Weekly sweatdrops

A glimmer of hope?

Wednesday before Thanksgiving we had our first period serenaded with the voice of Russ Thompson, District 7 Principal Leader, on the PA. He was stern and serious. He announced an apparent new set of policies for the new high school. Chronic tardiness will be result in detention. Defiance and threats of violence will be met with suspension and possibly expulsion. Wow!! That day transpired with a train of kids being sent to a room in the E building for detention assignments. Thompson mentioned over the PA how disturbed he was at the reports of violent incidents and defiance on the campus. I’m holding my breath with deeply curious anticipation at what will result in these next three weeks before the holiday recess. Could it be a genuine shake-up? Or will Beaudry Ave. step in and destroy any hope of improvement?

 Russ Thompson was principal at Gardena High School years ago. We have one former teacher at the new school who was at Gardena during that time. He credits Thompson with cleaning up the place. He says that Thompson was strict and fair, dealing out disciplinary consequences when they were needed. The district didn’t like the high suspension rates at Gardena. According to this eye-witness teacher, they pushed him out of the principal job. According to this teacher witness, the place deteriorated almost immediately.

 At our Tuesday fix-the-teacher “professional” development session, our “Yolie Flores” small school principal announced that the “site coordinator” at this new school would now be designated as the Principal for the entire school so that more decisions could be made at his level. It’s just humorous to see the Yolie Flores small school idea gradually break down due its inherent absurdities. Attendance has been a mess. It is still a mess. Now, periodic assessments have become a nightmare to try to administer. Next year I predict that the new school will be a comprehensive high school similar to others in the area.

 Our small school principal also announced that the entire campus would set up a “time-out” room in the cafeteria to handle the kids who can’t handle class. FINALLY, after almost three months of bedlam, the administration at this place is getting the message. They are actually seeing the wisdom that lies behind the set-up of comprehensive high schools throughout Southern California. This should have been done back in August. A time-out room, a single top principal, enforcement of rules rather than “counseling” and “paper trails” – things could have been so much different, but that would have run against the prevailing mentality of Beaudry Ave. which believes that the problem is the teacher.

 Russ Thompson appears to be a man who understands what the problem is. I wonder if anyone can even imagine our former principal at HPHS who is now a glorified “Principal Leader” in Local District 5 doing anything like this? I certainly cannot. I’ll never forget the School Site Council meeting in which he turned to me and said, “Well, you make it sound like it’s the students [fault].” DUH!! Get a clue Mr. UCLA grad. But will this announced crack down at the new high school turn out to be a case of too little, too late?  Time will tell. Stay tuned folks. 

 

The Saga of the new school escalates....

 

My experiences at the new school have given me a new understanding regarding administration. I can see now how terrible administrators are created by unrealistic expectations and game playing in the hope of career advancement. I see it happening right now.

 When the year began in early September at the new high school, there were high hopes and there was teamwork. Administrators were approachable. A few egos seemed to be exalted, but teachers nevertheless felt supported and affirmed. That was before “shell-shock” set in.

 I must credit the disaster that is unraveling at this place and other schools in the area to the deliberate “get soft” on the kids policies dripping down from Beaudry Ave. and from our superintendent, John Deasy himself. Teachers at this new school expected to be able to write out referrals and have kids removed from class when necessary. They expected to have the ability to teach in their own classrooms. They expected to be safe from harm by having appropriate outside supervision. They expected classified support staff which the district has decided is too expensive. They also expected real discipline which John Deasy has decided is a political liability. He doesn’t like suspensions and expulsions because they deprive the kids of valuable standards-based instruction.

