Monica Ratliff places a sticker on a list to identify dysfunctional school board characteristics.

Some school board decisions get ignored, all board meetings are too long and most decisions have nothing to do with what goes on in the classroom.

That’s some of the conversation that came out of an all-day session Tuesday with the LA Unified School Board and superintendent. The meeting, led by a private facilitator, was held to discuss the strategic plan and vision of the nation’s second-largest school district.

They didn’t make any binding commitments, but the discussion could lead to some major changes in the way the school board deals with the public, and how the superintendent deals with the board.

“Everybody knows low-performing schools should not exist, everybody knows this, so why does it still keep happening?” asked board member Monica Ratliff. She noted that the school board doesn’t have much to do with what goes on in the classroom and then answered her own question with: “There’s this giant bureaucracy and layers of bureaucracy and you can get help from one layer and then get stifled by another layer. And sometimes you have to go to a school board member and have that member advocate for them, but it should not have to be that way.”

Ratliff said that even the agreements made at board meetings seem to go nowhere. She said a few members nod in agreement, but sometimes nothing gets done unless she writes a resolution forcing them all to vote on it.

“I see some people (on the board) throw out the same ideas over and over and we all nod our heads and it doesn’t go anywhere,” Ratliff said.

Board member George McKenna agreed and said, “When we throw out an idea, who is supposed to pick up on it? The superintendent? I hope others can pick up on it and will come up with something.”

Superintendent Michelle King admitted that she has to prioritize what the board throws at her. “There are great ideas, but we can’t take the focus off of where we have to go,” King told the board. She noted that if there are five new things for her to do that are suggested by the board, and money is already allocated for other things they must do, she has to “clear the must-haves and stay centered and focused on what is aligned to our mission and where we are trying to go.”

King said she preferred that school board members come to her directly with issues. “I prefer direct contact and we can talk about issues, that works best for me,” she said. “I appreciate clear expectations and where it will go, and that is how I operate. The more the specific the better.” That way, board members can avoid so many resolutions.

Facilitator Jeff Nelsen

McKenna said to King, “I’m concerned what stimulates your office is a private meeting with a board member. You start doing something because a board member is asking.”

The issues brought up were not supposed to lead to direct solutions, said facilitator Jeff Nelsen, of Targeted Leadership Consulting. A coach to more than 2,000 principals and school leadership teams over the past decade, Nelsen said the exercise with the board is to identify dysfunctions, and he said, “some underlying issues naturally surfaced.”

For example, the board members and superintendent were to put dots next to items on a board that had a list of dysfunctional characteristics. Most of them put dots next to: “Disagreement among members on goals and processes,” while others pointed out “Unfocused agenda that wastes time on unimportant, peripheral issues.” A few noted: “Disagreements get personal in public” and “Members represent special interest groups or only certain areas of the district.”

Others suggested problems, including: “Board members play to other district staff, go around superintendent” and “Board plays favorites with press.”

“I think as a board we get in your way,” board member Ref Rodriguez told the superintendent. “You report to seven people rather than one board.”

King suggested that some decisions like business contracts could be handled during the various committee meetings rather than the marathon monthly board meetings that often start at 9 a.m. with closed sessions and then start again at 1 p.m. and often last until 9 p.m.

“It takes me a whole day to recover from those board meetings, I would like a more humane process,” said board President Steve Zimmer, who is in charge of the agenda for the board meetings.

Board members threw out some ideas, such as moving closed sessions to another day, getting board materials earlier than the Friday before the meeting and holding more board meetings.

The strategic plan is discussed at a meeting held at USC.

Rodriguez said some media reports “try to polarize us as a result of expressing our viewpoints and that is a shame.” He admitted, “My 4-year-old self may come out, but there’s so much value that we have different perspectives.”

King said she doesn’t mind the diversity of the board and said, “It is healthy to see the diversity of the board and their districts and how it all fits together as one. It is healthy to be aware of what it looks like in other parts of the district and it’s really not the same. We talk about poverty and there is poverty everywhere, but it does not look same everywhere.”

King suggested field trips or meetings in other parts of the district to see the diversity. Board member Richard Vladovic, who said he has worked in every district, said, “I don’t think that would be helpful for me.”

Vladovic suggested that the district consider decentralizing or even breaking up more to allow more local control.

“We as a district can’t change instruction, we can tinker with it, but the real change works at the school,” Vladovic said. “We need to stop thinking central, we need to divest ourselves of that.”

King agreed, adding, “I don’t believe one size fits all, and each school has a unique DNA. I need to see them get the results and not dictate that this is the way you need to do it. I agree that decentralizing is one of the best ways to serve the kids with the budget.”

Vladovic said he remains frustrated that the same schools continue to fail and said some solutions have become political. He said, “Union leadership doesn’t share our vision. State and federal laws don’t necessarily share our vision. We’re all together in this.”

Board member Scott Schmerelson said that when he asks staff a simple question, he often gets back a detailed five-page report that isn’t necessary. King defended the process and said, “Not every board member is satisfied with the same level of response.”

Another idea that came up is putting high-performing teachers in low-performing schools. Ratliff suggested that teachers would go if there were incentives, but McKenna said the existing teachers may resent the newcomers.

Zimmer suggested increased investments in 3-year-olds not yet into the school system. McKenna replied, “Why should we make investments on 3-year-olds when we are graduating students who cannot read?”

Zimmer said, “I am interested in a revolution of mindset and how it can be a dynamic and synergistic confluence that has to come from the messaging and framing from the district level.”

Zimmer and board member Monica Garcia both said they wanted to learn more from employees who have chosen to educate their children in the schools they work at, even though those schools may not be their neighborhood schools. Their choices show the schools are doing something right. “You want to have people proud of the school they send their children to, and we should look at that. I do not want to see any school tumble.”

Rodriguez quipped, “I have the intestinal fortitude to take on the lowest-performing schools, but I take a lot of Tums.”

School board members and facilitator Jeff Nelsen (far right) at USC’s Caruso Catholic Center for a special committee meeting.

LA Unified’s three-year strategic plan lacks a clear mission statement.

That was the consensus of an all-day school board session Tuesday. So the seven board members decided to fix it, landing on the goal of a 100 percent graduation rate. Yet the draft of the strategic plan remains light on exactly how to accomplish it.

Because even with every teacher and principal knowing that 100 percent graduation will be the ultimate goal for the district, the three-year plan presented by Superintendent Michelle King offers targets that expect only 81 percent graduation by 2018-2019, and only 52 percent of students getting a C or better in the A-G classes required for graduation. Board members agreed that while a 10-point increase in the graduation rate to 75 percent from the 2010-2011 school year was significant, it wasn’t enough.

Draft of strategic plan targets.

The strategic plan does not directly address what King has previously acknowledged as two of the most pressing issues facing the district: the decrease in enrollment and a serious financial deficit, which she addressed last spring when she held a series of meetings before the budget was approved to discuss major challenges.

During Tuesday’s discussion at the Committee of the Whole at USC’s Caruso Catholic Center, school board President Steve Zimmer said a number of times, “I would argue that people don’t have a sense of mission” in the district. He insisted, “This discussion today is so important. We’ve got to coalesce about something.”

In a brainstorming session Tuesday that was described in the agenda as discussing “vision elements and core values” rather than specifics of the strategic plan, the school board was led by Jeff Nelsen of Targeted Leadership Consulting who has coached more than 2,000 principals and school leaders over the past decade.

“I will argue today that we should revisit the goals,” Zimmer said. “None of us is OK with 75 percent graduation, and we are being dishonest if we think so.”

Zimmer’s preferred goals are to eradicate the school readiness gap and have every graduate be bilingual and bi-literate. “We can lead the state and the nation with this,” he said.

But Zimmer was willing to let go of his ambitious goals to allow for one singular goal that the board agreed on that could encompass other goals. “We can really make real that we don’t give up on a single kid,”  Zimmer said. “We can lead in that area too.”

Zimmer told his fellow board members, “I don’t think we have a mission sense right now, and I think it’s our role to create it. And it has to be big, and the strategic plan should fall behind it. The strategic plan should be about implementing a broad mission.”

School board members with Superintendent Michelle King and facilitator Jeff Nelsen.

While King’s draft plan sets a goal of 100 percent graduation, she conceded Tuesday it wasn’t the sole clear mandate. “Heretofore, it’s about graduation,” she told the seven board members. “It’s about getting students to graduation and all that entails.”

In the initial draft, dated Aug. 3, the mission statement reads: “Embracing our diversity to educate LA’s youth, ensure academic achievement and empower tomorrow’s leaders. We are LA Unified.”

And the strategic plan does not include the 100 graduation rate in its seven targeted accomplishments with benchmarks to be hit in the next three years.

The seven goals included a 24 percent increase in school pathways such as magnets, dual-language immersion and Linked Learning programs; a 30 percent decrease in chronic absenteeism; and 100 percent access to quality art instruction, a parent computer program and restorative justice practices. Two other goals — of high school students concurrently enrolling in community college and an increase in bilingual, bi-literate graduates — did not have numerical targets yet.

“We can have all the mission statements in the world, but if it doesn’t translate to action, it doesn’t matter,” board member Monica Ratliff said.

Ratliff said that once every teacher is on board with a unified mission, then everything they do, from preschool to third grade to fifth grade, to children with trauma and more, should all lead to a child graduating from high school. “That provides us with a very clear mission that everything feeds into,” she said.

But can the district ever get to 100 percent graduation, asked board member George McKenna? “I have a problem with 100 percent graduation, it’s like a trap,” McKenna said. He pointed out that students get to the next grade simply by their birthdays, not because they are academically equipped to go to the next grade level. “How do you reconcile that we’ll never get to 100 percent graduation?”

King said some pilot schools in the district have reached 100 percent graduation and they are looking at how to replicate those programs. But she also pointed out that the one-size-fits-all approach that the district used in the past doesn’t work for every district school.

King acknowledged, “If there is a common vision and direction that is set forth and folks know where you want to go, it’s better than having competing multiple agendas.” She said, “You can’t go anywhere by spinning around about this one and that one, all that energy dissipates.” She said she plans to outline clear messages that don’t contradict each other and then plans to get the word out to kids, parents, educators and all school stakeholders.

Michelle King at the white board with Jeff Nelsen, facilitator.

Board members Ref Rodriguez and Zimmer both pointed out that statistics prove that early education helps achieve college-ready graduates.

Board member Scott Schmerelson added, “I believe most people think they work for the district, they don’t work for the kids. They forget for whom they are working.”

Board member Richard Vladovic said, “The same schools are still failing and I believe we can do better. It’s about leadership and good teaching and we’re not putting our resources where the greatest need is. I believe we have to do it now, time is running out.”

Board member Monica Garcia said she champions the 100 percent graduation goal and they all need to work out what can be done most immediately.

Zimmer pointed out that King has the respect of the teachers. “You have more trust than any superintendent has had,” Zimmer said. “You inspire trust amongst our ranks, and it’s our job to establish this mission sense once again.”

King acknowledged that the “superintendent represents the image of the district” and that “once we have what we want to do, I will go out again when I can engage (parents and teachers) face-to-face” to explain how they will accomplish their mission.

“We want graduation, bar none, not just college eligible but also getting students to be productive citizens,” King said. “Getting them to get a diploma in hand and being eligible to get to college, if that’s their choice, and everything else that supports that happening” is now the district’s clear mission, she said.

