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Saturday, February 27, 2010

Big Plans

















Here is a pic of what our new building is supposed to look like (don't ask me who all those people are) and then a shot of what it looks like now.

What I keep wondering, though, is what is going to happen to our school when we get this facility. Will it still be ours? Or are we just going to become someone's little showpiece?

We just finished our three-year accreditation visit and received a pretty favorable report--having demonstrated that we had addressed all of our "areas of improvement."

But I wonder--how many students have we failed in the last three years?
How many have we kicked out because they annoyed us and we just didn't have the ability to help them?
How many did we just not challenge enough?
More than I think we would like to consider or admit to an accreditation committee.

Middle College HS was supposed to be a school for at-risk students who had academic potential but that mission is a dubious one.

Don't all students have academic potential?
Isn't it just a matter of having the time and resources, the skill and patience to teach them all?

I just hope that when this new building opens we haven't forgotten that.

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Big Losses and Big Gains


Another tough playoff loss for the MCHS Cougars boys basketball team. We blew a six point halftime lead and a chance to retake the lead with 2:00 minutes to go in the game. A sad ending to what was a good season—and maybe could have been a great season.

After the game I had a talk with the coach, AD, and principal from the charter school we had just played—mostly about how broke they are and how difficult it is to afford athletics at a small charter school, and I was reminded of what it was like for us trying to have sports teams in the early days. Not that much has changed since then—the finances are still impossible—but now I’m kind of used to it. We were never supposed to have interscholastic athletics. It wasn’t in the original school plan and money was never budgeted for it. But the students wanted it. They demanded it.


There are now dozens of small charter high schools in L.A.—many of them have sports teams because their student demanded it—and, in a way, every one of these small learning communities is a direct descendent of Middle College High School, the original: New York City (the borough of Queens, Long Island City, to be exact), 1974.

It was an educational revolution for it’s time. Janet Leiberman, a professor at LaGuardia College envisioned what she believed might be a solution to the overwhelming problem of delinquency in the New York City schools. “Students at-risk” was the new term for an old problem. The dropout rate in the city was near 40%. Drugs were rampant. So were violence and apathy.

My wife and I were a high school student in New York at that time and we remember—most kids were just hanging out. School was where kids went to buy drugs, get high or get drunk, flirt with each other, and mess around. Very few teachers or students were engaged in anything educational. Everyone I knew couldn’t wait to get out of that place.

Most of the city’s public schools were warehouses, containment centers trying to keep adolescents off the streets between 8am and 3pm. Pedagogy was as dull as the flat gray walls of these places with most so-called teaching delivered on faded mimeographs. Those teachers who did take an interest in their students or even tried to engage them in some kind of meaningful learning were heroes.

The learning disabled often wound up as undiagnosed outcasts. Some of the brightest students went unnoticed or themselves became outcasts, trouble-makers screaming for a way out of the mind-numbing tedium of rote learning, relentless uniformity and standardization.

It was these students – “at-risk” with high potential, smart and bored, mostly working class and poor, and, in some cases, emotionally and socially troubled, who ought to have been preparing for college but instead were being disillusioned by school – who most concerned Janet Lieberman. Her solution, based upon a finding by the Carnegie Foundation:

- Remove these kids from those large secondary institutions where, according to Lieberman, “…restriction and frustration [from the multitude of rules] resulted in aggression.”

- Put them on a college campus because, according to Lieberman: “Fifteen year olds have more in common with twenty year olds than with twelve year olds.” It was her theory that high school students on a college campus would “subtly modify their behavior to be accepted by the college population.”

- Get them thinking about going to college. In fact, Middle College High School was conceived as spanning the high school sophomore year to the college sophomore year, and students could complete that goal at their own pace.

- Help teenagers realize that they belong in college by letting them take college classes while they are in high school; have them work toward a diploma and a degree at the same time. Provide them with tutoring and other supports so that they are likely to succeed in those college classes.

- And put together a high school program on that college campus that is engaging, with innovative pedagogy, imaginative curriculum delivered by teachers who really give a damn. Include an intensive counseling component and an internship program to help students value their education and to connect their learning with the world around them and, hopefully, with their career goals.

With $95,000 from the Carnegie Corporation and $48,000 from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Janet Lieberman and LaGuardia College President Joseph Shenker brought their first high school cohort of 125 tenth graders to LaGuardia in the fall of 1974.

