Relentless Pursuit (3 page)

When Cubias started at Locke—just twenty-one years after it opened—the student body was 78 percent black and 20 percent Hispanic. Four years after he graduated, the ratio was fifty-fifty. During the 2005–2006 school year, Hispanics at Locke outnumbered blacks two to one.

Even as their numbers dwindled, blacks still enjoyed positions of power in the community. The local papers were black-owned; the administrative positions at Locke tended to be filled by African Americans. (For a few months during the 2005–2006 school year, there were two Spanish-speaking assistant principals on staff. By year's end, one was gone and the other had announced she was leaving.) When visiting artists came to Locke to entertain at lunch, they tended to be black rappers. The homecoming festivities were largely a black affair. Murals on the outer walls of the handball courts, which were used exclusively by Latinos, honored black leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Locke, like all schools in the district, celebrated African American History Month each February.

But the way of life in the neighborhood was Latino. Taco stands outnumbered soul-food takeouts. Billboards were written in Spanish. The majority of home buyers were Hispanic. Posters celebrating Latino history and culture started appearing in Locke's hallways. The king and queen of the 2006 prom—along with every other member of the court—were Hispanic. (The principal personally intervened in the voting and announced a “tie” for one spot in the court so that at least one black face would appear in the commemorative photo.)

The transition from black majority to Hispanic majority had not been a smooth one. Maribel Gonzalez, valedictorian of the Locke class of 1998, who went on to UCLA and joined Teach For America when she graduated, remembers that race riots occurred all four years of her time at Locke. After a while, she became inured to most of the racial jousting. But it was hard to forget the riot of 1997. Maribel was a junior. Fighting broke out between blacks and Latinos at lunch, and LAPD swat teams were called in. When order was restored and kids returned to class, a lockdown was declared. Cops surrounded the school, patrolled the nearby streets, and manned the traffic stops. When the bell rang at three o'clock, kids were released class by class. By the time Maribel left Locke that day, it was five-thirty. The incident that sparked the fracas? Two black students had inadvertently bumped into a Latino student, knocking a can of soda from his hands.

When former student Corwin Twine returned to Locke as a teacher in 2001, he was shocked. “I couldn't believe it,” he recalls. “Kids were shooting dice, having sex, doing drugs—it was like a freaking war zone. And there were certain people working here who were scared. You could tell by the way they talked to the kids.” Twine reassured one frightened white teacher: “Dude, they won't mess with you. They kill a white guy, you know how many cans and rocks they gonna turn over here?”

In 2005, the two cultures coexisted, uneasily. Most teachers made an effort to “integrate” the races in their classrooms. But outside, on the quad and the scruffy playing fields, the cultural turf was clearly demarcated. The handball courts belonged to the Latinos. The football field and basketball courts were all-black terrain. On the quad, Latinos would “kick” along the south boundary. Directly opposite, facing them, were the African American students. The cafeteria divided pretty much the same way: as you entered, it was blacks in the left-hand corner, Spanish speakers in the first few benches, special ed students tucked away in the right-hand corner. The area just outside the cafeteria—the eastern edge of the quad—was a kind of demilitarized zone bounded by two trees. The African American football players sat under one. Under the other was a group of Latinos, some of them athletes, too. The understanding was that between the trees there would always be peace. The treaty has yet to be broken.

Even in 1967, when Locke was a spanking new $5.4 million school built on 25½ acres in the middle of a moldered community, closing the achievement gap for all the at-risk students it enrolled was going to be an uphill battle. The 1965 McCone Commission had found that the achievement test scores for students in the city's disadvantaged neighborhoods, like Locke's, were “shockingly lower” than the citywide averages—in all subjects and at all grade levels.

But few could have imagined that forty years on so little would have changed. In the 2005–2006 school year, by virtually any and every measure—whether by state, federal, or private-research yardsticks—Locke was one of the lowest-performing schools in all of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), if not in the state.

