U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. takes questions from reporters Wednesday at USC.

U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. was joined by LA Unified Superintendent Michelle King and a number of education leaders at the USC Rossier School of Education Wednesday to announce the release of his department’s new teacher preparation regulations.

The regulations call for more detailed information to be gathered on how new teachers are performing, aim to provide better tracking of retention rates, offers more flexibility to states in how they measure the performance of preparation programs and require states to report annual ratings on their programs.

“The regulations really try to establish a better feedback between our K-12 schools and our teacher preparation programs, so that teacher preparation programs are getting good information about how their graduates are doing,” Sec. King said to a group of reporters. “What kinds of schools are they going into? Are they staying in those schools? Are they being retained in the teaching profession? What kind of impact are they having on their students that they teach?”

In his opening remarks at USC, Sec. King referred to the information gathered in the old regulations as “surface data,” and Superintendent King offered praise for the new, more detailed data the regulations call for.

“The use of data and really focusing on outcomes I really think is critical. And so whenever we can put that in place I think it helps drive the whole system forward, which is important,” Superintendent King told LA School Report when asked how the new regulations would impact her district. “And we certainly want teachers that are prepared, that are making an impact and a difference for kids. And so we can look at that and go back and have our partnerships with the different universities and say, ‘Look, this is what’s working.'”

The new regulations also:

• Will punish low-performing programs by cutting off federal TEACH grants.
• Require feedback from graduates and their employers on the effectiveness of their program.
• Give guidelines for measuring the student learning outcomes of those under novice teachers, including academic performance.

The new regulations were criticized by American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.

“It is, quite simply, ludicrous to propose evaluating teacher preparation programs based on the performance of the students taught by a program’s graduates,” Weingarten said in a statement.

The new regulations have been in the works for at least five years and were begun under Sec. King’s predecessor, Arne Duncan, who stepped down in 2015. Earlier this month, in an open letter to college presidents and education school deans, Duncan said, “The system we have for training teachers lacks rigor, is out of step with the times, and is given to extreme grade inflation that leaves teachers unprepared and their future students at risk.”

Sec. King also participated in a roundtable discussion at Rossier, where he was joined by Under Secretary Ted Mitchell, Superintendent King, Rossier School of Education Dean Karen Symms Gallagher and a number of education leaders. Also at the table were some educators and administrators at LA Unified schools, including Norma Spencer, principal of the Alexander Science Center, and Kristen McGregor, principal of Belmont High School.

One issue that was raised several times was the problem of teacher retention and the teacher shortage plaguing the nation. According to a new study from the Learning Policy Institute, enrollment in teacher-preparation programs dropped from 691,000 in 2009 to 451,000 in 2014. And according to a recent commentary on LA School Report by Jane Mayer and Jesse Soza, approximately 11,000 LA teachers are predicted to leave the profession in the next five years.

“What I have learned is that teachers are feeling isolated and when they don’t have other teachers or a support team there, they are more likely not to stay within the profession,” Superintendent King said during the discussion.

Kearstie Hernandez, a chemistry teacher at Huntington Park High School and a 2014 Rossier graduate, listed during the roundtable discussion all the different roles she has taken on at her school, including head of the girls’ basketball program, assistant athletic director, head of the science fair and several others.

“I sleep five hours a day. I commute an hour in the morning and an hour and a half in the evening back home,” she said.

Superintendent King was impressed with the list — and concerned.

“I was listening to all that stuff. That’s a lot for a new person. I’m thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, she is going to hit the wall and burn out,'” King told LA School Report. “So we really have to be very intentional about that and put the supports around them and really hook them up with other people. Because if you don’t, three years out, they just say, ‘It’s too much.'”

During his closing remarks at the end of the panel discussion, Sec. King had praise for Superintendent King and LA Unified.

“Certainly, Michelle, I really admire the things you are doing in LA and your commitment that LAUSD has to continue to get better and close gaps and create better opportunity. And your willingness to have the hard conversations to make that happen, I appreciate,” he said.

Valerie Childress with one of her four graduates at Hybrid High, Cambria Kelley.

*UPDATED

The first class to graduate from an innovative university-based charter school in Los Angeles is sending all 84 grads to four-year colleges, most with scholarships.

