The Right Idea

By the late 1980s the original Middle College in New York had become a model of alternative education with graduation rates 50% higher than the rest of the city schools, and many of their graduates going on to higher education. Grant money poured into the school, including $276,000, from the Ford Foundation to replicatethe school across the five boroughs of New York and in other American cities.

The first of these replications were at community colleges in Chicago, Memphis, Richmond, California and at Los Angeles Southwest Community College. LASC was celebrating its twentieth year but was also recovering from its greatest crisis. By the mid-1980s, this college, which had become a cultural center of South Central Los Angeles—with well-respected programs in nursing and administration of justice, an award-winning newspaper, a television studio, a child development center that offered daycare to single parents pursuing an education, and an increasing rate of students successfully transferring to four year universities—had begun to disintegrate. State budget cuts, administrative instability, and the ravages of the crack cocaine epidemic had reduced the school’s enrollment from 8,000 to fewer than 3,000. The campus had fallen into disrepair. Graffiti covered walls. Weeds over-ran the lawns. Some of the maintenance workers were selling crack out of their tool boxes. In 1985 California’s Little Hoover Commission recommended closing the campus. College President Walter McIntosh promptly resigned. The rest of the administration and the faculty were in disarray.

Dr. Thomas Laikin was hired as “acting president.” The term “interim” was not used because it wasn’t clear how many months, weeks, or even days the college would remain open. Students and teachers were jumping as fast as they could from the sinking ship. Laikin fired administrators, replaced the entire maintenance staff and anyone from any other department who was suspected of dealing drugs on the campus. He organized his staff to yank all the weeds from around campus and put on gloves and overalls himself and somehow, together, they began to dig the college out of its miserable state. From the beginning, according to Pat Lewis and others who knew him, Dr. Laikin seemed to have a mission much greater than the daily struggle to keep this college alive. He was determined, Lewis recalls, to do something about the crisis of schools, at all levels, in South Central. His was not only an ethical position but also the most logical one, since the success of a community college is inextricably linked to the quality of the high schools, middle schools, and elementary schools in the community.

The high schools feeding Southwest were a disaster. Dropout rates were near 60%, and nearly everyone who did graduate and attended LASC needed remedial English and mathematics. When, at an education conference, Laikin heard a presentation by Janet Lieberman about Middle College High School replication, he decided, immediately, that Southwest should have one.