SCOTUS REVIEW IS SOUGHT FOR 2 ONLINE FREE SPEECH CASES, ONE INVOLVING STUDENTS AND “DOUCHEBAGS”

(Yes, you’re right, my inner 9-year-old does think it’s funny each time I type the word “douchebag.”)

Ahem…

The Student Press Law Center reports that the lawyers for two cases that involve online communication by students, and First Amendment rights, hope that the US Supremes will agree to hear their cases. Both address similar issues and have the potential to set precedent. Here are the rundowns on the cases, as reported by SPLC:

CASE 1: The Right to Mock in MySpace

“J.S.” was a student at Blue Mountain Middle School in Pennsylvania in 2007 when she was suspended for 10 days after creating a MySpace profile mocking the school principal, James McGonigle. Her parents sued the school district on her behalf for violating her First Amendment rights and their due process rights to discipline their child as they wished.

Both the district court and a three-judge panel of the Third Circuit found in favor of the school district. However, when the full Third Circuit court reheard the case along with an extremely similar one, Layshock v. Hermitage School District, it found in favor of the students in both cases.

CASE 2: The…er….Douchebag Matter

On April 25, a panel of judges from the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals concluded that Connecticut student Avery Doninger’s First Amendment rights were not violated when she was prevented from running for class office, and later prevented from accepting the office she was elected to by write-in ballot, after calling school administrators “douchebags” on her blog in 2007.

The Second Circuit determined that the district had been “objectively reasonable” in their decision to punish her for her blog post. It granted the district immunity from the lawsuit but did not address whether Doninger’s rights were violated.

Doninger attorney John Schoenhorn wrote in an email that he intends to ask the Supreme Court to hear an appeal in this case as well because the conflict between the Second Circuit and Third Circuit’s decisions could create confusion.

Here’s a more detailed account of the Doninger case.

Let us hope that the Supremes take on or both cases as the arguments will be interesting.

LAUSD AND THE NEW HOMEWORK POLICY

The LA Times Howard Blume writes about the Los Angeles Unified School District’s new homework policy, and how it is not a simple wrong/right matter.

Here’s how it opens:

Vanessa Perez was a homework scofflaw. The Marshall High School senior didn’t finish all of it — largely because she worked 24 hours a week at a Subway sandwich shop.

Alvaro Ramirez, a junior at the Santee Education Complex, doesn’t have his own room and his mother baby-sits young children at night. “They’re always there and they’re always loud,” he said, explaining his challenges with homework.

The nation’s second-largest school system has decided to give students like these a break. A new policy decrees that homework can count for only 10% of a student’s grade.

Critics — mostly teachers — worry that the policy will encourage students to slack off assigned work and even reward those who already disregard assignments. And they say it could penalize hardworking students who receive higher marks for effort.

Some educators also object to a one-size-fits-all mandate they said could hamstring teaching or homogenize it. They say, too, that students who do their homework perform significantly better than those who don’t — a view supported by research.

But Los Angeles Unified is pressing forward.….

IS THE LOCKE TAKEOVER BY GREEN DOT WORKING? A REPORT CARD

It’s been three years since Green Dot Charter Schools fought for and won the right to take over and try to transform LAUSD’s desperately failing Locke High School. So how is the grand experiment doing?

An LA Times editorial says the progress is not exactly dramatic, yet it is slow, steady and in small increments.

That’s what I’ve heard too. In my experience, however, some miracles occur, not in a blinding flash of light, but in slow motion. Yet they are miracles nonetheless. Maybe the changes at Locke could be said to fall in that category.

Let us hope so.

The editorial is a good one. Here’s a clip. But read it all.

How did Green Dot do at stemming the tide of students who disappear from campus into lives usually plagued by high unemployment and low wages? Solidly better, but not the quick and extraordinary transformation everyone had hoped for. Not yet, anyway.

Charter schools are not the ultimate solution to bad public schools; rather, the solution lies in improving public schools so that they have adequate resources, good teachers and a stimulating curriculum. Like many charter operators, Green Dot has had financial help from outside foundations, help that isn’t available to most public schools.

Still, well-run charter schools have played a valuable role in pressuring public schools to improve, and they can be a lifeline to students who are sinking in crummy neighborhood schools or, in many cases, leaving school far too soon. In the case of Locke, the switch appears to be working, albeit more slowly and haltingly than Green Dot expected.

