The photo above doesn’t have a thing to do with the stories in this post. I took it on Friday afternoon when I stopped to talk to police at the scene of an attempted robbery of a West Los Angeles marijuana physician’s office on Pico Blvd., just west of Sawtelle, in which two people were shot, one of them critically. (The guy in the snazzy hat is the detective.) The shooting, which took place just after 4:30 p.m., was an odd and scary one according to the two witnesses with whom I spoke. (The witnesses were two young men in their early 20s.) They told me that a couple of guys walked into the doctor’s office, one dressed unaccountably in a yellow reflective traffic vest, the other dressed normally but with a back back strapped to his chest. The yellow vest guy signed in as if he was a patient, then the backpack guy reached into his pack, pulled out a pistol and shot the doctor’s receptionist and another office employee, a single shot fired at each. Just like that. No demand. No warning. A few seconds later, the shooter and friend ran out. It is not clear if they attempted to steal anything, or not.

STATE EDUCATION CUTS = 48 OR 50 KIDS IN A CLASSROOM

It is no shock to find out that this fall many LAUSD classes are absurdly large and crowded due to teacher cuts. On Sunday, the LA Times had a look into some of those classes and schools that are faring the worst.

As it was, every seat was taken. One young woman plopped on the floor, next to a microwave oven. A young man stood in the corner, shifting from one foot to the other. Three teens scrunched on top of a desk. Everyone’s attention was riveted on the slight, soft-spoken man pacing the small patch of bare linoleum in front of them….

But, hey, at least the state legislature avoided letting those prisoners out a few months early (and putting them on house arrest) Whew! .

OBAMA AND NEWSPAPERS

During his Sunday media blitz, Barack Obama said that he would be open to giving tax breaks to newspapers that restructured as nonprofits.

The Hill reports:

….“I haven’t seen detailed proposals yet, but I’ll be happy to look at them,” Obama told the editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Toledo Blade in an interview.

Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) has introduced S. 673, the so-called “Newspaper Revitalization Act,” that would give outlets tax deals if they were to restructure as 501(c)(3) corporations. That bill has so far attracted one cosponsor, Cardin’s Maryland colleague Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D).

[SNIP]

“I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding,” he said

LEAK CONTROVERSY HOLDING UP FEDERAL SHIELD LAW

The Washington Post reports:

A congressional push to enact a federal shield law for journalists is being held up by disagreement with the Justice Department on how to deal with cases that involve leaked national security information, congressional and media sources say.

OPEN LETTER TO THE TEACHERS’ UNION….FROM A UNION REP

This open letter to UTLA President A.J. Duffy from on of the union’s chapter chairs, Jordan Henry, a well-liked teacher and union rep at Santee High School.

(The link was in one of last night’s tweets by another LAUSD teacher/union activist, Jose del Barrio.)

In the letter, Henry suggest that the union rethink its knee-jerk condemnation of the charter school movement—for its own benefit.

Here’s a clip:

At this critical juncture in our union’s history, with at least one third of our union at stake, it is imperative we learn from past mistakes with haste. In particular, we must undo the misunderstanding, mischaracterization, and underestimation of the charter movement in Los Angeles which has marked your term and fueled the coalition of forces behind the School Choice Motion.

47-YEAR OLD ESCAPE FROM THE ROCK, NOT YET A COLD CASE

Okay, well if the 1962 infamous escape from Alcatraz isn’t a cold case, it’s mighty chilly. But according to Monday’s NPR story, U.S. Marshall’s are still actively working the case.

The U.S. Marshals Service is still actively pursuing the case on the chance that the three men pulled off one of the most daring prison escapes in U.S. history.

“Leads still come in. I just got one a couple weeks ago,” U.S. Marshal Michael Dyke said recently in his office in Oakland, Calif., as he poured over a stack of old file folders from the case.

Okay, he gave it. It was pretty good. Antonio can be quite moving when he puts in the effort. The man does, after all, have skills. And, since he is planning to run for Governor, he did put in the effort.

