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Q&A: LAUSD Board’s Nick Melvoin Says School Rankings Can Drive Improvement The Argonaut: What are the top characteristics parents should look for in a school? Nick Melvoin: Thinking back to my time as a student and a teacher and now as a board member talking to parents, I think the quality of the people is the first thing I would look for — a strong principal, great faculty. I’m pleased to say we’re opening the school year with really dynamic adults at our schools. Also, the diversity of programs … looking at what the school has to offer besides just the basics, and afterschool programs as well. Why should LAUSD rank its neighborhood schools and charter schools? This was passed by the board 6 to 1 over a year ago, and now that we’re about to roll it out there’s been some opposition in the news. But I wouldn’t start with the rankings. There are two things I was trying to solve when I came into office. One is that we had no internal evaluation system to look at where we should put more support and which schools were doing well. If you were to ask me which five schools were the fastest-growing in middle-school math, there was no tool the district had to answer that question. Another is that parents were going to
need more resources, and external-facing so parents don’t have to look at what in many cases is flawed information. I think there are some people opposed to this because they’re fine with the status quo; I’m not. … I get that some of the schools are going to feel like they’re working really hard and still not improving, but that’s the point — we need to focus on results and figure out how to help our schools that are struggling.
Nick Melvoin websites like greatschools.com and telling me they wouldn’t go to a school because it has a 2- or 3-out-of-10 ranking, and when I looked at those systems I could see they were flawed. They weren’t looking at growth; they weren’t looking at demographics as much as they should. We took it upon ourselves to create a tool geared toward improvement — internal-facing so we know which schools
What’s going on with early childhood education? This has been a priority. Kentwood Elementary School in Westchester has had a closed early childhood facility for a few years now. That’s a double-bad situation, because not only are you missing those seats but it’s also been kind of a blight. When people walk by and see this dilapidated building it reflects poorly on the school. That facility is going to be reopening soon, which means we’ll be able to serve more kids and beautify the neighborhood. At Westminster Avenue Elementary in Venice, we’re going to be expanding that early childhood program and trying some innovative ways to attract families, including maybe a sliding-scale fee-based program. One of the challenges with
early childhood programs is we don’t get the money from the state that we need, so we’re looking at charging parents a nominal fee that’s much cheaper than private school but helps us run the program. My hope is that families going to private preschool will come back to LAUSD, and once they’re on campus they’ll stay for elementary school. What are you most excited about for the school year ahead? I think we’re really making progress in expanding opportunities and looking at how we go from good to great — not just graduate kids, but graduate them for college. When I came to the district, only 40% of 11th graders were taking the SAT. We decided to give it to them in school for free, and last year over 80% took the SAT. … I’m excited about expanding our dual language immersion programs through high school. … And I’m excited also to figure out how the district can be a good community partner. We have a pilot program to keep our schools open on nights and weekends as parks. We want to be a focal point in the community. Interview conducted by Managing Editor Joe Piasecki.
Local Innovators Take New Approaches to Learning (Continued from page 11) When on campus, students pursue coursework that’s aligned with state standards but involves real-world projects and problem-solving exercises. As juniors and seniors, students’ off-campus mobility allows for enrollment in community college classes.
Workshop Helps Parents Talk to Kids about Race Santa Monica’s grassroots Committee for Racial Justice is hosting a workshop on Sunday (Sept. 1) to help parents talk to young children and even toddlers about racial bias. “People have the mistaken impression that children are colorblind, that small children don’t notice race. But studies show they are not colorblind,” says committee organizer Joanne Berlin. “Prejudice starts very young, and it’s harder to get rid of it than it is to prevent it.” The free 6 to 8:30 p.m. gathering at the Teen Center in Virginia Avenue Park involves group discussion and guided roleplay exercises drawn from two books: “Anti-Bias for Young Children and Ourselves” by Louise DermanSparks and Julie Olsen-Edwards, and “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting PAGE 12 THE ARGONAUT August 29, 2019
Together in the Cafeteria?” by Beverly Daniel Tatum. “The goal of Anti-Bias Education is to help every child be comfortable with who they are and open to other folks who are different to them,” says Berlin. “It goes into how children will raise questions about race, and how adults need to be more comfortable with that.”
Building Cities at Open Magnet Charter School There’s rarely a “typical” school day at Open Magnet Charter School in Westchester, where students are encouraged to develop critical thinking and social skills by learning at their own pace outside rigid classroom structures. Open Magnet Charter teachers write their own curriculum and teach in pairs within large, double-sized classrooms that allow students to move freely from room to room throughout the class period. They teach in two-grade “clusters” — kindergarten and first, second and third, and fourth with fifth. Each year these clusters build a “city of the future” with its own currency, elections and governance systems based around a particular futuristic theme, explains magnet
coordinator Peggy Lew. Staff and students alike enjoy the freedom of the Open Magnet philosophy and the intellectual opportunities it creates. “It’s like a teachers’ nirvana,” says Lew.
this year, students who are aging out of middle school can continue their Spanish or Mandarin immersion track at Venice High School.
Mandarin and Spanish Immersion Pipelines
The city of Los Angeles includes more than 6,500 miles of roads. Part of the reason there are so many potholes is that public workers must rely on tips from the public or conduct manual inspections to find them. A team of Loyola Marymount University engineering students recently teamed up with Google hoping to expedite the process of pothole discovery. Using the company’s open-source machine learning platform TensorFlow, they worked to devise a model that could identify potholes and potentially dangerous cracks from footage captured by a camera attached to the hood of a car. So far, the results are promising. Incoming seniors this year, the students may continue that work as their capstone engineering project.
There once was a time when a majority of Californians frowned on bilingual education. Now many parents are jumping at the chance for their kids to attend schools that immerse students in two languages in every class, driving a rapid expansion of dual-language immersion programs on the Westside. Braddock Drive Elementary, Stoner Avenue Elementary and Grandview Boulevard Elementary schools offer Spanish immersion — Grandview being LAUSD’s oldest immersion program, teaching in Spanish 90% of the time. Broadway Elementary School offers an immersion program in Mandarin Chinese. Students can continue on the Mandarin or Spanish immersion track at Mark Twain Middle School’s world languages magnet, which also offers Korean and French. And for the first time
Tracking Potholes with Machine Learning
Stories compiled by Gary Walker, Matt Rodriguez and Joe Piasecki