Zacarias Gives Deadline to 100 Lowest Schools

In a closed-door meeting Thursday with school administrators from throughout the Los Angeles Unified School District, Supt. Ruben Zacarias gave the system’s 100 poorest-performing schools an October deadline to come up with their own improvement plans.

The list of targeted schools has not changed since a draft was disclosed by The Times last month. The majority of Los Angeles campuses where students test toward the bottom third against a national standard lie in working-class areas and share the complex problems of poverty, crowded classrooms and inexperienced teachers.

Zacarias said that he intends to require quarterly progress reports from the schools and that the results might trigger more aggressive bureaucratic intervention.

Although each school has its own unique problems that must be sorted out locally, Zacarias said, some “universal truths” apply to many of them and offer avenues for broader changes from the top--including chronic teacher absenteeism, low parent involvement and high student-dropout rates.

The new superintendent also made it clear that while he was singling these 100 schools out, he would not be letting the other 544 schools off the hook. He said that was why he summoned all 27 regional cluster leaders to district headquarters.

“This is not about 100 schools,” said Zacarias, who begins his second month as superintendent today. “I expect improvement from all schools.”

After the two-hour meeting, cluster leaders said they welcomed the scrutiny as a wake-up call that they hoped would stir more support from parents and teachers for improvements already in the works.

“Sometimes you get complacent and you don’t rise to the occasion,” said Robert Barner, who oversees a South Los Angeles region that includes Jordan and Locke high schools.

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Two-thirds of 21 regular schools under Barner’s jurisdiction made the lowest-performing schools list. Though student attendance was not part of the criteria for selecting the schools, Jordan and Locke also had the worst attendance rates among district high schools and Jordan had the second-highest dropout rate.

Cluster leaders were talking Thursday about plans to beef up anti-truancy programs, parent training courses and reading tutors.

But without additional money, the administrators said, making headway will be difficult.

“To make it come alive, we have to have that,” said Daniel Lawson, leader of the Crenshaw/Dorsey cluster, where 10 of 17 schools were on the list. “You simply can’t say, ‘You have to do it’ and not provide the resources.”

While vowing not to pull funding from other schools, Zacarias left the door open to funneling additional money into the 100 schools’ efforts from this year’s expected increase in state revenue.

Primarily, however, Zacarias said he would work with the 100 principals to craft ways to put the money they have to better use--beginning with a workshop next month and ending in final plans of action by the end of October.

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After two years, the schools that have not met individual improvement goals could face such radical action as “reconstitution”--an approach being tried in some other big-city school districts in which an entire school staff is replaced.

“I plan to keep a watchful eye on the progress at each school,” Zacarias said.

The list of the bottom 100 was taken from a ranking of all the district’s campuses based on a calculation of each school’s average 1996 test scores in the fourth, seventh and ninth grades.

In the secondary grades, only the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills was used, leaving out all non-English-speaking middle and high school students. The fourth-grade ranking used a combination of that test and Aprenda, the test given to Spanish-speaking students.

Although the cluster administrators were given each school’s average scores for the past three years as a way to gauge whether student performance is improving or declining, the ranking did not take into account schools’ scores from previous years.

Testing experts say such a one-year snapshot does not provide important context. Professor Robert Calfee, who teaches education and psychology at Stanford University, said a three- to five-year window is essential to determine whether a school already is on the right track.

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Zacarias said multi-year trends will be looked at during the school-by-school review, with encouragement offered to those improving and more intervention given those on the decline.

A preliminary review of the 10 lowest-ranked schools, however, indicates that none have logged significant upward trends during the past three years on either test.

Many of the schools on the lowest-100 list have been part of years-long improvement efforts that have not lifted them off the bottom.

Forty of the 100 schools are part of LEARN, the district’s largest reform program, which offers additional budget control to schools willing to restructure their governance to include a panel of parents, teachers and staff.

Three were part of a similar reform known as Ten Schools, which a decade ago targeted 10 of the worst-performing schools with high African American populations for a large investment of money and personnel. Another is part of a program called Accelerated Schools, which shuns remedial classes in favor of speeded up instruction for lagging students.

A Times analysis of the 100 schools offered some insight into the uphill battle they face: More than 42% of their students came from families on welfare, compared with 30% at other district schools. Nearly twice as many operate on year-round schedules because they could not otherwise accommodate all the neighborhood’s children.

