Ronni Ephraim vividly remembers two sad-eyed twin girls struggling through third grade at Limerick Elementary School in Canoga Park. Absent as often as they attended class, they were unable to read, were behind in their lessons, and were on an early path taken by tens of thousands of students who finally just drop out of the massive Los Angeles Unified School District.
It was odd that the sisters skipped class on alternate days, one showing up on Mondays, the other on Tuesdays — but never at the same time.
Illustration by Fred Noland
“We found out they were sharing a pair of shoes,” says Ephraim, who was then the principal at Limerick before becoming the district’s chief instructional officer, a job she recently left after fighting the bureaucracy for years — and sometimes prevailing.
She remembers how the PTA and local civic and business organizations took up collections for the girls. “If we hadn’t intervened,” says Ephraim, a widely acknowledged change agent who now uses her experience to train faculty members at USC, “they would have gone on to the fourth grade not reading and the fifth grade not reading. It could have led to later frustration, patterns of D’s and F’s, and the despair that causes a lot of students to drop out.”
As many teachers leave for summer break, and thousands of kids are shut out of summer-school catch-up classes that have been canceled because of LAUSD’s severe budget cuts, the latest student dropout rates have cast a new pall — and prompted criticism of a two-year push by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to stanch the hemorrhaging.
The precise Los Angeles dropout figure for 2008, as calculated by the state — 34.9 percent — jumped by nearly 10 percent from the year before. And from 2006 to 2007, dropouts in LAUSD also soared by 10 percent — in raw human numbers, that means some 20,000 students vanished from campuses from San Pedro to the San Fernando Valley.
Dropouts for 2009 cannot be calculated for another year, but the fear about what is unfolding, without real-time measurements, is palpable.
One top administrator labels the situation a “catastrophe,” while Superintendent Ramon Cortines — addressing a recent Board of Education meeting — brands the situation “completely unacceptable.”
The city’s dropout crisis consistently attracts political razzle-dazzle, yet so far, none of that firepower is producing results. On a rainy Friday morning in May, for example, an event called the “Dropout Prevention Summit” convened at the showy new Central Los Angeles High School No. 9, the notorious campus where $232 million was spent on cone-shaped buildings and spiffy towers, but whose eye-catching downtown architecture might now be called the stairs to nowhere.
L.A. Weekly was among the first to report last fall on this strange, beautiful and entirely unplanned school. Fitted with a state-of-the art theater and interior design, this glittering school’s overlords — the elected LAUSD school board — failed, entirely, to decide what kind of teaching to stress, which curriculum to use, how to determine the student-selection process, or how to attain academic excellence via a heavy arts program.
This edifice to vagueness was now the site for a daylong program in which Villaraigosa stationed himself in front of the TV cameras but offered no particulars about what’s really driving the kids out of LAUSD, except to say, essentially, I told you so.
“One of the most important things we can do around the dropout rate,” Villaraigosa said, “is to track it.”
Tracking the rate — something the bureaucrats have been doing for years — will help to determine why students are dropping out, Villaraigosa announced.
The mayor was asked, does he have an opinion on exactly why students are dropping out? “Yes, I think for the longest time this school district refused to accept what five studies have said: There is a dropout crisis. When I was asserting there was a dropout crisis, they challenged it.”
Under this logic, then, the existence of a crisis — or the refusal to acknowledge a crisis — is the reason for the crisis. Villaraigosa looked sharp in his shiny blue tie and charcoal suit, and seemed sincere as he grabbed a few moments of TV exposure. Yet months’ worth of work by the mayor’s handpicked team to turn around just 10 of his own schools — a flanking maneuver he undertook after he’d failed to grab full control of all 658 LAUSD schools — is now badly foundering.
Teachers are in revolt at all but one of the schools Villaraigosa now controls, a vivid example of the fervent infighting that consumes huge amounts of time at LAUSD, while creating divisiveness and poor morale.
His Partnership for L.A. Schools program has begun gradually spreading more than $60 million across a small group of supposedly lucky schools, with the money aimed at improving classroom instruction and teaching abilities over the next decade. The Partnership wants teachers at Villaraigosa’s “model” schools who get these substantial extra funds to stress core skills and college prep, while promoting students’ self-esteem.