 Our Yolie Flores small school principal does very little to enforce much of anything. I see him taking care of matters which directly affect him and giving official voice to official ideology. I characterize the man as dwelling in some kind of unreal ethereal realm of ideal instruction and ideal pupils just to come down from the pedagogical Mount of Transfiguration once in a while in order to bestow some sort of wisdom on us during Tuesday “fix-the-teacher” professional development time. He is already beginning to move into a “blame the teacher” mode of thinking. “If the teachers would just get the instructional component together, there would be no need for referrals.” A personal laptop has been stolen. The sprinkler system was turned on, flooding out the second floor. A pregnant teacher was attacked. Drugs are being sold on campus. Windows have been broken. Tagging is occurring with regularity. Yet, our silly principal gives voice to the imperative to post content standards on the board. I don’t think he’s actually been in a classroom in over a decade. Fortunately, he’s usually gone during class time. I have much better things to do with my time than post content standards for a class of 40 sophomores who wouldn’t understand the language or care.

 There is no “time-out” room. There is no “in-house” suspension place. There are only two campus supervisors and the two school cops are often busy with busts that take them off campus. We have two deans, but they are also teaching in order to save money for Beaudry Ave.  One dean is the sports director for the campus. If our local Yolie Flores sponsored small school secretary permits it, she will babysit a few miscreants during class time. That’s about it. Heaven help us if a serious life-threatening emergency erupts during class.

 A revealing, salient moment occurred during the last faculty meeting. Our site coordinator (the real acting principal for the campus) complained that when they did random weapons searches on the kids during class time, they noticed that teachers are allowing kids to wear hats in class and to listen to ipods. These are against school rules, he reminded the simmering faculty. Really? And when a confrontation explodes between a faculty member and a kid, are you going to defend the teacher? – Not likely. Teachers are utterly impotent, but they are still blamed for the problems that unsupervised kids who run amok with impunity create on campus.

 These are all familiar conditions. We had these issues at HPHS, but on a smaller scale. Discipline was eroding and “blame-the-teacher” games were multiplying, but there was a difference. At HPHS, a certain number of teachers and staff members actually bought into the district ideology. At this new place the truth is painfully obvious as we hold our breaths and wait for a disaster to unfold. 

 

Dante's infernal School District and destruction of tax dollars in a new school.

It’s the third week of October. The traditional school calendar began after Labor Day, so this makes the beginning of the Seventh week of school??  The new school campus in South LA where I was “placed” this year has been experiencing some intense birth pains. That’s putting things lightly. I credit the problems to poor planning and simple naïveté.

It concerns me that the many displaced teachers there, as well as the new ones, seem to fall in line and accept the prevailing district dogma that continues to be touted. The problem, so it is told, with the poor, underperforming children is that they’ve had bad teachers and suffered under bad teaching practice. “Bell to bell standardized based instruction” – I heard that line several times from the glorified new administrators at my new school. The implication is that the kids are ready, willing, and set for 80-minute block periods of direct instruction. They starve for good standards based lessons and their previous teachers have been too lazy to do right by them. It’s the corporate line that our board majority and our charter school operators love to use, and it betrays an ignorance of urban reality. I’m hoping for simmering resentment from the teachers with genuine experience, but I don’t know if I’ll last long enough at this place to see it.

One long term substitute – we have several of them (they’re usually friends with someone higher up in ranks) – commented to me that on all of the new campuses in LAUSD the overwhelming, most prevalent issue is student behavior. It’s painfully true for us as well. Freshmen run around campus willy-nilly. Tagging is happening. They’re hanging out of windows. They defy. They run down the halls and scream. They do whatever they please with relative impunity. The long term sub credited the situation to the desire for new school campuses to keep as much ADA as possible. A “Time-out” room, like the one we had at HPHS, would solve many issues. You must have some kind of negative, immediate consequence to put a halt to dangerous behavior. “Counseling” doesn’t cut it with 14 year olds. 

I credit the behavior problem to a leadership that just didn’t anticipate behavior to be a serious issue. They trusted the district’s judgment when it dropped its great “positive behavior” program into their laps without actually polling the various campuses that have tried to follow our Beaudry Ave. pie-in-the-sky approach with its complicated referral slips and “steps” in discipline which do nothing more than indulge adolescents and put a leash on teachers trying to establish some order in their rooms. Remove the teeth from teachers and then blame them for not using their teeth – this appears to be a national trend in pedagogy. LAUSD is at the forefront of detrimental national trends. “Positive behavior support” is another example of it.

