Carson High School was one of two schools in the Los Angeles area to be selected to be part of a highly-touted reform program that comes with a $1.5m grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The grant is part of a development program created by researchers at Johns Hopkins University that has shown strong promise at reducing dropout rates and increasing student achievement at the schools that it has been tried.

Carson was selected in part because of the exceptionally poor performance of the school. Carson was a 2 on a scale of 1 to 10 with 1 being worst and 2 being only slightly better. Furthermore, well less than 50% of students who start at Carson as Freshmen graduate. These should be considered monumental failures by anyone’s criteria (especially parents unlucky enough to be in the Carson district). The principal of Carson agreed the school should be doing much better and sought the involvement of the outside development program. That’s when he ran into the nemesis of any reform effort–the teacher’s union.

According to a Los Angeles Times’ story, the Carson teachers didn’t like outsiders telling them how to teach. They also thought the grant money made them look like they were performing worse than they were. After all, if you looked hard enough there were actually schools doing worse than them. According to Kary Harger, who chairs the Carson chapter of the United Teachers Los Angeles (the same group that is battling Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa):

“We didn’t want the change.”

In other words, we may have a horrible graduation rate and be near the bottom of every possible school grading criteria, but we (the teachers) are comfortable and don’t like change–especially when it comes from do-gooder outsiders.

The best quote came from the a representative of the outside development program:

“It amazes me how [the teachers] can remain so ignorant…”

If you live in Los Angeles you get used to UTLA broadsides and their excuses for stifling reform at every possible chance. As always, the kids lose again.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 18th, 2006 at 7:54 am by Insider and is filed under (Un)education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.