Not Good Enough

It’s been more than a decade since the Los Angeles Unified School District decided to give special attention to 10 mostly black inner-city elementary schools to show that “all children can achieve their highest potential when the conditions for learning are at an optimum.”

Those optimal conditions were going to be created with an extra $1 million a year per campus: a top-notch staff, smaller classes, back-to-basics emphasis on the written and spoken word, even full-time nurses.

It was called the Ten Schools Program. And the measure of success was to be straightforward: bringing average scores on an annual standardized reading, math and language test up to the national median, the 50th percentile.

“The school district is on the line,” declared then-administrator Paul Possemato. “Either it can teach poverty children, or it can’t.”

Now Los Angeles has embarked, with fanfare, on yet another campaign to transform schools at the bottom of the academic heap. This time it’s Supt. Ruben Zacarias’ “100 schools” project. “I will not make or accept excuses,” he says.

But what happened to its predecessor, the Ten Schools Program? Did all that cash buy the promised improvement? And did anyone really monitor how well it worked?

This much is clear: By its own strict goal, the program has failed.

More than 10 years and $100 million later, the schools as a group have not come close to the 50th percentile. Last year, their students scored at the 34th percentile, barely above the district’s average of the 33rd percentile.

At the same time, the schools are faring better than when they started, and outpacing neighboring campuses, suggesting that something good has occurred.

As with many touted educational programs, however, there has been little formal analysis to determine whether taxpayers have gotten their money’s worth--and what can be learned from the experiment.

So The Times conducted its own review, including having a leading expert analyze a full decade of test scores from the Ten Schools.

What emerged is a textbook lesson in the false promise of exaggerated claims--and the astounding complexity of trying to improve the performance of California’s most troubled schools.

* Beyond the rhetoric, the “optimum” conditions proved impossible to reach--particularly the part about hiring experienced teachers. All 450 teaching positions at the schools were thrown open, but initially only 330 people applied, most of whom were already working in the Ten Schools. Today, one in four teachers at those campuses lacks a full credential.

* Though there were substantial gains at most schools, they came after a population shift dramatically altered the experiment. The original idea was to help African American students, so the schools picked were at least 60% black. A decade later, all but one are predominantly Latino. The only school that still has a majority of black students--102nd Street--languishes on Zacarias’ list of 100 lowest performers.

* While test scores in the first and second grades have shown the biggest gains, scores slip significantly in the upper grades.

“I can’t believe that the district should be persuaded that they have a model,” concluded Robert Calfee, associate dean of Stanford University’s School of Education, who analyzed the scores.

But the program’s top administrator, Assistant Supt. Theodore Alexander, says there has really been only one flaw with Ten Schools: that district higher-ups set such an outlandish goal--the U.S. median.

Alexander asks that the schools be stacked instead against those facing similar challenges. Indeed, scores are far worse at nearby campuses, at the 22nd percentile.

“It’s a constant battle, with people saying there’s no significant difference,” Alexander said. “When I hear that argument, I want to tell people to go to hell.”

Academic Strategy Ahead of Its Time

The Ten Schools are places where a first-grader, when asked to make a sentence using the word “which,” offers: “Which boy got killed?” Or where a special bell signals a “lock-down” because of violence outside. Or where a principal keeps the business card of a child abuse police detective in the corner of a photo frame.

These are words of Consuela, a fifth-grader at Flournoy Elementary:

I am a strong black child.

I wonder if I’ll make it through life.

I hear the sound of gun shots and curse words.

I see homeless family’s and drug addicts.

I want a better life.

Consuela was the sort of child for whom Ten Schools was created in the fall of 1987. For by every measure, African American students in Los Angeles--as a group--were failing.

First came the statistics, exposed by a court desegregation lawsuit. Then came a list of demands to the school board by advocates for minorities. Then came the program singling out 10 elementary schools with test scores below the 30th percentile.

Seven were in, or within a few blocks of, Watts. One--102nd Street--stood across from the harsh world of the Jordan Downs housing project. Another--Flournoy--hugged the perimeter of the Nickerson Gardens apartments.

The program’s academic strategy was ahead of its time. All 10 schools were to use a phonics reading program known as Open Court--years before the state mandated it. All began a mainstream English program specially tailored to black students--long before the Ebonics debate. All had smaller classes through second grade--a decade before Gov. Pete Wilson made that his cause celebre.

Teachers were to sign forms promising to be punctual, to have high expectations for students and to use grade-level materials, not the easier lessons often found in struggling schools. They even agreed to a dress code: ties for men and hose for women when they wear skirts.

