Tale of Three Turnarounds

Turning around a low performing high school may be the most difficult task in K-12 education. This week Sec. Duncan has suggested that charter schools should play a critical role in the effort to turn around low performing schools. Perhaps this comparison will start to suggest why. There is a lot to learn about two attempts started this year in Los Angeles Unified both of which have been backed with a lot of foundation funding. The first, Mayor Villaraigosa took control of Roosevelt High school and all of its feeder elementary and middle schools as part of compromise to the mayor failed attempt to take control of the entire district. It seems that the school take over business has not turned out to be a feather in his cap to help him in a run for the governor’s office that many speculated when he first proposed mayoral control. Villaraigosa gave up aspirations of the Governor’s office earlier this week, and we can only hope that this will give him more time to address the problems facing LA and investing energy in really turn around these schools. The first year of the mayors reform appears to be a disaster although the test results to confirm this will not be available for several month (here). Teachers have given the mayor a sound vote of no confidence the worst of which was a vote of 184 (no confidence) to 15 at Roosevelt. Much of the complaints seems to result from the ambiguity of the governance of the schools being both LAUSD schools and mayor schools with a lot of finger pointing between the two.

And the future for the mayor’s schools does not look very bright either. The mayor’s take over is not really much of a takeover because all of the teachers at his school are still a part of the school district staff and the teachers union and are part of the districts budget. I can only imagine how the fiscal relationship is going. The mayor’s staff did have some authority in choosing staff for the schools from the district’s existing staff. And, generally the schools have staff that are much younger than the district average. From a budget perspective this can be a good thing because the schools in theory should be able to provide more services for the same funding level. But, as LASUD implements budget cuts this year cutting thousands of employees based solely on seniority, a disproportionate number of those staff cuts will come from the mayor’s schools including many of his principals and an estimated 20 percent of the schools staff. This is not likely to add to the morale. The budget just adopted in LA appears to be a patch job that will set up the need for a whole round of additional cuts next year and the year after that. Details on budget just adopted. And if you look at the districts $10 billion in unfunded retiree health benefit obligations their budget pains may be longer than two or three years especially as broke as the state is.

Combine the general confusion of governance between the mayor’s office and the district with the lack of teacher support and a bleak budget future, and the path to success for Roosevelt seems unlikely.

In contrast, Locke High school, another of LA high schools that were among the lowest performing in the state, has been part of a hostile take over by Green Dot charter schools. There has been a lot of press about Steve Barr and Green Dot the last month including an entertaining article in the New Yorker. While there is a lot of work to do to turn this school around, it sounds like the process is on track as summarized in a LA Times article a couple days ago (here). It is clear that the campus is safer and less chaotic which is a first step for education happening. The governance of the school is clear, and it seems like systems to run the school with the effective Green Dot model are being put in place. Traditionally these type of charter schools start with a ninth grade cohort and then grow as that cohort moves through the system. Thus it may take 4 years to find out if this experiment is really working. But still I will be looking to see how Locke and Roosevelt do later this summer when the state test results are released.

For comparison purposes these two schools need to also be compared to a low performing high school run by the school district. Such comparison high schools are not hard to find in LA because there are so many of them. I chose Fremont Senior High. This school has been in school improvement under NCLB since 1997-98. In theory, the district has been required to implement reforms in this school for the last 11 years, and it has been in major governance restructuring under NCLB for the last 5 years. In addition, the school participates in a state turnaround program called the High Priority schools program.


Here are the test scores for 2007-08 for 10th graders for these three schools.
Percent of 10th graders proficient on state test in 2007-08
Roosevelt High (Mayoral takeover)
English 21% Algebra 3%

Locke High (Green Dot)
English 13% Algebra 5%

Fremont High (LAUSD - control)
English 12% Algebra 2%

Will update in August when the new test results are public. My money is on Steve Barr and Green Dot, how about you?