No one is happy with what the numbers say about school performance at Crenshaw High School.  But do they show signs of progress?

That will be hard to judge until later this year, when results come out on the state tests students took in May.

  
Urban League President and CEO Blair Taylor points to other positive signs, such as a 10 percentage point jump in the graduation rate in 2007-08 compared to the previous year. The graduation rate in 2007-08 was 51.8 percent, while for the district as a whole it was 72.4 percent. Crenshaw's dropout rate fell from 48.6 percent in 2006-07 to 41.4 percent in 2007-08. More recent state-verified dropout and graduation statistics are not yet available.

Crenshaw long has been one of the lowest-performing schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. But it's not the only one where academic achievement has been lagging far behind district and state averages for years. Six of the district's large, traditional high schools scored lower than Crenshaw last year on the Academic Performance Index, a state measure that combines results on English and math tests and the high school exit exam.

All of these schools have high rates of poverty, although the six with lower scores on the Academic Performance Index, or API, have higher rates of students learning English as a second language than Crenshaw. At Crenshaw, 80 percent of students are eligible for free and reduced-priced meals and 12 percent are English language learners.

Like several other high schools in L.A. Unified, Crenshaw did not have enough students taking the state English and math tests in 2007-08 to come up with a valid API. Crenshaw and district officials say that high school students often do not take the tests seriously, because they don't count toward grades and students don't have an incentive to do well. In 2008-09, the school's API was 547 on a scale of 200 to 1,000, with 800 the state target for all schools.

Last year's test results showed 20 percent of students at Crenshaw scored at the proficient or advanced levels in English, compared to 38 percent for L.A. Unified as a whole. In math, just 4 percent of Crenshaw students scored at the proficient or advanced levels, compared to 37 percent for the district.

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To read our entire package on Neighborhoods@Work, which includes an evaluation of the overall program, its results in revitalizing the neighborhood, interviews with residents and a day in the life of a student, click here. We also include video excerpts of our interview with Urban League CEO Blair Taylor.