School Daze
The long-running battle between charter schools and traditional public schools has heated up nearly to a boiling point, with business magnate Eli Broad recently unveiling a campaign to charter-ize public ed in L.A. once and for all. The drama is happening mostly at the top between the Broad camp and public school advocates--notably the teacher's union, which has stepped up protests and criticism of Broad and his so-called reforms. But beneath the drama is the story of one campus's attempt to resist the takeover of a charter school, a story that illustrates the political complexity of the battle--the limitations of both sides, and how what almost always gets sacrificed in the struggle is what's best for students.
The campus is Emerson Adult Learning Center, a dedicated adult-school campus that sits at a dead end of a leafy block off of Manchester Boulevard in Westchester. Because it's an adult-school campus and not elementary or secondary, it tends to get overlooked--adults just aren't as compelling as kids as characters in the ongoing education wars. In fact, adult schools are de facto stepchildren of Los Angeles Unified; the campuses have been decimated by cutbacks in recent years, with Emerson's teaching staff shrunk down to 15 from a peak of 150. The school has practically no office staff. Yet in this still-unforgiving economy, the services offered by Emerson, which include classes in GED and pharmacy training, is perhaps greater than ever. Emerson is at capacity and California has an adult-ed wait list of 14,000, with the bulk of that number waiting in L.A. Unified.
Patrick Meyer is a teacher and reading lab director who's spent his entire 28-year career here. Like so many other students and staff, he calls Emerson a special place where a highly motivated, tight-knit community of learners and teachers function as a family. (I wrote about Emerson a while back when I profiled the unique, enduring friendship between Patrick and a career student, Phil Sparks). The majority of students here are black and Latino and many hail from other, less affluent parts of town: Inglewood, Long Beach, South Central. That's in stark contrast to the population of Westchester itself, which like many beachside communities is chiefly white and increasingly gentrified. More on that in a bit.
Emerson student Phil Sparks and teacher Patrick Meyer. Photo by Erin Aubry Kaplan.
The trouble started a couple of months back, when Patrick noticed a crew of facilities workers from L.A. Unified walking around Emerson, sizing up the place. When he asked what they were doing, he got no answers. He asked his principal and got the same. Eventually he circulated a petition amongst Emerson students demanding information from the district about what was afoot. School board member Steve Zimmer, who represents Westchester, admitted there was a crush of school space on the westside, but told Patrick not to worry about the adult classes. Unconvinced, Patrick persisted in trying to get more specific information, though with little luck. "There was secrecy on all sides," he says.
Then, district superintendent Ramon Cortines showed up suddenly at school, though not to reassure Patrick and the Emerson community. Quite the opposite. Cortines didn't talk to any students, and in response to questions from Patrick only said there was "a shortage of classroom space 'in the area.'" Patrick kept pressing with questions, insisting that students at such a critically important adult campus that's been around 35 years deserve to know its fate.
Finally he got an answer: Emerson was going to be displaced by a charter school operation known as WISH or Westside Innovative School House. WISH had been operating at Orville Wright Middle School and Cowan Elementary, two of several School Daze | Cakewalk | Departures Columns | KCET: