Locke High School: Competence Matters

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.