The charter operator deserves praise for its massive and earnest effort at Locke. It was the first charter school in Los Angeles to accept all of the students within its attendance boundaries, just as public schools do, rather than restricting enrollment and accepting students through a lottery. Students who choose their charter schools are motivated to follow the rules and achieve; public schools take all comers. The Locke takeover served as the model for L.A. Unified’s Public School Choice initiative, in which new schools and some failing schools were turned over to outside groups that filed the most promising applications. Some of those were groups of teachers, others were charter schools. All had to follow Green Dot’s example and admit all students within their enrollment boundaries.

BILL WANTS TO ABOLISHED THE DEATH PENALTY IN CALIFORNIA

Don Thompson of the AP has the story. Here’s how it opens:

A state lawmaker on Monday introduced a bill seeking a public vote on whether California should abolish capital punishment and convert death sentences to life in prison, citing a study that said most condemned inmates die of suicide or old age despite billions in taxpayer costs.

Democratic Sen. Loni Hancock, of Berkeley, said the state can no longer afford the cost of trying capital cases, defending them through a lengthy appeals process and housing inmates in the nation’s most populous death row.

She cited a study prepared by Judge Arthur L. Alarcon of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Loyola Law School professor Paula M. Mitchell that calls the capital punishment system “a multibillion-dollar fraud on California taxpayers.”

Their analysis, to be published next month, estimates California has spent more than $4 billion on capital punishment since the death penalty was reinstated in 1978. In that time, California has executed just 13 inmates, which works out to $308 million per execution.

“Capital punishment is an expensive failure and an example of the dysfunction of our prisons,” Hancock said in a statement. “California’s death row is the largest and most costly in the United States. It is not helping to protect our state; it is helping to bankrupt us.”

Yeah. What she said.

NBC San Diego also has a report on the bill.

COMPUTER ERRORS MAY HAVE DESIGNATED POTENTIALLY DANGEROUS PAROLEES FOR NON-REVOCABLE PAROLE, SAYS CALIFORNIA INSPECTOR GENERAL

Dear CDCR,

If the LA Times’ Jack Dolan has his story right, you’ve done a lousy job of sorting out who can be paroled without supervision and who needs high control parole supervision. If true, it means you’ve compromised public safety and betrayed those of us who have pushed hard for much needed parole reform.

And “Ooops, our computer programs need a little work,” is not an adequate response.

Please advise. Immediately.

FORMER PROSECUTOR SAYS “EVERY CHILD DESERVES A SECOND CHANCE”

More and more people who are veterans of many sides of the justice system are saying that we should reconsider putting kids away for life without the possibility of parole—LWOP kids, they call them.

A recent voice on the matter if Anthony Barkow whose essay on the topic appeared this week’s Huffington Post.

Barkow was a decorated federal prosecutor in the US Attorney’s office for 12 years before he became the Executive Director of the Center on the Administration of Criminal Law at NYU School of Law.

Here is a clip from his essay:

I was a prosecutor for 12 years. During that time, I prosecuted a wide variety of crimes, ranging from international terrorism to securities fraud, from domestic violence and sexual abuse to homicide. I prosecuted cases in which offenders received very substantial sentences. I am proud of my work as a prosecutor and I have no doubt that criminal punishment is critical to keeping communities safe.

One of the defendants I prosecuted committed murder when he was 17-years-old. He gunned down his victim and shot him 17 times in cold blood in broad daylight in the middle of a residential street. The same defendant had committed another murder before he turned 18. For these crimes, he was sentenced to consecutive terms of years that were so long as to be tantamount to life imprisonment, and he will never be released. And, in that case, that was a just result.

