School Sign-Ups for LEARN Dwindle

Only 25 schools have applied this year for admission to the Los Angeles Unified School District’s main reform program--the lowest sign-up since LEARN was established five years ago and a clear sign that officials will be unable to meet their goal of enlisting every district school by the end of 1998.

The low turnout comes despite a monthlong extension of the deadline, until today. The new schools and centers that joined bring the total LEARN ranks to 322 schools.

LEARN offers schools control of their own budgets and considerable decision-making autonomy through a coalition of teachers, parents and staff.

Although a news release from the nonprofit group that developed LEARN, the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now, describes the total as “a critical mass” and “nearly half of the district’s schools,” it is in fact just slightly more than a third because LEARN counts smaller facilities such as preschools. Five of this year’s applications came from the so-called children’s centers. Two are from continuation schools.

LEARN supporters are putting the best face on the news, saying that they always knew it would get harder to recruit schools because those most eager and ready for reform have already joined.

“This was not intended to be a PR program, to see how many you could get in raw numbers,” said Mike Roos, the president of LEARN.

Instead, he said, he now believes that the goal of an all-LEARN district will be met only as student performance rises at the core group of reform schools, causing the public to pressure other campuses to get involved.

The rub, Roos and others said, is that the schools that need overhaul the most are the ones least likely to muster the enthusiasm needed to persuade 75% of their teachers to approve LEARN, the support level required under the reform’s tenets.

But the low numbers were counted as a victory by those who have long been fighting LEARN on the grounds that it forces teachers into endless meetings and contract compromises.

“The more time goes on, the more teachers find out what LEARN’s all about and then they don’t want to vote for it,” said Maurice Herberg, a dean at Manual Arts High School. “I’ve spoken this year at 11 schools and not a single one has voted for LEARN since then.”

The previous low point for LEARN enrollment occurred during its first year, in 1992, when just 34 schools signed on. Once the ice was broken, nearly 100 schools signed on every year, until now.

Undeniably, LEARN is hard work, which may be a deterrent for some schools. It calls for campuses to create a governing panel of “stakeholders,” including parents, teachers, staff and the principal, that is charged with reaching consensus about everything from who will be hired to what will be taught.

It has been a harder sell at the larger and more complicated secondary schools than at elementary schools, although this year’s class includes two San Fernando Valley high schools--Sylmar and San Fernando.

Although stakeholder surveys consistently indicate that people feel better about their schools as LEARN progresses, only a few more tangible results of the reform have emerged so far. An analysis of test scores at the first 34 LEARN schools completed in June showed that students at those schools improved on standardized tests at a rate slightly higher than their non-LEARN-school counterparts.

When the data were broken down by race, it turned out that Latinos generally did not share in that success, however. Furthermore, a follow-up study by the same outside evaluation team indicated persistent delays in LEARN’s promised rewards, including budget autonomy, which it blamed on the school district and its problem-plagued computer system.

Opponents blame that combination of hard work and little reward for turning off non-LEARN schools.

“The word has gotten out from some of these LEARN schools,” said Joshua Pechthalt, a social studies teacher at Manual Arts High. “Teachers have their own networks. They get reports of, ‘Oh, there’s a lot of meetings . . . and nothing’s really changing and the principal’s acting like a jerk.’ ”

LEARN backers, however, find solace in the fact that at 75 additional schools, votes taken this year drew the support of more than half the teachers. Roos said those schools might have been coaxed above 75% had it not been for the absence of LEARN’s top two recruiters: the late Helen Bernstein, who left the teachers union presidency last summer under term limits, and the district’s LEARN director, Judy Burton, who was on illness leave for much of the year.

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Prospective

LEARN Schools

The application deadline for the reform plan is today. If the 25 schools below are accepted by the school board, the total LEARN lineup will be 322, about 38% of the schools in the L.A. Unified School District.

* Angel’s Gate Continuation High

* Angeles Mesa Elementary

* Coliseum Elementary

* Dublin Elementary

* Eastman Avenue Children’s Center

* Erwin Elementary

* Kennedy Elementary

* Kester Elementary

* Markham Middle

* Maxine Waters Children’s Center

* Mission Continuation High

* 97th Street Children’s Center

* Nora Sterry Children’s Center

* Northridge Middle

* 122nd Street Elementary

* San Fernando High

* 2nd Street Elementary

* 74th Street Elementary

* 6th Avenue Children’s Center

* 6th Avenue Elementary

* Sunny Brae Elementary

* Sylmar Elementary

* Sylmar High

* Willenberg Special Education

* Woodlake Elementary

Source: Los Angeles Unified School District