administration took a different tack, sending in star principals with the money and the mandate to rebuild failing schools from the ground up. The two strategies have delivered mixed results. Locke stands out because it blends both approaches to good effect.
In 2007 the Los Angeles Unified School District invited a CMO called Green Dot to engineer a turnaround at Locke. It was the first time a US charter group agreed to take on a failing school, and Locke was failing on a grand scale. Opened in 1967 as a symbol of renewal after the Watts Riots, the school was named after Alain Leroy Locke, the first African-American to win a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University. But over the years, as jobs and middle-class families drained out of the neighbourhood, the school’s fortunes drained away with them. By the time Green Dot stepped in, Locke, which sprawls over six city blocks and houses 3,100 students, was the sort of drop-out factory you see in the movies: buildings riddled with graffiti, smashed windows and broken lights; paint peeling off the walls in every classroom; litter blowing like tumbleweed across the scruffy campus; cars parked all over the place, even on the handball courts.
Students routinely missed class to wander the halls or sit outside in large groups shooting dice or smoking weed. They set fires inside the school and held parties on the roof. Gang members sold drugs outside the gymnasium. Campus security guards spent most of their time breaking up fights and keeping rival gangs apart. Several pupils were shot in front of the school’s gates.
Some teachers toiled heroically to give proper instruction to the few students willing or able to receive it, but the tide was against them. Many just gave up. Staff screened movies so often that parents dubbed Locke the ‘ghetto cineplex’. Many read newspapers or novels in class while the children horsed around and played cards. Even the Life Skills teacher turned up to class drunk. Locke hit rock bottom in 2007, when the city sent in helicopters and riot police to break up a brawl involving hundreds of students. But while the shootings, rapes and beatings grabbed headlines, the most damning statistic of all was this: of the 1,451 children who started ninth grade in 2004, less than 6 per cent graduated four years later with enough credentials to apply to a California state university.
It is not as if officialdom gave up on Locke. On the contrary, the city hurled initiative after initiative at the school: a new attendance policy here, a fresh reading programme there, a revamped code of discipline some time after that, and so on. The trouble was, the authorities never took the time to look at the big picture. Instead, they churned through one-off initiatives as I churned through cures for back pain. Stephen Minix, the director of athletics, had a front-row seat on this kaleidoscope of quick fixes. ‘Year after year, we had people in suits and ties showing up and sprinkling some of this or some of that on the school, and saying “This’ll fix it,” and then just walking away,’ he says. ‘They were always sweeping policies handed down by District with no thought for what they would really mean for Locke, so they never made a dent. They were just band-aid solutions to much deeper problems.’
Green Dot therefore faced a lot of scepticism from the start. Teachers at Locke, including Minix, suspected the newcomers of being just another band of quick-fix merchants. Many Watts residents distrusted the smooth-talking outsiders. As one parent puts it: ‘For a lot of people, it was like “Here come these white folks, these pilgrims, putting up their tents, their fences, and they’re promising to fix our school and our kids but we don’t have no say in it, and when it don’t work out they’ll ride off into the sunset and leave us with an even bigger mess than before.”’
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