The LA Times has a nice rundown on the main part of the speech, which had to do with what the city was going to do to help itself and its residents survive this economy. (You can find the speech in full after the jump.)

Apart from the economy et al, there was one other significant section of the speech. And that was the last big section, the stuff about education.

Antonio praised charter schools in a big way—in particular Green Dot and its takeover of Locke High School—which, now that it is eight months into its first school year, can be tentatively labeled a real and very heartening success, even though it is still early days.

AV also praised the new Alliance charter that has opened up to rave reviews on the Cal State LA campus.

Rather than fight the charters, Villaraigosa made clear that the district must actively partner with them—thus giving a loud message to the union leadership (We’re talking to you, Mr. Duffy) that they need to get over their charter aversion and start making some deals.

None of this was new. Antonio was just swaying to the popular music of the moment, educationally speaking, and telling us to sing along.

But he assuredly set the right tone. Charters are the reform leaders right now. Anybody paying attention knows that. But the mayor saying so gave it a nice official stamp.
Read the rest of this entry »

NOTE: Arrrggghhh. The lack of a post this morning was pure idiocy on my part. I wrote this story earlier than usual and figured I’d wait until midnight to actually put it online. Then I got busy and plum forgot that I never pushed the “PUBLISH” button. I’d like to blame this glitch on nefarious forces. But sadly it was me.

Look for additional stories over the weekend.

Happy Friday!

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This is a good news moment.

On Wednesday, the California State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Jack O’Connell, announced the state’s 2009 picks for the California Distinguished Schools Award. According to the State Department of Education, the award “identifies and honors those schools that have demonstrated educational excellence for all students and progress in narrowing the achievement gap.”

In other words, instead of simply flagging schools that are doing poorly under No Child Left Behind, since 2000, the state has endeavored to use a carrot along with the NCLB stick by honoring the schools that are doing well.

In even years, O’Connell’s office honors elementary schools. In odd years (like 2009), middle and high schools are given awards.

This year the area of Los Angeles covered by LAUSD had 12-schools honored, the most Distinguished School Award winners of any region in the state.

Given all the bad news we’ve been hearing lately—the budget problems, the proposed teacher layoffs (the overpaid consultants) it is cheering to have some good news.

Yet, here’s the interesting thing: out of the 12 LA schools named, 10 of them are charters.

Now, it is important to mention here that, according to the rules of the award, if a school was named “distinguished” in the last awards cycle—which for middle and high schools would be 2007—one cannot apply for the following year. By the same token, the schools that won this year, can’t apply until 2013.

That meant that a few of the great LAUSD magnet schools named last time, were not in the running this time.

But not many.

The LA Charters named were: Animo Pat Brown Charter High, California Academy for Liberal Studies, CALS Early College High School, College Ready Academy High #4, College Ready Academy High #6, Gertz-Ressler High School, Marc and Eva Stern Mass High School, New West Charter Middle School, Oscar De La Hoya Animo Charter High and Renaissance Arts Academy.

So what does this mean? That LAUSD sucks? Well, yes, probably, in certain ways. But we knew that already. We are looking to the future here.

(And, to be fair, LAUSD does much right too. . There are those magnets, and some great neighborhood elementary schools.)

Still, the awards configuration suggests that, despite the problems of the LA Unified School District, a new model—or series of models—is emerging.

“It means that the charter school movement is getting lots of traction right now,” Jed Wallace, the head of the California Charter School Association, told me when we chatted about what the awards signified. “It means that a lot of charter schools are figuring out an instructional model that makes sense, and that really includes the community in which they’re located.”

Wallace said that he felt there was far less resistance to charters among LA leadership—people like the mayor and Ray Cortines, the LAUSD sup. “Maybe I’m being optimistic,” he said. “but I think they sense that Los Angeles is being remade in terms of school reform, and that reform is being driven by charters.”