We are understaffed at this new school. We cannot succeed without adequate classified personnel. It’s ridiculous to expect counselors to be doing campus supervisory jobs. It’s ridiculous to have so few supervisors and only two campus police when one of them must be gone most of the day whenever an arrest has been made. Secretaries are over-worked and asked to problem-solve on their own. We need more teachers. Teachers are asked to do extra work (yes, it’s a pilot school), but are also required to teach SIX 80 minute classes of 35-45 students each. This happens on a rotating block schedule. Beaudry Ave. is going to implement radical reform, or so it claims, by whipping its lower level employees, like the disposable teaching staff, with longer hours and unreasonable demands. Yes, that’s a recipe for academic growth if I ever heard one.

 Teachers cannot be trusted with keys and are only given restroom keys, and keys to their own classroom doors at school. Only very recently have the benevolent powers graciously offered to give teachers keys to the buildings where their rooms are located. 

There was talk at the beginning of the school year about syllabi for each class. Teachers should submit syllabi. I guess that notion fell apart when textbooks didn’t arrive until a month after school began. I have my own materials that I can use, but I’m wondering what other teachers did during the month of September.

 I was told that I was going to teach two classes of Journalism. I began doing exactly that. I gave journalism notes on power point to the 10^th graders. I’ve taught Journalism before. Then, the rug was pulled out from under me. It’s not journalism. It’s “Academic Literacy.” Huh? So is there a plan for this class? No, there isn’t a textbook either. I’m glad for my own black line master materials and for no limitations on photocopies. What would I have done otherwise?

 Shifting policies and last minute decisions plague the campus. There are a few of us at this place with decades of experience under our belts, but we’re just teachers, so no one really talks to us about how our experiences might shed some light on the situation.

 The campus is divided up into four “Yolie-Flores sponsored” small schools with separate location code numbers. Our on-line attendance (ISIS) was not picking up all of our students in our classes for several weeks. We attributed this to the constant rearranging of students into different classes – annoying in itself. No, that wasn’t it. The problem was the separate location codes. We had kids from different “Yolie-Flores sponsored” small schools in our classes. Now, they’ve remedied the situation by forcing us to log in FOUR times and take attendance FOUR times for each “Yolie-Flores sponsored” small school, and this is done for each and every class. A few administrators and secretaries still have the gall to whine that we don’t take attendance within the first 15 minutes of class. Get a clue people.

 Wasn’t the point of the “Yolie-sponsored” small school that it might offer more individualized instruction? Right. That’s really going to happen with 35-45 kids in each class. Where is that woman anyway? Oh yes, she did her damage and then moved on to enjoy a six figure salary from the Gates Foundation. Oh, bless her little boot straps as she pulls herself up by them.

Kids are getting the message loud and clear that there are no consequences for much of anything. Behavior is on an irrevocable downward spiral.  Tomorrow is Tuesday. On Tuesdays we begin the day with an hour and a half of “fix-the-teacher” professional development time while the kids get high and come to class later on, pumped up with energy and chutzpah. Few adults smile.

I have found one friend at this place who regales me with stories of incorrigible middle schools in South LA where he has been unfortunate enough to do long term subbing. One place refused to come to his aid in a classroom full of young cholos – “We’re under lock down son. See to it yourself.” He said he wandered around the room glaring at the little guys, hoping that someone would hit him and award him some LAUSD money. Our latest inside joke concerns the possibility of having a gun put to your temple and then having the school administration say, “well what did you do to the child to make him do this?”

 I’ve been informed of possible avenues out of my predicament by way of Human Resources on the 15^th floor of Beaudry. The people there have been obliging. Wait for further installments of the saga in the near future.

 

 

 

 

Displaced teachers beginning to fight back and organize.