But at the same time, there are other youthful defendants who have been sentenced to unjust sentences of life without the opportunity for parole. For example, a 15-year-old boy in Chicago, “Peter A,” on instructions from his older brother, helped steal a van so that his brother could drive to the home of two individuals who stole drugs and money from the brother’s apartment. Peter stayed in the van while two others went inside. While Peter waited in the van, one of the men who had gone into the home shot and killed two people. Peter was sentenced to life without parole, even though the judge said at sentencing that he wished he could impose a lower sentence and described Peter as “a bright lad” with “rehabilitative potential.” But the sentence was mandatory and the judge had no discretion or choice to sentence Peter otherwise. Peter is now 29 and has spent nearly half of his life in prison. During that time, he has obtained his G.E.D. and completed a correspondence paralegal course. He has an exemplary record in prison, receiving a disciplinary ticket only once in the past six years (for possessing an extra pillow and extra cereal in his cell). But no matter how much Peter changes in prison, he will serve the rest of his life in prison without having even the possibility of asking to be released, much less getting out.

That is the critical fact to keep in mind about those seeking to end life without parole for juveniles. No one is arguing that any particular individual should be let out of prison. Ending juvenile life without parole merely leaves open the possibility that a child who commits a crime can petition for release later in life, if he can demonstrate that he is remorseful, has rehabilitated, and will not reoffend. Parole authorities can and should be trusted to make informed, reasoned decisions regarding the release and continued incarceration of inmates petitioning for parole…..

Read the rest.

STRAY DOGS, SAINTS AND SAVIORS: FIGHTING FOR THE SOUL OF AMERICA’S TOUGHEST HIGH SCHOOL

Madeleine Brand interviews ,education wonk and commentator Alexander Russo, about his new book, Stay Dogs, Saints and Saviors: Fighting for the Soul of America’s Toughest High School chronicles the transformation of very troubled Locke High School—what has been accomplished and what remains to be done.
I’ve been looking forward to the book’s release for months, and will have more it once I’ve finished reading. In the meantime, listen to the interview. Russo’s a smart guy and has a bracingly clear-eyed view of why the “Locke experiment,” as he calls it, is important.

WHY THE CRENSHAW-TO-LAX TRAIN NEEDS TO STOP IN LEIMERT PARK

WLA doesn’t usually cover transportation issues but, seriously, this is a no brainer. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority Board votes on this issue today. Let’s hope they understand how important a station at historic and iconic Leimert Park station is, not just to South LA, but to the rest of the city.

Supervisor Mark Ridley Thomas has an op ed in Thursday’s LA Times explaining very clearly why there can be only one possible answer to the Leimert Park station question.

Metro board, please get this one right.

GREEN DOT CHARTER SCHOOLS’ FOUNDER, STEVE BARR, GOES A NEW DIRECTION

I’m not sure why no LA media seem to have reported on this story since Barr has been such a significant figure in LA’s education reform movement, but….in any case, this story from the NY Times has the basics on Barr’s parting of the ways with Green Dot. He’d stepped down as head of Green Dot a couple of years ago, but had remained on the board of directors. But now, it seems, the divorce is complete.

It sounds like it would be a good time for WLA to check in with Steve and find out more. But until then, here are some clips from the NY Times article.

On Friday, Mr. Barr and Shane Martin, the college dean who succeeded him as chairman of the Green Dot board in 2009, issued a joint statement announcing that Mr. Barr would no longer use the Green Dot name as he sought to open charter schools in New York and elsewhere.

The Green Dot organization will continue, under the leaders who have replaced Mr. Barr, to run its network of 16 charter schools in Los Angeles.

[SNIP]

Alexander Russo, the author of a coming book on the efforts of Mr. Barr and Green Dot to overhaul the troubled Locke High School in Los Angeles, said, “Steve is a hard-charging visionary, as many founders are, and as Green Dot got bigger, people struggled to find an appropriate place for him in the organization.”

[SNIP]

For more than a year, Mr. Barr has been in discussions with school and union officials in several cities, exploring ways of extending his vision of overhauling schools nationwide.

He has been operating as Green Dot America, and recruited a six-member board for that organization that includes two other directors who also sit on Green Dot’s board: Susan Estrich, the prominent Los Angeles lawyer, and Jeff Shell, the president of programming for Comcast.

On Friday, Green Dot America changed its name to Future is Now Schools. [Not the most felicitous of names, IMHO, especially with its acronym of "FINS." But maybe it'll grown on me.] Mr. Barr said the name was inspired by President Obama’s call in the State of the Union address to “win the future” by improving American education.