They also tended to fall below the average spending level for teacher and administrative salaries, an indication they employ more novice teachers.

Student transiency emerged as another thorny issue for the low performers. As a group, the 100 schools lost 27% of the students during the course of the year, compared with 19% in the rest of the district.

With a lack of continuity in the student body, schools find themselves testing a significantly different group of students than the ones they taught.

Crenshaw/Dorsey administrator Lawson said he believes that transiency levels may be the biggest difference between lower- and higher-performing schools in his region.

To begin to address that problem, elementary schools in the cluster recently agreed to buy the same series of reading texts, so that as students move from one school to another they do not encounter a new book.

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Here are the 100 poorest performing Los Angeles Unified schools, with No. 1--99th Street Elementary--being the school with the worst ranking on new Supt. Ruben Zacarias’ report card on the demand improvements from the bottom 100.

ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS

18: 6th Ave Elem.

81: 28th St. Elem.

66: 54th St. Elem.

32: 59th St. Elem.

24: 52nd St. Elem.

93: 68th St. Elem.

29: 75th St. Elem.

95: 74th St. Elem.

48: 95th St.. Elem.

1: 99th St. Elem.

19: 102nd St. Elem.

3: 107th St. Elem.

20: 116th St. Elem.

41: 112th St. Elem.

11: 118th St. Elem.

73: 122nd St. Elem.

98: Ambler Elem.

70: Arlington Hts. Elem.

94: Bassett Elem.

71: Hughes Elem.

82: Bridge Elem.

52: Broadous Elem.

59: Broadway Elem.

60: Budlong Elem.

50: Cohasset Elem.

40: Elizabeth St. Learning Ctr.

97: Euclid Elem.

33: Figueroa Elem.

96: Garvanza Elem.

87: Glenwood Elem.

42: Graham Elem.

8: Grape Elem.

86: Hawaiian Elem.

10: Hillcrest Drive Elem.

39: Holmes Elem.

100: Hooper Elem.

5: Hyde Park Blvd. Elem.

78: La Salle Elem.

76: Logan Elem.

53: Manchester Elem.

61: Menlo Elem.

2: Miller Elem.

85: Murchison Elem.

58: Normandie Elem.

56: Park Western Elem.

37: Pacoima Elem.

74: Parmalee Ave. Elem.

35: Purche Elem.

9: Raymond Ave. Elem.

14: Russell Elem.

9: Santa Monica Elem.

80: McKinley Elem.

47: Shenandoah Elem.

16: Sierra Vista Elem.

77: South Park Elem.

46: Weemes Elem.

83: Utah Elem.

13: Virginia Elem.

68: Wadsworth Elem.

25: Weigand Elem.

44: West Vernon Elem.

49: Westminster Elem.

23: Woodcrest Elem.

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MIDDLE SCHOOLS

26: Adams Middle School

88: Audubon Middle School

51: Bethune Middle School

30: Carver Middle School

67: Clay Middle School

72: Curtiss Middle School

7: Drew Middle School

38: Edison Middle School

21: Gompers Middle School

64: Harte Prep Middle School

69: Le Conte Middle School

36: Maclay Middle School

28: Markham Middle School

84: Mt. Vernon Middle School

34 : Muir Middle School

65 : Nimitz Middle School

54 : Olive Vista Middle School

92 : Webster Middle School

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HIGH SCHOOLS

91: Banning

57: Bell

62: Belmont

31: Crenshaw

27: Dorsey

63: Franklin

6: Fremont

99: Gardena

90: Garfield

55: Hollywood

45: Huntington Park

15: Jefferson

4 : Jordan

12: Locke

75: Los Angeles

17: Manual Arts

43: Roosevelt

22: Washington Prep

79: Wilson

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(Valley Edition, B7) Valley Schools

Olive Vista Middle School: 14600 Tyler St., Sylmar

Hillery T. Broadous School: 12561 Filmore St., Pacomia

Pacoima School: 11016 Norris Ave, Pacoima

Charles Maclay Middle School: 12540 Pierce Ave., Pacoima

Glenwood School: 8001 Ledge Ave., Sun Valley

Cohasset School: 15810 Saticoy St., Van Nuys

Basset St. School: 15756 Basset St., Van Nuys