Inner-City Students End Year of Special Attention in Experiment

For Tyron Turner, a fifth-grader at 112th Street School in Watts, this year brought tough new schoolyard rules, two extra weeks in class and some novel experiences--such as studying Shakespeare on Saturdays.

“I liked it!” said the 11-year-old, adding that changes such as these have made his school “a lot better” than it used to be.

The youngster’s first-time encounter with Elizabethan prose came as part of a five-year experiment by the Los Angeles Unified School District to upgrade 10 of its worst inner-city elementary schools. Called the Ten Schools Program, it promises to play a critical role in negotiations to settle a protracted legal battle between the district and the NAACP over the quality of education for black students.

Settlement Talks

“The Ten Schools Program is based on the premise that if you put some additional resources into a school and teachers and administrators who volunteer (to work there), it will work,” said Richard K. Mason, special counsel to Supt. Leonard Britton. “This project or a program that shares the same theoretical underpinnings” will figure prominently in settlement talks scheduled to take place over the next two months.

Attorneys for the district and the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People met in federal court Monday to ask that the NAACP’s class-action desegregation lawsuit against the school system be dropped. They were granted a conditional dismissal with a 60-day stay to allow the two parties time to settle their differences.

Grover Hankins, general counsel for the NAACP, said the organization is interested in getting the district to commit to efforts, such as the Ten Schools Program, that will offer “educational enhancement” to students at risk of failing school.

Designed and implemented as a result of pressure from several black community groups, the 1-year-old, $8-million program represents the district’s most concerted effort to date to improve learning conditions for poor children attending low-achieving, predominantly black elementary schools.

At each school, the administration and faculty were overhauled. Seven schools received new principals, and as many as 80% of the teachers were replaced by instructors from other schools who volunteered to be reassigned. The schools had a longer school year by starting classes two weeks earlier than the rest of the district, and class sizes were reduced from an average of 28 students to 20 in kindergarten through second grade.

In addition, a new instructional approach was implemented that emphasizes oral and written language skills, and teachers held after-school tutoring and Saturday “learning clinics.” Each school also received a full-time counselor.

‘Encouraging’ Results

With the first year of the program ending Thursday, district and school officials have few hard statistics to indicate whether the schools are making progress academically. Tests of basic academic skills designed by the schools’ teachers have produced some “encouraging” results, Assistant Supt. Barbara Smith, who is overseeing the project, said Tuesday. But the district will not have a firm basis for making comparisons until October when all students will take a standard achievement test to measure their growth in reading, writing and mathematics.

Principals and teachers interviewed Tuesday said they have observed small but positive changes.

“I find that with the reduced class size, the children have been able to learn a lot more, and I have been able to work with them more closely and observe them,” said Barbara Stiggers, who teaches kindergarten at 112th Street School. “That has made a tremendous difference.”

Mark Keller, a fifth-grade teacher at 112th Street, said he has noticed an overall improvement in the school environment. “The school is more organized . . . and more structured,” he said, and as a result, his students “seem more motivated” to learn.

‘Have Done Better’

Kathy Fitzpatrick, a fourth-grade teacher at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School, praised the longer school year as “fantastic” for students. During the upcoming four-week summer session, she said she will teach her students “fifth-grade skills” instead of concentrating on remedial work. “Academically, (my students) have done better.”

One of the biggest changes students said they noticed--and, perhaps surprisingly, liked--was that they had to learn a lot more rules--simple things such as no playing after the bell rings and no talking once they are seated in their rooms.

Last year, said 9-year-old Francesca Joubert, students at 112th Street didn’t mind as well and “would take over the teachers.” Now, said Edward McNeil, also 9, “we have more order . . . and that makes it better.”