In an interview, Mr. Barr said that the use of the Green Dot name had become confusing as he sought to build the new organization, which he said would explore using a lot of technology in classrooms to augment traditional instruction in what he called a “hybrid model.”

Read more here.

As always, it will be intriguing to track what becomes of Barr’s newest venture.

SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENTS ARE PRESSING REPUBS HARD ON A JUNE TAX VOTE

Let’s hope that it works. The Fresno Bee has the story.

Here’s a clip:

With time running out for a budget deal, a group of California school superintendents is pressing for a tax vote, saying that the state’s schools will see debilitating cuts if tax extensions are not approved in June.

The superintendents told reporters Monday at the Capitol that they have urged Republican lawmakers to accept Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed tax election, a big part of his budget plan.

If the measure fails, Fresno Unified School District Superintendent Michael Hanson said, “We will spend the ‘11-’12 school year decimating, devastating and tearing down programs … across this entire state.”

THE LA TIMES HAS A RUNDOWN ON VALUE ADDED TEACHER RATINGS STRUGGLES ACROSS THE NATION AS LAUSD GEARS UP

I’d still like to see a far more robust conversation about the advantages and pitfalls of the various approaches but Teresa Watanabe moved the ball down the field at least a bit, which is good.

It was slightly curious that the LA Times part in the controversy was so undermentioned. On the other hand, maybe that was a good thing as otherwise the Times part in the kerfuffle might have intentionally high-jacked the article.

(photo by Kris Krug, Flickr)

There is a strong push for change in education policy in America. As with the nation, school reform in California is at its beginning stages and, as a consequence, it is messy. In LA, the reformers themselves have fractured into warring camps, with one camp frequently accusing members of another of everything from personal profiteering to belittling and disempowering the lower-income parents they claim to champion.

The issue of charter schools one of the biggest areas of contention. Some reformers love the possibilities that the charter movement suggests, others decry it as the privatization of public schools.

After reporting on and observing education reform in LA since 2005, I’ve drawn a few personal conclusions about some of the issues and about which of the various players are worth taking seriously. But these are, as I said, personal conclusions.

Kevin Grant at Neon Tommy has written a story about some of the squabbling that is going on between various progressive factions and he lays out the issues informatively and evenhandedly, allowing the reader to draw his or her own conclusions.

Kevin’s piece is just a beginning, a glimpse really,as education reform in LA alone is a topic that could easily be covered at book length.

But it is a good beginning. Below you’ll find the opening to Kevin’s story. I urge you to read the whole thing.

On his first day as a member of the California Board of Education, Ben Austin voted against a proposed charter school at Piru Elementary in Ventura County.

“I think most outside observers would consider me an easy vote in favor of a charter school,” said Austin, the executive director of LA-based school reform group Parent Revolution, after his first day in Sacramento. “But there’s nothing inherently good about a charter.”

A group of teachers at the school had petitioned to take Piru out of the control of the Fillmore Unified School District. They contended that parents and teachers could run the school more effectively than the district could. However, the board rejected the request by a 6-2 vote.

Speaking from his hotel room May 5 after what he described as a 12-hour first day, Austin said he voted against the charter proposal because the district was already making steady progress improving student performance. He wanted to make it clear that the charter model is not desirable in every case.

“We don’t support all charters,” Austin said. “It doesn’t help to have underperforming charter schools representing the charter movement.”

Austin’s star has been rising as the head of Parent Revolution, a non-profit started by charter school operator Green Dot Public Schools in 2006 as “a coalition of parents who tired of sending our kids to broken schools.”

In Los Angeles and across California, the charter school model has been promoted by leaders ranging from Schwarzenegger to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to Senator Gloria Romero.

But as Green Dot prepares to close one of its 19 Los Angeles schools, Animo Justice High School, after just four years in operation, Parent Revolution is coming under fire for failing to support parents and students at the south LA school.

At the same time, the aggressive growth of Green Dot, which made its name working to overhaul the underperforming Jefferson High School and Locke High School, appears to be slowing.

Given that Education Secretary Arne Duncan was reported to have told Green Dot’s founder Steve Bar that he had apparently “cracked the code” for reforming education, the organization’s challenges may be a matter of national significance.

You’ll find the rest here.

