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Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Failing School, Charter School, Traditional School–A Student’s View | Gatsby In L.A.

Failing School, Charter School, Traditional School–A Student’s View | Gatsby In L.A.:



Failing School, Charter School, Traditional School–A Student’s View

“So of all the schools you attended, if you could go to just one of them, which would you pick?” I ask Natalie.
She smiles and looks up a moment, thinking about it.  A poised, friendly senior at Gabrielino High School in San Gabriel, she has the warm smile and firm handshake of a polished professional.  My friend Will Wong, who teaches math at Gabrielino, suggested that I interview her because Natalie’s life story makes her an inadvertent test case for a lot of the current theories in education.  Over the last six years, she’s attended a failing public district school, a high-performing charter school (Animo Leadership, which I have coveredhere and here) and Gabrielino, a traditional large district school in a diverse middle-class neighborhood.
Though Natalie was born in L.A. and grew up in Inglewood, her entire family spoke Spanish at home; she didn’t learn English until kindergarten.  Through 8th grade, she attended Inglewood district schools, an experience she remembers with a shudder.  “Oh, my God,” she says, shaking her head.  “Inglewood has a lot of gangs from all these places, East L.A., Hawthorne, South L.A., and there’d be racial fights in the halls all the time.  We had a police station on campus.  I guess like the police were there but it didn’t