LAUSD STILL MUST LEARN BIG LESSON.

Byline: EARL OFARI HUTCHINSON

AT a news conference in mid-August, a beaming LAUSD Superintendent Roy Romer compared the rise in test scores at some Los Angeles schools to a company whose stock jumped. In touting the improved scores, Romer sounded like a stockbroker whose pet stock had just hit the crest in a bull market.

But Romer forgot one thing: Bear markets inevitably follow bull markets.

The plunge in Romer's stock was swift and brutal. A week later, a standing-room-only crowd of nearly 1,000 parents, teachers and students at Crenshaw high school in South L.A. screamed for Romer's scalp.

The parents were enraged that Crenshaw had just earned the dubious distinction of being only the second Los Angeles Unified School District high school in the past three decades to have its accreditation yanked by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges.

Crenshaw is hardly an isolated educational basket case. Despite the slight spike in testing scores that Romer publicly trumpeted, a report by the National Association Assessment of Educational Progress found that student math and reading scores at all South L.A. schools still wallow near the bottom. More than one third of Latinos and a staggering one half of blacks drop out.

The chronic low scores and high dropout rates are also symptomatic of a district still in deep crisis. The crisis is fueled not by bumbling teachers, and asleep-at-the wheel administrators - although they certainly don't help matters - but by poverty, skyrocketing immigration and segregated housing in Los Angeles.

In Los Angeles, the majority of blacks and Latinos attend schools where the students are either predominantly or exclusively black or Latino. Crenshaw is a near textbook example of segregation at its worst. According to the racial profile of the school by School Wise Press, nearly all of the students at Crenshaw are either black or Latino.

Though poverty and segregation are no excuse for L.A.'s failing schools, far too many teachers, school officials and parents think that they are. They use both as a crutch to evade their responsibility to do what they're paid to do as professionals and should do as parents - and that's to challenge students to perform to the best of their ability.

If poor black and Latino students can't read, write and do simple math - and if they are suspended or expelled and dropout at far higher rates than white students - then it's blamed on their color and unfortunate circumstance. Failure is not only acceptable, but expected.

That's a dangerous notion that teachers, school officials and parents must root out of their thinking.

The students at Crenshaw and South L.A. schools are not hopeless educational cripples who can't or won't learn. Generations of black and Latino students attended mostly segregated schools in South Los Angeles. Yet many managed to graduate, go on to college and become successful in business and the professions.

The reason is that they were taught by dedicated and determined teachers. These professionals expected and demanded that their students perform up to the same level as white students. They pushed the students to learn, set specific goals, demanded their full participation in classroom work, and gave them positive and continual direction and reinforcement.

Romer and school officials should steal a page from the dozens of innovative programs in other school districts nationally that have boosted achievement levels among poor and minority students. One is the Talent Development Program, which targets schools in the poorest inner-city neighborhoods in Baltimore, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. In three years, reading and comprehensive test scores of the students in the program have soared.

It's easy to take shots at Romer, school officials and teachers for the educational nose dive at Crenshaw and other schools. Yet parents must also take some of the blame for the failure.

It took a crisis to get many Crenshaw parents to pack the auditorium at the school to saber-rattle Romer and the board, but how many of those parents regularly show up at parent-teacher conferences, monitor their children's classroom and homework assignments, join and get actively involved with the PTAs and parent-advisory councils at their local schools?

The Crenshaw debacle happened because school officials and parents dropped the ball. It's their job to make sure it doesn't happen again.