Cheers and Impatience

At Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School in South-Central Los Angeles, second-graders zip through chapter books and ace math problems with up to four-digit numbers. Their improved Stanford 9 test scores, released Tuesday, provide an excellent lesson for the Los Angeles Unified School District.

These inner-city children, all qualifying for free lunches, scored in the top one-third nationally in reading and the top one-fifth in math on the test. The second-graders posted an increase of 10 points in reading and math over last year. If the kids at King can do it, boys and girls at every school can do it.

Unfortunately, King’s scores are an exception. In the LAUSD overall, second-graders scored in the bottom half for reading. The district’s scores are steadily improving, but under-50% reading scores still are nothing to get too excited about.

Reading and math scores rose overall in the district for the fourth consecutive year, helped by schools like Rosemont Avenue Elementary in Echo Park, where second-grade reading scores more than doubled in the last four years. Gov. Gray Davis stopped by to congratulate the students and called the LAUSD’s fine showing a “four-peat,” a riff on the Lakers’ three consecutive championships.

This school district will need a “ten-peat” to move the needle high enough in the secondary grades, where test scores showed students making minuscule progress or stagnating in the academic cellar.

As usual, primary grades performed best on the test, powering growth spurts that reflected better teaching, the return to a stronger reading program and classes limited to 20 students. In the fourth grade, the work gets harder and class size grows to 32. Not surprisingly, failure starts here. But test scores show fourth-graders are moving close to the national average in math and are making progress in reading.

The Council of the Great City Schools, which includes the LAUSD, reported in June that over the last two years most urban districts had raised scores. Few had as far to go as the LAUSD. Five years ago, the worst schools scored in the single digits. Those single-digit scores all but disappeared this time.

L.A. schools Supt. Roy Romer remains concerned about middle school and high school, and he should be. Stubbornly low scores reveal that many high school students can barely decipher a driver’s license manual, ballot or menu. The gap between the worst schools and the best ones in the LAUSD is narrowing, bit by bit. The public school system is nowhere near where it needs to be. But it’s inching in the right direction, and for that, as impatient as we might be, we offer a cheer.