Valerie Childress watched her quadruplets graduate Saturday evening on the campus of the University of Southern California with tears in her eyes.

“I said I wasn’t going to cry, but I have been waiting for this moment since they were born,” Childress said outside USC’s Bovard Auditorium. “All of them are graduating and all of them are going to college. I’m so proud, and I’m so grateful to this school.”

The Childress quads are part of the first graduating class of USC Hybrid High School, an LA Unified charter school operated by Ednovate, which focuses on personalized learning. The students landed more than $5 million in scholarships and 400 acceptances from schools such as University of Pennsylvania, UC Riverside, Pepperdine, Cal State LA, California Institute of the Arts, UCLA and, yes, six to USC, which sponsors Ednovate.

The school, near downtown and on the first floor of the old Los Angeles World Trade Center, is 74 percent Latino, 22 percent black and 85 percent in lower socio-economic families. All of the graduates have completed graduate prep courses, 10 percent are “DREAMer” immigrants and 85 percent are first-generation college students in their families.

USC Hybrid High School is unique because it is a personalized college prep school where everyone has a Chromebook and teachers monitor each student’s performance every step of the way. The students learn to be self-directed and self-motivated in the schoolwork.

Ednovate has two schools in LA Unified, USC Hybrid High and USC East College Prep, which opened in Lincoln Heights this year. It will open another school in Santa Ana in Orange County in August, and two other schools have been approved to open in LA Unified in 2017.

Hybrid High seniors graduate on the USC campus.

“When I graduated here from USC there weren’t that many charter schools in the country,” said Ednovate President Oliver Sicat before the ceremonies. “The idea that I can start a charter or create a high school was not available to me at the time,” Sicat said, but he knew he wanted to intersect entrepreneurship with education, and that’s what he’s doing now with the help of his former alma mater.

“I have been thinking about this moment for quite a while, it’s the culmination of hundreds of staff members, students, parents and partners,” Sicat said. “We have created a positive multi-generational change in these families, with the first generation to attend college for most of them and trying to break the cycle of poverty.”

One of their students was homeless when she enrolled as a freshman and entered through the foster program. “She worked through some really tough conditions to transition to college prep and is now going to a four-year college on scholarship,” Sicat said.

Another student acted out by tagging bathrooms and skipping classes when they asked why he wasn’t doing his homework. He said that everyone in his family was either in auto mechanics, on drugs or in a gang. He wanted an option out of it to break the cycle.

“That student is now going to a college outside of the city,” Sicat said. “That’s one of the amazing stories that has come from here.”

Tristian and Raymundo Corona at the Hybrid High graduation ceremony.

Tristian Corona, 18, is the oldest of seven children in his family and now has a scholarship to UC Merced where he wants to major in mechanical engineering. “The teachers here really helped create a pathway for me and inspired me,” he said.

His father, Raymundo Corona, said he has home-schooled his children until he heard that the school was opening and enrolled his son in the freshman class. “My wife and I went to district schools and we were not comfortable sending our children there,” he said. “The local schools were overcrowded and he would get lost in the crowd. Here, he got personalized teaching and reached a level he never would have. They are strict and wear uniforms, and so they can focus on their work and not trying to be trendy.”

Another student, Pamela Joya, is one of the top five scoring students in the school and reminisced about some of the good and bad over the past four years. Some teachers left, some persevered. “We stayed up late at nights and cried and wanted to give up, but they set the bar high,” Joya said. “And many of us are now the first in our families to even touch a college campus.”

Class president Vanessa Ruiz translated the opening speech into Spanish for the mostly Latino audience. Another student speaker at the graduation ceremony was class valedictorian Juan Castro, who landed a full scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania. He encouraged his fellow students to remember all the firsts in their school: first prom, first senior camp, first graduating class, and their principal, Mide “Mac” Macauley, who provided all of them motivation.

Juan Castro landed a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania.

The principal recalled the first hot summer day when school started four years ago for this class and admitted, “It was novelty and confusion for all of us.”

USC President C.L. Max Nikias told the students in his keynote address: “The decisions you make will determine your character, and good judgment is the difference between success and failure.” He called the accomplishments at the high school a “historic graduation day.”

