The Saturday edition of the L.A. Times story by their education reporter, Howard Blume, was pretty gloomy in terms of the depths of inadequate performance that LAUSD school have sunk over the years, especially on the Eastside. “Garfield High is eligible for takeover; Control of the East L.A. school, setting for 'Stand and Deliver,' could shift because of its low academic standing.” By Howard Blume, September 26, 2009, http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-lausd26-2009sep26,0,3974782,full.story
Besides a Garfield takeover, as the title points out, Lincoln High is right there with the same eligibility, too. LHS has also failed to improve enough to climb out of the public school version of a death spiral under the “No Child Left Behind” federal mandate. When a school fails to make its goal according to the test results, it causes the school to make the "PI" category, "Performance Improvement." When the school attains three consecutive years of being in the PI classification, the state can take it over from the LAUSD.
So besides trying to move ahead, there's this negative element of attaining a PI rating that a school wants to avoid. If there is any year that the scores meet the minimum levels of performance, the school gets to start over fresh with a zero years of PI accumulation. The school still is not necessarily doing great, but in terms of take-over, there’s that fresh start to give it a reprieve from the prospects that we see now.
At the moment, I don’t see the state rushing in to do anything at all the schools, maybe they will put things in process with a long timetable to run before any actual changes to the school arrangement actually happens. The State of California has a lot on it’s plate right now without trying to squeeze in direct management of any more schools. You will note that the State budget is fouled up, late, vouchers issued in lieu of real money and furlough in place for state workers, along with various other cutbacks happening and more planned. Taking on the LAUSD schools to improve would probably just make the outcomes worse, considering current circumstance. In fact, school issues were supposed to be handled by the state legislators, but so many of them headed out on vacations, or trips to study methods as they like to say- or, “junkets” as I prefer to call it- that that effort had to be put on hold until more are present.
My prediction about how things were headed at Lincoln became more certain to happen after seeing the results of the testing that was released two weeks ago. The news now reported in the L.A. Times this week came as the expected consequence of the problems. The story on the LAUSD school test scores, as the L.A. Daily News reported it, was, “Some LAUSD schools score higher on state test," by Connie Llanos, Staff Writer, Updated: 09/15/2009 09:41:34 AM PDT.”
The L.A. Times story on this had a link to the test results and Lincoln High made "Program Improvement" status with 5 years shown. With only 3 years in PI status, you can expect some things to be shaken up because of the exposure to the state take over. When I was teaching at Lincoln, just before that string of bad test results and the PI condition began, LHS had “met goals” and had some satisfactory test scores that pulled Lincoln out of the “P.I.” category one year, avoiding the 3-year condition of jeopardy, and starting the clock all over again.
Changing Lincoln High’s operations, possibly to a charter school, was something I thought was a real possibility after seeing Birmingham High and Locke High go the charter school route. This is where Lincoln will wind up, sooner or later, as the performance deficits cannot be allowed to continue on this way.
The Board of Education already determined that in the coming years, charter school proposals would be considered for up to 250 schools, many of them new or not even completed yet. Charters have usually been able to improve performance at schools that had poor results in earlier years. “Subtle signs of a turnaround on a troubled L.A. campus; Green Dot faced much skepticism when it took over Locke High last year. There's still a long way to go, but most students say they're safer and are learning more. ” L.A. Times, By Howard Blume, June 24, 2009. http://articles.latimes.com/2009/jun/24/local/me-locke24
The change made over to the SLC’s or Small Learning Communities was one of the LAUSD’s attempts to improve education. Maybe it will work under certain conditions, but there is too much that LAUSD and Lincoln still don’t do that make a difference in the degree of improvement of the learning environment and the performance as shown by the test scores. Out of a 1000 maximum rating, the 800 level is set as meeting goals, but with scores consistently being below that mark, a serious problem persists.
Here is a short list of what I think could be changed to help performance- and these sure couldn’t make it any worse-
1. Prohibit student usage of cell phones and other electronic devices between 8am and 3pm- with the possible exception of lunch break, and maybe nutrition, too. The achievement of a productive academic environment suffers from unneeded and regular distractions occurring in an already short time available for learning.
2. In lieu of attempting to enforce a dress code (and that seems to be some sort of “sacred cow”- the majority of adults at Lincoln ever did much to try to enforce a student dress code, from the top management at LAUSD, and downward), make a changeover to a requirement of school uniforms. That will help remove a lot of distractions related to dress that damage the educational process. It will probably work to save money for families while building a school wardrobe.
3. A plan should be followed to implement instruction in general and common courtesy that many students and some adults appear to lack, and apply the practices in an ongoing fashion during the school day.
4. A similar but separate plan should be created to show students some alternatives in verbal usage of profanity in the classroom environment, begun immediately, and then continue to improve the language improvement in the public areas of the school grounds as a separate goal.
5. Adopt consequences for non-compliance that match severity to the levels of violations, as well as make changes so that continued violations or breaches by students will progress in severity of consequences; include parents and guardians as part of any corrective action.
O.K., all of this sounds very serious and hard to do, but look at what’s there now and how it got there. The idea, remember, is not to punish or show anyone up, but to create an educational environment and demonstrate that intent on a consistent basis. This will allow for an ENVIRONMENT for learning to be maintained regularly.
In my time teaching at Lincoln, the dress code and any language issues were left on a low priority and there were some unsuitable situations that resulted in the system at that time that had an impact on the academic enviornment. Usually, you want to handle discipline problems in the classroom on a "local level," meaning, "in" the classroom. The term used is classroom management and everyone uses a little different approach to similar conditions. When a problem begins to infringe on the entire class time without any sign of an immediate resolution, you get to a point that you have to move the student out of the classroom or lose more classroom time for the rest of the students. If I sent anyone to the office for whatever level of defiance or behavior that was disrupting the class beyond any margin of acceptability (and that’s subjective, of course), there usually was a one-day suspension of the student, a “one-size fits all” approach.
It was overkill, but there was little alternative to this at the time and a school wide approach to these conditions was not established to offer an appropriate and practical substitute for this outcome. There was no “detention” system in place to cover the “in-between” levels of student’s behavior problems, so the remedy applied for the behavior was only successful in getting the student removed from school for a day or two. This was going in the wrong direction and missing more school days did not bother some students. They often were becoming more and more lost in relation to what the class was studying. That was just the way it was, with little coordination of any sort between the administration and the teachers regarding disciplinary approaches or better solutions.
The overkill action of “suspension” for many of these incidents was not productive for the student, making him or her fall more behind in class work, more hostile to the system and accepting of the idea that this is the way life is for that student, and not being part of the class. It reinforced the negatives by causing students to become more detached from lessons by applying suspensions, where a study hall or detention session, as an alternative to this, could be a used to try to do work, and at least stay on campus for more time instead of being out of school longer.
There’s more to all this and this is just the brief summary of the situation brought to mind by the L.A. Times story. I have a lot more experiences with students and adults that contribute to the conclusions that I make on the subject, and will discuss that at another time, but I think you get the idea.
I will also leave out for now the comparisons to private schools, most numerously including the “Catholic Schools,” and how they usually out-perform public schools and why that’s expected. I know there are some of you who have other views but we are talking about getting needed improvement that, so far, has come either not at all or at snail’s pace, and you can see it’s not working.
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