California has a grab bag of indexes used to calculate academic performance; they are as confusing as their acronyms. The state metric is the Academic Performance Index (API), a scale ranging from 200 to 1,000 that reflects a school's performance based on the results of statewide testing. Schools that fail to reach California's API performance target of 800 must hit specific annual growth objectives until they do. Failure to meet the growth goals results in penalties, which can include school reorganization or even a state takeover. In 2005, Locke's API was 488, the second lowest—by a hair—in LAUSD.

The feds' system of accountability for schools receiving antipoverty funds is called Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) and is based on a set of requirements, including API growth. Schools that lag in their AYP for two consecutive years go to a Program Improvement (PI) plan in which the severity of the penalties increases over time, although the government doesn't spell out consequences past year five. Locke has been in PI since the 1997–1998 school year. The school met its API growth target in 2005–2006, and it graduated 332 students—the largest number in recent memory. But it still fell far short of reaching federal proficiency rates.

Research carried out by UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies in 2006 only underscored Locke's last-place status. UCLA found that Locke's “College Opportunity Ratio” was rock bottom in a study of nineteen of the city's lowest-performing high schools: for every 100 of the 979 ninth-graders who entered Locke in 2001, 24 graduated in 2005, and 3 completed the course requirements for admission to a California State University (CSU) or a University of California (UC) campus. Locke's ratio on another key UCLA indicator, the “Cumulative Promotion Index”—which calculates the probability that a student entering ninth grade will complete high school on time with a regular diploma—was the lowest of the low, at 15 percent.

Over the years, beleaguered Locke High School became the poster child for needed school reform in Los Angeles, a photo op for politicians and celebrities alike. Vice President George Bush visited Locke in 1988, and President Bill Clinton stopped by on a “poverty” tour in 1999. Tipper Gore, John McCain, and Maria Shriver all made house calls. The rapper Ice Cube appeared in 1993, and Muhammad Ali was there in 1996. Edward James Olmos, star of the movie
Stand and Deliver,
basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and jazz great Herbie Hancock have paid their respects as well.

The school district tried numerous interventions and reforms to turn things around. Administrators were hired and fired, the school was reorganized into small learning communities, after-school and Saturday classes were offered to beef up instruction, and gang-prevention measures were put in place. Lots of money was allocated; much of it was misspent.

Inevitably, the initiatives had as much staying power as did the staff forced to implement them; each year, up to fifty teachers dropped out of Locke. When Dr. Frank Wells took over as principal in 2004, he was the third person to hold the title in almost as many years. Things had gotten so bad that in 2001 local superintendent Sylvia Rousseau moved her district office to Locke and briefly ran the school herself. But since the arrival of Wells, the vibe on campus had changed. Locke was a safer school. Everyone said so—even the rotten, bottom-of-the-barrel teachers, the ones Wells referred to as “the residue,” the ones who “grieved” him to the union every chance they got. Locke had fewer drug busts and fights, and the school district police had the numbers to prove it: the school had gone from first in the number of campus crime reports in LAUSD to thirteenth. Wells recited that factoid every chance he got.

Wells brought a lot to the table. He was an African American male with a commanding presence. As the only son of a single mother, he could relate to all the kids at Locke whose fathers were MIA. And he knew what it was like to grow up living week-to-week on government assistance. Most important, he had a reputation for raising test scores. As principal of a low-performing elementary school in northern California a few years before, he had made news with “soaring” scores under his leadership. His framed press clippings were hanging on the wood-paneled walls of the principal's conference room.

Wells made his mark at Locke immediately: trouble started on the second day of school. It was during lunch, and he was on the quad, the large grassy interior courtyard where kids naturally gathered during breaks. As the new principal stood there surveying the student body, two groups of rival gangbangers squared off in a furious scrum in the middle of the quad. It didn't last long. Campus security moved in, and the ringleaders were nabbed. When Wells asked for a list of the other kids involved—and anybody else known to associate with them—security presented him with some eighty names. Satisfied that he had identified the few kids responsible for the most trouble on campus, Wells kicked them out of Locke. Most, he suspected, would end up back in juvenile hall; some would be offered “opportunity transfers” to other schools. He called Superintendent Rousseau to let her know what he had done.