High school classes were taught in college classrooms by what Lieberman referred to as “teacher-counselors,” subject specialists who took a strong guidance (and in some cases parental) role with a specific group of students. Teachers created interdisciplinary courses. They sought student input and feedback and encouraged students to be on a first name basis with them.

When students did not meet academic expectations, they were given non-credit – rather than the demoralizing F – and allowed to complete the requirements of the class at their own pace.

Students were counseled about their personal struggles and about their educational and professional futures, and given interest-based internships in the public and private sectors throughout the city.

Middle College High School was a place in which these lost souls could find themselves, in which they could ask and answer essential questions about who they were and where they fit in this crazy world.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

History Part TWO: Visionaries and Lunatics


It was just a little like old times this week at MCHS with Mr. Kennedy, our old assistant principal back as acting principal while current principal Moats was out on family leave. Kennedy left MCHS in 2002 to become an AP at Narbonne, then principal at Gardena High School. Now he works at the local district office. He was one of the founding faculty of our school, the only one still there three years later when I was hired. He was pretty laid back this week. I guess after a few years in charge of Gardena, there isn’t much that happens at our little school that is going to stress him out too much. The funny thing is that after all his big school administrative experiences, he still gets really excited talking about the nuts and bolts of effective teaching. It’s still his passion.


Kind of like the original teachers at LA Southwest College when they opened up in 1967—crusaders from other LA community colleges who had voluntarily transferred to the new school; visionaries determined to bring enlightenment to this neglected part of the city.


Thirteen “bungalows” were been anchored to the soft earth while asphalt was spread above water pipes and electric lines—and on September 10th of 1967 Los Angeles Southwest College had its first day of classes. It looked more like a trailer park than a school. The bookstore resembled a small town railroad station, the library an army barracks. At night, the grim lamp posts and high surrounding fences suggested an internment camp. Five hundred students attended 49 classes – from Intro Accounting to General Zoology. Early rains made mud of the still untarred ground through which students had to wade. But spirits were neither dampened nor muddied.


“It was very exciting. Exciting and a little bit crazy,” recalls Pat Lewis, one of the original students at Southwest (now one of the professors there). “We were the first ASO [Associated Student Organization]; we put on the first play production, the first everything. We were helping create that school and that made us feel like we could reinvent the rest of the world!”


She remembers how her teachers encouraged everyone to do great things. “We read and performed Shakespeare inside those bungalows. We learned about Socrates and Plato and about our own history. The black professors were the only African Americans I’d ever met with post graduate degrees. I didn’t even know a black person could get a Ph.D.”


By the spring of 1968 the college had 20 cement and plywood “bungalows” to go along with the 13 wooden trailers. Enrollment had swelled to 1200, and the class offerings increased to more than 160, but the overall condition of the place did not change, and by the fall of 1968 many students were disenchanted.


They took offense to the dirt and mud trails that connected classrooms, and to the bleak functionality of the place. There was no grass anywhere; no plants, no trees, no benches or statues. The student lounge had been crammed with wobbly wooden chairs, the “cafeteria” trailer offered a pitiful assortment of non-nutritious food. Campus police, some students believed, were racist and abusive. Student activists wanted them gone. They wanted a voice in the hiring of teachers and other staff to ensure “sensitivity to the needs of Black students” and a say in the selection of classes in the schedule as well as the books in the library.


They wanted their education to be about more than job training. They demanded a Black Studies program and wanted the college named after an African American. The college president, John Grasham, a bespectacled white man with slick hair and tight features, was non-responsive. Students walked out of classes. Others expressed their frustration in class, sometimes causing teachers to walk out. The activists vandalized classrooms; they threw library books on the floor, broke the windows of an administration trailer, hanged an administrator in effigy, and made bomb threats.


The student revolts divided the faculty and administration. The president of the college resigned. His replacement, John Nicklin, closed the school for several days. Faculty members transferred. So did students, some of the brightest among them.


A year later, in the fall of 1969, LASC added eight more concrete temporaries and its first African American college president, Leadie M. Clark. She lasted for two years. The turnover for other administrative positions was equally high. Office space was cramped or non-existent. With nearly 120 faculty members – 64 of them fulltime – many professors worked out of their cars.


By 1973 the enrollment reached 4000 with 400 sections of mostly university transferable classes. By then there were 48 trailers and a football field encircled by a track. LA Southwest not only fielded football and track & field teams, but also competed at baseball and basketball—even though they had to use high school and park facilities for those sports. Plans for permanent buildings included a library and a theater, lecture halls and science labs.


