Continued from above.

It is hard not to want Esperanza to be more like Camino Nuevo. They test less and score higher. They have art, music, dance, computers, and field trips to The San Diego Zoo. All parents volunteer at least 15 hours during the school year. If they cannot help during the day, they can translate documents on the weekend or sew costumes for the school’s annual dance recital at the end of the year. Conferences are mandatory; so are school uniforms, punctuality, and attendance at four different workshops (how to start a college fund, how to prepare for the CST). Even their building makes more sense. L.A. Unified hired architects who built Esperanza’s classrooms out of concrete, so that it is nearly impossible to hang student work or even the alphabet outside of the designated boards on the walls. The windows are lined in bars. At Camino Nuevo’s Burlington site the classroom walls are all bulletin boards (and if not bulletin boards, then wipe-off boards that open into ample amounts of storage space) and student work is everywhere. There are skylights in the classrooms and perforated panels outside the building so the kids can enjoy natural light without staring right into it. None of the windows have bars.

The Odds

The problem is that it is no way guaranteed — and in fact, the odds are less than likely — that if Esperanza were to be taken over by an outside entity that it would perform similarly to Camino Nuevo. Stanford’s latest research on charter schools finds that, nationwide, only 17% of them perform better than traditional public schools while 46% perform at about the same level, and 37% perform worse. Mr. Cole-Gutierrez, featured, added to this that charter-takeovers have a much lower success rate than those that start independently and then dimly noted that the scores at Locke High School, which the Mayor took over in 2008, “didn’t exactly jump off the page.” (In fact, they stayed almost exactly the same.)

And remember:

Founders, funders, and board members of charter schools vary widely. The Walton family, of Wal Mart, gives millions to charter schools; so do CEOs and boxers and politicians (Donald Fisher, of The Gap, Oscar de la Hoya, and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, respectively. The latter two each have their own charter academies in L.A.). Some charters are run for-profit, others have imbued themselves in controversy over their use of the bible or classroom instruction in Hebrew.

The Difference

Charter schools are publicly-funded, but independently run so that they do not have to hire and fire teachers based on seniority and they do not have to have unions. In fact, few of them do — Mr. Cole-Gutierrez told MPM that only 30 out of 161 charter schools in L.A. are unionized.

Camino Nuevo is one of these 30 schools. (Actually, since they are K-12, with three different sites, they constitute three of these 30 schools.) The Camino Nuevo Teacher’s Association has bargained for competitive salaries and extended contracts for teachers who have worked at the school for more than five years. (First-year teachers with a credential make $50,100 at Camino Nuevo; similar teachers make $45,637 in L.A. Unified.) But Camino Nuevo’s teachers also work a longer school year (195 instructional days, compared to 180) and a longer school day (8-3 p.m., compared to 7:45-2:15 p.m.) and they have part-of-the-job after-school committee obligations that teachers at traditional public schools do not. (Listen to Shanna Burbank, above.)

The Concern

Mostly the traditional public school teachers, and even some district personnel, that MPM talked to are concerned that charters do not admit students with learning disabilities, a history of behavioral problems, or a low-level of English. Many teachers at Esperanza insisted that this regularly happens; Mr. Cole-Gutierrez admitted that this sometimes happens. (Also that it is illegal.) Ms. Casallas was unequivocal in saying that this so-called cherry picking does not happen at Camino Nuevo. Their numbers support this — 10% of Camino Nuevo’s student body has special needs which is the same percentage of students who have special needs nationwide.

The Appeal

That charter schools may or may not screen for the most motivated students likely obscures the larger point which is that most charters don’t actually need to screen for these kind of students, because they already, inherently attract them. Academies like Camino Nuevo appeal to families who are willing to commit to a longer school year and a longer school day, who want to volunteer their time, who want to go to workshops on college preparation, who like the word academy. The school’s incredible success — Camino Nuevo High School’s 2008 graduating class sent 100% of its students to 4-year universities or community colleges — may or may not have to do with managerial differences fundamental to charter schools, but it seems wrong to ignore that, similar demographics aside, the parental priorities vary greatly. MPM interviewed a teacher at Esperanza who said that in 14 years of teaching, he had never had a parent volunteer. Turnout at Open House is 50%, at best. Every year, there are parents he never meets: they don’t pick up their kids, they don’t come to conferences — they need to work and can their child’s fourth grade sister come to the conference instead?

Ms. Gutierrez works full time, during the day, but makes it to every conference. They are mandatory. She completes her volunteer hours on the weekend. She likes Camino Nuevo because she thinks it has more choices than traditional public schools. In fact, she thinks so highly of it that she has decided that it is too advanced for her older daughter, newly arrived from Mexico, and not yet able to speak English. Where to send her eldest daughter then, who needs a lot of work? Ms. Gutierrez put her in Hollywood High School, a traditional public school down the street from her house.

Notes

*The resolution also makes 51 new schools available for outside management. These schools are set to open over the next four years.