Warren Fletcher, our new UTLA President, said it loud and clear at the meeting of displaced teachers held at UTLA Headquarters on Saturday August 27^th.  He said, “UTLA screwed up.”  Our union screwed up by being “ambiguous” about Fremont High School when it was the first major secondary school in LA Unified to fall under the axe of “reconstitution.”  According to Fletcher, reconstitution is analogous to a teacher threatening to send his or her entire class to the Dean’s office for discipline. It simply isn’t feasible to attempt such a thing. The Dean’s office doesn’t have the resources, but if you can get the students to buy into the threat, you can accomplish what you want to accomplish. The district wants the teachers to buy into the possibility of full faculty replacement.

 The district was losing the game at first. The majority of Fremont teachers were not reapplying. This remained true until UTLA waffled on its commitment to back them up. As a result, the one reconstitution led to eight the following year, including Clinton Middle School, Huntington Park High School, and Jordan High School. “What’s going to happen next year? Will there be 64 reconstitutions?” Already, a list of Public School Choice 4.0 schools is being compiled for “reform” plans, which might or might not be accepted by the board.

 Displaced teachers are still guaranteed employment with the district. They have not violated their contract by abandoning an assignment or by engaging in any sort of misconduct. They are not being let go due to economic necessity.  Warren pointed out that it is important not to toy with new assignments once they are given.

When the district assigns a displaced teacher to a location, the teacher needs to show up there and report for work. Failure to do so could result in an AWOL designation and subsequent termination.  The Human Resources office began “forced placement” of displaced teacher last week. According to Warren more than 100 secondary English teachers will be assigned as “pool teachers” for particular schools. A pool teacher will be paid as a regular teacher but function as a substitute for the school to which he or she has been assigned.  Apparently, the district is waiting for the four-week “norm” day in September when a final tally of students takes place before it recalls RIF teachers who were let go for budgetary reasons.

Warren Fletcher refers to this delay in rescinding RIF notices and rehiring these teachers until Norm day as “maximizing desperation.” It is part of strategy to pit RIF teachers against displaced teachers and to pit the regular substitutes against both groups. Fletcher announced that the district has “wildly understated its enrollment” and corresponding teaching positions. The money is there for both RIF and displaced teachers to be regularly employed.

Displacement will continue next year if the district continues to reconstitute troubled campuses and give away new campuses to private charter companies. There is a movement among people in power to change the Education Code in order to allow school districts to terminate the employment of displaced teachers if they are unable to beat the stigma attached to displacement and convince an individual school to take them full time. Gloria Romero, an elected legislator in California, has inquired as to whether UTLA might be “open to new models” of reform. She claims that she wants to emulate the NY model, but does not know the specifics of this model. What attracts her is the idea that displaced teachers could lose permanent status after a year. According to Warren, UTLA has become “drunk on the concepts of local control and local autonomy.” Too much local control can work against the interests of displaced teachers. As Warren reminded everyone at the meeting, the mechanisms are in place right now for incompetent and poorly performing teachers to be released from their jobs. It requires due process. Most advocates for dismissing displaced teachers do not believe in due process for teachers.

Warren Fletcher told the group assembled on Saturday that he wants to know if anyone is being “strong armed” into a thin contract such as the kind that exists with pilot schools. He alarmed the group when he reported that the new district budget is allocating money for 20 new “investigative” positions to Human Resources on Beaudry Ave. in order to keep files on undesirable teachers in the hope of using information to dismiss them.

LA Displaced Teachers are making some demands from UTLA now that we have been afforded a kind of honorary chapter status. We want the union to enforce the contract. Displaced teachers have priority over most other categories of teachers when it comes to the assignment of teaching positions. We want a grievance to be filed by UTLA. We want to know if there is such a thing as a “no hire” list since so many displaced teachers have been routinely turned down in as many as a dozen interviews. Such a list would be a violation of the contract.

At the next School Board meeting on Tuesday, August 30, the board will vote on Steve Zimmer’s proposal that no more new campuses be given to charter companies since these campuses have been purchased with public tax money and charter companies are not making any strides in academic performance throughout the district. The latest collection of data has shown charter-operated schools to be underperforming regular public schools in student academic achievement. People need to be there to show support for Zimmer’s proposal.

The next displaced teachers meeting will be held at UTLA Headquarters on Wilshire Blvd. on Saturday September 17^th at 11 am.

