A PROBLEMATIC PARTNERSHIP: MAYOR’S PROGRAM TO BOOST 10 NEEDY SCHOOLS HAS HAD A CHALLENGING FIRST SEVEN MONTHS

New parent center at Gompers Middle is a win for the mayor's Partnership for L.A. Schools, but the fledgling program has had its problems.

Bob Chamberlin / Los Angeles Times - Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa hobnobs with parents after he inaugurated the refurbished center for them at Gompers Middle School, a victory for his Partnership program.

By Howard Blume | LA Times

February 25, 2009 - Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa on Tuesday unveiled a refurbished parent center on a middle school campus in South Los Angeles to spotlight his fledgling improvement efforts at 10 schools.

The updated parent room at Gompers Middle School was joyfully received, but his overall effort has hit snags as his team struggles to boost student achievement while also including teachers and parents in vital decisions on how to move forward.

Tuesday was all about the successes of the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, the nonprofit that has managed, on the mayor's behalf, some of the city's lowest-performing campuses over the last seven months.

"We remember the bathrooms that didn't work, the graffiti all over the school," he told the assembled students, parents, dignitaries and others. "This is a new day."

The event coincided with reelection campaign ads for Tuesday's city primary that tout Villaraigosa's education accomplishments. But it was not until late in his first term that the mayor obtained control of a group of schools -- after an abortive effort to gain authority over the entire Los Angeles Unified School District.

Although state test scores won't be available until late summer, the mayor can point to cleaner campuses, tree plantings, community picnics, school uniforms and a policy to have principals evaluate teachers three hours a day. Operationally, his team had to scramble, quickly hiring seven principals and dealing with 35% staff turnover at Markham Middle School in Watts.

Security concerns at Markham prompted the mayor's team to hire four new guards there, leading to a reduction in campus crime, said Partnership Chief Executive Marshall Tuck.

There has been no increased security at other campuses -- although that element is highlighted in campaign materials.

Tuck asserted that the campuses are, in fact, more secure because they are better managed, with classrooms that are more engaging. To date, he said, the Partnership has not had an opportunity to leverage ties with the city to make the streets around schools safer.

Beyond the 10 schools, consultants first brought in by the Partnership played a key role in developing districtwide school report cards and a pilot data system intended to help teachers track student progress.

But Exhibit A this week was the Gompers parent center, for which the mayor's group has provided two computers, a copy machine, furniture and a 46-inch, high-definition LCD TV with free educational programming -- all new and mostly donated by DirecTV.

"This is a remarkable change," said foster parent Nathaniel Perkins-Ali, who likened the center to a "second home."

The $6,000, plus volunteer labor, for the parent room contrasts with nearly $12 million that the district has spent on the school in recent years from bond funds for re-piping, heating, flooring, sprinklers, roofing, security cameras and more.

In relative terms, Villaraigosa has raised little new money. A much-publicized $50-million donation has to be spread out over 10 years -- and must also pay for the mayor's education team. The Partnership, however, has won greater control for schools over dollars once managed by the school district.

The parent center was more about symbolism than dollars spent.

Leadership teams at these schools, for example, have set goals of getting 50% of parents to participate in at least one activity geared toward student achievement between January and June. They're also pushing parents to sign compacts to encourage their involvement.

"Parent participation was never really linked to student achievement," said Ryan Smith, the Partnership's director of family and community engagement. He said that not one of the schools had a functioning PTA.

---

A little PTA 101 here, and a wee bit o’ history:  For a school to have a PTA requires active participation and approval of the principal.

• As a plaintiff to the action Mendoza v. Villaraigosa, which overturned the mayor’s attempted and unconstitutional takeover of LAUSD,  PTA as an organization made no points in the mayor’s office.
• There was a functioning PTA at Santee Education Complex – and one was in formation at Markham MS;  the principals at both schools were supporters of and advocates for PTA. At Markham Deputy City Attorney Michelle Mcginnis was instrumental in introducing PTA to Markham.
• However with the advent of the mayor’s partnership and the placement of new principals at those schools PTA ceased to exist.  Coincidence?  You decide.  - smf

---

But some teachers and parents said their role was limited after a promising beginning. The months leading up to the Partnership hand-over were a high note at the Santee Education Complex south of downtown, said English teacher Jordan Henry. "In our short turbulent history, it was the most optimistic we ever felt," he said. But despite good intentions, once the Partnership gained control, "the collaboration disappeared and it became -- and largely still is -- a top-down system."