Kids need role models? Even today, all but two of the principals are black. So is 57% of the teaching corps--almost four times the district’s 15% average.

Kids need connection to the material? In an English class, a teacher highlights Black History Month with a book following a slave family’s flight.

Teachers need training? Have them arrive a month before their students and spend that time not just fixing up their rooms, but learning from fellow Ten Schools teachers--to encourage consistency and cross-pollination. Then have teams of evaluators--from principals on down--visit every classroom every year to write helpful critiques.

But the idealistic game plan still did not make it easy to recruit teachers to schools like Flournoy, where two-thirds of the students are on welfare.

“You have your husband drive you by your new school, and you just keep on driving,” said Principal Albert Davis, rolling his eyes.

Davis was a reluctant recruit himself, brought in from Kester Avenue Elementary in Van Nuys when the program began. “I didn’t volunteer,” he said. “A friend asked me, ‘What are they going to give you for being there?’ That really got to me. If I’m not willing to work in the black community,”--he’s African American--”who is?”

Yet even the teachers he landed tended to stay no more than four years. Today, half of his staff has fewer than three years’ experience. And three of his four instructors at the crucial third-grade level lack a full teaching credential.

Davis tries to take a positive view of having a green staff. “They’re more open,” he insists.

In recent years, he has focused on developing home-grown teachers, coaxing classroom aides to finish their college work. One shining example is Sandra DeLucas, a teacher now for four years. Though she grew up in neighboring Compton, working near the projects initially bothered even her.

“You hear shootings, you hear helicopters--it’s a little bit intimidating,” she said. “But I’ve been here long enough, I’m over it.”

You see quickly that DeLucas is one of those super-creative teachers who makes lessons fun. On the 29th day of the month, that number is everywhere on the walls of her first-grade class--27+2 or 36-7 or a coin chart showing two dimes and nine pennies.

For a math lesson, children toil in pairs to chart M&Ms; by color--then eat the candy. They move to the rug to play food bingo, a lesson in categorizing (fruit or vegetable?) and vocabulary.

“A lot of these kids are in foster homes, single-parent homes, so I know the education I give is the only education they get,” DeLucas said. “If they blossom, it’s because of me.”

What does “blossom” mean at Flournoy? Given the locale, it is cause for celebration that overall standardized test scores last year hit the 33rd percentile, right on the district average.

Racial Changes Alter Experiment

That’s par for the course for the Ten Schools these days: Three others are at the district average, three above it and three below.

But how do you make sense of such statistics in a California where standardized tests are changing all the time--and so are the students?

Nearly 20% of the kids who start a year at Ten Schools leave before it’s over, replaced by students from other schools or, increasingly, from south of the border.

Schools chosen because they were at least 60% black have seen that number shrink to 44% as Latino immigrants have poured into the area.

The schools have found it hard to adjust. Only 21% of the teachers carry a bilingual credential, which signifies that holders are fully qualified to instruct students whose primary language is not English.

Former school board President Leticia Quezada said she tried in vain to raise concerns about how a staff picked specially to serve black students would handle the new ones, often recent arrivals to this country.

“You have monolingual English-speaking teachers and monolingual Spanish-speaking kids and parents,” Quezada noted. “But we were not supposed to raise that, because it would start a black-brown race problem.”

Today, because there are not enough bilingual teachers, limited-English students at the Ten Schools often find themselves segregated at the side of the classroom, taught by an aide.

Yet--confirming studies touting the drive of new immigrants--the “limited English” students have helped lift the standing of the schools, in part by registering math scores around that ballyhooed 50th percentile.

Ethnicity is not the only way these schools are, in the popular phrase, diverse.

While all 10 are in poorer areas of Los Angeles, their environments are hardly alike. Again echoing a pattern in education, the performance of students reflects the differences outside the classroom:

Two of the three schools that score above the district average are in stable neighborhoods of single-family homes west of the Coliseum. One, King Elementary, approached the project goal, hitting the 46th percentile on last year’s Stanford Nine test of reading, language and math.

In contrast, the seven in the Watts area--many near public housing--had the lowest scores. And 102nd Street School, across from Jordan Downs, lagged at the 22nd percentile.

But not from lack of effort.

Visit the Ten Schools classrooms and, almost without exception, teachers are engaged with students. The lessons burst with images, words, ideas--and the basics.

Many believe that the emphasis on skills is the program’s greatest strength. There are regular mini-tests to prepare students for the standardized exams that others use to judge them.

On this day, there’s a phonics lesson in Carlette Johnson’s first-grade class at 102nd Street.