Nelsen, who monitored the discussion, said afterward that the meeting went well, and that often large urban districts don’t have as cohesive a mission as LA Unified does. He said the meeting helped “get some closure around what is the focus” for the district. He added, “I was impressed on how open and honest the board members were with a room full of people.”

The room contained about a dozen onlookers, half staff members and half media. The school board members, King and Nelsen sat around a boardroom table with religious iconography hanging over them and bulletin boards listing characteristics of a successful superintendent and school board. Although the committee meeting wasn’t televised live as meetings at LA Unified headquarters usually are, an audio recording is expected to be available in the next few days, said Board Secretariat Jefferson Crain.

The off-site meetings held outside the regular Beaudry headquarters of the school district are considered “field trips” for the board, and although they are still open to the public, the off-site locations usually discourage the public from making comments. Vladovic said Tuesday that public comments made before the monthly closed sessions end up extending the board meetings much longer than anticipated.

King said she would revamp the strategic plan in two weeks and then discuss the changes at the Oct. 25 meeting of the Committee of the Whole set for 2 p.m., although it is not yet clear where it will be held.

“We have a crisis with our youngsters,” board member Richard Vladovic told the district’s chief academic officer.

LA Unified’s chief academic officer came before board members Tuesday with an upbeat-titled report called “Breaking Our Own Records,” but instead of resting on the improvement in overall test scores, the four school board members in attendance grilled her for nearly two hours throwing out terms like “frustrating,” “depressing” and “disappointing” and saying the district is in “crisis” when educating certain segments of the student population.

“I had to say this because it depressed me as an educator and after eight years I was told it was going to get better, and I’ve been assured it will get better,” said board member Richard Vladovic, chairman of the Curriculum, Instruction and Educational Equity Committee that met Tuesday. “I’m most concerned about those children not getting what they deserve, and that is quality education.”

Math scores highlighting groups that need attention.

Board member George McKenna said, “I’m as frustrated as I can possibly be. The data is miserable. Test scores are still almost embarrassingly low. It is continually depressing and disappointing.”

The committee was discussing the list of lowest performing schools and other test score numbers that the district was touting as “breaking our records!”

Chief Academic Officer Frances Gipson pointed out that the district’s record 75 percent graduation rate is up from 72 percent last year, and she showed other upward trends in the Smarter Balanced Assessments. She also noted that 265 schools are now participating in the Early Language and Literacy Plan, up from 85 in the 2015-16 school year.

“Some of the scores are record-breaking, but we have not hit the finish line yet,” Gipson said. “Our goal for graduation is 100 percent.”

Gipson tried to paint a positive spin repeating district catchphrases including “A District on the Move” and “All Hands on Deck” used by Superintendent Michelle King. But the four of seven board members on the committee were having none of it. Other members of the committee included representatives of three unions and USC and UCLA.

She pointed again to the increase in students meeting or exceeding English Language Arts standards, to 39 percent, up from 33 percent last year. Math scores rose to 29 percent from 25 percent in 2014-2015.

But then came the board members’ harsh reaction to zero improvement for English learners’ math scores: only 5 percent met standards, and only 4 percent met English standards, up one point. There was no improvement for students with disabilities: 6 percent met math standards two years in a row, and 8 percent met English standards.

Frances Gipson

Gipson said some successes were made through personalization of graduation goals and a dozen different types of interventions. “We are assessing what worked best for students and are accelerating that while eliminating things that did not work best.”

Another new number showed that 42 percent of students received a C grade or better in each of the 15 required A through G courses. Even though students can graduate by getting a D in those classes, Gipson said they want to strive for a C grade or better. California’s public universities require a C or better in those classes.

State math score rankings for the largest school districts in California.

School board President Steve Zimmer said, “I want to ask staff what specific crisis we are addressing? What do we need to see in due time? We need to reflect the urgency to see some positive results in continuing areas of inequity and our failure for public education.”

Zimmer said the board needs to hear “some type of strategy plan and urgency and honest feedback of what we need to do.”

Gipson had staff members from Beyond the Bell, Counseling Services and the Charter Schools Division ready to explain other recent successes in various departments but cut some of the presentations short as the board members asked her questions for nearly two hours.

“This group does represent a sense of urgency,” Gipson responded. “We have taken some bold steps.”

Gipson said she plans to report back with how some of those bold plans are working at school sites.

“We have a crisis with our youngsters and our youngsters need the very best, and if we are paying someone 15 percent more why aren’t they concentrated in schools that need it the most?” asked Vladovic. “There needs to be a concentrated plan. We are in the process of being confronted with a budget crisis that we have never confronted before, and people don’t know that.”

George McKenna and Scott Schmerelson.

Vladovic was particularly concerned with Long Term English Speakers who have scored persistently at 23 percent and never higher. “I feel like we have written them off,” he said.

Board member Scott Schmerelson echoed that, saying, “I’m not concerned about the cracks in the system, but the craters.” He also referred to students continuing from fifth to sixth grades or eighth grade to high school without the appropriate skill sets.

McKenna pointed out that some schools celebrate successes while African-Americans and poor children are still failing. “Is it that these poor children have gangs, or don’t have a momma or a daddy, or there’s no literacy at home? I got all that! So, what are the extreme measures that we should do?”

McKenna pointed to math scores, for example, that showed 18 percent of African-Americans and 23 percent of Latinos exceeding standards while Asians hit 70 percent, Filipinos hit 56 percent and whites were at 57 percent. Economically disadvantaged students scored 23 percent compared to 50 percent for non-economically disadvantaged.

McKenna, the only African-American on the school board, added, “Girls do better than boys and African-American males are at the bottom of the ladder. Am I surprising anyone? Absolutely not! What else can we do? Do we tell them to sing and dance and play baseball?”

McKenna said the district must focus on middle schools because only then “graduation becomes an aspiration rather than an illusion.”

Gipson pointed to working with the community colleges, using block schedules, holding twilight classes, getting grants and creating a director of innovation to review what is working in education. She also said a new dashboard computer program allows teachers to quickly figure out what each student needs to improve on the most.

Gipson said her team “ended some curriculum chaos” by pulling together many different teams and figuring out how to support each other. The district tripled their work in English language development. Gipson said the district saw a large drop in reclassification percentages because of changes in state accountability, and, because the year is from October to October, she said she expects some better numbers in a few weeks.

Zimmer said, “I think we are on the right path, but I want to caution that if we want to eradicate the school readiness gap we have to see the literacy foundation results” and see how early learning initiatives are directly linked to early elementary and math initiatives.

“We need to align the resources with the neediest students,” Gipson said.

One of the committee members, Mojgan Moazzez, principal of Logan Street Elementary School and representing AALA, the principal’s union, praised Gipson and said, “I have personally seen how she works with schools and has allocated resources where it is needed.”

The school board members wanted to see a more precise plan of action to help the lowest-performing students.

“And if we believe in the plan, why not have the plan anchor our approach?” Zimmer asked.

Vladovic added, “We need to see a plan rather than wishes of what we want to do. We need to shore up those youngsters and need a timeline and expected outcomes and what will happen if they are not achieved. We have to make a change.”

“We are doing it now,” Gipson said.

Vladovic continued, “We want to see some real particulars in what you’re doing. I truly believe all kids can learn. It’s our fault, … not theirs. I’m hoping you’ll do it. Let’s not just wait.”

After the meeting, Gipson was asked if the board seemed particularly harsh.

She answered, “We all want better. We have done better. We have a way to go.”

The schools are eligible for School Improvement Grants (SIG) money that can result in $2 million a year for five years if the school administrators decide to implement one of seven school models that will help improve their scores.

The issue was brought up at the first LA Unified School Board meeting of the school year on Tuesday. Board members also discussed whether they need to intervene with the five traditional schools that are run by Partnership for Los Angeles Schools (and are not charter schools), as well as the six other charter schools that they oversee in the district.

The surprise is that a few of them named on the list are notable and previously celebrated schools as far as past achievements, yet some of them have been identified as low performing since 2010.

The traditional district schools are:

• 107th Street Elementary
• Annalee Avenue Elementary
• Augustus F. Hawkins High School-A Critical Design and Gaming School
• Barton Hill Elementary
• Cabrillo Avenue Elementary
• Daniel Webster Middle
• Dr. Owen Lloyd Knox Elementary
• Edwin Markham Middle
• Florence Griffth Joyner Elementary
• George Washington Carver Middle
• George Washington Preparatory High
• Samuel Gompers Middle School
• Tom Bradley Global Awareness Magnet Elementary
• Westchester Enriched Sciences High School Magnets- Health/Sports/Medicin

The charter schools are:

• Alain Leroy Locke College Preparatory Academy High (Green Dot)
• Animo Phillis Wheatley Charter Middle (Green Dot)
• Los Angeles Leadership Academy High
• Lou Dantzler Preparatory Charter Middle (ICEF)
• North Valley Military Institute College Preparatory
• Wallis Annenberg High (Accelerated School Foundation)

The list from the California Department of Education only slightly differs with the low-achieving list from the CORE district ratings which also included Century Park and Hillcrest Drive elementary schools and David Starr Jordan and Dr. Maya Angelou Community high schools.

The list of 291 schools throughout the state of low-performing schools identify 20 in LA Unified, one in Los Angeles County Office of Education (Soledad Enrichment Charter High) and one in Long Beach (Jordan High). In Los Angeles County, there are 12 other school districts with schools named in the lowest 5 percent of state schools.

The state’s lowest 5 percent of schools was based on 2015 math and English assessment scores, graduation rates based on four years of data, the English learner indicator of the past two years, suspension rates over two years and college and career indicators.

Among the charter schools, the 3-year-old North Valley Military Institute is the only one of its kind in LA Unified and is championed by Gov. Jerry Brown.

Wallis Annenberg High’s Accelerated School’s elementary school was named by TIME magazine as the “Elementary School of the Year” for its impressive approach to education, and has boasted years of 90-plus percent graduation rates.

Lou Dantzler Preparatory Charter Middle is getting a new building, and ICEF CEO Parker Hudnut said they have hired new experts in math that are joining the staff.

Among the traditional schools, the Augustus High School Critical Design and Gaming School has been noted for its innovation in computer science, while the successes at George Washington Preparatory High were chronicled in a movie starring Denzel Washington who played then-Principal George McKenna, who is now a school board member.

George McKenna

McKenna said he is unhappy with the low performance of a school where he gained his academic legacy, but said, “Our role is not to play ‘gotcha’ and I know some people have that perception. But if you have that perception you may think we’re in some way an intruder on someone else’s autonomy or freedom and they should be left alone. We need your help, we are the district and we have responsibility. If it’s our property, it’s our responsibility, it’s our kids. We have an obligation to insist and inform otherwise we are enabling or are complicit in negative outcomes and deficits.”

McKenna and other board members approved allowing the 14 traditional schools to apply for the SIG money, but they expressed concerns about how to help the charter schools that they were not voting on Tuesday with SIG applications. Those charter schools must apply on their own, and McKenna also wondered about the five Partnership schools that the district co-runs as part of the nonprofit started in 2008 by former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Of the 18 Partnership schools they now run in LAUSD, five of them are on the district’s list of 14. Four of those five have been on the list since 2010, and have received extra money to help improve their test scores. Partnership’s CEO Joan Sullivan was unavailable to comment.

The money used to help the schools could be something that must sustain their progress, said board member Monica Ratliff. She said, “The schools begin to rely on the funding for the purchased positions, and then they lose those positions and it causes a lot of heartache on those campuses. If they bring up achievement levels maybe they do need those positions, and then suddenly those resources are not there anymore, and you’re out of luck.”

