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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The US News and World Report has announced their 2009 list of America’s 100 best high schools.

In the article, which may be found here, the magazine tells how—together with their project partner School Matters— they evaluated a total of 21,069 public high schools , out of which 1,925 were recognized for considerably outperforming their state’s standards. In that group, there were 604 schools that also were “found to be doing an excellent job of preparing students for college-level coursework.” Then out of the 604, USN found 100 that ” performed the best in our three-step America’s Best High Schools analysis.”

Two of Green Dot’s charter high schools were in that top 100.

Oscar De La Hoya Animo Charter High was 53rd on the list.

And Animo Inglewood Charter High School was 94th.

I know I natter on a lot about Green Dot on this site. And, look: I don’t think they’re perfect by a long shot. They’ve got a good model, but in some of the newer schools there are ups and downs as they continue to refine their stroke, so to speak.

But they’re doing an awful lot right, as this ranking suggests. And they’re doing it in areas of town where students have been chronically underserved to the point of what often constituted grinding neglect.

Oscar de la Hoya, which was originally located in Boyle Heights, opened its doors to kids who’d been failing in other East LA Schools. At De La Hoya, they began to thrive. (I watched it happen with a couple of kids I knew well, who had crashed and burned at their local public school, and then first began to feel capable at De La Hoya.)

So when, one wonders, are Green Dot’s critics (cough–teachers union—cough) going to decide to do all they can to replicate the best aspects of these school’s successes—- rather than peevishly opposing them?

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PS: While we’re on the subject, here is a video of the three Locke student’s self-taped reactions to the documentary ion the Green Dot charter conversion of Locke High School in which they were profiled.

Last night on KCET’s new magazine show, SoCal Connected, ran a half hour special on the Green Dot charter converstion at Locke High. It was excellent. You can watch it here.

Although the SoCal Connected people interviewed plenty of adults, they chose to focus on three different kids, each of whom were very much on the edge when the new, revamped school opened.

There names are Joanna, Damon and Bryan.

Each kid has been through serious trauma—as is true with a lot of kids in these kinds of chronically low-scoring schools. A month before the filming, Joanna’s brother was shot to death in a gang-related murder. She found him on the pavement. He died in her arms.

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. He’s 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.

The show intends to check back in with all three kids as the year progresses, to see how they are doing, and through their eyes, how Locke is doing.

In the meantime, each kid talks about his or her life, and how the school feels so much different now that the new Green Dot Sheriff is in town— like how even the bathrooms are finally clean.

“There used to be tagging all up and down the hallway,” says Joanna, “In the restroom, even the place that you would sit down, the toilet seat would have tagging. But now you look and it’s all clean. You actually see the walls are… white.”

“And there used to be two or three fights a week, ” says Damon. Not any more. Damon admits he used to ditch two or three days a week, he said. “But now you can’t ditch,” he says. And he likes it, he says.

“When he graduates,” says Damon’s grandmother of her newly hopeful grandson, “I’m going to find me some bells and put ‘em on my shoes, so I can stomp and jump for joy and just rattle the bells. Because I will be one happy grandmother to see her grandson graduate.

There’s much, much more.

The thing that is both horrifying and remarkable is how many years we have somehow been content to watch kids like these fall through the cracks and fail. Just drown. And, while success is far from guaranteed for any of the three, all three seem to feel at the new Locke they have a real chance.

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“We have to undo ten years of neglect,” said Steve Barr on Larry Mantle’s show on KPCC yesterday. “We have kids at Locke who came in and were rreading at fourth grade level. Now we do an individual lesson plan for every kids. We have seniors at Locke who don’t even have one credit. They’ve just been floating around there.”

Not anymore.

“Parents are pulling their kids out of charter schools and bringing them back to Locke,” he said.

So, why is it again these same principles haven’t been put into place at others schools?

Really. Why?

Yeah, yeah, I know. Last night was the Grammys.

But, more importantly, it was also the night of the PEN USA Literary Awards, an event when writers and editors from all over Southern California show up at the Beverly Hills Hotel wearing slightly rumpled dress-up clothes and looking deeply startled to be away from their computers.

(I include myself among the rumpled and startled. And, in truth, most people looked quite snazzy; it was more of a metaphorical rumpledness. I did, however, talk to two different—very stellar—writer friends who confessed that they had each changed clothes in the car. It’s not that we don’t care about such sartorial matters, it’s just that we have other things on our minds.)

As is usual, a pile of awards were given to a bunch of fabulously talented and deserving people (whom you can find listed here). And lots of literary types got up and said inspiring and articulate things.

But there were two moments in the night that stood out for me.

THE FIRST MOMENT was when PEN’s International Freedom to Write Award. was given to U Win Tin, the 79-year-old Burmese journalist/poet who has been imprisoned for 19 years for his writing. He was finally released 42 days ago.

