Westchester High School hits the skids
It’s official, The California Department of Education released the Base API and school rankings yesterday and Westchester High School’s 11 point drop from 600 to 589 last summer has now earned the school the distinction as being one of the worst performing schools in the state with its statewide ranking of a 1 on a scale of 1 – 10.
This is hardly a surprise. As noted in previous articles the academic performance of the school has continually fallen in the index since 1999 under the Perryman and Barner administrations. When the Academic Performance Index (API) became law in 1999, the school’s first statewide ranking was a 4.
One fair comparison is the successful Pacific Palisades Charter High school which earned a state ranking of 10. Westchester community members should insist that Westchester HS be modeled after Palisades once our school begins operating as an iDivision school.
There was a mix of results from other Westchester schools.
The Good news
- Cowan Elementary while dropping 1 point is still rated quite high at 8
- Loyola Village remains remarkably unchanged at 7 where it has consistantly been since 1999
- Paseo del Rey also remains remarkably unchanged at 7 where it has consistantly been since 1999. Paseo once had an API score of 8 in 2001.
- Westport Heights has been see-sawing between 5 and 6 since 1999. This year it rose to a 6
So so news
- Orville Wright rose 1 point from 4 to a 5 API which still leaves it in the bottom half. Orville was a 6 in 1999 and 2000
Bad News
- Kentwood Elementary lost 1 point putting it into the lower half of the API scale at 5
The Really Bad News
- Westchester High School finally bottomed out as among the worse performing schools in the state. The 1 API will guarantee that the school will be in its second year as a Program Improvement (PI2) school.
The Family of Schools and iDivision are what YOU make them! Take this transition as an opportunity to get involved and harness resources to improve our local schools. With more local control, any failure of our schools will be our failure. Long-term personal commitment to the improvement of our schools is the only way things will change. You might ask what am I doing? I’m working on a grant proposal to improve science education in the FoS. I am very happy to report that I have received widespread support and assistance from LMU on this. If funded, the grant would bring broad resources from LMU and UCLA into our schools and provide money for teacher training and materials. Wish us all luck! Now back to work!
>>With more local control, any failure of our schools will be our failure.
It’s a little more complicated than that. Choosing to join the iDivision instead of going independent charter has saddled WHS with many of the same LAUSD rules, regulations, and policies that made the schools so bad before the partnership. I described this in a previous article at Old policies remain in new WHS LMU/iDivision partnership There is a possibility that some of this could be managed but that will depend on the type of governance model that is agreed on.
Good luck on your grants.
My husband and I recently purchased a house in Playa del Rey as first time buyers and absolutely LOVE the neighborhood! In addition, my husband works for Fox Interactive Media and will soon have a 5 minute commute to work once the new business complex in Playa Vista is completed.
We currently do not have any kids but this is definitely a consideration for us in the future and part of the reason that I checked out this website. It is very disappointing to read about the quality of the education at Westchester High School. It is extremely unfortunate that such a great community has very little control over its high school. I hope that people will be able to reform the school and help make it of acceptable quality that people from the community will send their kids to the school. Both my husband and I attended public elementary, jr. high, and high schools (and even colleges.. UCLA) that had a great amount of community involvement and the experience was great. I really think that all of the transfer students at Westchester make it difficult to establish a community feel to the school. It seems like a cycle of repetition of failure as community residents refuse to send their kids to a school that is ranked a 1 out of 10. I hope that things turn around over the coming years. If there is any way that we can get involved, I would love to hear about it.
Home prices in Westchester would be 20-40% higher* if the schools (particularly at the middle and high school levels) were in the “9″ range.
*Compare prices here versus El Segundo.
Your only hope at this point is a total and complete takeover. Ask Green Dot to come in and clean up this mess. Animo Locke is already on it’s way to success. Westchester has too much at stake to allow the high school to remain at rock bottom.