According to a national report when the schools were helped first in 2010, generally 69 percent of the schools helped for three years saw an increase in math, but 30 percent saw declines and 2 percent had no change.

School board President Steve Zimmer said he wanted to know for sure where money was spent to pinpoint interventions to see how they worked. He said he supported the Partnership schools and wanted to help.

“As far as charter schools, we feel these things shouldn’t happen,” Zimmer said about the list including independent charters. “We are granting the level of autonomy from the ed code that charter schools get and then results should follow them and not get deeper.”

Zimmer noted that the school board took a “leap of faith” in approving Green Dot charter renewals and said their two schools on this state list indicate “this should green-light more collaboration and I hope that it won’t be punitive, and would be a lot of engagement.”

George Bartleson, chief of School Choice at LA Unified, said the district has helped with partnered schools in the past, and there was a time when someone from the central office was assigned to schools to help.

David Tokofsky, a former LA Unified school board member who works for the principals union, pointed out that the school board and superintendent should have more scrutiny of the charter schools that will be getting the extra $2 million a year, especially if they continue to remain on the state’s improvement list.

LA Unified originally had 31 persistently low-achieving schools on the list. Eight schools are still receiving money from past SIG funding, according to a report by Frances Gipson, the chief academic officer. The district has to submit their applications for the schools to the state by Sept. 8.

Gipson said schools are already “discussing the selection of the intervention model that will best benefit their school culture.”

Nolan Cabrera of the University of Arizona.

Anti-immigrant rhetoric going on in presidential politics and a potential state law have added a renewed emphasis on developing required ethnic studies classes in the LA Unified curriculum.

An expert from the University of Arizona spoke to an LA Unified school board committee this week to explain the importance of ethnic studies in education. He brought in some statistics to show the benefits.

“This is a very pressing educational issue,” assistant professor Nolan Cabrera told the Curriculum, Instruction and Educational Equity Committee on Tuesday. “We need to know how to get along across differences. People like to knock these courses like it’s an easy class, such as basket weaving, but it’s not.”

In Arizona, pilot schools targeted low-performing students and gave them Mexican-American studies courses. The schools saw that attendance, class scores and graduation rates all improved, Cabrera said. Attendance went up by 21 percent, grade point averages went up by 1.4 points and students added 23 credits to their curriculum, Cabrera said.

School board members Scott Schmerelson, Steve Zimmer and George McKenna at the meeting all expressed support for the ethnic studies courses.

“I’m am continued to be troubled about politics in this country,” said McKenna, the only African-American on the board. “People who are running are running anti the concept of ethnic inclusion, and anti ethnic contributions and they are being celebrated for it. Now they have someone espousing with all the bombast that some people should be kept over here and some kept over there, and I know how that feels like because I rode at back of bus for the first 25 years of my life.”

McKenna said that he hoped that the Ethnic Studies Task Force starts meeting again, and asked to district to support the programs.

Derrick Chau, the director of Secondary Instruction for the district, said they are now developing a strategic plan for implementing ethnic studies across the district and are revising three English language arts classes to align with ethniic studies. Chau said the district is planning professional development for teachers, too.

Chau pointed out that the ethnic breakdown among the roughly 650,000 students at LA Unified is now 74 percent Latino, 8.4 percent African-American and 6 percent Asian. He said, “I turn to my own children who are of Asian and Latino decent and I think how beneficial it would be for the children of LAUSD and my own children to have access to these courses.” 

Jose Lara of Ethnic Studies Now is fighting for the classes throughout the state and said seven districts have already taken the lead in making the courses a graduation requirement. The LA Unified school board voted to do that in 2014, but the plan became stalled because of potential costs in training teachers and an estimated $72 million for textbooks.

“Those are bogus arguments,” Lara told the LA School Report. “Teachers are doing these courses with online resources and there are amazing classes going on right now throughout the district already. It doesn’t require developing a whole new training. LAUSD has been in the lead of this, but the implementation is stuck in the weeds.”

Lara and Cabrera were actually both students at UCLA graduate school and started the Raza Graduate Student Association together to support Latino grad students. “We would talk about one day bringing ethnic studies into high schools and look at us now, in two different states doing the same type of work,” Lara said.

Next week, Lara said he has meetings with district officials about starting the Ethnic Studies Task Force meetings up again. The classes are now in 40 high schools as electives.

After Lara’s presentation at the last school board meeting, Sylmar High School principal James Lee asked to bring ethnic studies to his school, and he contacted six east San Fernando Valley high schools about doing the same thing.

“It looks like this will be required for our ninth graders eventually anyway, so why not start as soon as possible? It’s a great idea, and the other principals are very excited about being part of the pilot program launch,” Lee said. “Next, I am going to ask for teachers who are interested in teaching the classes.”

Lara said another impetus for LAUSD is a bill sponsored by state Assemblyman Luis Alejo, (D-Watsonville) requiring every school district and charter school have a high school required ethnic studies course beginning in the 2020-2021 school year. Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a bill very much like that last year because it created an advisory panel that duplicates the work of the state education department. Lara said the new bill will most likely pass.

The San Francisco and San Diego school districts have already started on the path to required ethnic studies, and Lara said he is doing a presentation next week in Fontana for all their schools.

“We need the commitment and funding to get this going in LAUSD finally,” Lara said. “It seems like there’s a momentum and willingness now to do it.”

Zimmer echoed Lara’s frustration and said, “Many of us are extremely impatient about our approach to the implementation.”

Pedro Noguera presents his recommendations to LA Unified board members and superintendent.

Internationally renowned education expert Pedro Noguera warned members of the LA Unified school board and superintendent that unless more serious measures are taken, the nation’s second-largest school district is destined to lose more students.

“The future is dire,” Noguera told the Committee of the Whole on Tuesday afternoon. He pointed to entire neighborhoods in Philadelphia with abandoned schools. “It’s not there aren’t enough kids, they lost the commitment to education. I hope that doesn’t happen in this city.”

The challenges LA Unified is facing, he said, include declining enrollment because of the growth of charters and demographic shifts, chronically under-performing schools, structural budget deficits and the need to increase public support for schools.

Noguera has written 11 books and more than 200 articles about education and focuses his research on how economic conditions impact schools. He served as a school board member at Berkeley Unified and is now a Distinguished Professor of Education in the Graduate School of Education and Information Sciences at UCLA.

Committee chairman George McKenna invited the professor to make a presentation to offer advice and give examples of what other schools do.

“I appreciate you coming to tell us the truth, even though we may not want to hear it,” McKenna said. “We have to take this situation seriously, really seriously.”

School board president Steve Zimmer attended the committee meeting although he was on his way to Washington, D.C., for the rest of the week to help lobby for the district. He told Noguera, “There is no more important city in this world for you to be in, and I’m glad that you’re here and work with us.”

Zimmer noted that Noguera discussed the district’s concerns about competition for students between traditional and charter schools. “As you spoke,” Zimmer said, “it was actually quite emotional because I think we have been through a time where we have misunderstood the role of competition and in that misunderstanding have caused some injury and caused it to be potentially more difficult to build the foundation of trust.”

Nearly 16 percent of LA Unified’s students are enrolled in 211 charter schools, and that number would grow significantly under a plan to increase charter enrollment in the district, which the school board unanimously opposed in January.

Noguera said, “Like it or not, schools are competing for kids, and public schools don’t even realize it. Like it or not, that’s the set-up.”

He pointed out his granddaughter goes to a traditional LA Unified school where the parents are only allowed to drop children off between 7:45 and 8:15 a.m., while the charter school around the corner allows drop-offs as early as 7 a.m.

“For a busy working parent, like her mom is, and in a city like this where transportation is a big issue, that is not a small factor,” Noguera said. That alone could be a reason for a family to choose a charter school over a traditional school.

“Public and charter schools are collaborating, but that is not happening enough,” Noguera said. “It has to be OK for principals to say, ‘I need help,’ and not have that being used against them. Otherwise, they will just hope that no one knows what the situation is.”

He called for “collaborative problem solving,” which must come from the central office. “They must let everyone know they are not here to scrutinize, but want to help you and show you how to figure it out and solve the problem.”

That includes the charter school and traditional school situation, he said. “Trust comes from collaboration,” he said.

Noguera on a visit to Hollenbeck Middle School.

Superintendent Michelle King asked how to replicate what is successful at schools, and he described a program in San Diego where leaders visit schools once a quarter and offer support to principals and teachers about best practices.

Noguera cited a 90-minute math class he had visited at Hollenbeck Middle School
whose teacher had complete control of her class and allowed students to help each other. Meanwhile, a class across the hallway had students who were unable to focus and were being disruptive.

“It took a while for that teacher to establish the class,” he said, pointing out that many of the students were English-language learners living in East Los Angeles. “She had to determine which kids could work together and which ones can’t work together.”

He recommended that the district structure time so teachers can learn from other good teachers. McKenna brought up celebrated teacher Jaime Escalante whose rough approach with students was highly criticized. His story was told in the 1988 film “Stand and Deliver.”

“Why is it so difficult to replicate good work?” asked McKenna, who like Escalante taught math in LA Unified. “Jaime Escalante’s work was frowned upon. What makes it difficult to go across the hall and learn from each other?”

Noguera answered, “That is a common problem, because of the isolation of teachers.”

Among Noguera’s suggestions for the school board were:

• Support and recognize high-quality teaching.

• Focus on morale.

• Provide incentives for teachers and administrators with a track record of effectiveness to work in “high need” schools and communities.

• Publicize your success.

• Prevent educational issues from becoming overly publicized.

Monica Ratliff asked about the bonuses and incentives given some teachers to work in more challenging schools. Noguera said the incentives don’t even have to be monetary but could include more planning periods or other bonuses.

“We should look into this,” Ratliff said.

Noguera pointed out that some answers are within the district already but aren’t being shared. He said some schools might be very good at converting English-language students into the general school population, but the district doesn’t have a way of tracking which schools are better at it.

He and other university education experts are visiting schools throughout the LA Unified district.

“I hope this will be an ongoing collaboration with the district,” Noguera said.

Principal Aresa Allen-Rochester, Superintendent Michelle King and George McKenna at a January visit to Windsor Hills Elementary Math/Science Aerospace Magnet.

George McKenna is going into his 55th year as an educator, and he has a lot to say about it.

In fact, he declares: “Give me a school that’s supposedly poor-performing for three years and I guarantee you no charter school would be able to snatch any kids from that school, and no kids will want to leave that school. Now, I’m not bragging, but I can do it.”

Of course, he adds, “I’d have to have the flexibility to be able to do what charter schools do and be able to get the right teachers in there, but it can be done.”

McKenna, who started teaching math at LA Unified in 1962 and now sits on the school board of the second-largest district in the country, said he has some common-sense ideas for making schools better. His style is peppered with homespun anecdotes and folksy humor, sometimes referred to as McKenna-isms, but they also offer solid solutions.

McKenna remains critical of some structures of the institution that he now is a leader of, and he is skeptical of Common Core and and various district policies. He has succeeded in implementing some solutions, and he has failed at others. But at 75, he is still trying.

“You have to figure out what will make the students interested in coming to school,” McKenna said in an interview with LA School Report. “Why did kids like to come to my trigonometry class? I had jokes, and I try to show them the practical side to what they’re learning. I would have them figure out the height of a fence that they would have to jump if a dog was chasing them over it, things like that. I keep them entertained.”

