LAUSD Flunks Good Sense

Motivated, perhaps, by ongoing outcry that Los Angeles’ public schools are too often an insult to the idea of serious education, the teachers at Pacific Palisades Charter High School want to flunk students who don’t show up for class. In their grade books, six unexcused absences in one semester rate an F.

So what does the Los Angeles Unified School District do upon hearing that some of its teachers take their job so seriously as to impose this sensible standard? It slaps them down, of course, citing that bane of all innovation in public education, “district policy”--which in this case allows students who miss class to make up the work and pass.

This approach makes sense for students who suffer from chronic illnesses. But if kids can routinely ditch class without a legitimate excuse and without academic consequences, why not let them “phone it in”? The LAUSD’s policy suggests that nothing valuable is going on in the classroom, and it doesn’t matter if a student attends class or not as long as the assignment gets done. Bad thinking. Robert Balfanz, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University, has found that simply getting students to show up engages them more fully in their education and increases their chances of graduating.

Responsible parents make sure that their kids are seated at a desk each school day unless they’re too sick. They use thermometers to flush out fakers. Others will let their youngsters skip classes when the surf’s up and then cook up excuses for their darlings. Neither teachers nor other students should have to put up with the disruption such mollycoddling causes. All the standardized testing, teacher training and textbook investment mean nothing if students don’t have to show up for class.

Palisades is a charter school and can make its own rules, but they must be approved by the Los Angeles school board because the campus remains a part of the LAUSD system. The principal and teachers believed that their no-nonsense attendance policy had been approved in their application for charter status. District administrators say it wasn’t, and add that the school can fix that by submitting an amendment that would have to be approved by the school board. Meanwhile, Palisades teachers who flunk students for missing too many classes face discipline.

This mess, first reported by Times staff writer Solomon Moore, should encourage the Palisades leadership to break from the LAUSD, becoming an independent charter school, freed from district and state regulations in exchange for proving that its students are receiving a good education.

At the Accelerated School in South-Central Los Angeles, for example, students who are tardy or absent 17 times, roughly one-tenth of the school year, are not invited back. They have a choice: Line up with 1,200 other students waiting for admission or go to another school.

According to a study on low-income students released Monday by Cal State L.A., independent charter schools get better results than their bureaucracy-constrained counterparts. Isn’t that the point of education?

Rules with teeth, like those at Pacific Palisades, are key to a school’s success. Since the LAUSD feels compelled to butt in, it should promptly change district policy and demand that all schools crack down on ditchers.