing their students to move forward with their lives."
Whether teachers at the school have done enough, however, remains to be seen. LAUSD officials continue their plans to reconstitute the school next fall with a new core of educators.
Tags: fremont high school locke high school los angeles unified school district ramon cortines south los angeles
