Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa learned a major lesson in school reform Tuesday: It's hard to fix failing schools in Los Angeles, even those under his purview.
That insight arrived with the release of the state's standardized test scores. They painted his reform efforts at 10 of the city's historically low-performing schools as an inconsistent work in progress.
A similar story emerged at South Los Angeles' Locke High School, which just completed its first year under the management of a charter school operator.
The mayor's schools and Locke have been the city's two highest-profile reform efforts. Although scores weren't markedly better across the board, there were some positives, as there also were for the Los Angeles Unified School District and for California as a whole.
"We expect progress and we have progress, but we still have a long way to go," Villaraigosa said of his schools. "Transforming a failing school takes more than one year."
The test results arrived at a crucial juncture for the mayor, for the charter school movement and for school improvement citywide. A school board resolution, scheduled for a vote next week, could turn over new schools as well as low-achieving campuses to outside operators, including the mayor and charter schools. The mayor's team already has quietly obtained control of a new Boyle Heights campus, an implied endorsement by the district of his effort at nearby Roosevelt High School.
The mayor has made the pending school-board resolution a signature reform and cited his own schools as a model. The proposal is also being pushed by Green Dot Public Schools, for which Locke High has become a kind of demonstration project of what an outside group can accomplish.
The scores at Villaraigosa's schools fall well short of what his original rhetoric suggested. He implied that he could deliver rapid academic gains if given control of schools in the nation's second-largest district. At the time, L.A. Unified officials and some education experts said Villaraigosa was unfairly discounting the school system's incremental progress.
On Tuesday, it was the mayor's turn to celebrate increments.
He and his team touted 99th Street Elementary in South Los Angeles, which had the eighth-largest increase among traditional district elementary schools. For middle schools, Hollenbeck in Boyle Heights was ninth in gains in math among traditional district middle schools. Roosevelt High in Boyle Heights and the Santee Education Complex south of downtown both ranked in the upper third in improvement in English.