Okay. Maybe. Sort of. Last Thursday, when the Marc & Eva Stern Math and Science School—a state of the art charter—- opened on the campus of Cal State LA , the mad rush of the LA dignitaries was something to behold. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Dick Riordan, Ray Cortines, and State Sup, Jack O’Connell all were there and all gave effusive speeches. (As illustrated in the photo above.)

(NOTE: A Marc & Eva Stern sister school was one of the “distinguished” campuses named by the state.)

As one education policy watcher pal of mine put it after the ribbon cutting and the speeches, “Obama has opened the charter floodgates and everyone is tripping over him/herself to say that charters are great and we need to learn from them.”

Yep. Probably. But that isn’t a bad thing at all.

It’s good.

On Saturday, as promised, I went to have my hideously dirty Escape Hybrid washed by the kids at that new charter high school I wrote about late last week, FreeLA High.

As you remember, FreeLA was opened by a partnership headed by the Youth Justice Coalition. Its raison d’etre is to provide a high school education for kids who have dropped out or been tossed out of other LAUSD schools—and for kids who have had trouble being readmitted to school after they’ve returned from a probation camp or juvenile hall.

Saturday’s car wash was a fundraiser intended to earn money to pay for the school’s first graduation in June.

While my car was being washed, I toured the nearby school campus, which was located in a stucco and brick former office building across the street from where the car scrubbing was taking place. Inside the school building, I met a bunch of the students, including Maritza (below), the girl whom I’d interviewed for the earlier post.

My tour guide was a sixteen-year-old named Gabby who, like Maritza, said she had dropped out of Locke High School, which she described as a chaotic place in which overstressed teachers seemed unaware of their students’ needs and often allowed kids to simply walk out of class rooms and out of campus at will.

At FreeLA high, by contrast, the kids I met seemed to view the school with a sense of ownership. Even on a Saturday afternoon, there were quite a number of students in evidence. Some were there to help with the car wash, of course. Others were in classrooms working at computers. One guy was practicing drums in an upstairs space that had been set up as a music room. Other were simply chatting comfortably with couple of teachers.

In terms of the school site itself, FreeLA high had several unusual features. For instance it had a cinderblock “art room.”

“We have this room because a lot of our students like to write,” said Gabby when she brought me into what appeared to be some kind of large cement storage area, its wall covered with elaborate graffiti. .

“Write?” I asked, confused. The “art room” was a furniture-free space, the walls of which were covered with floor to ceiling graffiti. When we walked in, a couple of guys had just finished skateboarding.

I stared around me, perplexed. Then suddenly, I got it. By “writing” Gabby meant tagging.

In other words, since many of FreeLA’s kids had likely gotten in trouble for tagging in the past, the school wisely gave them a safe place to do it with gusto.

“There’s a lot we’re still trying to figure out,” said Kim McGill, Youth Justice Coalition’s founder and director, when I came to retrieve my newly clean car.

No doubt. But even my brief visit suggested that this atypical little school was also getting a lot exactly right.

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PS: When I asked Maritza if she had been back to Locke High School since the Green Dot takeover and, if so, what she thought of its new incarnation.

She said she hadn’t been back. But that, from what she’d heard, she had some concerns. “But me and Gabby could go over and do a report for you, if you want,” she volunteered. “We’ll write it up and then you can edit it or do whatever.”

Sold, I said. You have an assignment. We talked about some guidelines she and Gabby should use when reporting, and set a deadline.

Last night after the Super Bowl, I talked to Green Dot’s Steve Barr and told him there might be a couple of student reporters taking a critical look at the Locke transformation.

“Great,” he said. “Bring ‘em on! I want to hear what they have to say.”

Me too.

I’ll let you know as soon as I know.

The Rosebowl is on as I type (Go Trojans! Fight on!), so I want to draw your attention to a rather winningly encouraging commercial that will be running at some point during said bowl game.

(Pete Carroll rules! Trojan defense is awsome! Must stop Derrick Williams! In the nicest possible way, of course. Fight on! ….ahem. Sorry.)