One problem arose at Ritter Elementary in Watts, where scores of parents wanted to continue a dual-language Spanish-English program. The Partnership recently agreed to form a task force to tackle the issue.

"Since September, we have been struggling for the reinstatement of the program, and it's taken until now to do something about that," said parent Fanny Trujillo. "They seem to be listening right now, but it took three demonstrations in front of the school."

From the start, the Partnership has had to manage sometimes conflicting goals at its schools. Its leaders profess faith in democratic school governance -- which, like democracy, can be slow and messy.

At the same time, the mayor's team wanted to accomplish a rapid, significant rise in student achievement, and hired assertive administrators who believe they know how to get that done.

Teachers union President A.J. Duffy said he remained committed to working with the Partnership, but "I'm not sure leadership of some of these schools understands that if you really want buy-in from stakeholders, you have to give them a piece of the action. This is not the paradise it has been portrayed as in some quarters."

Steve Lopez: MAYOR VILLARAIGOSA, RECESS IS OVER ON L.A. SCHOOLS REFORM.

 

 

Steve Lopez: Points West | Los Angeles Times

December 10, 2008 -- Back when he was running for mayor of Los Angeles and calling education the No. 1 issue in the city, Antonio Villaraigosa's campaign put out a news release chiding his opponent for not being more involved with the schools.

The headline was:

"Jimmy Hahn, Please Report to the Principal's Office."

No one can dispute that Villaraigosa has been more involved in the schools, but somebody needs to call Tony V. into the principal's office too.

If I were to fill out Villaraigosa's report card on his role in education, I'm not sure whether I'd give him a C, a D-plus, or an Incomplete.

On the up side, the mayor had his fingerprints all over the ouster this week of slow-moving Supt. David L. Brewer, a retired Navy vice admiral, so we owe him a debt of gratitude. It seems a little sneaky that he left the dirty work to Monica Garcia, the school board president he helped get into office, but I guess you can understand why he didn't want to rile black voters who supported Brewer.

The bigger question, though, is this: How did we get stuck with Brewer in the first place, and end up giving him an early Christmas present -- a minimum $517,500 an buyout?

In part, because of Villaraigosa's clumsy politics.

Back in 2005 and 2006, Mr. Smooth got out a megaphone and screamed that L.A. Unified was failing miserably, despite improvements under then-Supt. Roy Romer. For the sake of the children, Villaraigosa blared, he had no choice but to take over the district. Not that he had any jurisdiction or experience, but that's a crumb of a concern for a man of Villaraigosa's appetites, especially with the usual heavyweight suspects -- Eli Broad and Dick Riordan -- cheering him on.

And so Tonio rammed a piece of sloppy legislation through Sacramento, giving him extraordinary new powers. A judge eventually tossed out the legislation. But the school board didn't wait for the ruling.

Racing to beat the mayor's possible takeover, the board quickly named a surprise-pick superintendent. In a neat trick, the announcement came just as Villaraigosa hit the ground in Asia on a trade mission.

Operating behind a news blackout over at the Beaudry Avenue Kremlin, our heroes had gone with a recommendation from former state senator and current county Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, among others.

Welcome to Los Angeles, retired Vice Adm. Brewer.

No education experience?

No problem. Glad to have you aboard.

And now, two years later, Brewer walks the plank after barely getting the ship out of the docks.

Before I move on, though, let's look back on a great moment from the conspiracy to dump the vice admiral.

I'm talking about the day when Garcia, a Villaraigosa ally, was chasing fellow board member Marguerite Poindexter LaMotte to Union Station, where the latter was boarding a train for a meeting in San Diego.

Garcia had realized it might look bad to dump Brewer while LaMotte, the one black board member, was absent. So she sped over to the train station along with a trusty aide, hoping to stop LaMotte before the train whistle blew. The aide was apparently the quicker of the two, even in high heels. She valiantly gave chase but reached the platform just as the doors of the train were closing. I have only one complaint. At a time when everything's captured on video and ends up on YouTube, why not this? So here's where we stand:

Villaraigosa ally and capable Senior Deputy Supt. Ray Cortines appears ready to take the helm, at least on an interim basis. And for the time being, Villaraigosa still pulls strings on the board. (Although he appears to have lost one potential ally on Tuesday. In a perfectly bizarro twist, his presumed candidate for one open seat, the reform-minded Ben Austin, didn't qualify for the ballot because -- are you ready for this one? -- his signature-collection company gathered its John Hancocks in the wrong neighborhood.)