“O, consonant, E,” she tells the students, instilling the long vowel pattern in the word “home.” They repeat the pattern when she shows them the word “cave.”

New today is the letter V. Johnson introduces it with an audiocassette on Vinnie the Vacuum. “As Vinnie vacuums the velvet rug, a van of visitors rolls up.”

They end the lesson by writing V-letter sentences in workbooks.

Still, examples of the academically lost are easy to find.

Down the hall, a third-grade girl’s writing about “The Frog and the Toad,” a popular story, is unintelligible: “There rad to toat hoves frog and reading they chirt to.”

Her teacher marks up several other papers, pointing out grammatical mistakes, but bypasses hers.

The challenge can even get to teachers like Sharon Robinson at Flournoy Elementary. She started working at the campus on East 111th Street before the program began, left to teach in Europe, then returned in 1989.

Robinson, who is white, is dedicated to the inner city, convinced that children there can excel. But this is what she’s up against in second grade: 7-year-olds who come to school drowsy from watching television half the night; 7-year-olds who have already been bounced out of several schools for discipline problems; 7-year-olds who challenge her--”Why?”--when she asks them to please sit down.

Of the 17 in her class recently, seven enrolled months after the school year began. Others appeared and disappeared.

During a phonics lesson, her students tried to use the word “shrug” in a sentence. Their vocabulary is so limited that none could get it right.

“My mom shrugged the wall?” tried a girl, one of six limited-English students in the class.

“My sister when she washed made my T-shirt shrug?” attempted another student.

During a break, Robinson confided, “They come into kindergarten already two years behind. All you’re doing is playing catch up.”

Some Gains Made

Even if Ten Schools has not performed miracles for its students, some benefits are quite tangible.

Each school is provided a part-time nurse, psychologist and attendance counselor, which most campuses turn into full-time positions with other funds.

The average L.A. Unified elementary school has a nurse only one day a week, meaning that teachers may be left with “a box of Band-Aids and cotton balls,” as one put it, and serve as “mother, doctor, counselor, everything.”

But at 93rd Street School, Carrie Harrison clocks in every day for full-time duty.

On Monday morning, a steady stream of children with injuries and maladies suffered over the weekend line up at her door, sent by concerned teachers.

First comes a boy with a welt under an eye; another child threw a wrench at him Saturday.

Then a boy with a black and blue cheekbone. His story changes twice, but he finally settles on saying his sister tripped him.

In comes a second-grader complaining of a headache. She has no fever, so Harrison gently prods:

“Did you eat breakfast?”

“No,” the girl replies.

“Do you want something to eat or do you want to go home?”

“Eat,” the girl says, tears welling. The nurse pulls saltines and orange juice from her private stash.

Between interruptions, Harrison calls in third-graders for eye tests, as mandated by state law. Two girls need glasses so badly they can only see the top line of the chart. She tells them to have their teachers seat them close to the board until their mothers buy glasses and, if the family cannot afford them, to contact her for help.

The Ten Schools had long received more money than the average public school because their students were poor and their classrooms not integrated. The extra $1 million each campus gets also is drawn, in part, from state funds intended to reduce the inequity of racial segregation.

At 93rd Street School, the money also helps employ Carol Haro, who enforces a Ten Schools tenet: If the students are not in school, they can’t learn.

“Attendance counselor” only begins to describe her work. She also keeps an updated file on food pantries for needy families and once a month takes the poorest children to a clothes giveaway in North Hollywood.

This Monday, she has a more complicated mission. A student sent home with head lice has been out almost two months. The School Review Board downtown has gotten involved.

“They want me to call the social welfare department, the health department,” she says. “But if they go out, they’ll take her away. That would rip that family apart.”

Haro decides to take a field trip. The girl lives blocks from the school in a one-bedroom shack squeezed behind another house. Five people live there, and it’s difficult to see how. The place is filthy and cluttered.

The girl’s mother comes to the door, apologetic about the lice. The girl cries, the mother explains, when she tries to comb the dead nits out of her hair. The girl also doesn’t want to get up in the morning.

Haro asks to see the youngster, at which point the girl peeks from the top of a bunk bed set up in the living room, from where she has been half-watching soap operas. She climbs down, wearing a soiled, torn nightgown.

“You have to get her in school,” Haro tells the mother. “If you don’t, they’ll take you to jail and then where will you be?”

Then Haro tries another tack: “She’s so smart, you know, she could be a doctor or a lawyer. But she has to come to school.”

The mother smiles, nods, strokes her daughter’s hair. Haro fixes on the girl. “Do you want to come to school?”

“Oh, yes,” the girl says.