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SOME COMMENTARY:

 Kudos to Warren for quickly pouncing on the claim that a “no hire” list and the act of displacement itself may actually have some legitimacy. This is not about improving schools or helping kids. It is utterly political maneuvering with displacements resulting from fictitious interviews staged for show. The best teachers are not retained. Teachers who think and speak are noted and discriminated against. Isn’t that ironic when state standards call for critical thinking? Ultimately, this is about the privatization of public education.

Already one can see a “dumbing down” of curriculum at HPHS and an easier grading scheme intended to make students and their parents happy without actually preparing students for further academics. Sending a student out of class is now viewed as an offense that prompts the new principal to question the abilities of the teacher. 

 

Abominable Administrators - the unacknowledged bane of teaching in LAUSD.

Those of us on the frontlines in the battle surrounding public education are most often trumpeting the big issues. We know about the efforts of Corporate America to privatize public education. We understand the implications. We know how they are doing it. If anyone needs more education on the subject, plenty has already been written. Here’s a link to what one British observer has to say which fairly summarizes the situation:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/feb/04/usdomesticpolicy-schools

 Diane Ravitch is correct to lay the blame for underperformance on the conditions that spring out of poverty. I’ve always maintained that it makes absolutely no difference what kind of method you might use for instruction. If the kid doesn’t want to learn, he’s not going to learn – for whatever reasons that lack of desire might arise.

There’s more to be said, however.

Not enough is said concerning the negative effects of incompetent, negligent, and downright abusive school administrators. After almost 12 years at Huntington Park High School, I firmly believe that administration has played no small role in the dysfunction of the high school from which I and so many of my colleagues have been dismissed under the provisions of NCLB. The problem is how do I discuss this in any meaningful detail without naming names and exposing the guilty parties? I am going to try to categorize administrators in an abstract way so that my fellow teachers will know who and what I am talking about and the guilty parties will certainly not wish to acknowledge the generalizations as applying to themselves.

 We’ve had no more than three, possibly four, decent administrators at my former high school.  A decent administrator understands that he or she is there for the benefit of the school, not the other way around. The decent administrator sees himself or herself as a first among equals, not afraid of genuine discussion or disagreement, not superior, but the person who must ultimately take responsibility for decisions. The decent administrator will genuinely hear people, but at times will say, I have to do what I feel is necessary despite our disagreements. The decent administrator will have plenty of classroom experience from which to glean valuable insights in the decision making process. The decent administrator is the captain of a cohesive team, not a feudal lord or third world dictator with visions of grandeur.

 

The Ornamental School Administrator.

An ornamental administrator is there for the show and the paycheck. The O.A. knows nothing or very little about administration or about education.  He or she will not do anything on their own, but immediately call a mini-district supervisor or the principal for instructions. They are often snazzy dressers and strut the grounds of a school with walkie-talkies and big smiles on their faces. Beaudry Offices have hundreds of cubicles filled with these know-nothing, do-nothing inhabitants drinking coffee and following instructions all day. Memos disappear from their desks and fall into bureaucratic “black-holes.” They parrot catch phrases and educational buzz-words like hecklers at a baseball game, but they are utterly ineffective and worthless. Yet, they make no waves and bow to anything and everything that comes from the top of the Ed food chain down the line.

 

The Kitty Litter Administrator.

The administrator who covers up and deodorizes problems rather than tackling them and attempting to work with teachers and other staff members to eliminate them is an administrator who functions like kitty litter.  The K.L. administrator is a step or two above the ornamental one because he or she can see a problem. He or she can see a fire in progress and throw water on it, but will most often ignore the root causes of the fire and thereby set themselves up for a repeat of the conflagration. They take the quick and easy road to deal with problems.  They can acknowledge their own inadequacies, but they learn how to gloss these over well. Words on paper or over the intercom can be used to gloss over tough situations. They know that a quick, superficial solution can forestall consequences. These kinds of remedies are often short-sighted and make the situation worse in the long run, but then again, you can always blame the teachers when you run out of other explanations.

 

The Father Confessor School Adminstrator.