Not all of his ideas succeeded. He wrote a bill for the California legislature to consider that would permit parents to take time off from work to visit schools and sit in classrooms. The measure didn’t get out of committees, but he still thinks it’s an important idea.

George McKenna talks with a parent.

INVOLVING THE PARENTS

“Parental involvement is one of the most important elements to a successful school,” McKenna said. He disagrees with the use of automated robo-calls or sending home flyers because parents rarely respond to them. Teachers need to call the homes of their students if they’re not coming to school, and if necessary the principal needs to make those calls too. “Parent involvement is crucial, and I believe if you have somebody sitting in the back of every classroom, smiling, education would improve 500 percent. That’s why I asked the business community to release parents to their schools for two hours a month to do that.”

When he took over a failing high school and turned it into Washington Preparatory High School, he had parents sign contracts with students and teachers that outlined specific goals and expectations. He implemented a dress code, cleaned up the graffiti and gang tagging and created an air of respect for each other and among the staff. That’s the model that became the subject of a movie, “The George McKenna Story” in which he is played by Denzel Washington.

Mandating homework was a challenge for both the teachers and the students, but it helped them create a structure. McKenna said he wanted to nationalize homework throughout the U.S. “That way no parent would ever have to ask, ‘It’s Monday night, do you have any homework?’ because Monday will be national Math Homework Day and maybe the TV stations will have instructional shows that night.”

SHARING WITH CHARTERS

One of the things McKenna said needs changing in the system is to share practices that work and are replicable. He said that would solve a lot of the problems between charter and traditional schools.

“We have more charter schools in my little pocket of District 1 than any other in the whole state. There’s a big concentration. It does keep traditional schools under-enrolled, and I wished that weren’t the case.”

Great Public Schools Now, a plan partly funded by the Broad Foundation to increase the number of high-performing schools in the district including through charters, is not as threatening to him as it is to others in the district. McKenna’s district, just south of downtown Los Angeles, is predominantly lower-income and mostly black and Latino. McKenna said, “I’m not worried about charter schools, it depends on your lens, it’s an alternative. We are all public schools, but we should ask ourselves why children want to go to charter schools, what are they seeking? We should encourage all to do better.”

He added, “Some charter schools take advantage of exclusivity and they go look for better students and they fill up and say they don’t have any more room. Then they have better test scores. Sometimes it’s separatism and classism that works for them.

“The educational system must be education for all, not a few. Not for some in the Silicon Valley, but not for the ones in Napa Valley picking crops. That is ridiculous.”

TEACHING THE TEACHERS

Teachers sit together in the lunchroom, ride in carpools and have their own cliques, but McKenna pointed out, “They have never been in each other’s classrooms to watch how they teach. It doesn’t matter if it’s a different subject, but it helps to see how teachers handle classroom management and see how good practices work first-hand.”

Allan Kakassy with his McKenna archives.

At Washington High School, teacher Allan Kakassy was skeptical at first of McKenna’s plans for the teachers. Once the union representative among the teachers, Kakassy said he heard many complaints from teachers who were concerned about extra work that McKenna required of them, including calling parents at home for students who needed more help, working extra hours or weekends to help with tutoring and turning in lessons plans for the next week every Friday afternoon. Kakassy, who was depicted in the movie about McKenna, became one of McKenna’s leading supporters. Now retired and living in the San Fernando Valley, Kakassy keeps a few boxes full of newspaper clippings, photos, videos and other memorabilia of McKenna’s heyday of teaching, and he still serves on committees in an advisory capacity.

“There were some teachers who were resistant to what McKenna was doing, but others saw positive changes,” he said. Within five years, only 20 of the 140 teachers at the school when McKenna took over were still there. The rest had either transferred or resigned.

McKenna said that it’s important to change the mindset of teachers who may blame the students, or the neighborhoods where they live. “There’s nothing wrong with the kids, we should go with that premise,” McKenna said.

“First you have to identify the problems,” McKenna explained. “If you don’t mind that the carpet is red, then there’s no problem. So if you don’t think it’s a problem that a lot of your students are truant and not coming to school, then there’s nothing to be solved there. That’s a problem.”

He added, “There’s nothing wrong with the kids. There is something wrong with the people who work in the school.”

QUESTIONING COMMON CORE

“A lot of training for teachers now involves Common Core, and that’s a methodology and shouldn’t be handicapping teaching,” McKenna said. “The outcome should have more flexibility.”

One of the problems McKenna sees with Common Core Standards is that the process eliminates some rote memorization. As a former math teacher, he said it is important to memorize the multiplication tables, for example, and that’s what gets you to algebra. “It’s a mystery to me why that is no longer driven into kids and they don’t know their multiplication tables anymore,” McKenna said. “And there are ways to make math fun.”

He doesn’t believe in the district’s policy of moving students from one level to the next when they aren’t sufficient in basic reading or math levels. “Maybe he’s a slow learner, maybe we are not effective teachers, but we shouldn’t be passing them up the line without doing a better job. We shouldn’t have ninth-graders with the skill sets of third- or fourth-graders. Can’t we keep them another year?”

McKenna with Steve Zimmer and other board members in December when the district closed the schools due to threats.

TEACHING SOCIAL JUSTICE

Another important part of McKenna’s ideal school includes the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesus. He started social justice programs at Washington and that led to a drop in absenteeism to less than 10 percent because students knew it had become safer to attend classes.

“Anything that leads to helplessness and hopelessness also leads to violent behavior,” McKenna said. “And we’re all in it together.”

He added, “Honor students have an obligation to help their friends, their home boys to do better in school. They think they’re supposed to break dance and spin on their heads, but that’s only because we don’t have anything else to offer them. They need to all get high school diplomas.”

McKenna disagrees with the principals who seem like tough guys and walk the school hallways with a bat. “I’m 145 pounds and will not kick anybody’s butt, I’m not a bully,” he said. “Why not give them confidence and embarrass them with recognition when they do something good and read off their names on the intercom when it’s their birthday?”

He also sees value in including police and probation officers on campus. He had a police officer teach a class and work as an assistant football coach at Washington.

“Encourage a positive police presence on campus, that stops negative thoughts about it,” McKenna said. “It shows they are real human beings who will come to their dances, teach in the classrooms and maybe play basketball on occasion.”

McKenna is sworn in by Congresswoman Karen Bass.

SUPPORTING TEACHERS

“You don’t need doctors till you’re sick, you don’t need lawyers until you are in trouble, but you need teachers all the time,” McKenna said. He is supportive of professional development training, but he adds, “I do not believe in staff development of rotten teachers, I have no use for that.”

McKenna created the Zero Drop-Out resolution last year to eliminate students leaving high school.

“There’s now a commitment to let no child escape,” McKenna said. “If we can get to the point where we get no drop-outs, then that’s a success, and that’s different than 100 percent graduation.”

He also said he wants students to have the idea of going to college instilled at an early age, from first grade. “It should not be if you go to college, but where you’re going to college,” McKenna said.

He doesn’t believe that teachers shouldn’t hug or give a child an encouraging pat when they’ve done something good or need a hug. “Sure, I understand that there are strange people, but we’ve developed a system where we can’t touch a child, even if they need a hug, and that’s wrong,” McKenna said.

A final word of advice to principals and teachers: “Never initiate anything you can’t monitor. You must be able to monitor everything you try to do.”

McKenna said there’s a long way to go. “Public schools are the most powerful institution in America, they’re more powerful than Wall Street, more powerful than banks, more powerful than politics. It’s because it is one institution that requires by law that our children participate in it for 12 years. Children can’t drive, can’t drink, can’t vote, can’t have sex, can’t be out too late on street at nights, but they have to go to school otherwise they break the law, and the parents break the law. Some still don’t attend, and that’s truancy, and we want to correct that.”

He added, “We should know why they’re not there — and figure out ways of making them want to come back.”

George McKenna

And when he does, it often turns into a life story, a history lesson or a smart anecdote from his teaching days ranging back to when he started at LA Unified in 1962.

Here are a few choice McKenna-isms we’ve observed at the school board.

On successful teachers . . .

“I don’t feel sorry for you because you chose to do this. You are putting together something that you must sustain. You are like the land. We can devastate everything else, but the land remains. That’s how we plant the seed, and the fruit is our children.”

On bad teachers . . .

“A lousy teacher is a bad thing to have, it’s like having a lousy doctor: you’re not going to make it.”

On ethnic teachers . . .

“The ethnicity of a teacher has nothing to do with their ability to relate to children. It does not require a black teacher to teach a black child, it does not require a Hispanic teacher to teach a Hispanic child. Melanin does not protect you from racial prejudice. It only protects you from sunburn, that’s about all. I have never found anybody that protected a child against prejudice just because they are black.”

On celebrating successful schools . . .

“We don’t need to celebrate successful schools, that should be expected. It’s like when you take an airplane. You expect it to land; you don’t celebrate that, you expect it. That’s what you’re supposed to do.”

On picking a superintendent . . .

“We can have Sleepy, Bashful, Dopey and all of them stand before us, but we are picking a Snow White.”

On the process of picking a superintendent . . .

“We can have all the forms and surveys and input in the world, but what’s going to tell it to me more than anything is when I look the person in the eye and ask them, ‘Why do you want to be superintendent of this district?’ And that’s how I will decide.”

George McKenna on a school visit with new Superintendent Michelle King.

On community input . . .

“You know, I’m all for community involvement and engagement and such, but the community is who picked us to represent them. No one invited me to sit on the board of their organization to give input. The community gave us this responsibility, let us do it.”

On fellow board member Monica Ratliff . . .

“Miss Ratliff is psychic as well as bright. … I appreciate everything she asks about, especially when it concerns the budgets. No one else is going to read through all these papers like she is.”

On unanimous decisions . . .

“That, we all agree, would be a flawed assumption, especially with the bizarreness of one or two of us.”

On a motion to close a charter school in his district . . .

“These are my children, I walk with them to school, they’ve been there since 1965. I’ve been there and know what they are doing. The objections are bureaucratic, not because of instructions. I will not vote for this.”

On teaching . . .

“One of the best ways teachers need to learn is to observe other teachers, and I hope we implement that. You watch someone; don’t interfere, just watch. It’s like reading about swimming. You can’t learn how to do it by reading, you need to jump in the water and swim.”

On educating girls and boys . . .

“Are females demonstrating their superiority [over] males, or are males not as competitive as they should be? Or maybe being smart is not machismo?”

On writing . . .

“Do girls still keep diaries? That may help them write, and writing is a most complex process. I do not know many boys that keep diaries.”

On public schools . . .

“Schools are tough, and public schools are the heart and soul of the country. They shape the minds and values of the country — not the military, not the government, not politics, but schools.”

On keeping kids in school . . .

“We can’t give up on your children. It’s about sacrifice. Children I don’t even know need us first. The thing we do in any district is take care of employees, I got that, but the children get what’s left. What are we going to do to keep the teachers being magnetic and keep the kids’ attention?”

On taking too much time . . .

“People say, ‘Wait, that takes time, George, and you’re kind of crazy anyway.’ Takes time? Time has run out. What if your Mama has cancer? You say you have to do something and go in there now and give it a try, you can’t wait. If you love the people you work with, the children — and they absolutely are innocent — you do it now.”

On fighting structure . . .

“The structure may say don’t have school in the summertime, you’re supposed to pick crops. Well, the affluent love the summer. They go to Europe. They recreate and educate and dominate. But what do we do? We vegetate, procreate and deteriorate! That’s what happens. You need to say no to those kind of structures.”

On calling an initiative bold . . .

