So let’s take a look at one particularly horrid high school in inner city Los Angeles, one with a 20% graduation rate (that would mean an 80% dropout rate!). Envision “gangs gone wild” with beatings in hallways during class session, gang parties on the rooftop, and then throw in a litany of bathroom rapes. Turf-claiming gang graffiti combined with rampant drug sales let you know who was in charge. Locke High School was home to 3,200 students on a dilapidated six acre campus. Everything, from windows to bathroom fixtures to lights to security cameras, was broken and badly in need of repair. Dante’s vision of hell could easily have embraced this ramshackle lions’ pit of an excuse for public education. That only 15% of the entire student body could even pass the state math tests in 2008 should tell you about the “quality” of education, although stories of teachers reading the newspaper in class instead of teaching might have been another signal.
Then, under federal action plan, control of Locke was ceded to a non-profit, Green Dot Public Schools, and through government aid (which the stimulus program caps at $6 million for any one school) and private donations, Locke was reinvented as a charter school. The four-year turnaround cost a total of an extra $15 million over the school’s normal operating budget, more than double the federal cap. The necessary funding went to repair the broken pieces and to create a pleasant central plaza with newly planted olive trees. $2 million was spent revamping the school’s security force, reconfigured to push gangs out the door and to transport 500 students by bus who had previously been forced to walk through dangerous gang turf to get to school.
But everything about the school is now different. Teachers had to reapply for their old jobs, and only 40 of the original 120 teachers were brought back. Green Dot changed the operating strategy of the school, breaking it up into smaller, more manageable “academies,” each with a freshman class of under 150 students (by 2011, the numbers will increase to 500-600). Academies allowed for specialized programs – from potential preparation for a career in architecture to specialized remedial efforts for older students (including those who have been released from prison) – to allow different levels of instruction to apply as truly needed. Test scores are modestly better but still fairly low; the program has not been operational that long (Green Dot took over in the fall of 2008, and the tests were administered in the spring of 2009). The campus is vastly safer and completely functional.
It’s too soon to evaluate the ultimate academic impact of the new structure, but even if this is a wild success, skeptics question whether the necessary financial resources to replicate this success among inner city schools across the nation is remotely possible: “Hundreds of school districts across the nation will soon be trying makeovers, prodded by the Obama administration’s push to remake the nation’s 1,000 worst schools, and the availability of $3.5 billion in federal money… But if they rely on federal money alone, they will have to spend less than Green Dot… Under rules set by Congress, districts can apply for up to $6 million f or each failing school, to be spent over three years… During a Senate hearing in April, Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, congratulated [Green Dot] on the Locke transformation, but also suggested its reliance on philanthropic donations would make it difficult to imitate… ‘I’m thinking, how scalable is this?’ Mr. Franken said.” The New York Times (June 24th). I’m thinking what the costs might be to build new prisons, house and feed those incarcerated, pay for the damage to society caused by the resultant crimes and provide social safety nets to the children left behind in an educational system that just doesn’t work. Some major dollars now or… a vastly higher numbers of dollars later… and millions of wasted lives. Hmmmm… let me think….
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