Locke High – A last-ditch bid to keep Alain LeRoy Locke College Preparatory Academy in Watts open is heading to the Los Angeles County Board of Education, where advocates and evaluators are locked in a fight over whether the school’s test scores show failure—or whether the
For weeks, the question has sounded simple enough: Should Alain LeRoy Locke College Preparatory Academy in Watts keep operating as a charter school, or should it be shut down.
On Tuesday, that decision will go before the Los Angeles County Board of Education. The stakes are blunt. The county’s education staff is recommending closure for the Locke High charter. operated by Green Dot Public Schools. which enrolls about 1. 000 students. But the school’s supporters see a different story—one they say turns on a missing piece of measurement: how much students improve from the day they arrive to the day they take the state exams.
The conflict didn’t start in a vacuum. In March, the Los Angeles city school board voted 4 to 3 to remove the current operators of Locke High. Seventeen years ago. Locke marked the first time in Los Angeles that an outside group took over a low-performing high school—continuing to take in all neighborhood students. Its fate now hinges on a last-ditch appeal to county education officials, and on two different interpretations of academic progress.
In one version of the evaluation, Locke is “chronically underperforming,” so poorly that the students would be better off if Locke High was returned to the control of the L.A. Unified School District.
In the other version, Locke is helping students catch up academically and make significant gains—more than meeting the mark to remain in operation as a privately governed charter school.
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