The Partnership for Los Angeles Schools is a unique school model that focuses on turning around the lowest-scoring schools with the highest dropout rates in the toughest neighborhoods of Los Angeles — Boyle Heights, Watts, and South Los Angeles.
LA Unified invites the Partnership into struggling schools, which then benefit from more freedoms, community resources, and organizational support. Teachers and principals receive intensive professional development, and principals are sometimes replaced and new curriculum introduced. The schools remain part of LA Unified, and they follow state education codes and honor all labor agreements.
Instead of expansion, the Partnership’s goal is to share best practices so schools throughout the district can replicate what works. Their contract is renewed every five years with the district.
This year, the Partnership is celebrating a decade of working with schools, and an independent report released last month from Public Impact shows it has achieved tremendous growth with some of the state’s lowest-performing schools. Another educational research organization, the Center on Reinventing Public Education, published a study in October on the partnership model after discovering a sudden proliferation of this type of in-district school turnaround model in 10 cities throughout the country.
Last month, the Partnership received a 10-year pledge of $35 million from local philanthropists Melanie and Richard Lundquist, a decade after their initial $50 million pledge that launched the Partnership. Theirs is the second-largest donation to public schools in U.S. history. (The most was $100 million given to Newark public schools in 2010 by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.)
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