The commercial features students from ICEF Public Schools, a South LA charter school group that operates 13 schools serving 3000 of LA’s minority kids. Founded in 1999, ICEF—which stands for Inner City Education Foundation—takes kids from low-performing urban areas, and has an impressive record of academic success.

For instance, in 2007, ICEF graduated its first senior class from the View Park Preparatory Accelerated Charter High School and sent 100% of its graduating class of 71 kids to college—-This in our fair city where the LA-wide public school graduation rate hovers at a dismal 50 percent and only 10 percent of south LA seniors go on to college. Actor Don Cheadle gave the keynote address at the graduation.

According to its statement of purpose, ICEF Public Schools “will transform South Los Angeles into a stable, economically vibrant community by providing first-rate educational opportunities and annually graduating 2,000 high school students.”

In other words, ICEF along with Green Dot and others are working to remake the education possibilities in Los Angeles, inspite of the ongoing blockades thrown up by LAUSD.

After years and years of so many of LA’s children being allowed—to our shame and heartbreak—to slip through the educational cracks, these break-throughs in the charter school world this past year, are a source of much welcomed good news.

The bad news is that the lovely 30-second commercial is funded by Citigroup. In other words, some part of our $326 billion in tax dollars bailout of the self-same Citi-folks was used to buy this high ticket commercial. (A Super Bowl spot costs $3 mil these days. I’m sure a Rose Bowl spot is cheaper, but still…..)

Interestingly, originally the commercial was going to be billed as a “Chairman’s message,” but Citigroup wisely decided to back-out of the limelight and merely let the schools and the kids shine, rightly deducing I suspect, that otherwise the spot would draw exactly the criticism I am leveling.

A better use of bucks than executive bonuses, I suppose. (I notice that on Wednesday, new Citigroup chairman, Vikrim Pandit announced that the companies top executives would be forgoing bonuses this year. Nice of them. A little late, since in 2007, the year in which many of the decisions were made that led Citigroup into this year’s trillion dollar catastrophe, the companies top executive officers earned more that $70 million in compensation.)

Citigroup aside, looking into the faces of these smart, beautiful kids—-who represent all the kids nationwide whom our future rides—-seems like an excellent way to begin 2009. They remind us what is possible—-and what, in the end, really matters.

Happy New Year, everyone!

(7-0 7-7 14-7 24-7 31-7 38-24! Go Trojans. Go Mark Sanchez! Woo-hooo!!!

Also, Go OU, and then let’s take a long hard look at who should be declared the national champions damn-it! Fight on!)

THIS MORNING AND THE WEEKEND PRODUCED a pile of Must Reads. Here are 5 from the list:

1. FRANK RICH TALKS ABOUT BLOGOJEVICH, ACCOUNTABITY AND POLITICAL MORALITY

Yeah, Rod Blagojevich is creepily amusing, writes Rich, but this scandal, while loathsome and deserving of a trip to the slammer, is nothing….comparitively speaking, to a few of the games we’ve seen in the past 8 years.

Here are some clips.

What went down in the Land of Lincoln is just the reductio ad absurdum of an American era where both entitlement and corruption have been the calling cards of power. Blagojevich’s alleged crimes pale next to the larger scandals of Washington and Wall Street. Yet those who promoted and condoned the twin national catastrophes of reckless war in Iraq and reckless gambling in our markets have largely escaped the accountability that now seems to await the Chicago punk nabbed by the United States attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald.

[SNIP]

Bush had arrived in Washington vowing to inaugurate a new, post-Clinton era of “personal responsibility” in which “people are accountable for their actions.” Eight years later he holds himself accountable for nothing. In his recent exit interview with Charles Gibson, he presented himself as a passive witness to disastrous events, the Forrest Gump of his own White House. He wishes “the intelligence had been different” about W.M.D. in Iraq — as if his administration hadn’t hyped and manipulated that intelligence. As for the economic meltdown, he had this to say: “I’m sorry it’s happening, of course.”