Green lawns colored the campus along with the increasingly eclectic mix of students. The Chosen Few, an African American biker gang in fresh leather jackets and shiny chrome Harley Davidsons would sometimes roll up en mass—even if just one member was on his way to a speech class or football practice. Or the glinting metallic-detailed low-riders of the Compton Camaro club would fill the parking lots. Card games and domino tournaments crowded picnic tables while Black separatists and other radicals, with no official sanction, recruited and organized students in protest of the LAPD and the Vietnam War. Many veterans of that war enrolled in classes—some for the sole purpose of collecting GI Bill cash, others sincerely trying to restart their lives.


“You could get about six-hundred a month,” recalls Moses Robinson, who attended Southwest just after arriving home from the jungles of Vietnam. “I was trying to get my degree, do something, but that place was crawling with vets who never went to class. They’d go the first day and maybe the last. They must have been bribing those professors. You weren’t supposed to get your money unless you attended class and got a grade.”

Moses had applied for the LAPD Academy, taking classes at Southwest while he awaited acceptance. Then, suddenly, he became the single parent of six children and deferred his career plans, taking a job with the city parks department.


Monday, February 8, 2010

Two Riots and a Revolution: An Institutional Genealogy of Our School (PART ONE)


Of course it all began on a hot August 11 evening in 1965 when a seemingly “routine” traffic stop at 116th Street and Avalon escalated into a confrontation between police officers and African American residents made angry by years of harassment, brutality, segregation, unemployment, isolation, and poverty. The ensuing violence came to be known as the Watts Riot.

By the third day of looting and burning, nearly fourteen-thousand National Guardsmen occupied the south central sector of the city. They rolled up and down the long flat boulevards, set up checkpoints and enforced a strict curfew. Police Chief William Parker blamed “outside agitators” and later, when the size of the insurrection disproved that claim, said:


“They started acting like a bunch of monkeys in a zoo.”


Central Avenue, once a cultural center of jazz clubs, dance halls and theaters, was reduced to ashes. Thirty-four people died and more than 800 were injured. Arrests, depending on who you ask, ranged from three to four thousand. Property damage estimates were between twenty-seven and thirty-five million dollars.


In the political aftermath, an angry community was promised jobs and other opportunities for economic and geographic mobility, a more reasonable police force, and better schools. One promise made good on was a community college in South Central Los Angeles. It was an idea that had been around since 1950, promoted by community residents led by Odessa Cox, activist, lifelong learner (through the city’s community college system), and owner of the Utopia Dry Cleaners -- which was thirteen miles south of the nearest city college.


For years, Cox and other residents of Watts had to ride the Red Car trolley downtown, and then catch a bus west to Vermont Avenue (a two hour trip one way) in order to attend Los Angeles City College. The city government and school district had never cared about any of that, but now, after the conflagrations of August, the LA Unified School District (which then oversaw the community colleges, referring to them as grades 13 and 14) found a piece of land in the Athens Park section of South Central. The land was just a few blocks from where, during the third day of the 1965 insurrection, young men who had looted gun stores brandished their new arsenals and threatened to “invade white neighborhoods.”


On July 11th of 1967, in the pre-dawn hours, a convoy of trucks hitched a pair of gray wooden trailers, (cast-offs from LA’s oldest city college campus), and towed them down Vermont Avenue, then dumped them onto a depleted oil field that had been sucked dry by Union Oil. 14.2 acres of the field had been sold to LAUSD for a few hundred thousand dollars. The property bordered South Western Avenue to the west and Frances X. Cabrini Church to the east. To the north was Imperial Highway—named for the Imperial Wooly Mammoths to which the neighborhood had once belonged—and to the south were the tracks of a Union Pacific freight line. The land itself, with its dusty slopes, had been known as Devil’s Dip, where boys tried to defy gravity on makeshift dirt bikes and homemade motorcycles, and where, quite possibly, gang bangers had buried the murdered corpses of enemies.


Nearby residents who were awakened by the loud rumble of trucks and the groaning of their wheels could witness a college crawling into the ghetto. It was going to be their college. It would belong to Odessa Cox and everyone who had stood with her. Cox was among the twenty-five people standing in the darkness of this unfolding dream as those first buildings arrived at what would be called South Central College, then, later, Los Angeles Southwest College.