Karen Symms Gallagher, dean of USC’s Rossier School of Education and chairwoman of Ednovate’s board, said, “We have all been looking forward to this four years ago since we welcomed the freshman class and it really is the culmination of our initiative in the school of education to improve urban education globally, nationally and locally. It is nice to see them in their hats and robes today.”

She added, “I see this as a model for university school collaboration for LAUSD and other districts throughout the nation.”

For the mother of quadruplets, Childress said she is emotional and ecstatic. “They are quadruplets and did not fit in to a conventional high school and Hybrid was a good fit, it was small, very organized and the best thing for them to flourish.”

One of her daughters, Cambria Kelley, gushed, “One thousand words cannot tell how elated I am to graduate. This is a new chapter for me, I’m opening a new book in my life. As a family we have always bonded and done things together, and this is a new beginning for us all.”

Cambria has a scholarship to UC Riverside. She plans to study creative writing.

*This article has been updated to correct that Oliver Sicat graduated from USC but not from its school of education, and to correct the number of schools Ednovate now operates.

Crenshaw High School

On the first day of school last week, students at Crenshaw High School showed up in uniform. It’s the first time the school has ever instituted a dress code, and Principal Remon Corley was relieved when about 90 percent of students walked through the campus’s blue gates dressed in gold, black, blue, and white polo shirts with coordinating khaki pants.

“It just shows how different things are going to be this year,” Corley said enthusiastically.

Indeed, there have been drastic changes at the low-income south central L.A. school.

After months of controversy and heated debate pitting parents and community leaders against LAUSD officials, including Superintendent John Deasy, Crenshaw has been transformed from a traditional high school into three smaller magnet schools – Visual and Performing Arts, Business and Entrepreneurship, and Science,Technology, Engineering, Math and Medicine – all under one roof.

New administrative offices have been built. Thirty three of last year’s 65 teachers have been replaced. And the daily academic schedule has been restructured to include an “advisory” period and 20 minutes of school-wide silent reading.

The overhaul is intended to solve a number of problems plaguing Crenshaw, a school of approximately 65 percent African-American students and 35 percent Latino — and 80 percent who receive free and reduced lunch. It’s also a school of woefully low student test scores, ranking among the lowest performing schools in California and LAUSD for the last 14 years, with a hemorrhaging of students to nearby public and charter schools and a revolving door of administrators who have contributed to a profound lack of leadership and continuity.

Corley, who returned to the helm of the school, said he can’t remember the last time a principal held the position for two full years. He hopes to be the first to break the streak. Since 2005, more than 30 administrators have filed in and out of the troubled school.

“Our goal, which is to give these kids the education that they deserve, hasn’t changed,” Corley said. “And the magnet program is going to allow us to implement a high quality practice that’s going to make a difference in the lives of students.”

But critics of the magnet conversion worry that Crenshaw’s 1,150 students are victims of the latest trend in education reform circles and that Deasy’s decision to change course will come at the expense of progress that was being made.

Over the last five years, Crenshaw was governed by the Greater Crenshaw Education Partnership, a coalition that included the Los Angeles Urban League, USC’s Rossier School of Education and LAUSD. They too, implemented a themed school-within-a-school reform plan known as the Extended Learning Cultural Model. The curriculum was built around addressing real life issues at school, in the community and with local businesses. ELCM gained national recognition from the Obama Administration and was supported by grants from the Ford Foundation and the Bradley Foundation.

That approach is now being set aside to pursue the magnet school model.

In a letter to her fellow union members Cathy Garcia, the UTLA Chapter Chair at Crenshaw, called the magnet conversion “fake reform” and accused Deasy of “cleverly” using the guise of conversion process to get rid of unwanted teachers. Teachers were required to reapply for their jobs.

Garcia said Deasy opted for conversion over reconstitution “because it brings in more resources and connotes positive change.” But, ultimately, she argued, it creates more destabilization.

George Bartleson, whom Deasy assigned to oversee the conversion of Crenshaw, denies anything so sinister.

“We needed to make an immediate change and our magnet schools have a great track record,” Bartleson said. “In fact, our magnet programs have been a model for other states.”

Bartleson is convinced that the magnet conversion is the right method to raise student achievement scores. Only 17 percent percent of students tested proficient in English Language Arts while just 4 percent proved proficient in math.