2. TIM RUTTEN CALLS FOR A RESCUE OF HOMEBOY INDUSTRIES

On Saturday, Tim Rutten used his column to call, in very strong terms (and using hard numbers), for the wealthy in Los Angeles to step in to rescue Homeboy Industries.

Here are some clips:

Homeboy is one of this too-often-heedless city’s unambiguous municipal treasures — and it’s in trouble. We need to do something about that, and we need to do it now. The problem is simple: The economic catastrophe rolling across our country has dramatically pushed up demand for the kind of help only Homeboy provides. Despite the numbers of young men and women the community employs, and despite the others it has placed with private employers, its lobby is crowded with new applicants every morning. At the same time, the government and the private sources of funding on which Homeboy relies for most of its budget are cutting back as a consequence of the same downturn.

[BIG SNIP]

Here’s the point: We all need to step up and assist Homeboy Industries because it’s the right thing to do, and those who have more to give need to do it now. The rest of us can make contributions by going to the website — www.homeboy-industries.org– or by sending checks to 130 W. Bruno St., Los Angeles, 90012.

As Boyle said this week, “We’re located in the heart of the city, but we represent this city’s heart — a belief that everybody deserves a second chance and a faith that redemption is always possible.”

These are hard times for everybody, but what price can a city put on its heart?

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3. THE COACH IN THE HOOD

The final story on last night’s 60 Minutes profiled USC football coach, Pete Carroll. The segment talked about a lot more than Carroll’s success with Trojan football. The show also showed the coach’s committment to trying to help/stimulateinspire former gang members and gang wanna-be’s to turn their live’s around with his organization, A Better LA.

Carroll was a close friend of gang intervention leader, Bo Taylor, who died last summer, and whom he credits with inspiring him to start reaching out, and ultimately to put his own money into opening A Better LA.

It’s a nice segment and worth watching.

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4. D.C. CHARTERS LEADING REGULAR PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT

As in LA and other American cities, Washington DC charter schools are looking more successful than conventional public schools, according to this morning’s Washington Post.

Students in the District’s charter schools have opened a solid academic lead over those in its traditional public schools, adding momentum to a movement that is recasting public education in the city.

Students in the District’s charter schools have opened a solid academic lead over those in its traditional public schools, adding momentum to a movement that is recasting public education in the city.

[SNIP]

District children in both systems still fall short of national averages on standardized tests. But students in charter schools have been more successful at closing the gap. According to a Washington Post analysis of recent national test results for economically disadvantaged students, D.C. middle-school charters scored 19 points higher than the regular public schools in reading and 20 points higher in math.

On the city’s standardized tests, the passing rate for charter middle schools was 13 percent higher on average.

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5. ONE MURDER, TWO MOTHERS GRIEVE

In the LA Times this morning, Al Martinez writes about what happens for a mother when her child kills someone.
For parents living in high crime communities, the news that there has been a fatal shooting causes residents to pray that the dead won’t be anyone they know. Many also pray that the shooter won’t be someone they know.

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A successful charter school organization named ICEF Public Schools announced an intriguing plan today to expand its existing network of 13 public schools to 35 schools in the next four years, all of them located in South LA. The plan is that, once the 35 schools gear up, the ICEF charters will enroll one in four public school students in South Los Angeles, thus creating an “education corridor” that founder, Michael D. Piscal, hopes will be part of the a part of “economic and social transformation of South Los Angeles.”

To accomplish this, Piscal intends to use a variation on the theme being famously employed by Geoffrey Canada in Harlem Children’s Zone. Canada is working to change the educational outcomes for 8,600 low-income children on 60 New York City blocks, by providing social services for the kids from pre-school through their enrollment in college, giving guidance even at a university level, until the Harlem kids get their college diplomas.

In much this same way, Piscal’s schools will take a child from kindergarten through high school and on to college. The hope is to give lower income South LA kids the same kind of social/educational support that a middle class student would get, thereby producing generations of college graduates rather than the 50 percent dropout rate that is plaguing the area at present.

It will be an important project to monitor.

