Relentless Pursuit

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Book: Relentless Pursuit Read Online Free PDF
Author: Donna Foote
District (LAUSD), if not in the state.
    California has a grab bag of indexes used to calculate academic performance; they are as confusing as their acronyms. The state metric is the Academic Performance Index (API), a scale ranging from 200 to 1,000 that reflects a school’s performance based on the results of statewide testing. Schools that fail to reach California’s API performance target of 800 must hit specific annual growth objectives until they do. Failure to meet the growth goals results in penalties, which can include school reorganization or even a state takeover. In 2005, Locke’s API was 488, the second lowest—by a hair—in LAUSD.
    The feds’ system of accountability for schools receiving antipoverty funds is called Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) and is based on a set of requirements, including API growth. Schools that lag in their AYP for two consecutive years go to a Program Improvement (PI) plan in which the severity of the penalties increases over time, although the government doesn’t spell out consequences past year five. Locke has been in PI since the 1997–1998 school year. The school met its API growth target in 2005–2006, and it graduated 332 students—the largest number in recent memory. But it still fell far short of reaching federal proficiency rates.
    Research carried out by UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies in 2006 only underscored Locke’s last-place status. UCLA found that Locke’s “College Opportunity Ratio” was rock bottom in a study of nineteen of the city’s lowest-performing high schools: for every 100 of the 979 ninth-graders who entered Locke in 2001, 24 graduated in 2005, and 3 completed the course requirements for admission to a California State University (CSU) or a University of California (UC) campus. Locke’s ratio on another key UCLA indicator, the “Cumulative Promotion Index”—which calculates the probability that a student entering ninth grade will complete high school on time with a regular diploma—was the lowest of the low, at 15 percent.
    Over the years, beleaguered Locke High School became the poster child for needed school reform in Los Angeles, a photo op for politicians and celebrities alike. Vice President George Bush visited Locke in 1988, and President Bill Clinton stopped by on a “poverty” tour in 1999. Tipper Gore, John McCain, and Maria Shriver all made house calls. The rapper Ice Cube appeared in 1993, and Muhammad Ali was there in 1996. Edward James Olmos, star of the movie
Stand and Deliver,
basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and jazz great Herbie Hancock have paid their respects as well.
    The school district tried numerous interventions and reforms to turn things around. Administrators were hired and fired, the school was reorganized into small learning communities, after-school and Saturday classes were offered to beef up instruction, and gang-prevention measures were put in place. Lots of money was allocated; much of it was misspent.
    Inevitably, the initiatives had as much staying power as did the staff forced to implement them; each year, up to fifty teachers dropped out of Locke. When Dr. Frank Wells took over as principal in 2004, he was the third person to hold the title in almost as many years. Things had gotten so bad that in 2001 local superintendent Sylvia Rousseau moved her district office to Locke and briefly ran the school herself. But since the arrival of Wells, the vibe on campus had changed. Locke was a safer school. Everyone said so—even the rotten, bottom-of-the-barrel teachers, the ones Wells referred to as “the residue,” the ones who “grieved” him to the union every chance they got. Locke had fewer drug busts and fights, and the school district police had the numbers to prove it: the school had gone from first in the number of campus crime reports in LAUSD to thirteenth. Wells recited that
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