As evidence, he points to the gains made at nearby Westchester Enriched Sciences Magnets, which was reconfigured in 2011-12. In the same year, English language proficiency rates bumped up to 44 percent from 37 percent while math proficiency remained steady at 11 percent.

Schools function best when they’re broken down into smaller learning communities, he said.

Under the new reorganization each magnet school is designed to handle 500 students though Corley said as of last week, only about 450 students had enrolled in the STEMM program, by far the most popular with parents. About 360 students had been admitted into the performing arts and the business and entrepreneurship programs.

When the idea to transform the school was initially proposed, Bartleson said he noticed a fear of academic rigor by both students and parents that he found “really troubling.” But after involving students, parents, alumni and community members in creating the criteria used during the selection process for candidates and educational programs, “everyone’s on-board.”

“We made it a home-grown transformation,” he said.

And, he insists, lessons learned from the Extended Learning Cultural Model will be incorporated into the new curriculum. The business magnet will continue to involve local business owners and seek relevant internships for students, and the Debbie Allen Arts Academy will continue to train performing arts students.

Bartleson says the conversion of Crenshaw into a magnet school is not the end of an era but rather the continuation of one.

“I am not stepping away,” he said, “and neither is Superintend Deasy. We are both committed to the success of Crenshaw. We are betting on it.”

Previous Posts: Crenshaw Teacher Activist Packs Up His Boxes, Board Preview: Kayser’s New Magnet Proposal, Crenshaw Protest Heads to Board Decision

Synergy Charter Academy was ranked best in the elementary/middle school category, and High Tech LA topped the high schools. LA Unified placed six charters among the top elementary/middle schools and four among the top high school charters.

The report draws on data from 2005 to 2012 to rate charter schools across multiple measures of financial health and academic performance, including state test scores and classroom spending, said the press release announcing the findings. For the first time, charters at the high school level were also judged on curriculum rigor, graduation rate and college-readiness.

“This year’s USC School Performance Dashboard drills further into the multiple dimensions of each California charter school, revealing not only the greater and lesser strengths of each, but also how each is performing relative to other charters and to other California public schools,” Guilbert C. Hentschke, a report co-author and professor at the USC Rossier School of Education, said in the press release. “The overall picture conveys more than extreme variation in charter school performance; it conveys extreme variation in the effectiveness of charter school oversight.”

The Top 10 California charter elementary/middle schools, in order:

1. Synergy Charter Academy (Los Angeles)
2. Gabriella Charter (Los Angeles)
3. KIPP San Francisco Bay Academy (San Francisco)
4. KIPP Los Angeles College Preparatory (Los Angeles)
5. KIPP Heartwood Academy (Santa Clara)
6. Celerity Nascent Charter (Los Angeles)
7. KIPP Summit Academy (Alameda)
8. Endeavor College Preparatory Charter (Los Angeles)
9. Wilder’s Preparatory Academy Charter (Los Angeles)
10. Global Education Academy (Los Angeles)

The Top 10 California charter high schools, in order:

1. High Tech LA (Los Angeles)
2. University High (Fresno)
3. Leadership Public Schools – Hayward (Alameda)
4. Hawthorne Math and Science Academy (Los Angeles)
5. Preuss School UCSD (San Diego)
6. Alliance Gertz-Ressler High (Los Angeles)
7. Camino Nuevo Charter High (Los Angeles)
8. Summit Preparatory Charter High (San Mateo)
9. Orange County School of the Arts (Orange)
10. Renaissance Arts Academy (Los Angeles)

All of the USC Dashboard’s Top 10 charter elementary schools serve large populations of students from low-income families, the release said. Four of those schools – all in Los Angeles County – have more than 90 percent of their students qualifying for the federal Free or Reduced Price Meals program: KIPP Los Angeles College Preparatory, Celerity Nascent Charter, Global Education Academy and Synergy Charter Academy.

Last year saw the highest growth rate in the history of California’s charter school movement, with a 17 percent jump in the number of new charter campuses over the year before.

Previous Posts: Most Teach For America Teachers Will End Up at Charters, Events: Discussion of Charter Schools, By the Numbers: Charter School Waitlist Exceeds 15,000, Just In: Charters Top “Similar School” Rankings