Locke HS Is Turned Around, but Cost Gives Pause

Coincidentally, the NYT had an article last week about Green Dot's success in turning around one of the most notorious dropout factories, Locke High School in LA.  By the way, I totally disagree that the $15 million cost so far is too much, for two reasons: A) The costs to society of NOT fixing this school are FAR larger (for example, it costs roughly $35,000 to incarcerate one person for a year – see: www.nytimes.com/2009/03/25/us/25prisons.html); B) Locke HS is really big: 3,200 students, the equivalent of 13 250-student schools.  Does anyone think that $1.2 million is too much to fix a smaller school?

As recently as 2008, Locke High School here was one of the nation's worst failing schools, and drew national attention for its hallway beatings, bathroom rapes and rooftop parties held by gangs. For every student who graduated, four others dropped out.

Now, two years after a charter school group took over, gang violence is sharply down, fewer students are dropping out, and test scores have inched upward. Newly planted olive trees in Locke's central plaza have helped transform the school's concrete quadrangle into a place where students congregate and do homework.

"It's changed a lot," said Leslie Maya, a senior. "Before, kids were ditching school, you'd see constant fights, the lunches were nasty, the garden looked disgusting. Now there's security, the garden looks prettier, the teachers help us more."

Locke High represents both the opportunities and challenges of the Obama administration's $3.5 billion effort, financed largely by the economic stimulus bill, to overhaul thousands of the nation's failing schools.

The school has become a mecca for reformers, partly because the Department of Education Web site hails it as an exemplary turnaround effort.

But progress is coming at considerable cost: an estimated $15 million over the planned four-year turnaround, largely financed by private foundations. That is more than twice the $6 million in federal turnaround money that the Department of Education has set as a cap for any single school. Skeptics say the Locke experience may be too costly to replicate.

"When people hear we spent $15 million, they say, 'You're insane,' " said Marco Petruzzi, chief executive of Green Dot Public Schools, the nonprofit charter school group that has remade Locke. "But when you look closely, you see it's not crazy."

Locke High, with 3,200 students, sprawls across six city blocks in south-central Los Angeles. The school's principal in 2007 complained publicly that the Los Angeles Unified School District had made it a dumping ground for problem teachers.

Kevin Rauda, a senior, recalled a teacher who read newspapers in class instead of teaching. In spring 2008, only 15 percent of students passed state math tests.

Green Dot, which operates charter schools in Los Angeles and one in the Bronx, won control of Locke from the district in 2008 and began a turnaround effort.

…Green Dot divided Locke into small academies. Several, modeled on the charters it operates elsewhere, opened in fall 2008 with freshman classes of 100 to 150 students and are to reach full enrollment of 500 to 600 students by fall 2011.

Other academies concentrate on remedial classes for older students, including some returning from jail. Another focuses on preparing students for careers in architecture.

Green Dot required Locke's 120 teachers to reapply for their jobs. It rehired about 40, favoring teachers who showed enthusiasm and a belief that all Locke students could learn. The campus stays open each day until early evening for science tutoring, band and other activities.

Although state test scores administered in spring 2009, just months after the Green Dot makeover began, showed modest gains, Locke remained among California's lowest-performing schools. Still, a dozen students said in recent interviews that the school was safer and instruction had improved.

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.

…Tim Cawley, a managing director at the Academy for Urban School Leadership, a nonprofit group leading several turnaround efforts in Chicago, disagreed, arguing that even expenditures surpassing $15 million on a big school could be a smart national investment.

"We're wasting billions every year by not fixing these schools," Mr. Cawley said, "because the students they're not educating end up filling our prisons."

 

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School Is Turned Around, but Cost Gives Pause

By SAM DILLON

Published: June 24, 2010

www.nytimes.com/2010/06/25/education/25school.html