In the meantime, the Los Angeles Times has more:

“These students . . . are going to come back to the community and become the middle class and the leadership class,” [Piscal] said in an interview. “That’s going to change everything! Where the Crips were born, where crack cocaine was invented and spread throughout the country, we’re going to start spreading something good.”

Sunday, the newspapers and cable networks were full of Palin and Gustav.

Barack and Joe were on 60 Minutes. (A nice, strong joint interview with two men who seem to really like and respect each other.)

John McCain was on NBC Nightly News and, when he was asked about the inexperience of His VP choice, McCain told Brian Williams that “Facts are funny things…..She’s had executive experience as a governor, as mayor, as a city council member and PTA.” (PTA???)

But as we wait for and worry about what will happen when Gustav makes landfall, my pick for the SUNDAY MUST READ is this Op Ed from Sunday’s LA Times.

It’s about the kind of innovative thinking that is necessary—and possible—-if the next president really wants to rescue America’s public education system, rather than just tinker around the edges.

The authors of the Op Ed are an unlikely combo: the Mayor of Newark New Jersey, Cory Booker, a partner in the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, John Doerr, and Ted Mitchell the chief executive of NewSchools Venture Fund and president of the California Board of Education.

I’ve pasted a few ‘graphs below, but be sure to read the whole thing.

Today, the shame of our cities isn’t bubonic plague; it’s ignorance. In our urban areas, only one child in five is proficient in reading. On international tests, we rank behind the Czech Republic and Latvia; our high school graduation rate barely makes the top 20 worldwide. As columnist David Brooks has noted, educational progress has been so slow that “America’s lead over its economic rivals has been entirely forfeited.” Under-education may not end lives the way infectious diseases do, but it just as surely wastes them. For all the hard work of our good teachers, our system is failing to keep pace with the demands of a new century.

[SNIP]

We need a new, results-driven mind-set at the Department of Education that will drive pure educational innovation and “scale up” proven experiments and novel ideas that work. The federal government stands in a unique position to meet these needs.

The evidence for making a national commitment to innovation in educationis compelling. Today, many of the most promising solutions are emerging from entrepreneurial organizations that embrace freedom and accountability. Indeed, such social entrepreneurs represent a growing force. They have started nimble, typically nonprofit organizations that work in partnership with creative mayors and school superintendents.

Entrepreneurial charter schools such as KIPP, Uncommon Schools, Aspire, the Inner-City Education Foundation, the Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools and Green Dot demonstrate what a single-minded focus on excellence can achieve with low-income students. These public schools, open to all students, are dedicated to the idea that college success and wide career choices must be a reality regardless of the ZIP Code of a child’s birth. And they are proving what’s possible, sending students from the poorest neighborhoods to college at rates typical of far more affluent communities.

To call these solutions a drop in the bucket, as some critics do, is to miss the point. The federal government, through the NIH (and other programs such as the National Science Foundation, the Small Business Administration and the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency), has proved that it can multiply innovations in many fields and spread the most successful ones. Yet, historically, the federal government has constrained its investment in education entrepreneurship to comparatively small, isolated programs, limited efforts in a bureaucracy that resists change. To fix this, there are key steps the next president should take.

For the steps….read ON.

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PS: What the HELL is up the Inglwood PD? (Paging Jacqueline Seabrooks.)

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PPS: PALIN VETTING ALERT: You know how Sarah Palin said a big NO to the Bridge From Nowhere? Well, apparently she, uh, didn’t. (She said yes until way late in the game when the Feds declined to fund the extra money needed for the thing, at which point she pulled the plug. And, oh, yeah, she kept the money for it anyway, and used it for other stuff.) The New York Times , Reuters and others have this story too. But we like it from our NBBFs—new best blog friends—at Mudflats.

UPDATE: Mudflats is pushing the Bristol/pregnancy story in a way that is not kind to this teenage girl. So while I’ll continue to check them, for now they’re off the NBBF list.

(Not that I don’t get that it’s a reporting delimma. It is.)