And, yes, she did return to school. For two weeks. Then she disappeared again. The school district now plans to take the mother to court.

Smaller Classes Seem to Help

Ten Schools was intended to be a five-year pilot. Then it had its one public review.

It already was clear in 1992 that the schools would not reach the 50th percentile. But they were outperforming other poor schools, and the timing made it unthinkable that the experiment would be ended. The review fell shortly after the Los Angeles riots.

In a city trying to mend the ragged wounds of racial strife, the school board could not turn its back on a program aimed at helping African American youths.

The author of the five-year review, UCLA Vice Chancellor Winston Doby, gave decision makers an out. Rather than ask, “Did the program achieve its initial purpose?” he said the board might pose another question: “What has the district learned?”

One major lesson? It “might not be possible to create the optimum conditions in the Ten Schools.”

No outside study of the schools was done after that until The Times, with Calfee’s help, analyzed test scores for the entire 10 years. Among the findings:

* The smaller classes and personal attention seem to have helped. Compare scores from the Ten Schools with those from the 22 elementary schools within a mile of them--last year, students in the Ten Schools came out 12 points higher.

* But some numbers remain bleak--on tests given only to English-speakers in 1996, “these kids are still . . . in the 25th percentile in reading,” Calfee found.

* Then there was the slippage.

Calfee followed an early wave of Ten Schools students, entering in 1987, and a later group, entering in 1991, to see how they progressed from first through fifth grades.

From the start, the second group scored higher than the earlier one on national scales--13 points higher in first-grade reading.

But explaining that is not easy. Was it because the schools learned to work better? Or was it the changing population?

One thing similar about both groups: Each did worse as they got older. Indeed, the recent group, which started out ahead, had a sharper drop over time.

“If I were to be asked what’s important, I would say: How are the kids doing in the late elementary grades?” Calfee said. “That’s not a whole lot of payoff.”

But, again, why? Are the schools doing something wrong? Or does the drop simply reflect the influence of the inner city over time?

Calfee criticized school officials for failing to track Ten Schools students through middle and high school, leaving unknown whatever became of these students.

To the man who counts most, though, Ten Schools has proved its worth. In fact, Supt. Zacarias wants to “start providing other schools with the resources that these schools are receiving.”

Zacarias notes that some of the Ten Schools innovations--extra teacher training, staff selection committees and uniform reading programs--were later adopted by other school reform efforts, such as LEARN. At the same time, he seems to have taken care to avoid one problem of the Ten Schools program in crafting his campaign for the district’s 100 lowest-performing schools, most below the 25th percentile.

After originally vowing to bring the 100 schools up to the national average, Zacarias had second thoughts a few months ago.

His goal now: eight points.

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The 10 Schools

Anatomy of a Reform

An extra $10 million is spent annually at 10 South-Central Los Angeles schools identified in the mid-1980s as having a high percentage of black students and low test scores. In the decade of the program, scores have risen to slightly above the average for all Los Angeles schools. But reading skills still lag in the upper grades.

Meanwhile, the schools have ceased to be predominantly black.

*

Elementary Schools at a Glance:

*--*

School Percentile* King Jr. 46% 93rd Street 42 Bright 35 McKinley 33 Flournoy 33 Barrett 33 Compton 33 112th Street 28 96th Street 28 102nd Street 22 10 School Average 34 District Average 33

*--*

*Combines score on 1996 tests of reading, math and language skills

*

STANDARDIZED TESTS

Students graduating from the 10 schools in 1994 scored higher on standardized reading tests than those who graduated in 1990. But scores generally declined the longer the students were in school.

Average 10 School score on reading exam:

*--*

Grade 87--90 91--94 1st 26.33 39.50 2nd 20.00 27.75 3rd 17.67 26.50 4th 15.33 23.00 5th 19.67 24.25

*--*

*

10 Schools’ ethnicity:

1987:

Black: 64.97%

Latino: 34.2%

Other: .8%

1996:

Black: 44%

Latino: 55.6%

Other: .2%

*

PROGRAM BENEFITS

Each school in the program receives the following: year-round administrative assistant and clerk, full-time bilingual office assistant, attendance counselor, instructional coordinator, reading lab teaching assistant, library aide, half-time nurse, 20 days staff development, reduced class size in grades K-2.

Some benefits, such as reduced class size, have been extended to all Los Angeles schools. The 10 Schools still receive substantially more per student.

Spending per student (1995-1998)

10 schools: $5,096.71

District: $4,297.00

Source: Los Angeles Unified School District, Robert Calfee, associate dean of the School of Education at Stanford University.