 Or Mother, if you will – this is the true ideologue with a naïve and imposing agenda. Remember that a Father Confessor in the old style Catholic Church was a priest entrusted with the spiritual well being of a few individuals, offering them advice and absolution after penance. Transfer this concept to the world of education and educational theories and you will see what I’m talking about. This is the administrator who has come into a school from outside believing that he or she can save it with new ideas and faith commitments to these ideas on the part of its staff and faculty. This administrator has usually spent very little time as a classroom teacher, but is still painfully condescending and paternalistic. A five minute observation of one’s classroom can result in a 40 minute “debriefing” session in this administrator’s office during which the only appropriate response is deemed to be a bowed head and a contrite heart.  Regardless of the fact that this administrator has largely borrowed his or her ideas subliminally from the prevailing Ed fad of the day or the encyclical letters of the superintendent at a some subconscious level, this Father Confessor will seek to evangelize his or her faculty with head games and intimidation tactics because this is what the bad teachers need. Once again when things don’t entirely work out to his or her liking, the blame can fall on the unrepentant teachers.

 

Mommie Dearest.

 Finally, I must list the pathological category. The administrator who is not a blind ideologue, but sees ideology as a tool like everything else at HIS or HER school that exists to serve his advancement is the one I would label with this phrase from the movie and book about the life and legacy of Ms. Joan Crawford. Remember that the main character in the movie was never content with the abuse she leveled against Christine, but insisted that Christine respond with , “yes, Mommie Dearest.” The M.D. administrator knows exactly what the game is about and why he or she is playing it. One might assume that this is the very worst category, but no I think the blind ideologue is more dangerous. The M.D. administrator is so vain and egotistical that he or she can easily get sloppy and misinformed.  You can trip up the M.D. administrator with some careful planning and then the maniac can be sent on the lemon trail to another school.

 At Huntington Park High School, we have had our share of incompetents, condescending ideologues, and pathological egotists. We have had administrators who arrived at their position through the “casting couch.” We have had others who were dropped on us as a result of other scandals at other schools. We have had out-of-classroom coordinators who stepped all over their colleagues in order to jump on the administrative ladder. We have been kicked and given contradictory orders. We have been ignored and dismissed and then reproved because we weren’t “team players” in this school game.

When I hear John Deasy talk about giving local principals more power in hiring and firing teachers I cringe and groan. I don’t know the man well enough to guess at what’s going on inside of him, but if he is sincere in his wish list, then he is displaying himself as a newbie, totally clueless about the inner workings of LAUSD. 

 

What about Huntington Park High School? - a letter to the Board before they voted to reconstitute the school in April

Dear school board members and other concerned district employees:

 

      We have undergone quite a whirlwind of stress and consternation at Huntington Park High School. I know this because I have been a teacher at Huntington Park High School for over 11 years. I have been a School Site Council member for two years and UTLA Chapter co-chair for three years. We are a school that has experienced a rise in its API score in recent years.  The state of California gave us 603 last year. We have seen an increase in our graduation rate.  There have been no miracles. We still have loads of problems, but reconstitution (or restructuring) in a few short weeks of time will pretty much be the deathblow of the school and bring an end to any real possibilities of good for the future. It’s a shame when you consider that there are plenty of schools in worse shape than we are.

     I believe it’s our students working at higher levels who will suffer the most. Teachers qualified to teach AP classes and other advanced courses will disappear under the punishing austerity proposed in the restructuring plan. It is very doubtful that any teachers with an ounce of creativity or insight will survive the mock interviews.  The favored “in-crowd,” which will no doubt assume the various redundant and expensive leadership roles in the “small schools” or SLC’s, is a group that is mostly composed of individuals who are the least effective in a classroom and the least qualified to serve as leaders unless one values mindless subservience as a quality to be prized in education. Constant drone-like monitoring from the top-down will shrivel the communicative connection necessary for engaged learning to take place with our students, especially during adolescent years when hypocrisy and disingenuousness are so keenly perceived.