As I was saying before I rudely interrupted myself, now is the time for Villaraigosa to come out from behind the curtain and show us what he had in mind when he insisted three years ago that he could do a better job running the schools.

He doesn't have the direct control enjoyed by the mayors of New York and Chicago, but with Cortines in charge and the board on his side -- at least for now -- he's running out of people to blame for anything less than dramatic reforms and improvements.

So what should he do?

"The advantage the mayor has is a really good bully pulpit," said Charles Kerchner, who wrote a book called "Learning From L.A., Institutional Change in American Public Education."

Kerchner said the district needs to move toward a collection of mini-districts with many different teaching models available to parents and their children. His co-author, David J. Menefee-Libey, said funding shortages and Sacramento-based control of schools are daunting challenges, along with the vast number of poor and language-deficient L.A. students.

But if Villaraigosa has a strength, it's his ability to bring different parties to the problem-solving table, including legislators, parents, administrators, the teachers union and the business community.

"If anybody could pull a civic association together, he would be the guy to do it," Menefee-Libey said.

I stopped by Roosevelt High School on Tuesday morning to see how things were going on one of the 10 campuses Villaraigosa took control of earlier this year in a deal with the district. Too early to tell, I was told by the principal and teachers. But they also told me there's plenty of frustration, and some flagging faith, over the slow rate of change.

Slow change is unacceptable from a guy who talked such a big game.

Get moving, Tony V., or prepare to report to the principal's office.

from the wonderful folks who would turn over school governance to a Jiffy Lube franchisee:

"With so much anxiety over public schools and gang violence, here’s a modest proposal: If elected, Villaraigosa’s school-board candidates will certainly vote to permit Villaraigosa to go beyond his municipal duties and take over three high schools. So in exchange, Villaraigosa should allow his newly elected school board to take over three LAPD stations in the Valley, where homicides shot up nearly 18 percent in 2006 and restaurant-takeover robberies by masked men have terrified diners."

MUNICIPAL WHIPLASH - The mayor suddenly decides gang crime, not L.A. Unified, is public enemy No. 1

by David Zahniser, LA Weekly

Ruling? What court ruling?

Wednesday, January 17, 2007 - Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa started the new year by putting plenty of miles between himself and the politically disastrous court decision handed down last month by Superior Court Judge Dzintra Janavs, who shit-canned his bid for power over the Los Angeles Unified School District as a violation of not just the state Constitution but also the City Charter, the legal document that says who does what at L.A. City Hall.

“Our New Year’s resolution in 2007 is to make violent street gangs public enemy No. 1,” said the mayor, standing next to Police Chief William Bratton.

The dramatic shift in emphasis was, to say the least, a bit jarring. The mayor had been doing about 90 miles an hour on education issues, spending the first 18 months of his administration talking about test scores, dropout rates, a longer school day and the need to put the mayor in charge of at least three high schools — maybe the whole district.

After such an intense push on public education, Villaraigosa’s decision to make 2007 the year of gangs left many at City Hall suffering a form of municipal whiplash. Villaraigosa rarely broached the topic of crime between June and December, lavishing time on education-oriented town-hall meetings, school-reform photo ops and last-minute lobbying trips to Sacramento, where he twisted a few arms to get lawmakers to sign off on a legally problematic L.A. Unified bill.

But then, last month’s ruling delivered a not-too-subtle message to the Villaraigosa camp: If the California Supreme Court sides with Janavs on appeal, the mayor could have precious little to show for his foray into public education. And with statistics showing a disturbing surge in gang crime — increasing by 42 percent in the San Fernando Valley alone — Villaraigosa just might have decided it was time to pay attention to some duties actually assigned to him in the City Charter.

You know, public safety and stuff.

In a 15-day period, Villaraigosa held five different press events focusing on public safety. But by then, some community activists had already begun grumbling that the mayor had lost focus on his municipal portfolio. One group of African-American leaders, alarmed by last month’s allegedly racially motivated killing of a 14-year-old Harbor Gateway girl, complained that the mayor had gone missing in action.

“He took on the LAUSD and the whole school board, trying to take over the district and make it the centerpiece of his administration,” said Najee Ali, who staged a press conference Friday in Leimert Park to chastise the mayor for his absence. “[Villaraigosa] became so engaged with that battle that he lost focus on other issues in L.A. that have been critical, and the racially motivated gang violence is the best example.”

