Troubled Schools Able to Help Pupils Realize Dreams : Education: Inner-city students have shown improvement in reading and math skills under the Ten Schools Program. But the project is facing cuts in state budget crunch.

For five years, 10 of Los Angeles’ most troubled inner-city elementary schools have enjoyed an infusion of cash, talent and hard work aimed at halting their long history of educational failure.

For the most part, the efforts have paid off, offering promising lessons to a city struggling to recover from the riots and ease the problems that fueled them.

Since the Ten Schools Program’s inception in 1987, test scores have risen, attendance has soared, parent participation has picked up and discipline problems have plummeted, according to an independent report to the board of education this spring.

Although the schools--hampered by staffing problems--fell short of their student achievement goals, the rate of improvement in these once stagnant campuses has dramatically outpaced similar schools and the Los Angeles Unified School District as a whole.

“People can see the results, and they are so excited,” said Charles Barrett, principal of 97th Street School, which recently won a state Department of Education citation for its students’ progress in reading and math. “Now they see this is not an impossible dream.”

The project, its advocates say, represents the best hope for students in the all-minority schools, located in neighborhoods rocked by the recent violence.

But the dramatic gains have been expensive. Now, as the five-year experiment nears its end, school officials, faced with mounting budget problems, must weigh the program’s cost against its benefits.

“Any progress these schools have made is important,” said longtime board of education member Roberta Weintraub, “but (the project) still doesn’t demonstrate that it is easy to turn around inner-city schools . . . especially without lots of money.”

Today, the board will consider a staff recommendation to keep the project going, but at least some reduction in its $10-million budget seems inevitable. Nor is there money available to expand it to struggling schools in other parts of the district.

Much of the Ten Schools Program’s budget comes from a special pool of state funds provided to ease the inequity of racial segregation. An outgrowth of a lengthy legal battle over the quality of education for African-American students, the program has been spared the degree of budget cuts that has sliced into other campuses and district offices.

This year, however, district officials face their biggest shortfall to date--at least $400 million must be cut from the 1992-93 budget. About $18.3 million must be pared from the Integration Program’s $405.7-million spending package, in effect forcing school board members to weigh the Ten Schools project against such programs as bilingual education and the popular magnet schools.

Board President Warren Furutani said he believes there is strong consensus among his colleagues to continue the program, but he conceded that it will be nearly impossible to spare it entirely.

“The issue will be at what (funding) level we can continue it,” Furutani said. “With a shrinking budget pie, the expense will be debated, and there will be a weighing of things against each other.

“To me, this is a meager investment focusing on a group of young people who for generations have been in a system that has failed them. I just don’t think we can abandon it. Although it didn’t meet the goals, it surely got us a lot farther down the road.”

The program was launched with much fanfare and high hopes, said Assistant Supt. Barbara A. Smith, who formerly oversaw the project: “It was an effort to change history . . . to show the world that African-American students can learn as well as others when conditions are right.”

Participating schools are Compton Avenue, Lovelia P. Flournoy, 96th Street, 102nd Street, 112th Street, Martin Luther King Jr., McKinley Avenue, 93rd Street, 97th Street and 36th Street. Located in Watts and other black working-class neighborhoods in South Los Angeles, they were chosen because their enrollments were predominantly African-American (although now they are about half Latino) and because their achievement test scores were among the lowest in the district.

The goal was to raise the median achievement level, as measured by standardized tests, to at least the 50th percentile in reading and math, up from the 30th or lower percentile that had been the norm for the schools when the program began.

Extra money--about $43 million over five years--was pumped into the schools, including the $1 million added to each of the schools’ budgets this year. It was spent to lower class sizes in kindergarten through second grade; beef up language arts throughout the curriculum; staff and stock libraries; hire full-time nurses and counselors; add instructional aides, and start parent education and outreach programs.

The extra money also enabled the schools to add four weeks to the school year and provided 18 to 20 days of pupil-free staff development time to let teachers hone their skills and coordinate efforts. Schools also held optional Saturday learning clinics and after-school tutoring sessions.

The program soon attracted corporate donors to provide even more--including IBM “Writing to Read” computer labs from the Riordan Foundation, a self-esteem-boosting Efficacy Program from Pacific Telesis Foundation, and “Mike’s Math Club” from the Milken Family Foundation.

But the program had trouble with staffing from the start. Officials’ dreams of starting from scratch with experienced, enthusiastic faculties could not be realized. District and union policies and federal Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights rules hamstrung the efforts, as did recruiting problems. Not enough experienced, well-regarded administrators and teachers applied to work in the schools, forcing program coordinators to draft some faculty members and delaying the project at some campuses. Further aggravating the problem, the report by an outside evaluation team found, was the resentment many staff members felt at having no input in the project’s planning.