PS: By the way, Kevin Grant is one of the 13 grad students whom I had the privilege of teaching this past semester at Annenberg, and this story is a version of his final paper for the class. You’ll be happy to know that right this minute there are 12 other wonderfully interesting final papers, each on different topics, in my class “assignments” file. With any luck, some of those will be posted on Neon Tommy soon too.

Ben Austin is the executive director of an LA-based organization known as the Parent Revolution, which has been extremely active in lobbying for various kinds of education reforms at an LA and a statewide level. In doing so, the group has often found itself on the opposite side of the influence-wielding push-pull from the various teachers’ unions—UTLA and CTA. As a consequence, Austin is either revered or despised, depending upon who’s doing the talking. Yet, whatever one thinks of Ben Austin and his organization, he has emerged as a recent big player in the world of school reform—both locally and nationally—alongside more recognizable stars in that firmament, like Green Dot’s founder Steve Barr .

Neon Tommy’s Jessica Flores (who also happens to be my smart student), took a look at how Austin’s Revolution is evolving with the passage of the so called Trigger Law.

(This week my USC class has been reporting on education, and they have found a number of LA ed stories that are under-reported, this among them.)

Here are some clips from Jessica’s story:

In a modest office with mostly bare walls and a few desks in downtown Los Angeles, Parent Union organizer Shirley Ford spends her time these days strategizing for, what she calls, a revolution.

“I’m making a list of people that I’m going to sit down with now that the Parent Trigger Law is passed, because that gives us leverage,” says Ford.

A new state law gives wings to a promise the Los Angeles Parents Union first made early last year, when it was headed by Green Dot, its mission to get parents to sign on to transform poorly performing Los Angeles schools to charters. They call the movement the Parent Revolution and promise parents to deliver new charter schools within three years if 51 percent of parents sign up for reforms. But no laws held-up their pledge, which was more hope than certainty.

“We were building the airplane while it was in the air. We didn’t exactly know how we were going to back it up,” said Ben Austin, the executive director of the L.A. Parent’s Union.

Now they do know. After the Parent Revolution aggressively campaigned for the trigger law, the state passed it earlier this year. For the first time, parents have the codified right to demand changes in failing schools. If a majority of parents organize to reform consistently failing schools, they can call on officials to take one of three steps: transform the school to a charter, fire the principal and half the staff or close the school altogether.

The law is changing how the Parent Revolution is positioning itself in the charter school movement. The Parent’s Union is saying they aren’t working for Green Dot or Green Dot’s agenda anymore. But the law is also fueling fire between the organization and other players in the education field who say the Parent Revolution simply pushes a charter school agenda, which is not necessarily better for students.

“The parent trigger assumes charters are the answers and they are not,” says UTLA Vice President Gregg Solkovits. He underscored studies that show charters have struggled to serve disabled and ESL students.

But Austin points to the new law as proof that other solutions are on the table and to show his organization will advocate for whatever parents deem necessary.

“The idea of the parent revolution is to say F-U, that every single thing about our school is going to be about kids. Otherwise, I’m sorry, we are going to take our kids and go elsewhere,” said Austin.

Read the rest here.

AND WHILE YOU’RE AT IT, READ ABOUT THE RESCUE OF THE WATTS TOWER ARTS CENTER FROM PRIVATIZATION

Also, on Neon Tommy, this story by LeTania Kirkland tells about community efforts to rescue the iconic Watts Tower arts center from budget-force privatization, and its recent—even if temporary—success.

22 LAUSD SCHOOLS GIVEN TO LA TEACHERS TO RUN—HIGH PROFILE CHARTERS COME UP EMPTY

At LAUSD school board meeting Tuesday In a large win for UTLA, the teachers’ union, 22 schools were handed off to the districts’ teachers to reorganize. That was 22 out of the 30 that were that were up for grabs as part of the controversial school choice plan. Three of the 30 were given to the mayor’s group to reorganize and another three were given to charters, with one last school given to some kind of partnership between teachers and charters and—I don’t remember who else..

And a most perplexing decision, three charter school operators were yanked completely out of the mix: the Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools and ICEF Public School—and Green Dot (which only bid for one school). In other words, the charter companies that are best known for their success in running schools in Los Angeles County.

