Charter School Takes Big Step on Road From Idea to Reality

For years, they fretted about it but didn’t know what to do.

They were a circle of friends, linked from childhood and by long professional association. And they had watched with growing alarm the educational drift of children growing up, as they themselves had, in South-Central Los Angeles.

“It started with the fact that we were not happy with the performance of the children in our community,” said Eugene Fisher, a governmental relations consultant. “What could be done to make that improve?” Then one of them crystallized the answer out of the diverse and sometimes conflicting strains of the statewide debate over educational reform.

They would open a new school in Watts.

Attorney and longtime civil rights activist Nira Hardon Long found that inspiration outside the liberal Democratic orbit in which her life had revolved, and one by one, drew her friends into her plan.

The school would be part of the Los Angeles Unified School District, but it would have the academic freedom and rigor of a private school. And, the most stunning of Long’s accomplishments, it would be run and financially backed by an educationally conservative foundation set up by one of America’s richest men.

After two years of preparation, the dream came to fruition last week when the Los Angeles Board of Education approved the Watts Learning Center as the district’s 15th charter school, and only the second started from scratch. The elementary school will open in the fall somewhere in Watts with 120 kindergartners, and will add a grade level each year for five years.

Only one missing piece now keeps the small group’s triumph from being complete.

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Long, whose steady determination had brought the plan this far, died of cancer three months ago. Some of her friends had not even known she was ill.

“She wanted to be as effective as possible,” said Jim Blew, a consultant who helped write the school’s charter and is now a member of its board. “She didn’t want anyone making accommodations for her because of her illness.”

As a testament to Long, her friends said they plan to name the school after her.

More importantly, they say, the school will start out on a strong foundation because of the diverse mix of political viewpoints, educational philosophies and financial resources she brought together on its eight-member board.

It includes two partisans of the L.A. Unified Schol District, Owen Knox, a retired assistant superintendent, and Sandra Porter, a retired elementary school teacher.

But Long, herself a former Los Angeles schoolteacher, had also included a contradictory voice by recruiting Sylvester Hinton, an activist who is trying to break up the Los Angeles school system by forming a separate district of about 125 schools in South-Central Los Angeles.

Long didn’t ask him to forsake that goal. “She said she had a plan that would help until I reached my goal,” Hinton said. “We talked for two or three weeks before I decided that any improvement in education would be better than waiting the two or three years it takes us to break up the system.”

The ability to reconcile conflicting views with her “her sober and reasonable way” was the key to Long’s character, said state Sen. Diane Watson (D-Los Angeles), who was her friend since their days as UCLA sorority sisters in the 1950s. “You could depend, when Nira stood to make a comment, it would be something to bring sides together, to make a consensus,” Watson said.

Nowhere was the payoff for this greater than in Long’s surprising affiliation with the conservative John Walton, son of the founder of Wal-Mart discount stores. Walton, who has been listed as America’s eighth-richest person, has thrown himself into school reform with a conservative bent that has alienated many in the educational mainstream.

“He thinks, as we all do, that competition will drive this performance issue,” said Eugene Ruffin, a former IBM and Xerox executive who met Walton through a mutual friend and agreed to run his San Diego-based School Futures Research Foundation, which has been primed with $2 million of Walton’s money. “Monopolies do not, by their nature, provide better performance.”

This philosophy represents a 180-degree turn from the lifelong commitment to government solutions that Long carried even in her given name, Nira, inspired by the acronym for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Depression-era National Industrial Recovery Act, newly unveiled in 1933, the year of her birth.

Long dedicated her professional career to economic development programs, both on the international scene with the State Department’s Agency for International Development and later in private law practice, consulting on housing and economic development for the cities of Washington, D.C., New Orleans and Los Angeles.

As her circle widened, Long became a close friend of controversial Washington Mayor Marion Barry--he spoke at her April memorial service--and also formed an association with Blew, a consultant for Walton’s School Futures Research Foundation.

Walton created the San Diego foundation in 1994, the year after contributing $250,000 to Proposition 174, an initiative rejected by voters that would have created a voucher system allowing parents to pay for their children’s private schooling with public funds.

After conducting extensive research, the foundation reached two decisions, Ruffin said: to embrace the state’s new charter school law and to concentrate its effort in poor urban neighborhoods where public schools are most overcrowded and where charter schools are most difficult to form, largely because of their start-up costs.

“The question is, ‘Where can you do the most good?’ Essentially, it was quite evident to us. To us, we’re in a crisis state. When you’ve got 50% of your population that can’t read above the 6th grade level, that is a crisis,” said Ruffin, the foundation’s president.

Long and her circle of friends had drawn a similar conclusion, looking at statistics showing that the academic performance of inner-city students who have shown promise in Head Start or other academically based preschool programs tends to drop once they enter elementary school.

“We’ve talked about this through the years,” said Porter, the former school principal who had grown up with Long in South-Central Los Angeles.

“We wanted to build on the progress that has been made with children in Head Start programs, because the research has proven that when you involve parents and when you train the parents and help to build their self-confidence, when you involve them in the school, you have more success with the students.”

They decided the way to do that was to use the flexibility offered to a charter school. Under state law, charters can operate free of most district rules and requirements of the state Education Code.

But that was no easy undertaking. Besides complicated legal requirements, the new school would need to raise $250,000 to show its financial solidity.

Long, who had worked as a consultant on the foundation’s research project, sought its help in applying for a charter. The foundation’s commitment soon went beyond the checkbook, and it embarked on a plan to own and operate 20 charter schools in inner-city neighborhoods.

“We decided the best way to support policy change was to demonstrate [that] the things we understand to be success formulas actually work in public education,” Ruffin said.

The affiliation with Walton, whose support of vouchers appeared to some educators as an assault on public education, raised some opposition to the proposed school.

School board member Julie Korenstein objected to using public funds for a school run by an organization that backed the voucher measure. Initially leaving the boardroom as four of her colleagues approved the charter, Korenstein later registered a “no” vote. She said she was concerned that the school appeared too much like a backhanded way of getting around the defeat of vouchers.

But district officials sided enthusiastically with the new school, whose leaders, by and large, are far from rabid opponents of public education.

“I have nothing against the LAUSD,” said Porter, who retired in 1995 as principal of Charnock Road Elementary School. “I’m a product of the LAUSD. I served for 38 years in the LAUSD.”

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Although the charter has been approved, much of the school’s governance remains to be worked out in the two months before the fall semester begins.

First, a campus must be chosen. Several charter school board members said they expect to begin in leased space near a Head Start program, and later build to meet their needs.

More challenging, an educational course must be charted that will address the problems that got Long and her friends caught up in the first place.

“The first thing was to get approval. Now we need to sit down and decide what are we going to do,” said Knox, who served the Los Angeles schools as a teacher, principal and assistant superintendent before he retired in 1984.

“What curriculum are we going to have? What kind of teachers are we going to hire? We have a lot to do between now and the fall,” he said.

And, in the biggest job of all, they have to live up to the memory of Nira Long.