The otherwise favorable report cited staffing problems as the major stumbling block to achieving goals. The report, which recommended that the project be continued, suggested several ways to improve staffing.

None of the schools had reached interim goals for all grades in all subjects by the end of 1991, the fourth year of the project and the latest scores available for the report. But all made strong progress, the report found.

On the reading portion of the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills, Ten Schools students scored better at every grade level than those at schools nearby with students of similar ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. They also outperformed students in “Chapter 1” schools, which get federal money to help underachieving poor youngsters. Their first-, second- and third-graders also did better than the district as a whole.

Ten Schools students also registered the strongest gains over a three-year period, showing an average growth of 14.2% in reading, 16.2% in mathematics and 11% in language skills. By contrast, students districtwide posted no gains in reading, an average gain of 5.3% in mathematics and 2.2% in language.

Evaluators also noted improvements in such areas as attendance, school climate, library use, curriculum and teaching techniques.

Theodore T. Alexander Jr., assistant superintendent for student integration services, said he is working with federal and teachers union officials to build more flexibility into the staffing. He also wants to refine the program’s faculty selection and development process before considering expansion to other campuses.

“I’m very pleased with the results, and I want us to go even higher,” Alexander said. “The administration and teaching staff are the critical factors. We have to have dedicated, experienced people who want to be in these schools, who are willing to build their skills and be the best they can for these kids. And we need them to stay.”

He cited a section of the report that showed the five schools with the more experienced faculties and lower staff turnover registered the highest student achievement--36th Street, 97th Street, King, 93rd Street and McKinley. The other schools, in the poorest parts of the city, near housing projects, were hardest to staff and had the neediest pupils.

Teachers gave the program high marks. Lyle Lindquist, who teaches fourth grade at 112th Street, said the positive effects on students go well beyond test scores. He said most teachers are enthusiastic and “really put their hearts and souls into it.”

Gwenette Parker, a first-grade teacher at 93rd Street, said she and her colleagues do not mind the extra work. “We enjoy seeing the results,” she said.

Indeed, test scores alone do not tell the whole story. Some signs of success can be observed in visits to the campuses.

At 112th Street on a recent school day, a once severely depressed second-grader named Henry rushed up to the visiting Alexander with a broad smile to show off his classroom comportment card filled with stickers for good behavior. At 93rd Street, Spanish-speaking fifth-graders were making and furnishing cardboard dollhouses--right down to the bathroom shower head--and identifying in English everything in their creations.

On the same day, lab-coated first-graders at King were videotaping their science fair, demonstrating the principles that drive their handmade pulleys. McKinley sixth-graders were fashioning a display illustrating their recent five-day trip to Yosemite, which they helped pay for with a book sale.

And over at 97th Street, the annual PEP (Proficiency in English Program) Oratorical Contest was under way. Students in kindergarten through fifth grades were reciting poems, telling stories or reading their original compositions. In the aging school’s tiny auditorium, their classmates listened attentively, murmuring encouragement when nerves or memories flagged and cheering vigorously at the end of each talk. In between speeches the students, accompanied by an aide on the piano, belted out the verses to “This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land.”

Parent Pearlie Johnson, whose children started attending 97th Street School before the Ten Schools Program began, summed up the difference it has made this way:

“The children’s test scores are rising and they are feeling good about themselves. They can read and write and speak better. The parents can see it, and they feel good, and they’ve started coming down to the school to see for themselves what is going on. It just keeps building and building.”

Johnson said she is worried that the district’s budget problems will jeopardize the program.

“Whatever happens, we’ll still be working together and supporting the schools, but I hope it can be continued,” Johnson said. “We hope we can be a model for others.”

Improvement in Test Scores

Between 1989 and 1991, students in the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Ten Schools Program made dramatic gains in reading, mathematics and language skills, as measured by their scores on the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills. During the three-year period, the 10 Schools student rates of improvement outpaced their peers in the district as a whole, in other schools with similar socioeconomic, geogrpahic and ethnic makeup and in Chapter 1 schools, which receive federal funds to help low-achieving, poverty-stricken students.

Average percentile growth in student achievement, 1989-1991

Ten Schools Comparison Schools Chapter 1 Schools* Reading** 14.2 2.8 Mathematics 16.2 2.8 4.3 Language 11 1.2 1.2

District Reading** Mathematics 5.3 Language 2.2

** Chapter 1 schools and the district did not show growth in reading.

* Chapter 1 students only.

Source: Report on LAUSD Integration Programs, March, 1992