“I know a lot of bold teenagers who make reckless decisions. Sometimes bold is reckless and they do things out of impulse.”

On teaching math . . .

“Math is one of the easiest things to learn and the hardest thing to teach. You have to wait for that ‘aha’ moment, and that’s when the student gets it.”

On voter apathy . . .

“I know not many people vote, look at how bad it was as far as people voting for the school board. I know it’s not that they don’t like me— a lot of people say they do— but there’s not much that compels them to go out to vote for me.”

LA Unified School Board members Scott Schmerelson and George McKenna join City Council members in calling for increased funding for after-school programs. (credit: CA3)

Members of the LA Unified School Board and the Los Angeles City Council joined last week with after-school program supporters, families and students to call for an increase in state funds.

About 75 people gathered Friday outside L.A. City Hall in support of a resolution authored by City Council member David Ryu, chair of the city’s Education Committee, urging Gov. Jerry Brown and the California State Legislature to increase funding for After School Education and Safety (ASES) programs in LA and across the state.

The resolution passed with all City Council members voting in support to increase school funding. In attendance were board members Scott Schmerelson, George McKenna and Monica Ratliff and council members Ryu, Bob Blumenfield and Nury Martinez.

The effort was led by the California After School Advocacy Alliance (CA3), a group of organizations that work to enhance accessibility to quality after-school programs. The alliance stated that if no action is taken by the state Legislature this year, nearly half a million low-income youth in California – 110,000 in LA Unified – would be affected, and as early as next year 50,000 could lose access to the programs. As a result, California could see more dropouts, higher crime and at-risk students being left behind, it stated.

In addition to supporting Ryu’s resolution, the CA3 recently sponsored a bill, AB 2663, that would help increase state funding to offset the costs of minimum wage increases and provide ASES programs with a statutory cost-of-living adjustment similar to other state programs.

According to a Los Angeles Times report, that would raise the daily per-student funding rate from $7.50 to $8.50, creating a $73.26-million increase for the 2016-17 school year and providing LA Unified about $10 million more for after-school programs.

George McKenna doesn’t talk about it much, but Denzel Washington played him in a TV movie called “The George McKenna Story.”

Fellow LA Unified school board members may occasionally rib him about it, and on a recent tour of an elementary school, Superintendent Michelle King pointed it out to impress the students. “This man had a movie made about him, and Denzel Washington played him,” King said as the students exclaimed, “Ooooh!”

McKenna gave his characteristically self-deprecating “aw-shucks” response and said about the two-time Academy Award winner, “You kids probably don’t even know who that is anymore.”

This year marks the 30th anniversary of that CBS-TV movie, about a principal who transformed a gang-infested South LA high school filled with graffiti and fear into a place students wanted to attend, and where they thrived. A great deal has changed in the three decades since the movie was made about this success in the LA educational system, but some things remain the same — and still need fixing.

Posters for the movie based on George McKenna’s school success in South LA.

McKenna was at first surprised when told by LA School Report that it had been so long since the movie’s release. “Time really goes by fast,” said the 75-year-old as he looked at the DVD version of the film, which has been re-titled “Hard Lessons.” (The movie is free online.) He didn’t have a copy of the movie until recently when he received it as a birthday present. McKenna, notorious for not talking to the media, agreed to discuss the anniversary and the issues the movie raised.

“I was a little embarrassed when the movie first came out,” McKenna admitted. “My ego is not that big, I never tried to seek that out, I was just doing my job.”

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The movie opens in 1979 with McKenna arriving at Washington High School in South Los Angeles on his first day as principal. He meets resistance, particularly from a teacher who reports him to the district on trumped-up charges. Students are skeptical, and a parent activist, Margaret Wright, warns him, “I got you hired, I can get you fired.”

Then a promising young athlete is shot just off campus in a gang fight and dies in the principal’s arms. That incident, like the rest of the movie, was true, McKenna said, adding about the death, “It was one of the toughest moments of my life.” The gang fight motivates the principal to step up changes both on campus — which he does with the help of an idealistic white teacher — and off campus, including painting over graffiti on a wall across the street and recruiting the football team to help. In the end, the graffiti is eradicated, students thrive and the principal is a hero. (Get a full synopsis and other facts about the movie here.)

Above, Denzel Washington walking into Washington High for the first time, and below, the actual logo at the school.

McKenna’s own voice is heard at the end of the movie, as he credits the changes to the group efforts of parents, students, staff, community and teachers. He says: “Some of the dreams at Washington Preparatory High School have come true. Attendance is now at 90 percent, and 70 percent of the graduates have gone on to college in each of the past four years. We now have a waiting list to enter our school. The school stands as a role model for what can be done at all public schools when responsibility is taken by the professionals and the entire community. The triumph of Washington Prep can be shared by all of us.”

Changes good and bad

Thirty years later, much has changed, including names: The movie has been retitled. McKenna is now Dr. George McKenna, after earning a doctorate in education from Xavier University. Washington High is now Washington Preparatory High School.

After the film, the school received many grants and motivation by the district to create Performing Arts, Math/Science and Communication Arts magnets. The school now has championship sports teams that have earned dozens of students full college scholarships. In 2006, it became part of LA Unified’s Small Learning Communities program in which the school was divided into more specific areas of interest including Engineering and Technology, Business, Health and Fitness and more.

“The school used to have 3,000 students, and when I got there, there were 1,700 and enough spaces for a whole other school,” McKenna said. Today, about 2,400 attend the school.

The school’s demographics have shifted. African-Americans, who then made up 90 percent of the student population, are now 48 percent; 49 percent are Latino. About 71 percent are socioeconomically disadvantaged, 54 percent are English learners and 52 percent have disabilities.

Progress has slid from the height of the McKenna era. Today, only about 70 percent of the students have high or near perfect attendance, while 27 percent are chronically absent. The graduation rate has fallen below the state average to 71 percent, and only 27 percent are college ready. In a district that strives to have zero suspensions, 26 students were suspended last year.

The real George McKenna, and Denzel Washington portraying him.

Only 14 percent of the students are enrolled in at least one Advanced Placement course, compared to the state average of 22 percent. In the McKenna era, 80 percent of the school’s graduates went to college; only 69 percent now say in a recent survey that they even aspire to get a college degree.

“Some things have gone backwards, it’s out of my control, but ultimately that school and all the schools in the district are much, much safer,” McKenna said. No school has metal detectors anymore, although random wanding is still done. Graffiti is gone, they have a dress code, and Washington Prep won’t let students participate in after-school activities unless they have a high attendance record.

A student dies in McKenna’s arms in the movie.

A half-dozen principals have come and gone since McKenna left in 1986, including his friend Marguerite LaMotte, who went on to be elected to the school board. McKenna succeeded her to the school board after her death in 2013.

“The key to the success of a school is the principal, and the worst thing a school can have is a mediocre principal, not just lousy, but mediocre,” explained McKenna, who then launched one of his famous McKenna-isms that made his classroom teachings so entertaining and long school board meetings less boring. “It’s like a square circle. You can say it, but you can’t draw it.”

McKenna insisted, “The principal is the single most powerful position in public education. A principal is more important than a superintendent, board members, mayors, anything. That principal’s work ethic, skill set and value system will affect everybody in the school, adults particularly, and the children and families that send their kids to that school. They all look to the principal.”

McKenna doesn’t blame recent principals for failing to keep up some of the successes he achieved at Washington High. He said the community and district have to continue to support those successes, and that takes a lot of extra work. “There’s a big difference between blame and responsibility,” he said. “It’s not your fault that they came this way, but now they’re in front of you. They’re yours, and the principal is responsible whether the grass grows. You don’t have to be a gardener, but you can’t just let the grass die. You have to figure it out and find somebody to help you keep the grass growing.”

Principal supporter 

That somebody in the movie, and in real life, is McKenna supporter Allan Kakassy, who retired in 2005 after 37 years in LA Unified and 17 years at Washington Prep. Now 70, Kakassy fondly remembers the McKenna years at the school and has kept two large bins of archives, articles, videos and pamphlets about the movie in his home in the San Fernando Valley. He claims to have the largest collection of McKenna archives, including his ticket to the movie premiere as well as teaching guides that CBS sent out to instructors throughout the country when the movie aired. He also was one of the real-life characters portrayed in the film who met with the writers and filmmakers during the making of the movie.

McKenna and Allan Kakassy as they are portrayed in the film.

“I remember the first time he appeared at Washington High with the teachers in the cafeteria and spoke about hope and collaboration and how he was determined to make the changes, it was just like in the film,” Kakassy reminisced. “He had a sense of determination, never believing something can’t be done.”

Kakassy recalled the unrelenting resistance by many of the teachers. In the first three years under McKenna, 122 of the 142 teachers transferred to another school or resigned. But many other teachers wanted to come to the school under McKenna, Kakassy said, and the school had a waiting list of 350 students by the time McKenna left.

“Quite a few teachers did leave, they just gave up,” said Kakassy, who has also collected some of the educator’s favorite quotes. “McKenna wanted us to fill out extra paperwork, make phone calls to students’ homes, stay a bit later to tutor. It wasn’t really too much, but it was enough to cause resistance. He had a precise way of identifying what needed to be done and how to do it.”

Allan Kakassy with his McKenna archives.

Kakassy said the movie didn’t show the whole story. “In the movie, I was the white young liberal who came to the principal’s defense, but it doesn’t show how the union at the time and even the district made it so very hard for him,” Kakassy recalled. “Now the unions support him, but at first they were all resistant to change. And the district told him to stand down.”

The original script depicted more of an overall struggle to change the education system as a whole. But it was rewritten to become a more traditional story of a heroic principal fighting gang violence.

“George McKenna wanted to change the system, he is a pioneer,” Kakassy said, welling up with tears as he recalled his days at Washington Prep. “People thought he was autocratic or dictatorial, but he was just the opposite. He loves the kids. He hates the system. He’s still trying to change it.”

Kakassy added, “It is a significant part of the aftermath of the movie that George McKenna is now on the school board, and maybe he can change things from there.”

McKenna said a significant way of changing the system is to repeat best practices and share what is working among teachers and schools. Some of the changes he made at Washington Prep were implemented at hundreds of schools throughout the nation. Many schools adopted his parent-student-teacher contracts that spell out specific responsibilities for each regarding a student’s education. With the help of the TV studio, McKenna’s school reforms were shared with districts throughout the nation and adopted in professional development trainings.

He received more than 400 citations and awards recognizing his work in education, including the Congressional Black Caucus’ Chairman’s Award in 1989, and was named to the National Alliance of Black School Educators’ Hall of Fame in 1997. President Ronald Reagan invited him to the White House to honor his work a year after the movie aired, and he was mentioned in Michael Dukakis’s Democratic nomination speech in 1988.

McKenna left Washington Prep to serve as superintendent of Inglewood Unified School District until 1992, and then worked as deputy superintendent of Compton Unified until 2001 and then as assistant superintendent of Pasadena Unified until 2008. Ultimately, he would return to LA Unified, where he began as a math teacher in 1962, as a school board member. He ran unopposed in the last election and will serve until 2020.

Denzel Washington with McKenna on the set.

“My challenge, my struggle, has been to get the system to change,” McKenna explained. “I don’t ask principals to change the world, just change that part of the world where you have some control and some responsibility.”

How the movie got made

The idea of the movie ignited when the husband-and-wife producing team of Alan Landsburg and Linda Otto came to McKenna after reading some of the dramatic accounts of what was happening at the school in the local newspapers.