Education watchers were caught off guard when it was announced yesterday that Caprice Young, the former LAUSD board prez turned president of the California Charter Schools Association, was leaving the five-year-old organization that she helped to found to take a job with a global education company called Knowledge Universe.

During the day, Antonio Villaraigosa quickly put out a written statement about Young’s significance:

“From Day One in the LAUSD boardroom, Caprice has understood the need to reinvigorate our public school system with small, independent community schools,” Villaraigosa said, reported the Daily News.

“She leaves a legacy as one of the pioneers of an independent school movement that will fundamentally transform this district.”

(For a fuller run down of what Caprice Young has accomplished in her five years of championing charter schools in California—which grew during her tenure by more than 300 new schools and enrolled more than 100,000 new students—see Howard Blume’s article in this morning’s LA Times.)
Since Caprice has been at the top of the food chain on the inside of the district and on the outside, battling the district in behalf of the So Cal charter movement, I thought that before she moves beyond the LA public school arena altogether, it would be a good time to ask her a few quick questions:

WitnessLA: In the last five years of being CCSA President, was there one most memorable moment?

Caprice Young: Last year during the charter school parent’s march. I was standing on corner of 4th and Broadway downtown, and I saw four thousand charter school parents streaming down 4th street to Beaudry [LAUSD headquarters on Beaudry St.]. They were loud, and they were organized and they were a sea diverse sea of faces.

At that moment, it was really clear to me that it didn’t matter if the power structure embraced charters. The parents embraced them. And parents who have their kids in a charter schools are never going back. They’re not going to allow their kids to be in unsafe school where they’re not getting a high quality education. As I watched them march, I saw the parents weren’t waiting to be given something. They were taking it for themselves. So in many ways, I was irrelevant.

WLA: What or whom are you going to be happiest to leave behind out of the whole LA California education drama?

CY: I’d be lying if I didn’t say I’m glad that I won’t be glad not to have to bang my head against the wall that is LA Unified It’s like poking mercury around in a bowl. Or it’s like Jell-O. You think it’s changed and then it goes back to the same old position.

WLA: As you look at it from the outside, what are some of the bright spots at the district?

CY: Look, of course there are good things going on at LA Unified, but they’re are going on covertly. Like the individual honors program at Reed Middle School. It’s a great program. And they have all these kids on the waiting list. It should be replicated. But frankly it’s a good thing that the central office doesn’t know much about it or they’d find a way to mess it up. I’m almost hesitant to mention it to you for that reason.

WLA: If that’s true, why do you think that happens? Obviously if someone runs for the school board one presumes they have their hearts in the right place….

CY: But, see it’s not about the people. There are good people at the district. It’s about this horrific system that is hurting our kids. And it’s hurting the adults. It takes young idealistic teachers and turns them into cynics.

Look: I was the president of the LA Unified school district and I had more power than anyone in all of public education in Los Angeles. The people who get into those roles think: I’m a smart person, and I’m really going to change things. I’m going to be on the one who fixes it. But then they accept all the chains and shackles when they get in there.

I love Ray Cortines, but But I think he’s making compromises that he shouldn’t continue to make. It doesn’t have to be this screwed up. That’s why a lot of us in public education who have slammed our head against that wall for so long, finally came to the conclusion that we just needed to go out and educate kids.

[NOTE: Cortines is LAUSD’s Superintendent of Instruction, but he is effectively running the district. No one even pretends any more that the actual district Superintendent, Admiral David Brewer, is calling the shots. He isn’t. Someone recently compared him to Queen Elizabeth. He may have the crown, but he doesn’t have the power.)

WLA: Other than Cortines, who are the most interesting characters in the high stakes soap opera that is public education in Los Angeles?

CY: There are a lot of them. When I was on the school board, my husband used to joke that I was on the first reality TV show. It’s sort of rife with interesting characters. I mean look a Julie Korenstein who’s been doing this for 25 years. After 25-years why isn’t there more progress? See, despite her demeanor, Julie’s not unintelligent. I served with the woman for four years. And it was perplexing that she didn’t have more rage that she has about why it hasn’t change. I mean, after all her time there, what does she want her legacy to be?