Hours after Ali’s protest, Villaraigosa’s press shop put out a news release saying the mayor would be in Harbor Gateway the very next day to march with anxious African-American families. But that was only the latest stop in his public-safety publicity blitz. Villaraigosa showed up with Bratton on January 2 at the LAPD’s Central Division downtown to talk about crime reduction in 2006. Six days later, the mayor posed in front of 67 newly hired officers at the Police Academy, promising signing bonuses of $5,000 and $10,000 to ensure that his hiring plan does not fall apart.

Despite the flurry of safety initiatives, Villaraigosa made sure to press ahead with the other pieces of his public school campaign, publicly introducing two of his candidates in the upcoming March 6 school-board race — county administrator Yolie Flores Aguilar on the Eastside and prosecutor Tamar Galatzan in the San Fernando Valley.

The mayor is banking on his slate of school-board candidates to win board seats and then help him reach some form of legal settlement with district officials to preserve his ability to run three low-performing high schools — his major education initiative. An ideal campus for him to oversee might be Grant High School in the East Valley, where two 16-year-olds were shot the very week Galatzan and Aguilar picked up the mayor’s backing.

In a nifty piece of stage management, the mayor introduced Galatzan outside Birmingham High School, the site of a deadly shooting last year. A 16-year-old boy was killed in a gunfight right across the street in September. The gunplay occurred 40 minutes after school let out, forcing school football players to hit the ground during team practice.

With so much anxiety over public schools and gang violence, here’s a modest proposal: If elected, Villaraigosa’s school-board candidates will certainly vote to permit Villaraigosa to go beyond his municipal duties and take over three high schools. So in exchange, Villaraigosa should allow his newly elected school board to take over three LAPD stations in the Valley, where homicides shot up nearly 18 percent in 2006 and restaurant-takeover robberies by masked men have terrified diners.

Civil rights advocate Connie Rice presented a 131-page report this week on the city’s gang crisis, telling council members that they will need to work with other government agencies if they want to tackle the problem effectively. Rice’s report did a funny thing, mentioning city government and L.A. Unified over and over again, as though she thought they too should be working as a team — as equals, not with one seeking to strip the other’s power.

On the day of Rice’s presentation, Villaraigosa staffers handed schools Superintendent David L. Brewer III the mayor’s new plan for fixing L.A. Unified. Brewer received little advance notice, getting the plan just four hours before the mayor went before a televised audience to unveil it. School board member David Tokofsky fared even worse, receiving an e-mail from the mayor's office telling him that his request to attend Villaraigosa's Wednesday night education speech had been denied.

The mayor's policy paper focused mainly on non-controversial concepts: paying teachers more, making schools smaller, securing more contributions from the business community and getting more of everything – gifted programs, arts classes, foreign language lessons, etc. Once his speech ended, Villaraigosa's press shop returned to the theme for 2007, announcing that the mayor planned another trip to Harbor Gateway to talk about cracking down on – you guessed it – violent gangs.

When Villaraigosa has focused on public-safety issues, he has reaped success only dreamed of by his predecessor, former Mayor James Hahn, a man truly obsessed with public safety but politically inept. Unlike Hahn, Villaraigosa won approval of a five-year plan to hire 1,000 police officers, persuading the council to hike monthly trash fees from $11 to $28 by 2011. Where Hahn had sought a sales-tax hike, Villaraigosa deftly found a way to hit up homeowners and renters in buildings with fewer than five units.

For now, however, a majority of those extra officers are a concept for the future. Roughly half of the police hiring sought by Villaraigosa won’t occur until after his likely re-election. But then, Villaraigosa — always the master of marketing — has a tendency to speak in the present progressive tense, as in “We’re planting 1 million trees” or “We’re hiring 1,000 officers.”

As he appeared with Villaraigosa, Bratton was all too willing to call the hiring plan what it was: an incremental plan that won’t boost his department significantly for years. Standing in the LAPD’s Central Station, Bratton told his officers they shouldn’t expect reinforcements to provide much help in 2007 — a comment that somewhat undermined the mayor’s upbeat pitch.

Since his election, Villaraigosa has always been one to criticize L.A. Unified for making only incremental gains in its test scores, which rose gradually over six years under former Superintendent Roy Romer, especially in the elementary grades.

Yet Bratton too has been the master of steady, incremental progress — the type that adds up to solid double-digit gains over a four-year stretch. Villaraigosa endorsed Bratton’s leadership wholeheartedly two weeks ago, saying the chief deserves a second five-year term. Romer, on the other hand, is back in Colorado, making incremental progress on his John Deere power mower.