Shake-Ups Launched at 4 Schools

The Los Angeles Unified School District has begun removing principals and teachers at four schools, kicking off a radical campaign to reinvigorate its most troubled campuses.

The actions result from scathing state audits that cited the schools’ low expectations for students, weak leadership, poor teaching and rundown buildings. They are the first among many possible staffing changes at faltering campuses across the district, officials said Thursday.

The campaign comes as the nation gears up for a possible wave of school shake-ups under demanding federal accountability measures signed into law by President Bush this week. The approach by L.A. Unified, the country’s second largest school district, may offer a preview of what accountability means in extreme cases.

Among the changes in Los Angeles, which will be finalized next week:

* All five administrators and three top teachers will be reassigned from Sun Valley Middle School in the San Fernando Valley within the next three months. The principal already has left and voluntarily agreed to a demotion.

* Three veteran principals--at Roosevelt High in Boyle Heights, Wilson High in El Sereno and Locke High in South Los Angeles--have been asked to leave or are stepping down under pressure. Even the secretaries and office workers at Locke could be moved to new jobs.

* At Sun Valley, Mount Vernon Middle School in the Crenshaw district and a few other schools, all employees will have to agree in writing to abide by dozens of corrective measures to keep their jobs at those campuses.

The reforms mark a shift for L.A. Unified, which has been reluctant to make drastic staff changes likely to draw the ire of administrators’ and teachers’ unions. But union officials, privately acknowledging the severity of the problems at some campuses, have not yet objected to the current changes.

“This is serious reform,” L.A. Unified Supt. Roy Romer said. “These schools had deteriorated to a point where they had very low expectations. People weren’t functioning well. Sometimes you need to change the culture of a place.”

Though unusual for L.A. Unified, the approach is not unprecedented. Within the last two years, other large California school districts, including those in San Diego and Oakland, have moved or demoted large numbers of school leaders. Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and many districts in Texas also have penalized principals for low test scores.

In coming years, the leaders of hundreds, if not thousands, of failing schools across the country could face similar fates under new federal rules requiring all campuses to raise test scores for all students.

Los Angeles Unified and California, however, are somewhat ahead of federal mandates for accountability.

State auditors last fall targeted 10 low-performing schools in the district. In their reports, obtained by The Times, they portrayed the campuses as paralyzed by low morale and overwhelmed by the needs of their students.

Auditors at Sun Valley, for example, found that management was poor, instruction was uneven and the campus was “unsanitary, unsafe and hazardous.”

Graffiti mars classroom doors and garbage litters the school grounds.”This school is a dump,” seventh-grader Vanessa Duran said Monday.

Teachers interviewed this week described former Principal Manuel Rangell as an ineffective leader who showed little initiative or vision, and did a poor job of building morale.

They said Rangell and the school’s teachers union representative regularly feuded.

“The atmosphere of the school was hurting,” said one teacher. “We did want a change.”

Rangell did not return phone calls Thursday. But the union representative, Sharon Noland, who also has been reassigned, said she plans to fight it.

“I have devoted 37 years of my life to this district,” said Noland. “Overnight, they’re going to demote me to destroy my life. I’ve done nothing wrong.”

Similar troubles have emerged at Wilson High in El Sereno. Principal Marcella Contreras had what the audit called “a closed-door policy” that left her unable to attack the school’s problems. Contreras has been reassigned and has left the school, officials said. She could not be reached for comment.

A major reconstruction of Wilson during the last four years caused logistical headaches, teachers said. Students said this week that the poor conditions disrupted learning.

“The restrooms are all tagged up, and there’s no doors so you don’t have any privacy,” sophomore Juan Bautista, 17, said Thursday.

At Mount Vernon, teachers agreed with auditors’ findings that the school wastes instructional time. But they declined to be identified, saying they feared losing their jobs.

One teacher said her classes were filled with students not fluent in English. “These students need one-on-one work,” she said. “They’re reading at a second-grade level, and I’m supposed to teach them very sophisticated material.”

In Boyle Heights, auditors who visited Roosevelt High School found that the quality of English instruction varied from classroom to classroom. In interviews this week, teachers complained about students’ low literacy levels.

“I’m a math teacher, but now I have to spend 10 minutes of every class not covering math, but working on English,” said Jina Cano, a Roosevelt teacher for 20 years.

Principal Henry Ronquillo acknowledged that he “hadn’t found a way to overcome” students’ poor reading scores. But he said he had too few English teachers to meet the challenge--an issue cited by the audit.

Ronquillo said he was surprised to learn that he was on the list of principals to be reassigned. He said he had been thinking about early retirement anyway.

“If I had known there was a memo [to reassign me], I would have stayed and fought it,” said Ronquillo, a community leader in Boyle Heights. “That bothers me.”

The state education official who oversaw the audits said it was obvious to investigators that no progress could be made until new leaders were brought into some of the schools.

“There isn’t a lot of time here to either rebuild trust or reestablish credibility, and the issues are absolutely urgent,” said Leslie Fausset, a chief deputy superintendent with the state Department of Education. “So in some instances, starting afresh seemed to be the best recommendation.”

Researchers, however, said that ousting school leaders is no sure recipe for successful reform. That is especially true, they warned, at campuses that already have trouble attracting experienced teachers and administrators and whose students struggle to overcome the disadvantages of poverty.

“It’s a huge assumption that if you throw the scoundrels out, there are all these people waiting in the wings to come and turn around schools,” said Betty Malen, a professor of education policy at the University of Maryland.

Said Susan Moore Johnson of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education: “Unless there is a sustained, well-financed plan to address issues of health, poverty and the need for specialized professional development, the long-term prospect for the schools is poor.”

Chaos often follows such shake-ups, detracting from efforts to improve instruction, Malen has found. “People were just scrambling to bring order to a school . . . opportunities for innovations were very limited,” she said.

The Los Angeles campuses targeted by state auditors were among a larger group of schools warned five years ago that they had to make dramatic improvements. But they failed to do so, which put them under outside scrutiny from the California Department of Education.

Romer called the audits of the 10 schools accurate, and acknowledged that similar conditions plague dozens of other campuses.

Indeed, Romer last fall identified 14 additional schools that he said were on the brink of failure. At the time, Romer said management changes might be necessary at all of those schools to push them in a new direction.

The schools’ new leaders face enormous challenges. The district and state have agreed on detailed recovery plans for each campus, but those plans set tight deadlines for revamping teaching methods, improving attendance, and launching remedial reading programs.

Sun Valley and Roosevelt high schools, for example, will be subdivided into smaller “academies” so instruction can be personalized.

In other parts of the country, L.A. Unified’s actions were viewed with some trepidation by school leaders.

Some principals fear they will be penalized for budgetary and instruction problems beyond their control. Gerald N. Tirozzi, executive director of the National Assn. of Secondary School Principals, noted that it is easier to remove a principal than to remove weak teachers, who enjoy strong union protections.

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Times staff writers Solomon Moore, Erika Hayasaki and Jennifer Sinco Kelleher contributed to this report.