A couple of months ago, I postulated that Green Dot’s new high school takeover, Locke High School, would start to outperform two other chronically low performing LA Unified schools—one run by the mayor and one run by the district (here) . Now Green Dot and the mayor just took possession of these schools at the start 2007–08 school year, so these results are only initial indications, and not definitive measures of the effectiveness of these school turnarounds. Here are the 2008–09 results compared to 2007–08. For the mayor’s school and the LAUSD school, there is a slight increase in both English and most math subjects. However, the scores for Locke actually went down in English and were mixed in math. One highlight was a jump in Algebra II scores.

But generally the results did not look dramatically better. In Green Dot’s defense, both the percent of taking the test increased dramatically, an early sign that the dropout rate has been reduced. According to Green Dot, they have reduced dropouts from 223 in 2007–08 to 19 dropouts and 8 expulsions. Official data on dropouts and graduation will come out near the end of the year. So, they may retained some lower performing students who would have historically dropped out. Time will tell. But for now, Green Dot has a long way to go catch up to the performance levels that they have been able to achieve in their start up charter schools that generally started with one grade of 9th graders, and added an additional grade each year. The Mayor’s other schools also had mixed results (here). These results come at an interesting time in LAUSD politics. Thanks largely to the work of Roy Romer, ex-superintendent in LA, next year, 50 new schools will come one line. The board is considering a proposal to have a competitive process to determine who will run these schools. The schools could be run by charters, the mayor, unions, community based organizations or the district itself. Both the charter school community and the mayor are strong backers of the proposal. While there are other proof points for Green Dot and other charter school groups, these results are not likely to help the mayor make his case. Now from my opinion I think that there is a lot to be gained from the board proposal. I think that there is a lot that would need to be worked out to make sure that the competitive process was rigorous and fair, and that the board developed an effective oversight mechanism for these new schools (certainly one that is better than their current oversight of charter schools).