Failing School, Charter School, Traditional School–A Student’s View
“So of all the schools you attended, if you could go to just one of them, which would you pick?” I ask Natalie.
She smiles and looks up a moment, thinking about it. A poised, friendly senior at Gabrielino High School in San Gabriel, she has the warm smile and firm handshake of a polished professional. My friend Will Wong, who teaches math at Gabrielino, suggested that I interview her because Natalie’s life story makes her an inadvertent test case for a lot of the current theories in education. Over the last six years, she’s attended a failing public district school, a high-performing charter school (Animo Leadership, which I have coveredhere and here) and Gabrielino, a traditional large district school in a diverse middle-class neighborhood.
Though Natalie was born in L.A. and grew up in Inglewood, her entire family spoke Spanish at home; she didn’t learn English until kindergarten. Through 8th grade, she attended Inglewood district schools, an experience she remembers with a shudder. “Oh, my God,” she says, shaking her head. “Inglewood has a lot of gangs from all these places, East L.A., Hawthorne, South L.A., and there’d be racial fights in the halls all the time. We had a police station on campus. I guess like the police were there but it didn’t
