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.”