Pali Implements Village Nation Program

Social studies instructor Steve Burr teaches four advanced placement world history courses at Palisades Charter High School, and he finds that the students who take his classes “do not reflect the diversity that we have on this campus.”
Very few of the school’s nearly 600 African American students take advanced placement classes, said Burr, an African American teacher who has taught at PaliHi for 12 years.
In addition, these students have historically posted lower scores than the white and Asian students on the Academic Performance Index (API) and this last year had the lowest score of all ethnic groups at PaliHi. API is based on statewide assessment results from the Standardized Testing and Reporting Program and the California High School Exit Examination. African American students scored 684, which is two points lower than their score in 2007, while Asian students scored 865, whites, 856 and Latinos, 734.
To encourage African American students to improve academically, Burr and other PaliHi staff members are starting a chapter of the Village Nation, a program that educators Fluke Fluker, Andre Chevalier and Bill Paden started at LAUSD’s Cleveland High School in 2003.
“We were frustrated, aggravated, even angry with the low test scores of African American students, not only at our school, but throughout the country,” Fluker told the Palisadian-Post. “We knew from our conversations with these students that the scores were not a true reflection of their intelligence.”
To participate in the program, PaliHi’s African American students will be invited to assemblies to discuss issues such as the “N” word and the disparity in API scores. The students will be paired with a teacher, staff member or parent who will serve as their mentor. They will be encouraged to participate in the Black Student Union and to take part in community service projects. On Thanksgiving Day, the students will be invited to serve the homeless dinner at the Fred Jordan Mission in downtown L.A.
“This is a great program for closing the achievement gap for African American students,” said PaliHi Executive Director Amy Dresser-Held. The board of directors has approved $30,000 to fund Village Nation.
At Cleveland High School in Reseda, African American students improved their API score by more than 130 points between 2003 and 2007.
“The students started to make better choices and their grades went through the roof,” said Fluker, a teacher at the school. “This program allows them to redefine who they are and what they are about so that they are reaching their full potential.”
After the program’s first year, Cleveland’s African American students increased their API score by 58 points.
“Many chalked the improvement in scores to be a fluke, which happens to also be my name, so I did take credit for it,” Fluker said, chuckling.
But the higher test scores were not happenchance. “We went from being a school almost on probation to a California Distinguished School,” Fluker said, adding they also received national attention for their success on the “Oprah Winfrey Show.”
Many administrators, teachers and students started asking to replicate the program at their school, Fluker said. Village Nation is now in eight schools in Los Angeles County and San Bernadino County and one school in Flint, Michigan.
This summer, Fluker and other leaders of Village Nation offered a teacher training workshop at UCLA, and about 35 teachers and parents attended, including Burr, social studies teacher Tami Christopher, Director of Student Services Monica Iannessa and PaliHi parent Patrice Fisher. During the three-day workshop, attendees were encouraged to think of ways to improve their school.
“We reflected on ourselves and our school,” Christopher said. “What are the real issues at our school? How do we address them?”
Christopher, an African American teacher who has worked at PaliHi for five years, said the group plans to conduct teacher and student surveys this fall in order to further understand the school’s climate.
“We do not supply a band-aid,” Fluker said. “We train teachers how to implement this program at their school. Palisades has a great teaching staff with an open mind to embrace this out-of-the box concept.”
Burr and Christopher are hopeful they will start to see changes in their students.
“We want to create a community for these students, so they are pushing each other to achieve,” Burr said. “My hope is that by the time these students leave high school, they will have taken some AP or honors class.”