   “Restructuring,” as outlined in Mr. Deasy’s plan, is a sure recipe for failure. It is unnecessary, misdirected and springs from erroneous assumptions. As the last student to appear in the now infamous You Tube video that stars our board member complained, “you’re not attacking the real problem.” He and his friends are being accepted to prestigious universities. They are earning excellent scores on SAT’s. These things are happening with the school structured in the way that it is right now. “You should be concentrating on finding ways to motivate other students,” this senior declared. But no, apparently our board member who has never taught in a public school and has no special degrees in education believes that she knows better than the people who spend their lives in this place.

   Ms. Flores has already diagnosed the problem and prescribed the answer without any real examination of the situation. Anyone who dares to disagree with her is deemed guilty of not “putting the children first.” She feels they should be subject to punitive action. The prescriptions outlined in the restructuring proposal to be voted on by our board betray the same assumptions, namely, that the problems are bad teachers and bad teaching. Putting a leash on the teachers and tightening it with more punishment when higher standardized test scores fail to materialize is the way to ensure better student academic performance. If you beat the teachers hard enough the CST scores will rise.

    Curiously, Libra Academy, a semi-independent entity on campus, has been exempted from this restructuring process. Apparently, Libra is good while the rest of HPHS is bad. I have done my own research on Libra over the past several months using data that is accessible through ISIS, and I can assure you that this claim is simply not true.

 

Yolie’s Libra Mythology: the truth is not very satisfying.

    HPHS as a whole was unjustly compared with Libra Academy, an emerging group of teachers with pilot school aspirations on our campus created through the efforts two key teachers and Ms. Yolie Flores, our school board representative.  Ms. Flores and Mr. Cortines have claimed that Libra has made great academic strides in comparison with the remainder of the campus; so that Libra stands as some kind of model for the rest of us.  Libra is still a part of HPHS, but they have still pointed to an API of 726 given by someone other than the state of California to Libra with its 124 freshmen last year. They have also claimed that removing these 124 freshmen from the figure would drop HPHS from an API of 603 to an API score of 546. This is a drop of 57 points attributed to the removal of 124 freshmen from the calculation of an API for a school of 4,000? You don’t have to be an Einstein to furrow your eyebrows at the math here.

    Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that the 726 API number is correct for Libra Academy. It becomes irrelevant when a closer examination is made of the two student bodies. The 124 Libra freshmen from last year began the year with recorded eighth grade CST scores well ahead of the remainder of the campus. Libra accomplished this by selecting its students using an application process that required a portfolio. What kind of prospective ninth grade student is going to produce a portfolio to get into a smaller school? Will his or her parents be uninformed or uninvolved in their child’s education? Parent involvement is a huge factor in a child’s academic success. We don’t have anywhere near the degree of parent involvement we would like to see at HPHS. Libra obviously received kids with that important factor firmly in place.

        The CST scores confirm what I’m saying. Percentages display a good contrast. 33 percent of Libra’s freshmen last year carried with them English CST eighth grade scores at proficient or advanced. 15 percent of the 916 freshmen in the remainder of HPHS scored as high during eighth grade. 28 percent of Libra’s freshmen scored this way in math during their eighth grade year. 13 percent of the rest of HPHS scored as high in math.

      In the spring of 2010, 112 students took the CST’s at Libra. Libra showed gains in English. 65 students tested as “Advanced” or “proficient.”(58%)  Their math scores, however, dropped significantly to show only 14 students testing into these categories (13%)while the number scoring at “below basic” and “far below basic” rose from 33 to 55 (49%). Science scores also dropped. Only 30 students demonstrated “advanced” or “proficient” skill levels in the spring (27%) compared with eighth grades scores of 45% at advanced or proficient levels in science.  HPHS took on a similar pattern of CST results in the spring with percentages in the advanced and proficient categories checking in at 25%, 6%, and 11% in the same subject areas respectively.  According to the tests, both schools gained ground in English and lost ground in math and science.