U Win Tin was jailed by the military junta in Myanmar (which, as you’ll remember, is what Burma is now called) simply for his peaceful opposition to the generals. It seems he had the bad sense to write about the need for human rights and freedom of expression, and to work (legally) for the country’s other main political party, the National League for Democracy (NLD) The NLD, incidently, won 82% of seats in general elections in 1990. (The generals didn’t like the election results so started locking people up.) U Win Tin was Myanmar’s longest serving prisoner of conscience

THE SECOND MOMENT was less dramatic, but in some ways more satisfying. It occurred when my friend Jesse Katz won PEN’s 2008 Literary Journalism award for his article for LA Magazine about the Jordan High School academic decathlon team.

The story, titled “The Test of Their Lives,” is not about a Cinderella team from the inner city who wins the local competition against impossible odds. The usual suspects won the LAUSD championship that year—namely El Camino High School in the West San Fernando Valley. And not only did El Camino win the LAUSD trophy. They won the state championship and then went on to win the national championship—as they have many other years. (When neighboring Taft High School isn’t winning it.)

In other words, for the Crenshaw Aca Deca team, it’s like trying to get fired-up to play your heart out at college basketball, all the while knowing that the Lakers are in your regional league.

Jesse spent six months shadowing the team and wrote a terrific piece about the Crenshaw kids who, with none of the advantages of the El Camino and Taft teams, competed with great heart and intelligence. They didn’t win. But they excelled. They shone. They held their own.

Last night Jesse brought one of he decathlon team members with him to the dinner, a tall, good-looking kid named Lance Mossett who was one of the main characters in the article When Jesse got up to accept the award, he introduced Lance to the crowd. It seems that Lance, who was one of the junior Aca Deca team members when Jesse was writing about the group, is now the team captain. He is also in the midst of applying for colleges.

“And Lance,” Jessie said into the mic, but staring at the kid, “I understand this award comes with a check……which I’ll sign over to you as soon as you get a letter of acceptance from college.”

The room exploded with applause.

The check is for a $1000 —-not a fortune in today’s world of high priced tuition, even for state schools. But, while a generous gesture, it wasn’t really about the money. It was about expressing pride and faith in a great kid.

I spoke to Lance during the dinner, at which time (as you’ll see above) he flashed his trillion-dollar grin, and said he was applying to Pitzer and Lewis and Clark colleges. Judging by what I saw last night, and what I know about Lance from Jesse’s article, any college would be foolish not to take this guy.

Tomorrow we can go back to talking about the usual sobering news stories. Today, however, I figure we can all take a breath and simply bask in last night’s good news.

State Senator Gloria Romero has been the best and smartest lawmaker on criminal justice issues, but she will be termed out in 2010.

(See, now this is why term limits drive us crazy.)

She is, however, going to run for California State Superintendant of Public Instruction in 2010 and, yesterday, she took a big step toward that goal when she was named chair of the influential Senate Education Committee.

Gloria, if you’ll remember, was the first woman Senate Majority Leader in California history. But she decided to step down as Majority Leader on November 30, in anticipation of being named the Education Committee chair.

Blocked at every turn by law-and-order troglodytes when she attempted to push much-needed criminal justice reform, Romero decided to stop banging her head against that particular brick wall and, instead, “spend remainder of her term in the State Senate to focus on making significant reforms to California’s education system.”

(The “troglodytes” part of Romero’s decision is my thought, not hers, but someone who has been close to Romero in her criminal justice endeavors, told me she was just plain fed up with the irrational resistance she got at every turn.)

“Education is the civil rights issue of our time,” said Romero. “California will not be able to lead our nation and compete in the 21st Century global economy unless we close the achievement gap and extend educational access to all students.

She looks forward, she said, to helping the Governor “…address the state’s current fiscal challenges and create an education system that will allow all California students to learn and succeed.”

May it be so.

Those of us who teach journalism at USC , if we checked our email last night, found the following message from Dean Ernest Wilson, the new-ish head of the Annenberg School of Communication at USC.

As you may already know, I have been appointed to the team advising President-Elect Barack Obama as he assembles his new administration. As this is an outstanding opportunity to help shape future public policy in communication, media and technology, I am delighted to serve our country in this capacity.

I will be wearing several hats during the presidential transition. I will be leading a team reviewing America’s international broadcasting services, including the Voice of America and the Broadcasting Board of Governors, and I will advise the transition team working with the U.S. Department of State on public diplomacy issues.

Effective Friday, December 5, I will take an official leave of absence from my position as dean of the USC Annenberg School until the end of the calendar year in order to serve on the Presidential Transition Team as a private citizen.

Dean Ernie is a good guy, and a smart guy. So…..what do we think? We think, Hey, Cool! This is good.

In today’s LA Times, Howard Blume and Jason Song outline some of the pros and cons regarding David Brewer continuing on as superintendant of the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The school board meets in private today to talk about whether Brewer should stay or go.