“They said they were looking for something like a sequel of ‘To Sir, With Love’ and tell a story of what would happen to the Sidney Poitier character in this situation,” McKenna recalled. “I was flattered. The school was showing progress in ways that were unexpected, so it became news. But a movie should not be about a school that works. It should work. Why should it be celebratory when it does work rather than invoking outrage when it doesn’t?”

At the time, movies about inner city schools were novel. The movie “Stand and Deliver” about tough LA Unified teacher Jaime Escalante (which earned Edward James Olmos an Academy Award nomination) came out two years later. The Poitier movie was made in 1967.

Young actor/director Eric Laneuville, whose mother was a Washington High counselor and worked with McKenna, was tapped to direct the film. Laneuville co-starred in the medical TV drama “St. Elsewhere” and directed some episodes. He suggested the up-and-coming actor playing Dr. Chandler for the lead role.

Washington Prep now.

“I met Denzel on location, it was made at a school in Houston,” McKenna remembered. (The actual school couldn’t accommodate such a large film shoot, so the production moved out of state.) “I was able to get kids from the local high school to get bit parts in the movie. They enjoyed that.”

McKenna laughed about the choice of Washington playing him. McKenna was born in New Orleans as a very light-skinned Creole black man. He grew up in an area where certain social privileges or club memberships were allowed if your skin passed “the paper bag test.” If your skin was darker than a brown paper bag, you couldn’t belong. McKenna is much lighter. And so, a darker actor playing the African-American principal was about the only part of the film that wasn’t quite accurate.

“I was very impressed with Denzel, and he talked to me about the part,” McKenna related. “He followed me around a couple of days at school, but kids didn’t mob him because he wasn’t so famous at that time. He tried to do my accent. Of course, he went on to do a lot of other great roles after that.”

The year the movie came out, the actor spoke at the graduation ceremonies, and of course the kids were thrilled, McKenna said.

“All the parts in the movie were real, everything happened, it was factual,” said McKenna, who read all versions of the script. “It happened in a much shorter time in the movie, though, when in reality it took a period of two or three years.”

McKenna’s love interest in the movie was a composite character of women long gone. He points out that high school principals have the second highest divorce rate, beaten only by undercover cops.

“I have never been married, no wife, no kids,” McKenna mused. “I don’t blame it on the job, but I accept the fact that that’s the way it’s supposed to be. I raised all kinds of other children in the schools.”

It wasn’t shown in the movie, but he kept a toothbrush and tie in his office when he slept over at school. He often worked weekends, checking teachers’ plans and tutoring students. He attended all the athletic events and held regular assemblies with male and female students separately where they could ask him any question that was concerning them — about life, family, love, drugs, sex, homework, college, anything.

The antagonist in the movie — the teacher who had it out for McKenna — was also a composite. “There were people who pushed back,” McKenna said. “Change was not on their agenda. A lot of people believed that all you needed to do was contain children rather than emancipate them. Education is the primary vehicle for the underrepresented community to be emancipated through the educational process.

“The movie was being made almost for the wrong reason, it was celebrating a school that works, and how that’s unusual,” McKenna pointed out. “And I would ask teachers why things were so wrong and why their students were getting D’s and they talked about the gangs, the violence, the poverty, the drugs, all kinds of factors that wasn’t looking at themselves. But they didn’t ask for help. It’s we shall overcome, not I.”

If they need help, they should go paint that proverbial fence across the street, McKenna insists. He had to paint that fence over and over again in the movie (and in reality), and finally asked the football team for help.

“I had to bully the kids,” he said. “I had to say, ‘You are on my football team, you have responsibility. You come over here and help me paint the fence. Guess who decides who the coach is, and who plays on this team? I got your helmets, I got your shoulder pads, I got your jockstrap, and you are not going to go on my field with my uniform on and not help me get this graffiti off.’ And we had to paint that graffiti off a number of times.”

McKenna continued, “What really changed was the people in those houses, the mamas and grandpas, who came out and gave them lemonade and some cookies and thanked the kids. That was personal, and that’s when the graffiti stopped.”

Washington High School with building named for Margaret Wright, depicted in the film.

School notoriety, the famous and infamous

Washington High was built in 1926 in the Westmont section of unincorporated Los Angeles County. Famous alumni include swimmer and actress Esther Williams, former LA County district attorney Gil Garcetti, surf guitarist Dick Dale and pro football player Hugh McElhenny. Later, actor/rapper Ice Cube, actress and singer Teresa Graves and many pro football and basketball stars would graduate from the school.

McKenna explained that the Watts Riots in 1965 scared many of the white families out of the area. Gangs formed and drugs were sold openly. McKenna said he witnessed the birth of the Bloods and Crips in his school neighborhood. Some of the most infamous gang leaders were in Kakassy’s classes.

“McKenna made students feel safe to come back where some of the country’s most notorious gangs began,” Kakassy said. “He pointed out that neglect was detrimental to the community and the students. It was important to be hard on the system, because there was an environment of uncaring. And yet, people resisted. How can George McKenna’s message be controversial? He is expecting a high level of behavior of the staff and the community for the best of the children!”

Kakassy added: “And how many high school principals are invited by the president to the White House?”

McKenna downplays the fanfare surrounding him, like when high-profile black politicians Maxine Waters and Jesse Jackson came to his school board inauguration ceremony. “I don’t know Jesse personally, but it was an honor to have him there,” McKenna said. “That was a bit embarrassing too.”

McKenna said, “The reality is that it’s not about a celebrity, or a movie, or a book, it’s about what we do and how we try very hard in the classroom. My soul is with the classroom teacher.”

McKenna notes that there are still schools nationwide like Washington High in the movie, but he is sure that there aren’t any that bad in LA Unified anymore.

“If the adults around don’t have sufficient commitment to let no child escape, then the situation in the schools will just get worse,” McKenna warned. “The classroom can be a place of salvation or a place of condemnation.”

Even now as a school board member, McKenna said changing the system is still a challenge. But he said he hopes his position will facilitate those changes, and quickly.

“Patience is not a virtue, it runs out on all of us, and there will still be things I need to get done when my time runs out,” McKenna said, smiling. Then, pulling out another McKenna-ism, he added, “Someday is not on the calendar. It is not a day of the week. For me, it’s now.”

Football players help Principal McKenna paint over graffiti in “The George McKenna Story.”

The tag line of the film “The George McKenna Story” (also known as “Hard Lessons”) is a punny George McKenna-ism characteristic of the man it profiled.

“He risked it all to make the grade,” is how the movie was advertised. In it, the heroic principal sacrifices relationships, career and safety to do the right thing for public education.

The movie kicks off with a funky, if not dated, original score written by jazz great Herbie Hancock. The scroll states, “Based on a true story,” and according to McKenna himself, it’s all pretty accurate and happened just like it unfolds in the movie.

Denzel Washington plays McKenna, shown in 1979 being driven up to Washington High School in South Los Angeles as principal. His girlfriend (played by Lynn Whitfield) hesitatingly drops him off at the school, which is covered in graffiti, as one of the students shouts profanity at her. (Whitfield later played the girlfriend to an LA Crips gang founder who came from the area around Washington High in the TV movie “Redemption: The Stan ‘Tookie’ Williams Story” with Jamie Foxx.)

Within a few minutes of being at the school, McKenna has to break up a gang “jumping” ritual and literally put out a fire started in the hallway. He tries to encourage a handful of teachers to do more for their students but meets resistance, particularly from a teacher named Ben Proctor (not a real person) played by character actor Richard Masur, known for TV shows such as “Rhoda,” “One Day at a Time” and more recently “The Good Wife.” The teacher expects McKenna won’t last and later reports him to the district on trumped-up charges.

Meanwhile, students are skeptical of the new principal. One smart young girl wants to leave the school and get bused to a safer school an hour away. A gang leader on campus gets arrested, and McKenna tries to help him. He drives a good student to his home and finds out he’s living in an abandoned car and is undocumented. He also confronts a father who would rather his son work with him at his business than go to school.

Then a promising young athlete is shot on campus in a gang fight and dies in McKenna’s arms. (It was shown on campus, but actually occurred just off the school grounds.) That motivates him to step up changes on campus, calling for a dress code and for teachers to check in with parents. He holds a meeting for parents, but only 16 show up. Parent activist Margaret Wright, played by singer Virginia Capers, warns him, “I got you hired, I can get you fired.” There is now a building on campus named after Wright.

He paints off the graffiti on the wall across the street from the school, and keeps painting over it, until he gets the football team to help him.

A young white teacher, Allan, played by character actor Ray Buktenica, allies himself with McKenna but calls him crazy. (Buktenica was also a regular in the TV show “Rhoda” and the series “House Calls” and is known for the movies “My Girl” and “Heat.”)

Allan walks to the parking lot where McKenna’s car is vandalized with graffiti. Later, a district official notifies the new guy that he can’t change the system.

McKenna then hires an inspiring English teacher, Aura Kruger, who gets the students to learn Shakespeare. She is played by tall, upright actress Barbara Townsend, when in reality the actual teacher was barely 5 feet tall and weighed 95 pounds. She wanted to bring a regional Shakespeare competition to the school, which McKenna accomplishes, despite fears from the other students attending. One of her students performs an amazing soliloquy at the contest after almost giving up.

McKenna (who is officially George McKenna III) goes back home to New Orleans to talk to his father, who gives him a pep talk and sage advice. By the end of the movie, the teachers who don’t like McKenna leave the school. His girlfriend realizes he is more wedded to public education and leaves him. The wall across from the school remains graffiti-free.

Then, with the strains of “Wind Beneath My Wings,” the principal walks down the now cleaned-up halls of the school to the words, “Did you ever know that you’re my hero, and everything I would like to be?” (In reality, it’s McKenna’s favorite song, which he told the filmmakers.)

There’s a montage of students lining up to graduate: the smart girl comes back to the school, the homeless kid does well, gang kids get diplomas. The father who wanted his son to work instead of going to school is applauding in the audience with tears in his eyes. The principal is handed a plaque inscribed with: “We are family and we love you Mr. McKenna.”

Then, at the end, the real George McKenna speaks, talking about how the change at the school was a group effort with parents, students, staff, community and teachers. “Some of the dreams at Washington Preparatory High School have come true. Attendance is now at 90 percent, and 70 percent of the graduates have gone on to college in each of the past four years. We now have a waiting list to enter our school. The school stands as a role model for what can be done at all public schools when responsibility is taken by the professionals and the entire community. The triumph of Washington Prep can be shared by all of us.”

Watch the trailer of the movie  below. Find out more about George McKenna here.

In fact, the percentage of students maintaining a C or better in college prep or A-G classes has more than doubled in 10 years, according to the latest LA Unified statistics.

In a report presented at a committee meeting Tuesday afternoon, Chief Academic Officer Frances Gipson noted that only 18 percent of the students had a C or above in 2005, but in 2015 that number hit 43 percent — a nearly 20 percent jump just from last school year — and this year it is expected to hit 49 percent.

Gipson repeatedly used the phrase “cautious optimism” when discussing the recent numbers with both the school board members and later with LA School Report. She said part of the reason for the new statistics and the optimistic outlook is “an action plan for incredible personalization” that was implemented by new Superintendent Michelle King when she took office last month.

“It was evident from the first week that Michelle King wants all students to be college ready, and that is C or better,” Gipson said. “We want a diploma from LAUSD to mean something. Ms. King has their families’ best interest at heart.”