        If Libra were to receive a “value added” score, it would be low. Someone might argue that the students don’t take the CST’s seriously and don’t put much effort into them. I would respond with, “YES INDEED!” Would someone please inform the staff of the LA Times before they start printing high school teachers’ “value added” scores!  At HPHS our passing rates on the CAHSEE have never correlated with scores on CST’s. The students take the CAHSEE much more seriously than they take CST’s. Why shouldn’t they? The CAHSEE counts toward graduation. The CST’s do not. Our kids are NOT stupid.

    At the present time over 220 students are enrolled in Libra Academy. They moved into more bungalows driving those of us from the regular campus who were using these bungalows prior to September to be shoved into the cafeteria or the auditorium during the last two weeks of an eight week block of instruction while the bungalows were repaired and beautified as preparation for Libra. Currently Libra has a population of special education students amounting to 2% of its enrollment. The regular school has 11% special ed. Libra’s population of limited English proficient students amounts to 17% of its enrollment. On the regular campus, 31% of our students are classified as limited English proficient.

    Libra Academy does not teach students who function at similar academic levels as the remainder of the school. Comparisons between the two schools are at best irrelevant and at worst deceptive. When you have an apple pie baking contest between two contestants and one contestant has riper, larger, juicier apples, is it going to be a big surprise when this contestant produces the better tasting pie? Do you BLAME the contestant who lost the contest?

     Academics have to do with what is going on inside of kids, not with school configurations and surface methodologies. This is why students from higher income areas and areas with safer, saner, more stable demographics will become more successful in their academic performance. They are better prepared, better able to be receptive to instruction in whatever form that instruction takes. To claim otherwise is to fly in the face of the overwhelming pattern of API scores in schools throughout LA County and the pattern of academic performance in rest of the nation.  How does radical restructuring address these issues? It doesn’t address them at all, but once again assumes that the problems have to do with the teacher and the teaching methods. It assumes that the apples have grown up in identical ways to produce identical raw fruit and that any difference in the resulting pie is due to the magic of the pie maker entirely.

 

An apple that would not have been accepted into Libra’s basket.

    As I was talking with Howard Blume of the LA Times when he came to visit our campus on Thursday evening, I introduced him to a few students.  One student, let’s call him Craig, is a fairly typical student at HPHS. He is distracted in school. His girl friend is pregnant. His parents are separated and neither of them is educated beyond a few years of high school. They don’t encourage him to excel in school. 

   Craig never graduated from eighth grade, but he was socially promoted. It didn’t matter. He learned that it didn’t matter, and that idea stuck with him.  During his freshman year he learned that he could take classes that he failed later on. He could take them in truncated form during intersession and after school.  A former administrator told intersession teachers that 80 percent of a teacher’s students taking intersession had to pass and receive credit no matter what in order for the teacher to be teaching intersession and earn extra money. Craig passed English in intersession by sitting and writing a paragraph each day. He got his credit, and he learned that what he did in his regular classes didn’t matter.  He was set to sit back and do very little in his regular classes.

      Craig is an athlete and calculates which teachers will be sympathetic enough to pass him with a “D” or perhaps a “C” with minimal class effort on his part. Counselors have been trained in subtle ways to give students whatever they ask without many questions as long as it fulfills graduation requirements. Craig’s calculations are not always correct, but there’s always intersession.

      There are plenty of discipline problems at our school, but Craig is not one of them. He behaves well. He is polite. He gets along with his teachers. He especially gets along with students who do a better job at school than he does. He can copy from their work and get credit without using his head in the process. They call it, “cooperative learning.” OH, I know that’s not how this method is supposed to work, but since it’s been abused for so many years in Craig’s past, it gets watered down into mindless copying.

      Craig passed the English section of the CAHSEE with a 352 last year. Passing is 350. He hasn’t passed the math section yet.

     Craig has naïve plans about going to college when he gets out of HPHS. I’d like to see him go there and actually master a course load of freshman classes. I’m sure you would as well, but I’d very much like to know how the radical restructuring of HPHS will help Craig to learn the things he needs to learn next year in order to fulfill his vague plans for college. If you have no answer, then please don’t try to use the students in your rhetoric. It won’t help Craig or any of the students like him. This has nothing to do with helping students.