I can save everyone the trouble and answer the question right here and right now. Here it is: GO. Please.

Brewer’s a nice guy but entirely overmatched. And LAUSD can’t afford this kind of lack of leadership right now. Or ever, for that matter.

Three months into the Locke/Green Dot charter transformation, an editorial in this morning’s LA Times issues a heartening interim report card.

Here’s the opening:

The lesson was polling. Math teacher Fernando Avila acted as pollster, the students as respondents and the four corners of the classroom their opinions: strongly agree, slightly agree, slightly disagree, strongly disagree. The topic: How Locke High School in Watts had changed since being taken over by charter operator Green Dot Public Schools.

Were the school uniforms of chinos and polo shirts a good idea? The students shuffled into their chosen corners. Many hated the uniforms; some liked them; some were indifferent. And so it went, the students distributing themselves among the corners for each question — until they were asked whether teachers cared more about them and their education this year, and the entire class crowded into “strongly agree.”

Nearly three months into the school year, the changes at Locke are obvious. Last year, when it was still run by the Los Angeles Unified School District, Locke was known for student brawls, rampant graffiti, ditched classes and a dropout rate so high that the senior class was routinely one-fourth the size of the freshman class.

This year, the halls are virtually empty during class. Teachers and aides say the campus is almost graffiti-free, and fights have diminished from one a day or so to less than one a month. Tardiness and ditching are down, now that both of those bring detention. Student attendance for September and October averaged 92%, close to that at suburban high schools.

Read the rest. It’s long and it’s good.

And as you read it, remember that this was the charter conversion of a failing high school that, in the beginning, LAUSD and UTLA, the teachers’ union, did everything they possibly could to prevent.

FOUR IMPORTANT READS from the LA Times:

1. FINALLY SOMEBODY HAD THE GUTS TO SAY IT: DAVID BREWER NEEDS TO GO

Everybody’s known this for what now seems like ever. But no one would say so publically: LAUSD Superintendant David Brewer is way, way over his head, and has been from the get-go. Now he needs to step down. Here’s the opening of LA Times editorial calling it for what it is.

The Los Angeles Unified School District is not without accomplishment. It has recently seen student test scores improve, and it is on track with a vast, long-term effort to build enough schools for all of its students. But along with much of California, the district is heading into troubled times — largely financial — that threaten its classrooms and students, and that will test its management and educational skills. This is a treacherous moment for a school district that has long operated on the edge of failure, and it demands unimpeachable leadership. In such a moment, the district cannot afford a superintendent who holds the title but isn’t up to the job.

2. PROP 8 STRATEGIES—-BEFORE AND AFTER

The LA Times’ Jessica Garrison writes a smart, thoughtful news story about the evolving nature of the strategies used by the Prop. 8 opponents—then and now. Here’s how it starts:

Leaders of the campaign against Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in California, raised nearly $40 million and ran a careful, disciplined campaign with messages tested by focus groups and with only a few people authorized to speak to the media.

They lost.

In the week since, California has seen an outpouring of demonstrations ranging from quiet vigils to noisy street protests against Proposition 8, including rallies outside churches and the Mormon temple in Westwood as well as boycotts of some businesses that contributed to the Yes on 8 campaign.

Many of those activities have been organized not by political professionals and established leaders in the gay community, but by young activists working independently on Facebook and MySpace.

The grass-roots activism is a tribute to political organizing in the digital age, in which it is possible to mobilize thousands of people with a few clicks of a mouse. It has generated national attention — and set up a series of Saturday demonstrations that organizers hope will attract tens of thousands of people to city halls throughout California.

But the demonstrations also have raised questions about whether the in-your-face approach will alienate voters
….

Read the rest of this entry »

In an analysis of the California schools that serve the state’s poorest kids (meaning those schools that have over 70 percent of their students taking advantage of free or reduced lunches), it seems that out that of the 15 highest performing schools, twelve are charter schools. This is according to an announcement released this morning by the California Charter Schools Association.

The schools were assessed according to their state-calculated Academic Performance Index—or API—results, .

Three of the 12 high scoring charters are located in Los Angeles:

They are Global Education Academy, Crescendo Charter Conservatory, Synergy Charter Academy.

“These results show that charter schools are opening doors of opportunity for California’s most under-served students, and effectively advancing them on the path to academic success,” said Peter Thorp, who is the interim head of California Charter Schools Association. “These exemplary charter schools should be studied and their best practices replicated in the broader public school system so that more under-served children can benefit.”

That last part about studying how the methods of the high scoring charters and then making trying to replicate their successes……would seem to be a no brainer.

So, like, all you folks who work in the upper echelons of the Los Angeles Unified School District, you’ve gone over to check out these schools, right?

Right???? Anybody???

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PS: One out of the three high-scoring non-charter schools is in LA, Solano Avenue Elementary, a Los Angeles Unified school near Dodger Stadium.