NO ONE SAID IT WOULD BE EASY:

Lessons from Locke (LA Times, August 20, 2010)

As Locke High School prepares for its third year as a charter school, operator Green Dot Public Schools has earned some bragging rights — as well as reasons for humility. There's no doubt that students at the Watts school are better off for the Green Dot takeover. Dropout and truancy rates are down significantly; more students are taking college-prep classes and passing the high school exit exam on the first try. Crime, especially on-campus fighting, is considerably lower. Scores on the state's standardized tests rose modestly this year.

Yet Locke's students are far from even mediocre achievement. Only 15% score as proficient or better in English, and only 6.7% in math, and that follows a year in which scores barely budged at all. By the end of 10th grade, only 72% of the students who started as freshmen at Locke were still attending the school — though that's higher than when it was run by L.A. Unified. Still, the numbers are nowhere close to as impressive as at other Green Dot schools, where early and dramatic successes earned the charter operator a reputation as a miracle worker.

Locke is different from those schools, and from almost every other charter school in California. It doesn't enroll students through a lottery, a system that tends to draw the most motivated students and parents. Instead, it takes all students within its attendance boundaries.

Green Dot deserves appreciation for taking the challenge and for bringing about progress on several fronts.

Three years isn't much time to undo decades of damage.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 21, 2010 10:58 AM