In her first meeting as superintendent, King let her local district superintendents know that they should all be personally accountable for contacting students who are not on track to graduate. Staff was notified to help students get into credit recovery programs so they can turn F grades into passing grades. Although the district lowered standards so that students can also graduate with D averages in A-G classes, that is not enough for King.

“You can receive a D to graduate, but we are looking toward the C college-ready achievement, and we would be very pleased to look at how we moved the needle for our kids to make them more college ready,” King said.

In the latest statistics, 63 percent of seniors districtwide are on track to graduate, and 17 percent are off by one or two classes, according to Gipson. The remaining 20 percent need to complete three or more courses.

In order to help those students, the district has 138 auxiliary classes and also offers independent study, blended learning, virtual learning and other individualized programs. At the moment, about 700 students are enrolled in Performance Assessment Student Support (PASS) in-class programs at 28 schools, and 330 have participated in the Students Taking Action for Readiness (STAR 17) program that gives extra instruction and testing time for students who need it. Since August, more than 4,000 students have enrolled in after-school classes at 38 high schools with 1,213 semester courses currently completed.

“We would love to move that green bar for those students who are off by one or two classes, and we have cautious optimism,” Gipson said. “Our predictive data is that it is heading in that direction. We have to wait for the grades.”

Frances Gipson, chief academic officer

Last year, the graduation rate was an unprecedented 74 percent, and this year it could be 80 percent if those students lacking one or two classes are helped. Board member Monica Ratliff exclaimed at the committee meeting, “This could be the highest graduation rate ever!”

George McKenna, a board member and chairman of the Committee of the Whole that heard the report, said, “I’m enthusiastically encouraged” and he suggested looking into the “ethnicities and gender data to see what subgroup is not doing well, we need to know that.”

School board president Steve Zimmer said, “It is evident we are changing what we’ve done before, and I want to keep us positive and keep us moving in the right direction.”

Local District Northeast Superintendent Byron Maltez gave a presentation showing how his district is working with students who are lagging behind. He said they have better ways of identifying and targeting the students now and offer unique individual programs. If students can’t make Saturday or after school programs and have trouble while on computer courses at night, Verdugo High School, for example, has hired a teacher available from 7 p.m. to midnight to answer questions. And San Fernando High School arranges counseling support for students who may have social or emotional issues that prevent them from performing well in class.

Ratliff said she wants to make sure that students in the credit recovery program are getting the same kind of education. “We want to make sure that ultimately the diploma is the same for everyone,” she said.

McKenna added, “You can graduate with a D, but we should not encourage students to only get D’s. It doesn’t make you eligible for college and we should continue to push them, that’s very important.”

Scott Schmerelson

The LA Unified board today put itself on record as opposing a proposal that originated with the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation to expand the number of charter schools in the district in the years ahead.

By a 7-0 vote, the board made it clear that it would do what it could to discourage the effort by the Broad-affiliated group, Great Public Schools Now, to grow what is already the largest charter school population of any school district in the country. At the same time, the board vowed to intensify efforts toward improving educational opportunities within traditional district schools as a way to discourage more students from moving into charters.

“We have thrown down the gauntlet to big business to be very careful with how they deal with LAUSD,” said Scott Schmerelson, whose resolution was also supported by all the district’s labor partners as well as many parents. “They will not take over our district.”

The vote followed a lengthy and sometimes passionate debate in which the board’s vice president, George McKenna, emerged as a surprise supporter of charter schools as an option to traditional schools. Rarely has any member, apart from Mónica García, expressed such unvarnished support for the role charters play in LA Unified.

It was McKenna who introduced the idea in debate that any school that educates a child is a valuable asset, saying, “I don’t care who saves my kids. Just save my kids.”

McKenna also had a kind word for Broad, saying he doesn’t consider the billionaire philanthropist “a villain.”

“We have not as a district admitted our culpability and our own ineffectiveness in dealing with our children,” McKenna said, adding, “What are we committed to, more than ‘Go. away, go away.’ I don’t believe in bogeymen.”

Underlying the board’s discomfort over the charter plan is the district’s slowly declining enrollment, a trend exacerbated by the appeal of charters to many parents. Even now, tens of thousands of LA Unified students are on charter school waitings lists. For months, the district has been struggling to develop ideas on how to stem the outflow.

In expressing support for Schmerelson’s measure, McKenna said, “I’m not anti-charter; I’m not for charters, either. I want to make our schools work, first, to make them competitive so we can compete on our terms.”

A spokesman for Great Public Schools Now said the group would have no response to passage of the resolution.

A major point within the debate was whether to keep the language general or to specify Broad as the originator of the plan that has roiled the district since it was introduced last summer. It was revised late last year to include support for some district schools as well as charters, in part as a response to harsh public reaction.

Mónica Ratliff wanted to insert Broad’s name but settled on the name of the plan. She said, “Eli Broad must know the impact on the district in the long run if that plan was to go forward. This plan was not created to strengthen LA Unified. I want that to be on the record.”

She added, “He’s a smart guy, that Eli Broad. He did not come up with this willy-nilly. There is public consternation with the plan, and it’s become a softer gentler plan and that did not happen without pubic speaking out in a lot of different areas.”

Ultimately, the board discussed various options and concluded to leave the wording that the board would “stand opposed to internal and external initiatives that seek to reduce public education in Los Angeles to an educational marketplace and our children to market shares, while not investing in district-wide programs and strategies that benefit every student whom we are sworn to serve.”

Prior to the debate, a parade of supporters and detractors made their sentiments known to the board members. A group of charter school employees expressed support during a morning meeting, and opponents, including the district’s labor partners, criticized the plan later in the day.

Richard Vladovic raised concerns about the ramifications of declining enrollment that the Broad plan would create. He had originally thought he was going to talk about how the district is too big and recommend making the district smaller, but said privately, “I didn’t think the board would be unified in this resolution.”

Board President Steve Zimmer said he appreciated the board’s coming together to give “a statement that fully recognizes the spectrum of lenses we have on this board.” He said, “I want to call to my own and all of our own higher angels today and moving forward.”

Zimmer said the board “needs to look at the models for of excellent schools across all sectors that have been identified and invest in all schools and if there’s philanthropic investment to make them excellent then why wouldn’t we encourage that?”

Earlier in the day, the board unanimously passed a Ratliff-sponsored resolution that called for making charter schools as transparent in providing information to parents as traditional schools are required.

Sarah Angel of the California Charter Schools Association said although she wasn’t thrilled with Ratliff’s resolution, there was more cooperation in working with Ratliff to refine her resolution than there had been with Schmerelson, who did not meet with the association in crafting his measure.

“These two resolutions are a contrast of public policy,” Angel told the board. She said Ratliff’s resolution “although not perfect, is not draining time and resources away from charter students. On the other hand, we had a different experience with Mr. Schmerelson. Myths and charter rhetoric made its way into the resolution and continues polarization and politics.”

After the vote, Angel added, “There is the sense right now that the school board is more open than before to seeking genuine solutions and common ground, hopefully without sacrificing urgency on behalf of families that need better schools. We’re hopeful that the loudest and most extreme voices on all sides will quiet down and give way to authentic, results-focused collaboration for students. Education should never be an ‘us versus them’ situation, and we all have the opportunity right now to find a third way.”

In a self-described era of board openness and transparency, some members have made significant improvements on their websites, and the district, itself, has expanded its digital outreach, with news features like LAUSD Daily, which captures feel-good stories from around the district.

But it’s clear that several members’ websites remain woefully out of date or lacking in useful information, calling into question the degree to which they truly want to engage the public.

According to the front page of his website, board member George McKenna is organizing a series of “education town halls” in January, February and March. The public is invited. There’s just one problem: Those meetings were held nearly a year ago. Even so, it’s the first thing McKenna has to say on his website, just as it was in July, when LA School Report first pointed it out.

What else does he have to say? There’s a homepage link to the “McKenna Memo” newsletter, the last issue of which was sent out last December, and links to the “latest news,” which is also from December. McKenna’s Facebook account is also frozen in time, with two posts in its entire history, the last of which was, yes, December.

The lack of activity on the Facebook page could explain why McKenna has a total of 39 followers. McKenna has a Twitter account, too, but does not appear to have ever sent a single tweet to any of his 49 followers. (McKenna did not respond to a request for comment.)

And that’s not an anomaly. Board President Steve Zimmer‘s website contains no information but for an invitation to sign up for his newsletter.  When clicking on the “Newsletter” page, readers find a newsletter from May. May 2014. (Maybe he should rename it the “Oldletter” page.)

Zimmer does appear to have produced newsletters since then, but they aren’t found anywhere on the newsletter page. A link to his recent September newsletter can be found on his Twitter and Facebook accounts. What’s in the newsletter? Primarily, photos from Zimmer’s participation in a Labor Day march and his thoughts on Labor Day, but not much else.

Zimmer’s social media accounts, particularly Facebook, are not much more active and amount to 12 Facebook posts since September and two tweets. Zimmer seems to have lost interest in his Twitter account over the last year, as the number of tweets has fallen significantly despite an impressive number of followers, over 1,400. His Facebook page, while more active, only has 165 followers.

On the other end of the spectrum is board member Monica Garcia, who has robust and regular communication through her website, Facebook and Twitter accounts. There are regular and easy to find newsletters and active social media accounts with frequent posts. This could explain why Garcia has many followers on social media, with over 1,100 on Facebook and 1,700 on Twitter.

The other board members seem to fall somewhere in-between McKenna’s inertia and Garcia’s dynamism.

The most useful information on board member Monica Ratliff‘s website is in her regular monthly newsletter, but she hasn’t added one since the summer. She has a Facebook page with over 1,100 friends, but only one public post in all of 2015. She has a Twitter page, but with a total of just six tweets ever and just over 200 followers, her reach on that platform is somewhat limited.

Board member Richard Vladovic has made a change to his website over the last few months, chosing now to embed his active Facebook page posts directly onto the website as the main source of regular information. The Facebook page is well maintained and up- to-date, with over 2,000 followers, but Vladovic does not appear to produce any regular newsletter, at least one that can be easily found.

Board members Scott Schmerelson and Ref Rodriguez took office in July and are just getting their online operations up and running — but to different degrees. Both recently produced their first newsletters. The home page of Schmerelson’s website contains a message saying it will be “the future home of information and updates.” Schmerelson does not appear to have any Facebook or Twitter accounts, while Rodriguez has active accounts for both, with over 1,200 followers on Facebook and 500 on Twitter.

The question is — as some school board members pointed out before the survey launched — why would anyone want anything less than all 21 qualities included in the survey?

With a pull-down menu in English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean and Armenian, the survey asks respondents to rate characteristics on a scale of 5 to 1, signifying greater or lesser importance.

They include such qualities as:

• Hold a deep understanding of the teaching/ learning process.
• Foster a positive, professional climate of mutual trust and respect among faculty, staff, and administrators.
• Establish a culture of high expectations for all students and personnel.
• Hold all employees accountable for their performance.

Some of these are “duh!” questions, and when the school board looked at them at its last meeting, several members said so.

George McKenna looked over the questions handed to him by the search firm on Sept. 15 and pointed out the obvious. “Why would someone not choose all fives?” he asked, with a reference to the highest rating. “I don’t know how you say no to any of these?”

Further, none of the charcteristics reflects anything specific to LA Unified, such as, “Has the political skills to balance the interests of an assertive teachers union and a well-funded state charter association.” Or, “Has the temperament to manage the diverse interests and personalities of seven bosses.”

