One of the hot topic issues right now in LAUSD is co-locations. Essentially, under Proposition 39, charter schools may request resources from the district. This can include space to house their campus, providing that there is open classroom space. There are many sites all around LAUSD that have empty classroom space, while the commercial real estate market in LA is going bonkers, so it has proved both reasonable and economical to seek this support.
The thing about co-locations is that it is hard to do an across the board analysis. Many co-locations are mixed grade level (an elementary school co-located on a middle school host campus) and they are all over the city, with different demographics and different histories. Therefore, I think this is one that I should start by looking at a couple of case studies. So here we go:
The first co-location I am going to look at is Forty Second Street Elementary (LAUSD) and Celerity Nascent Academy (Charter). According to LAUSD’s publicly released documents, Celerity occupies 14 classrooms on this site.
Let’s start with demographics:
While they are located on the same campus, Celerity Nascent has a significantly higher Latino population while Forty Second Street has a larger African American population. This also reflects itself in the English only and English learner populations, which would be higher in a more heavily Latino school. What interests me about this is that you essentially have a separation of school communities – two schools existing on the same campus, drawing from the same neighborhood, yet with distinctly different student populations.
*Note: Parent Educational Data for LAUSD schools is REALLY unclear, so it hard to compare. For more on this, see my older post.
Their test scores are also very different:
- Source: CAASPP Data (caaspp.cde.ca.gov)
Celerity (in green here) significantly outperforms 42nd street in all levels except for 5th grade English. Not by small margins either, but by enormous margins. And no, you are not reading that wrong: 42nd street has no students in 3rd grade who meet standards in math.
These two sets of data leave me very conflicted. On the one hand, Celerity Nascent significantly outperforms its’ co-located school, in a way, justifying its right to co-locate. On the flip side, the demographic differences between the school, combined with the academic success of one school over the other invokes the spectre of racial division. It is troubling, and makes me wonder if this is a common pattern in co-locations – something I will be investigating in this weeks posts….