“We missed an opportunity to make bold change today,” the Daily News reported that school board member Yolie Flores said grimly. Flores, who was the one who authored the district’s School Choice plan, was not a happy camper. “Clearly, there is a line of board members that are still beholden to unions. I am beholden to children.”

Howard Blume at the LA Times has the best account of what was evidently a very wild, very woolly day.

Hey, we all hope for the best.

Photo by Brian Vander Brug for the LA Times

CORRECTIONS VOTE DELAYED

It was hoped—foolishly, as it turns out-–that the California state assembly, after making a stupid and spineless number of compromises on the corrections reform package, that the thing could be slammed through to a vote so that it could take affect and we could stop hemorrhaging millions of $$ unnecessarily on a daily basis. The vote has been postponed until….well, until they can agree.

The San Francisco Chronicle was withering in its assessment of the Assembly’s paralysis.

And here’s what the Ventura County Star reported on the issue:

Observers said the paralysis should have been expected, because crime-and-punishment issues have produced political gridlock for decades.

“There’s been a 40-year trend wherein Democrats have been demonized as soft on crime and Republicans have painted themselves into a corner of never being able to be anything but hyper-tough on crime,” said Tim Hodson, executive director of the Center for California Studies at CSU Sacramento.

“Of the 80 members of the Assembly, I suspect there are at least 78 who understand the necessity of cutting from the corrections budget, but I don’t know if there are 41 who are willing to vote for it.”

Yeah, that about sums things up.

(cough) Constitutional convention. (cough)

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The so-called School Choice plan introduced by LAUSD board member, Yoli Flores Aguilar,is scheduled to be voted up or down on Tuesday at the school board meeting. The plan would allow nonprofit entities, private companies and charter schools to compete with LAUSD and submit proposals to run the 50 new district schools scheduled to open in the next three years.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is strongly in favor of the plan, as is the LA Times. The teachers union, UTLA, and other related unions are dead set against it. (You can read their reasoning in great detail at the UTLA website.) Union leadership has urged their members to show up in force at the meeting tomorrow.

Those supporting the plan are also planning to arrive in droves. (I have received two messages informing me of pre-meeting rallies, one from the Charter Schools Association, and another from the Green Dot-associated, Parent Revolution that is combining with Families That Can. The pro-Flores Aguilar plan rallies begin at noon.

UTLA wants the faithful to arrive at 8 a.m. in order to pack the room before it is packed by others.

The LAUSD board meeting is set to begin at 1 p.m. It should be quite a wild ride of an afternoon.

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IN OTHER SOCIAL JUSTICE NEWS.…The LA times has an interesting editorial about the principles called up by the the Troy Anthony Davis case and the right to prove one’s innocence.

State test scores assessing California’s schools came out Monday and among the stories to be told out of the new round of scorings, is the fact recently transformed Locke High school.

But, as the LA Times points out in a Wednesday editorial, not necessarily all of the important indicators that a school is becoming healthier, are to be found in standardized test scores.

Here’s some back story on the Locke/Green Dot transformation.

And here’s a clip of the LAT piece:

The state test results released Tuesday for Locke High School weren’t the sort of thing its new operator, Green Dot Public Schools, is accustomed to seeing: Not a single student scored as proficient in geometry, for example, and only a few percent tested at the next level down, basic.

By and large, students scored no better than they had under the Los Angeles Unified School District. But Locke is a different kind of charter school, and in its first year it successfully changed other, previously dismal numbers. Truancy was down. Crime and class-cutting were down. The numbers of students staying in school and taking the tests were up dramatically. Those suggest a changed culture at Locke and are the most important indicators of progress.

As this page has noted, Green Dot took on a much bigger challenge with this Watts high school than it had with its other schools. Charter schools typically start small, accept only as many students as they have ample room and staff for, and draw more motivated parents and students from a broad geographical area. Most public schools operating under those conditions would get higher scores too. But by enrolling all the students within its attendance boundaries — including the perpetual truants, gangbangers and likely dropouts along with the honors students — Locke accepted the same challenges faced by L.A.’s more troubled public schools.

Green Dot could have made itself look good by letting the potential dropouts go. After years of cutting classes at the old Locke, they were unlikely to score well on the state’s standardized tests. Instead, Locke tested 38% more students this year than last. That means a lot more students were still in school in late spring, when the state tests are administered.