“I need to know if you will support me on this or if I should pack my bag,” he said.

Rousseau told him to clean the school up; the district didn't need any more bad publicity coming out of Locke. Few on campus complained about what seemed to be a lack of due process for the alleged perpetrators; most were happy with Wells's housecleaning. But not everyone. Some higher-ups in the district questioned the legality of the expulsions. And the ejected students had their own way of registering their dissatisfaction. They carved a big
C
on the hood of the beautiful black Cadillac truck parked in the spot marked “Principal.” The
C,
of course, stood for the Crips, the predominant gang at Locke.

Frank Wells was no stranger to violence. Like many of his childhood friends from the projects in Hunters Point, outside San Francisco, he had flirted with gang life. But he was lucky. Though he was a special ed student who didn't learn to read until he was thirteen, he graduated from high school, joined the army, and went on to college. Many of his friends were not as fortunate. Some ended up in jail. Two were shot dead.

Wells fell in love with Locke at first sight. He saw the barred windows, and he stood before the sliding steel gates while beefy Themus, the sad-eyed security guard, opened the iron door just wide enough for him to enter. He strode down the cement breezeway that separates the instructional wings from the strip of administrative offices where Superintendent Rousseau had set up camp. And he saw the corner principal's office with its revolving door. He climbed the stairs and noticed kids roaming the halls when they should have been in classrooms. And he noted the graffiti, the ragtag fields, the littered campus, and the cement walkways polka-dotted with blackened chewing gum. Across the street from the back of the bungalows was the run-down housing on Avalon Boulevard, rumored to be a Crips hideout. He certainly saw the on-site police station, the full-time parole officer's desk, the derelict student garden, and the child-care center for student mothers. The “tardy room,” a holding pen for kids caught in the daily floor-by-floor truancy sweeps, was in plain sight—it took up a corner of the open-air cafeteria.

The test scores and school stats, of course, were another matter. Locke's 2004 API was 450—the lowest result in all of LAUSD. That gave Locke a statewide rank of 1 out of a possible 10—even among schools with similar demographic profiles. Results on the CAT/6, the norm-referenced tests that compare California students to their peers nationwide, were equally dismal. Only 11 percent of Locke's ninth-graders scored at the 50 percent level (the national average) on reading and math. Thirty-one percent of the freshman class was expected to graduate—a number just slightly lower than their parents' own graduation rates.

Wells submitted his application, and in the time it took him to drive home, the district was on the phone trying to set up an interview. Other candidates may have seen in Locke hopeless dysfunction. Frank Wells saw opportunity.

When Wells was named principal, Teach For America had already been a presence at Locke for a decade. But the number of recruits in any given year had never exceeded five, and in all, fewer than two dozen TFA alums had taught at Locke. That began to change when Dr. Rousseau signed a contract with TFA allowing recruits to train at Locke's summer school. At first Rousseau, now a professor of education at USC, was dubious. She was a product and proponent of teacher-ed programs. But the district was desperate for math and science teachers, and Rousseau reckoned a TFA recruit had to be better than a sub or what she called a “dying-on-the-vine” teacher. It worked out. TFA sent Locke quality teachers, and the dynamic at the school began to change. “TFA was a real asset for us,” she recalls.

Under Wells, Locke became a TFA factory, home to the largest cluster of corps members in the Los Angeles region. In 2004, his first year, TFA sent nine corps members to Locke. The next year, when Phillip, Rachelle, Hrag, and Taylor joined the staff, they were among thirteen new Locke TFAers, bringing the total of first-or second-year recruits teaching at Locke to nearly two dozen. Five more staffers, including the new assistant principal Chad Soleo and the brilliant physics teacher Josh Hartford, who headed the School of Social Empowerment, one of six small learning communities at Locke, were star TFA alums.