School System

More than 25 years after it was envisioned, a new South Gate high school is set to open this week on property that became known for toxic contamination, contributed to the downfall of the school district's top official and then slipped from public attention. South Region High School No. 9 sparkles these days, with compact, understated modern buildings atop tons of clean, imported soil. There's hardly a reminder of the toxic legacy - until one glances across the street to the south side of the 36-acre property.

Michelle Rhee, head of an influential education advocacy group that backs using student test scores to evaluate teachers, this week fended off accusations that she failed to pursue evidence of cheating when she ran the District of Columbia school system. In an internal memo, a district consultant warned that about 190 teachers at 70 schools - more than half the system's campuses - may have cheated in 2008 by erasing wrong answers on student testing sheets and filling in correct ones.

One week after the Compton Unified School District narrowly escaped a state takeover, residents will get a chance to question school officials about the school system and its future. The Compton branch of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People will sponsor a community forum on local schools at 6:15 this evening in the board room of the district headquarters, 620 S. Tamarind Ave. The topic will be "The Direction of Education in Compton: Where Do We Go From Here?" said Royce W.

A former priest and suspected child molester left employment with the Los Angeles archdiocese to work for the L.A. Unified School District, officials confirmed Sunday. The former clergyman, Joseph Pina, did not work with children in his school district job, L.A. schools Supt. John Deasy said. He added that, as a result of the disclosures, Pina would no longer be employed by the nation's second-largest school system. Over the weekend, Deasy was unable to pull together Pina's full employment history, but said the district already was looking into the matter of Pina's hiring.

John Lindsay, the mayor of New York City in the late 1960s, used to say that he had the second toughest job in America (after, presumably, the president). Today the toughest job outside of the Oval Office might be superintendent of a big-city school system. Caught between a public demanding change and a school system built to resist it, the average big-city superintendent now holds the job for only 2 1/2 years. Even baseball managers last longer.

I am encouraged by the emergence of organizations like the Education Alliance discussed in a front-page article in The Times on March 17. The tone of the article suggests that you oppose its objectives. For the average voter, identifying candidates for school boards who are truly committed to a conservative agenda is almost impossible. All of the brochures include the same bland statements. I hope that the Education Alliance will help us to select candidates who are truly interested in reform.

After suffering through a winter of sky-high natural gas prices, a Pennsylvania school system has decided to drill for its own. The school board in Penn Hills, 10 miles from downtown Pittsburgh, has struck a deal with Penneco Oil Co. to sink as many as 10 natural gas wells under the district's eight schools. The school system would get 12.

I attended the City Council meeting April 11 in Rolling Hills Estates in regard to the expansion plans for Peninsula Heritage School (formerly advertised as Wingrock School). The City Council with the patience of Job listened to the pros and cons, and with infinite wisdom and good sense decided to follow the General Plan set out in Rolling Hills Estates Resolution No. 685, adopted June 13, 1973, which states that "the primary objective of the City is to preserve and enhance the rural character and single family nature of the community."

A Long Beach native and local school administrator will be the next superintendent of the Long Beach Unified School District. Carl Cohn, 46, will be the first black superintendent of the state's fourth-largest school system. The school board selected Cohn Thursday afternoon and will formally approve the decision at a special board meeting Monday, officials said. Cohn is one of five area superintendents. Polytechnic High School and its feeder schools were under his jurisdiction.

Giving Bibles to a public school class violated the constitutional separation of church and state, the American Civil Liberties Union alleges in a lawsuit against a school system. Carolyn Hill, a parent named in the suit, contends that Alan Joshua's constitutional rights were violated March 4 when he and 34 fifth-grade classmates were given Bibles at Paris Elementary School in the southeastern Idaho town of Paris.

Re "Funding schools fairly," Editorial, Jan. 16 Gov. Jerry Brown should ask himself who will be left to buy copy paper and Kleenex when the middle and upper-middle classes finally abandon the public school system. In choosing to give more money to poorer districts over middle-class ones, how much of the money will be spent on overpriced consultants and administrators? How much might fall prey to fraud, waste and private companies out to make a quick buck? Balkanizing public schools is not the answer.

A jury has awarded $6.9 million to a 14-year-old boy who was molested by a Los Angeles Unified School District teacher when he was a fifth-grade student. The judgment, among the largest ever awarded in a district molestation case, comes at a time when L.A. Unified faces close to 200 pending molestation and lewd conduct claims arising from another teacher's alleged conduct at Miramonte Elementary School. Tuesday's jury award stems from acts committed by Forrest Stobbe, a veteran teacher at Queen Anne Place Elementary School in the Mid-Wilshire area.

When he was a kid, Kent Taylor bounced from school to school in South Los Angeles until his family landed in Inglewood. In sixth grade, he started classes at an elementary school under the LAX flight path. Thirty-six years later, he's back where he began. "This very classroom set me on my course through life," he told students at Oak Street Elementary on a recent day. As some of them whispered, wondering if the slender African American man before them was President Obama, Taylor spoke of how he struggled to read and do math until one teacher singled him out. "I understand what you are going through because I have been there, sitting right where you are sitting.

By now, it should be apparent that charter schools have been the spark to the education reform flame in the Los Angeles Unified School District. At first, applicants hoping to open publicly funded but independently operated charter schools had to fight for every new campus, opposed by school board members who were strong union allies. But as charters showed remarkable progress with disadvantaged and minority students who had been failing in regular public schools, appreciation for them increased.

SWABI, Pakistan - Under a torrid sun on a parched patch of dirt, 65 young boys and girls wiped sweat from their foreheads and struggled to concentrate on their studies. There were no blackboards, no desks. Nearby, their white two-room country school sat abandoned, shrapnel holes gouged into the exterior. The roof and walls had cracked, making the building too dangerous to use - the result of a homemade bomb detonated by the Taliban on the school's porch. "Everything was fine here," said 9-year-old Fazl Qadeem, squatting on the ground with his lesson book in hand.

This year was the best in a long time for low-performing Jordan High School in Watts and for schools across California, according to rankings on the state's Academic Performance Index, which were released Thursday. To the federal government, however, the long-beleaguered campus in Watts simply notched another dreary year of failure. So goes the complicated method by which schools are evaluated in California. The state rating system, based on standardized test scores, indicates that schools are getting better - and are at their highest-achieving level yet. But they aren't keeping pace with rapidly rising federal targets.

Members of the Little Hoover Commission sharply criticized state Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig for alleged lax administration over the state school system Tuesday during a contentious hearing into fiscal accountability.

As my daughter makes her way through the Los Angeles school system, I've been thinking of junior high in southern New Jersey in the 1960s, a memorable time for me. The standards were tough--I was once sent home because I didn't do my math homework--and the teachers were tougher. But everyone had their eyes on the ball, and the ball was learning. Learning was the main mission at Ventnor Junior High. One of the highlights came in the fall.

Myriam Ortiz, who entered the country illegally with her parents 19 years ago, finally has a chance to get a job, thanks to recent changes in federal policy. That prospect sent her to the Los Angeles Unified School District for the necessary documents - along with thousands of others, creating a backlog and new challenges for the nation's second-largest school system. Ortiz is among an estimated 200,000 current and former students who are potentially eligible for the "deferred action" program of the Obama administration.

More than 25 years after it was envisioned, a new South Gate high school is set to open this week on property that became known for toxic contamination, contributed to the downfall of the school district's top official and then slipped from public attention. South Region High School No. 9 sparkles these days, with compact, understated modern buildings atop tons of clean, imported soil. There's hardly a reminder of the toxic legacy - until one glances across the street to the south side of the 36-acre property.