Reducing the dropout rate is the single most important priority for L.A. schools — and it’s worth noting that the district has made gains in that area while modestly raising test scores. It will take a few years to see whether there is a pattern here, but there’s reason to feel encouraged.

Yep.

One more story about the Locke/Green Dot transformation—-this time on Wednesday’s Nightline.

“I don’t think parents have ever been welcomed to this school before,” said Locke High School’s teacher turned assistant principle, Zeus Cubias, just before the Green Dot transformation began, his voice breaking with emotion. “It’s like — almost like a combination of wanting to prove people wrong. It’s like, I’m going to show you that everything you said about this place is not true. And for the first time I think we’re going to do that.”

In the past, Locke had lost as many as 75 percent of its freshman class by graduation.

In May of 2008, before Green Dot took over, there was a massive riot on Locke’s campus that involved around 600 kids.

It didn’t get much worse than this school.

Nightline followed Locke during its first nine months under Green Dot’s direction as a high school transformation unlike any other in the nation was attempted.

In truth, while good, the Nightline story isn’t all that comprehensive. KCET’s SoCal Connected is doing it better. But this report is still very much worth watching.

Green Dot has not magically vaporized the problems of the neighborhood around it. Last April a Green Dot student was shot and wounded in front of the school as other students were arriving. But there are signs that the changes on campus are precipitating changes in the lives of the kids attending, so that even when difficulties occur—and they do occur—the students are better able to cope.

Whatever it’s imperfections (and nothing this new and challenging can be without a misstep or two), the Locke transformation is one of the most important public education stories in the U.S.—arguably the most important story— and it is happening in our collective backyard. Thus it is heartening to pay attention.

The full story has yet to be reported. That will take a year or three. But Nightline has contributed one more chapter .

If you missed it on air, you can read their report here.

By the way, here is another Green Dot story written by the LA Times Howard Blume this past June. I was out of town with my Bennington sojourn when it appeared so missed it. But it’s quite good, so worth a read now if you are so inclined.

(NOTE 1: Excuse the link to it on the Green Dot site. With the redesign, the LAT archives seem to have…..issues.)

(NOTE 2: It is no secret that I am a fan of this project. So a big thank you to my former student, Mat Mendez, for flagging the Nightline story.)

KCET’s Magazine show, SoCal Connected wanted to do a portrait of the transformation of Locke High School—to see whether or not the Green Dot takeover was really benefiting the Locke students.

But rather than trying to grapple with assessing the whole school, they decided to tell the larger story through the lens of the individual stories of three kids: Joanna, Damon and Bryan, all interesting kids, but also all teenagers who have each been through serious traumas.

The first chapter of the story ran on December 4. (And that segment just won the regional Edward R. Murrow Award for best news documentary.)

The second chapter is running tonight at 7 p.m.

I’ve seen a preview of much of tonight’s episode and really recommend watching. It’s a terrific show—filled with drama and emotion.

Here are notes from the first episode that ran in December.

A month before the filming, Joanna’s brother was shot to death and it sent her into a tailspin.

Bryan is a music talent who lives in a one bedroom place with his father and sister. Bryan sleeps on the couch. His sister sleeps on the floor. His dad is a single father. Sometimes they don’t have money for food, Bryan says.

One of Bryan’s source of pain is the fact that his mother ran out on the family. The Locke music teacher talks about how sometimes Bryan is so distraught that sometimes he doesn’t come to school.

When asked what he wants for his future, he says, “My dream would be to have a decent life. Just a decent life.”

Damon, a tall good lucking, basket ball player, also lost a parent, but in his case, his mother died when he was fourteen. He moved in with his grandmother and stopped caring about school. But now all that is starting to change at Locke.

PS: According to the So Cal producers, viewers had such strong reactions to the first episode that some of them reached out to help the three kids. One viewer donated an electric keyboard to Bryan Ordaz, the musical kid who lost his mom. And producer Scott Budnick offered internships to the three at Warner Bros.
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PPS: While we’re on the subject of local education, LAUSD Sup Ray Cortines and teachers union president A.J. Duffy are fighting about the 160 teachers in the district who, as it turns out, have been getting paid not to work while their fitness to teach is determined.

Details here and here.