Nor does it seek to learn if respondents want a superintendent who might stick around awhile, bringing a degree of stability to the district. Since 2000, LA Unified’s superintendent office has changed occupants six times. Long Beach Unified has had the same superintendent since 2002.

In fact, the charateristics cited on the LA Unified survey are almost the same as those in many of the other searches now underway by firm hired by the district to carry out the search, Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates.

Nonetheless, board president Steve Zimmer tells respondents in an open letter , “The public will be involved in helping to shape the conversation and to provide critical input. I ask you to participate in every way that you can. Your voice as a stakeholder is very important to the Board of Education.”The survey page includes  a link to a booklet that explains how a search is carried out, and a report by HYA of what makes a successful superintendent. (Not surprising, it includes all of the characteristics in their survey.)

Board member Scott Schmerelson was insistent that the survey include a question involving the candidate’s experience as a teacher or principal, and the search firm complied, with the question: “How important is it to you for the new superintendent to have had experience as a teacher and a campus administrator?”

Hank Gmitro, president of HYA told the board that the characteristics were compiled as the best traits of a successful school superintendent. He said it was important to get input from diverse communities, and the school board members will be able to discern from the data what each district said, and how parents, students, teachers and administrators, among others, responded.

The survey also asks respondents to suggest “a good candidate for this position.”

The search firm is planning to hold community meetings at each of the six Local Districts in LAUSD and another at the district headquarters during the weeks of Oct. 19 and 26. Anyone from the public can attend any of the meetings no matter what part of the district. Not all of them have locations and times set yet.

The search firm plans to compile the surveys to allow the seven school board members to come up with the best characteristics of a new superintendent. But even that could be difficult.

“That we would all agree on the same characteristics would be a flawed assumption, given the bizarreness of one of two of us,” McKenna said. “And ultimately, this superintendent answers to us and not to all the other people answering (these surveys).”

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It didn’t matter if they were in traditional schools, magnet schools or charters. It didn’t matter the grade level, area of LA Unified, nor the racial breakdown. Girls were better — and that was reflected in the overall California results, too.

“It is curious that females scored higher than males, we have never seen that before,” Cynthia Lim, the executive director of the Office of Data and Accountability, told the LAUSD Curriculum, Instruction and Educational Equity Committee at a meeting today. In math tests, the differences were minimal, and in years past there was never as marked a difference according to gender, she said.

Now, the district is going to look into possible reasons why.

“Do girls still keep diaries?” School board member George McKenna mused aloud. “That may help them write, and writing is a most complex process. I do not know many boys that keep diaries.”

The new Smarter Balanced Assessment scores are taken on computer tablets and require more blocks of reading than previous tests. Also, they require a section in which listening is required to answer the questions, which was never done before.

“The tests require much more writing, we will look into this, we haven’t seen the same trend with the math scores,” Lim said.

McKenna posited, “Are females demonstrating their superiority of males, or are males not as competitive as they should be? Or maybe being smart is not machismo?”

Ruth Perez, Deputy Superintendent of Instruction, was also interested in figuring out the disparity and seeing whether girls tend to write more, therefore scoring better.

One result that was not the least surprising was that economically disadvantaged students, students with disabilities and English language learners scored worse than the average student population.

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Hank Gmitro of Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates

Even before the superintendent search team passes out the first public survey, members of the LA Unified school board yesterday raised questions over questions that they want the community to consider in finding a successor to Ramon Cortines.

The board held most of the discussion in a closed meeting last night with the search team of Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates. That team, which seemed to emphasize secrecy more than the other teams that were considered for the search, said that most of the discussion over the first part of the search should be held outside of public scrutiny.

Board member Mónica Garcia even asked, “Can the public know specifics about the calendar” and other parts of the survey? Hank Gmitro, of Hazard Young, answered, “That would have to go in the closed session.”

But, the parts of the meeting that were held in open session showed the board already fine-tuning the 27 questions for online and on-paper surveys intended to seek opinions from staff, teachers and parents that would ostensibly influence the search process.

“I know people are asking, ‘Why is she harping on this survey?’ but this is the first thing that people will be looking at in our search for a superintendent,” said board member Mónica Ratliff. She complained that the questions about management were toward the end of the survey, at 16 through 20, and thought those questions should be higher.

“People tend to focus more at the beginning and lose attention at the end,” she said. “I think management is important.”

Gmitro said he would randomize the questions. The search team, he said, would then use the information, as well as interviewing organizations and community groups, to generate a report for the board.

Board member George McKenna noted that when the community is asked to rank, one to five, the importance of certain skills, “Why would someone not choose all five?” He said, “I don’t know how you say no to any of these?” McKenna said he preferred questions that were more introspective, such as “Who are you?” and “What do you believe in?”

Gmitro said that their team picked the characteristics of the most successful superintendents in education, and wanted to see how the public ranked those in importance. “Not everyone will be an expert in all,” Gmitro said.

Scott Schmerelson said the first question on the survey should ask how important it is to the community for the candidate to have been an educator or a school administrator. “The number one question should be, ‘Have you been a successful teacher and administrator in a public school?’ ” Schmerelson said. “I’d like to know how important that is to people.”

In closed session, the board planned to work on the calendar and structure of the process for community engagement. They need to discuss such issues as how many different languages the survey should be translated into and how to get the word out to stakeholders, parents, community and staff members.

“We will be spending several weeks in the school district interviewing each of you and constituent groups,” Gmitro said. “We are going to have community focus groups.”

Then, they will begin the search for candidates.

The LA Unified board endured a long and unusual protest last night as about 50 students demanded specific actions to get military-style weapons out of the hands of district school police.

The students, some of them wearing bullet-proof vests, chanted for 20 minutes at the start of a meeting — “Back to school, no weapons” and “We want justice for our schools” — in protesting the federal 1033 Program, a federal effort that provides school districts with surplus military-grade weapons. LA Unified has been a recipient.

Board president Steve Zimmer let the chanting continue and at one point said, “Let them go on.”

The demonstration inside the board meeting followed two hours of drumming and shouting outside LA Unified headquarters, with students holding signs bearing the face of President Obama and Superintendent Ramon Cortines.

Manuel Criollo, a protest organizer from the Labor Community Strategy Center, told the board that he wanted an end to the program, which had given the district a tank, three grenade launchers and dozens of M-16s. The district returned the tank and grenade launchers last fall, but has kept the M-16s. In a June letter the Criollo’s group, Cortines said the district had ended its involvement with the program.

Brillo called for the board to be more public about the weapons and demanded that they be returned.

“It’s ironic that we have surplus weapons but we do not have surplus books,” he said.

Inside, the crowd called out to the only black school member, George McKenna, and he responded by recalling his own experiences with civil unrest while defending the need for school police to be prepared for any occasion in which student safety is at risk.

“First of all, in 50 years of going to schools from Inglewood to Compton, I have never seen such weapons,” McKenna told the crowd. “I have always seen gang members with weaponry that exceeds the police. I have held dying children shot by each other, not by police.”

He challenged, “I have not seen this school police with M-16s on school site, and neither have you. I would hate the school police to make a 911 call because they cannot stand down to an over-armed person on campus.”

In response to the crowd’s calling for more money for books and not weapons, he said, “If weaponry is given to us, we’re not paying for it, we’re not taking it away from book money.”

Then, he said, “I would rather have what we don’t need than need it when we don’t have it.”

McKenna talked about teaching at Jordan High School in 1965 when the Watts Riots broke out. “We did not have police officers,” he said. He pointed out he was against metal detectors at schools, but then saw the proliferation of violence and then changed his mind.

“I saw Tookie start the Crips right there in my neighborhood,” he said, referring to the notorious gang leader Stanley (Tookie) Williams, who was convicted for two murders and executed in 2005. “It kills me that they may not be safe in schools, but they will not shot by police.”

Board member Mónica García also addressed the students.

“I have to tell you, you are effective,” she said. “You may not get the ‘yes’ now, but you were heard, we heard you. You are right to be leaders.”

She pointed out that the school district has fewer suspensions and fewer expulsions than ever before.

“You have caused that to be true,” Garcia said. “You young people have cause that to be true, and I have the pleasure of chairing the School Safety Committee and we will take this up. We also have solution; it’s called literacy. When kids read they chose different.”

After the meeting, Criollo said he was disappointed that Zimmer didn’t take more of a stand. “Silence says a lot, and only one board member spoke in public, and they seem to be supporting the arming of their police,” he said.

Ashley Franklin, who helped organize the students, said it was a good civics lesson, even though they may be walking away disappointed. She held a debriefing with the students where they expressed feeling helpless, and talked down to, or even ignored.

“You were vocal, you were more vocal than those who have to power to be vocal, and that is a good thing,” she told the students.

Then, she added, “We are a starving army, and we are out maneuvered at this time. So, let’s go get some pizza.”

In his first move, he named George McKenna, the District 1 representative, as board vice president, which didn’t require a vote. Then, the board elected others to positions in county, state and national boards. The positions weren’t contested, and neither of the two new members, Ref Rodriguez and Scott Schmerelson, volunteered for any of the spots.

First up was an election for a representative to the Los Angeles County School Trustees Association. That group was started in 1937 by the Los Angeles County Office of Education to provide school board members with training, informational support and ways to network with other school board members in other nearby districts. They collaborate with the California School Boards Association in Sacramento. 

It was suggested by staff that the same person taking that position should also be elected to the voting board of the Los Angeles County Committee on School District Organization. That’s also a county committee, made up of 11 members, that studies and makes recommendations about forming new school districts and changing boundaries and territories within districts.

Mónica Ratliff agreed to take both positons.

McKenna was named the board representative to the California School Boards Association, a nonprofit group with nearly 1,000 educational agencies throughout the state that serves as a unified voice for school districts and county offices of education.

For the next position, former board president Richard Vladovic suggested that the president of the school board be the representative to the Council of Great City Schools.

“You know the district, you can represent us well in that,” Vladovic said to his successor, Zimmer. “You should appoint yourself.”

The Council of Great City Schools is a national coalition of 67 urban public school districts, based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to bring the highest academic standards to diverse urban school populations.

Zimmer thanked Vladovic for the suggestion and then appointed himself to the position.

Zimmer also created a new position for Vladovic to be a school board liaison to the labor partners. Vladovic agreed.

That left an appointment to the National School Boards Association. Based in Alexandria, Va., this association represents 90,000 school boards and calls itself an “Army of Advocates” for public education. Talk show personality Montel Williams was recently named to lead the association’s “Stand Up 4 Public Schools” campaign.

After no one jumped at that position, and since it is appointed, not elected, Zimmer said, “I will make that appointment later.”

Among those joining in on the road trip are Chief Deputy Superintendent Michelle King, Chief Financial Officer Megan Reilly and board members George McKenna and Steve Zimmer. They planned to meet with Senate President Pro Tem Kevin de León and “other key legislators,” according to district officials.

Superintendent Ramon Cortines announced plans to eliminate funding for a pre-school program serving about 13,000 four-year olds, called the School Readiness and Language Development Program. SRLDP costs about $26 million annually and is the only pre-school program financed exclusively with district general funds.

As a result, the board approved a resolution to explore the idea of expanding existing transitional kindergarten programs, which are partially paid for with state funding.

Adult education programs were among the first to be slashed throughout the the recession years, and it has yet to benefit from recent state revenue increases. Further, more cuts are planned. The district issued layoff notices to hundreds of adult education teachers in April.

The latest budget projections from the state’s legislative analysts office estimate the district will receive $710 million dollars above what it had initially expected.