State hearing examines how to improve low-performing schools
Shirin Parsavand | 10-27-2009 | Comments |
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Locke High School in South Los Angeles has been a charter school for just one year, but speakers at a hearing there Monday night pointed to it as a potential model for California’s efforts to bring up performance at struggling schools.More than 50 people attended the hearing, held by state Sen. Gloria Romero (D-Los Angeles) to discuss what the state can do to turn around low-performing schools and how it can qualify for federal funds under the Race to the Top competitive grant program. Romero chairs the Senate Education Committee and Senate Select Committee on Urban Economies.
Green Dot Public Schools officials said far more students are attending school regularly since the organization began running Locke just over a year ago. But it’s too early to determine whether the school will see an improvement on standardized tests. Marco Petruzzi, Green Dot chief executive officer, said the fact that more students are coming to school hurts test scores, because the students who weren’t showing up previously were not the top performers.
Green Dot used the state’s charter conversion law to take over Locke from the Los Angeles Unified School District. When Green Dot came in, there were 4,300 students on the rolls but only 2,600 were showing up, Green Dot founder Steve Barr said.
“If you don’t have half the kids here, nothing else really matters,” he said. Now, he said, the school has about a 90 percent attendance rate.
Two Locke students said the school has improved dramatically. Renee Lloyd, 18, said when she first came to the school, it didn’t seem like anyone cared. Lloyd said she used to smoke weed in the hallways and faced no consequences when she was caught.
“Now it’s a big change. Can’t do nothing but go to class,” she said. Lloyd told the audience she used to be in a gang, but is now earning As and Bs in school and wants to become a criminal defense attorney.
Aubrey Ross, 16, said he heard about problems at Locke from his older cousin, including a riot there in May 2008, making him nervous when he entered high school. But once he arrived and met the teachers and security officers, he said, he felt calm.
“The teachers help you,” said Ross, who has a 4.0 grade point average. “Even though you think you don’t need help, you still receive help.”
Romero told the students that some in Sacramento don’t believe that schools like Locke can be improved.
“The people who say it’s not happening, tell them to come to South Central and check out Locke,” Ross said.
Other speakers at the forum Monday said that state officials should not focus on charter schools or any other single way of improving schools. Simplistic strategies have been tried since the 1980s, said Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA.
“They’ve all failed,” he said. Other ways to improve education could include expanding the number of innovative district schools, such as magnet schools and pilot schools, he said.
Winston Doby of the Los Angeles Urban League, one of the first teachers at Locke when it opened in 1967, said he worried reforms there would not last if they didn’t also involve community efforts such as making the neighborhood safer.
“I hope 42 years from now we are not looking at Locke High and saying, `What happened? Why did that transformation not last?’” he said.
Green Dot’s Petruzzi said he agreed the company and its work at Locke don’t provide all the answers.
“We feel we’re writing a blueprint,” Petruzzi said. “We think there’s many ways to turn around schools.”
Romero said the state needs to commit to bringing up performance at its lowest-ranked schools to compete against other states for funding from the $4 billion Race to the Top program, part of the federal stimulus package.
Earlier this month, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed legislation to remove one barrier to California’s eligibility for Race to the Top funds. The legislation removed language in state law that prevented the state from using student achievement data in making decisions on assigning and evaluating teachers.
State officials said that language did not prevent individual school districts from using test scores to evaluate teachers, but that it was better to delete the language than to be embroiled in a dispute with federal officials.
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