WLA: Speaking of legacies: What have you left undone?

CY: We’ve gone from people believing that charter schools were just an experiment, to really an understanding that they are a critical part of the public education formula. But it’s still almost impossible for charter schools to get a decent facility. That is truely hideous. Our schools are doing brilliant work in unbelievably unacceptable facility situations. But since LAUSD has been unwilling to comply with the law…. And the courts haven’t yet enforced the law….

WLA: So, other than the facilities issue, if there’s one piece of advice you could give Ray Cortines, what would it be?

CY: Do more of what works. Do less of what doesn’t work. And know the difference..

Can a group of enterprising South LA 15-year-olds (and a couple 16-year-olds) knit together a hidden part of LA history and, in so doing, teach Los Angeles a little more about itself?

That’s what a class-full of 9th graders at Animo Film and Theater Academy are attempting to do. Animo FTA is a charter school located among LAUSD’s most troubled high schools. The history the Animo kids are examining is that of Dodger stadium. But the project is a bit different than what you might think.

The story about how a tight-knit Mexican American community located in the hills of Chavez Ravine came to be yanked apart, and its houses demolished—the land eventually sold for a song to Walter O’Malley—has been immortalized in the form of a stage play by Culture Clash, a Ry Cooder music CD and a PBS special.

But, what few people seem to remember is that when Dodger owner O’Malley came to California in 1957 with the idea of relocating the his then Brooklyn-based ball club to Los Angeles, he originally considered housing the team, not in Chavez Ravine but at Wrigley Field, an art deco style stadium located on 160 acres in South Los Angeles. Wrigley was then the home of the Angels (but a different Angels than our present day Angels). O’Malley purchased both the Angels and their field in order to get a SoCal toe hold. Eventually, however, he decided he preferred the 300 acres of Chavez Ravine.

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Located in South LA a half mile from USC, Animo FTA routinely outperforms other public high schools schools in its area, including LAUSD’s nearest magnet school. (On the last released California Standardized Tests, FTA scored 701, Jefferson High school, 457, Santee High, 486, Manual Arts High, 513, and Orthopedic Medical Magnet 691.) Yet FTA draws from the same student pool as Jefferson and Santee.

FTA was founded in 2004 (and in an earlier incarnation in 1996) by former screen writer, Steve Bachrach, as a school within a school on the campus of troubled Jefferson High School. The idea was that a different teaching model, some creative approaches to classwork, and more personal attention for students, would help kids learn better. In 2005, when FTA’s test scores had jumped 50 points in less than a full year of existence, rather than try to replicate the model, LAUSD administrators instead threatened repeatedly to kill it.

“The way it works in this district,” former School Board Member David Tokofsky told me when I asked about LAUSD’s seemingly illogical behavior toward FTA. “The nail that sticks up is perceived as an inconvenience, and it gets hammered down. If that same nail sticks up in a more provocative way, like Steve Bachrach has, it’s in danger of being yanked out altogether and tossed away.”

After Bachrach grew tired of battling the district for his school, he yanked FTA away from LAUSD and accepted Steve Barr’s offer to bring it under the Green Dot umbrella as a charter.

I first ran across Steve and FTA when I was reporting on the race riots that took place at Jefferson in the spring of 2005 and have been following their progress ever since.

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The students’ Dodgers research was triggered when some other Animo FTA kids ran across the information about O’Malley and Wrigley while researching something unrelated. This, in turn, gave school principal Bachrach an idea that he proposed to some of his 9th graders who were in search of a class project: What if, asked Bachrach, they researched a sort of Tale of Two Los Angeles Neighborhoods and looked at what might have happened if the Dodgers had stayed at Wrigley? How might South LA be different if it was still home to a baseball team? And, what was the role of local and state government—for good and for ill—in influencing and facilitating that decision?

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