Discussions concerning Alain Leroy Locke College Preparatory Academy frequently bring up a point that is unrelated to test results. It’s the picture of inspirational signs that are displayed on campus, the kind of modest, upbeat gesture that doesn’t appear in a spreadsheet. Even though the entire future of the school rested in the hands of individuals who had never set foot in those halls, those signs remained there earlier this month.
For almost 60 years, the school—known to the majority of South Los Angeles as just Locke—has carried more weight than a high school most likely ought to. Built in direct reaction to the Watts riots, it opened in 1967 with the goal of providing stability to a battered neighborhood. For a considerable amount of time, it received the opposite. The 1970s, 1990s, and 2000s were marked by shootings on campus and nearby. In 2008, a campus-wide altercation garnered negative media attention. For a while, the moniker “Once a saint, always a saint” sounded almost ironic.
Then, in 2007, an oddity occurred. Teachers themselves pushed for the change, and LAUSD gave control to Green Dot Public Schools, a nonprofit charter operator. For the first time, the district allowed an outside organization to take over a failing high school while still requiring it to enroll every child from the neighborhood. No cherry-picking or selective admissions. The reason Locke’s numbers appear the way they do is because this isn’t a school that skims the easiest students off the top, so that detail is more important than it may seem.
That was deemed insufficient by the district seventeen years later. Citing persistent underperformance, the L.A. school board voted 4 to 3 in March to revoke the charter. Just 28% of eleventh graders passed the English proficiency test last year, and less than 10% passed the math proficiency test. These figures are approximations. No one at Locke is acting in any other way.
However, clean narratives can be complicated by context. When the school was directly run by LAUSD, about 12% of students scored well on an easier test in English and about 3% in math. Under Green Dot, graduation rates increased from 43% to 72%. One could look at that and see failure. Even if it hasn’t caught up to nearby wealthier campuses, it’s also possible to witness a school pulling students up from somewhere much lower.
The L.A. County Board of Education was confronted with this conflict this week: growth versus absolute performance. In support of the district, county employees suggested closure. The board failed to do so. Members rejected their own staff’s recommendation and voted to keep Green Dot in charge following nearly two hours of discussion in a Downey meeting room. This type of reversal is uncommon, and it implies that the human testimony in that room—students like Lizbeth Garcia discussing the significance of the school to her—carried significant weight against the data.
It’s unclear if this resolves anything in the long run. The fundamental argument remains the same: California still lacks a trustworthy method for gauging high school academic progress, so charter renewals continue to be evaluated based on single-year snapshots rather than trajectories. Locke’s supporters are correct in pointing that out. As you watch this unfold, it’s difficult to ignore how much of the dispute was actually about which numbers are used to define a school and which are disregarded.