Esperanza Elementary is located at 680 Little Street, Los Angeles 90017. (We need to include this so The Takeaway will appear on news aggregate sites like Everyblock.)

Credits

Written and produced by Devin Browne. Graphics and media programming by Alex Amerri. Photographs by Devin Browne, Alex Amerri, and Louise Baker.

photos by Louise Baker and Anna Bosch

MacArthur Park is a place many people come when they need immediately a fake ID and a tamale cart. They come from Mexico and El Salvador and mountains in Guatemala so rural and so remote that they do not even speak Spanish, but Kanjobal, K’iche’, Chuj. They come from trains and vans and the small space beneath the spare tire in trucks and they come here, to MacArthur Park, to start. It is a baffling, chaotic place to begin to assimilate and it is in this chaos that their view of America first takes shape.

If they are dropped off at the corner of Alvarado and Wilshire, and many newcomers are, then it is the 99¢ store that they see first; there is also, down the street, the: 98¢ store, 97¢ store, and the $1 Mas o Menos store in which goods are routinely priced and sold for $25.99 and $30.99. Such obvious, unapologetic misrepresentation is totally normal in this neighborhood. A dreamier version of America is in fact why many of them have come at all and they are shocked, for example, when they arrive to find Los Angeles expensive– whatever American story they were told at home was apparently so exaggerated and so mythic as to leave out certain critical details like the fact that most people in this country pay rent. And if rent is not a surprise, then a last name is. Mothers go to register their kids for kindergarten as only “Marcos” and “Francisco” to which the school secretary says that the children need a last name to enroll. For whatever reason, she does not explain that often one of the key points in a last name is that it stays consistent in a family unit and so the mothers make do: they ask random students in the school office for their names, to borrow, so that they may please the bureaucracy and go home. Marcos is now “Marcos Miguel”; Francisco: “Francisco Pedro.” These are kids in huge families with new last names in America, all of them first names, all of them different.

And when school starts they come with their High School Musical backpack and sit down on the rug and say in total seriousness that yes they have pets, they have chinches and would the Miss like to see them? Almost everyone lives with bugs. MacArthur Park was developed shortly after the turn of the twentieth century to be dense and compact– this was never the Los Angeles of the single-family home with the lawn and the two-car garage. Its design was intended for white, wealthy, single people who worked downtown and commuted close by. That the residents were wealthy meant glazed brick buildings with ballrooms in the basement; that they were single meant that the units were small, mainly studios and one-bedrooms. When the wealthy left–when the streetcars were ripped up and the price of rent plummeted– the demographic changed, but the infrastructure did not. Into these small spaces moved families of eight, nine, ten, more than ten. MacArthur Park is the densest neighborhood in the United States, outside of Manhattan. You cannot buy corn tortillas in packages of less than sixty.

You also cannot buy chocolate chips or tampons here– the palate is distinctly Latin. All along the street are carts and blankets and booths with belts and cologne and calling cards on display; the vendors are nearby in mid-mantra. Tarjeta, tarjeta, tarjeta. ID, ID, ID Bonita? A lot of the stores double as churches in fact and congregations rent storefronts at 10, 11 o’clock at night for services. If they cannot afford the rent at even that rate then they hold church in the park on Sunday with bullhorns and folding chairs; for special occasions: a generator, a drum set, a full band.

Church is in Spanish and if not Spanish, then Kanjobal. School is in English. Everything else is somewhere in between. There is “Mucho Bargain” and “Regalos Para Baby Shower” and “Flue Shot”– signs written in such pure invention that no one knows whether they’re looking at poor English, poor Spanish, or a new burgeoning dialect, another Yiddish.

Institutional signs are less confused. Esperanza, Hope, is the name of one school; Camino Nuevo, A New Road, the name of another. More recently a park was built and it was named “Hope and Peace Park.” This neighborhood is a Project. Everywhere there is evidence of this attempt to re-invent and create distance from the MacArthur Park that in 1990 was the site of 30 murders; there was (is) also problems with prostitution, narcotics, gangs, and rampant car theft.

The May Day Melee in 2007 certainly did not help the PR efforts of those trying to promote the neighborhood, but they go on. Westlake Theatre is under renovation. Survelliance cameras surround MacArthur Park and police officers are everywhere. And yet there is still the unsettling sense that there is in fact no order here. Teenage girls throw down, three on one, slamming a girl’s head into the pavement and kicking in her stomach, in the middle of a pedestrian walkway, on a high-traffic street, in bright, stark daylight. Maybe one or two people honk, but no one gets out of the car, and the girl on the ground limps off to the El Pollo Loco wiping street grease and tears from her face. A chunky 10 year old boy holds himself and urinates onto the clear, glass storefront of the McDonalds with customers inside, sitting on stools staring right at him, making eye contact even, and no one misses a bite. Still we all see what we want to see, and so every weekend the newly arrived go to the park and pay $5 to have their picture taken in front of what looks like a giant postcard of a clean and bright and beautiful MacArthur Park and they say thank you to the nice photographer and leave looking relieved to now have a picture of the America they came here for.