The sound of the Los Angeles Unified School District's preferred future comes from the north end of Jefferson High School's campus. It's loud.
Students at one end of a warehouse-sized classroom mill around computers, their voices reverberating off the concrete floor as they compare notes. At the other end, a math teacher practically shouts to her students.
Although chaos seems to be the order of the day at the Student Empowerment Academy, the small campus has produced some of the biggest academic gains in the district. The school, which is housed on Jefferson's campus but has its own administration and teachers, scored a 638 on the most recent state Academic Performance Index, which measures schools and districts on student test scores in math, English and other subjects. Jefferson scored a 457. The state target for 2007 was 800.
That 181-point difference between Jefferson and the academy has captivated school board members, especially because all the students at the academy would otherwise have attended Jefferson.
Like many large districts throughout the nation, L.A. Unified has been trying to increase the number of smaller learning communities, hoping that personalized instruction would boost student achievement and offer an alternative to charter schools, including the five Green Dot campuses near Jefferson.
The academy, one of four Los Angeles Unified campuses that opened almost two years ago, is partially funded through the New Tech Foundation, a Napa, Calif.-based nonprofit that supports 35 schools throughout the country. Two of the others, Arleta High School of Science, Math and Related Technologies and the Los Angeles High School for Global Studies, have increased their test scores dramatically. However, at Jordan New Tech High School, the API score was 25 points lower than that on the regular Jordan High campus.
Unlike charters, which are publicly funded but are not regulated by L.A. Unified, New Tech schools are run by district administrators. "We're under a lot of pressure: pressure from parents, pressure from the public, to find results that work," said Monica Garcia, president of the Los Angeles Board of Education, adding that New Tech "clearly works."
At many L.A. Unified schools, the computers are older than the students, so teachers often use their own laptops for presentations. At the Student Empowerment Academy, however, this was the message that greeted students at an English class: "Please go to your individual computers and answer the following questions based on yesterday's reading."
