In this week’s Just Talk,
John Rogers sits down with Jose Luis Navarro, the principal of Social
Justice Humanitas Academy (SJHA). SJHA is a pilot high school located at
the far northern edge of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Mr.
Navarro and a group of teachers founded SJHA in 2011 with the aim of
“achieving social justice through the development of the complete
individual.”
Here's an exerpt from the conversation.
John Rogers: Jose, how would you describe your school to someone who has never been here before?
Jose
Luis Navarro: I would like to use a lot of flowery poetic language, but
let me instead use data. Yesterday, we were told at our principal’s
meeting that our graduation rate was 94.3 percent. In our local
district, one other school just
outpaced us at 95.1 percent. As principals were being congratulated for
their improvements, I kept thinking that there are actually other
significant numbers, and the one I always look at is A-G
completion. I know my A-G completion rate is 90 percent. That’s what I
want–congruence. Some schools that have graduation rates in the 90s have
A-G completion rates in the 30s. I wrote my superintendent yesterday
about this and said we need to stop talking about just the graduation
rate. If the graduation rate blinds us to social justice issues, we are
going to trip over this low bar. The difference between A-G completion
and graduation is the achievement gap... Catch the entire interview, here.