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Los Angeles Times/ ­- Politics, Dom, 15 de Abril de 2012
CLIPPING INTERNACIONAL (Civil Rights)
When time allows, 1992 riots are
poignant lesson in L.A. schools
They were not even born at the time their city erupted
in flames, violence and rage against a system that
would not convict Los Angeles police officers of
brutally beating a black man.But high school students
Jiaya Ingram, Ashley Torres and Jessica Maldonado
have been gripped by accounts of the 1992 Los
Angeles riots as they learn about them through poetry
and plays, readings and recollections of their parents
and others.They say they felt shock over police
actions, horror over the mob violence and an uneasy
feeling that it could happen again, particularly as
unarmed African Americans are killed, most recently in
Florida, Oklahoma and Pasadena. Yet these
teenagers also express hope that they can make a
difference through personal action ­- education about
stereotypes, for instance, or peaceful protests. "I've
learned that you have to be the change you want to
see in the world," said Jessica, a junior at the Social
Justice Leadership Academy, a small school at the
Torres High School campus in East Los Angeles.
"History is not wars and dates; it's about the choices
you make."But two decades after the riots sparked
massive violence that would leave dozens dead and
thousands injured, lessons about them appear to be
limited in Southern California classrooms. For many
teachers, the pressure to teach content that will be
tested in state standardized tests and Advanced
Placement exams next month has crowded out time
for the riots, however crucial they are to city history
and the nation's larger civil rights struggle.The Los
Angeles Unified School District has not formally
included the riots in its history curriculum because it is
not part of the California social studies standards. The
district plans to post material on its website for optional
teacher use, however.Michael Reed, the district's
history specialist, said the push to raise test scores
has made principals "hawkish" about directing
teachers to focus on the areas that will be tested. Test
questions from the state's eighth­- and 11th­-grade U.S.
history exams released by state officials don't stretch
beyond the 1960s, although Reed said the latest tests
included a question from the Nixon era of the 1970s."If
students are taught what they will be held responsible
for on tests, they do much better," he said. "I
remember teachers who would close their doors and
teach whatever their pet era was. It's fine, but
California test scores go down the drain."At King Drew
Medical Magnet High School, teachers focus on the
1965 Watts riots because the school was founded in
part to prepare students for medical and scientific
careers, a community need at the time. The school
does not expect to cover the 1992 riots because of
time constraints, according to Karl Graeber, the social
studies department chairman.Carson High School
teacher Merri Weir also feels those pressures. But she
manages to squeeze the riots into her U.S. history
section on the move to the suburbs, exploring how
redlining created the kind of ethnic ghetto that
exploded after Simi Valley jurors chose not to convict
four Los Angeles police officers in the beating of
Rodney King. Her students create a memorial about
the riots ­- one pair of students, for instance,
constructed one from burned plywood to symbolize the
vast destruction the violence caused."The riots and
1992 feel like a time period we can never get to
because there are just not enough hours in the day,"
she said. "But it's really important for my students to
learn about what happens when a community breaks
down or has no hope and no sense of
justice."Teachers who work at private, charter, magnet
or other nontraditional campuses may have more
flexibility.Dorsey High School teacher Donald
Singleton, for instance, is able to cover the riots as part
of the school's law magnet program. In his introduction
to law class, he explores the King case as part of an
examination of civil rights and related U.S.
constitutional amendments.Ninth­-graders at
Gertz­-Ressler High School, a charter campus, are
creating multimedia poetry and photography
presentations about the riots in Crystal Greene's
elective English and math class.Greene, like many
teachers, uses materials from Facing History and
Ourselves, an international educational organization
that has trained more than 1,700 Los Angeles­-area
teachers in the last 17 years on how to teach about
tolerance through case studies of the Holocaust, the
Armenian genocide, the L.A. riots and the eugenics
movement. The group, started in 1976, aims to present
history not as an inevitable chain of events but as a
series of choices by ordinary people that can produce
great evil or tremendous good, according to Mary
Hendra, the associate program director.The group's
curriculum is used at such schools as St. John
Chrysostom School in Inglewood. Through an
assignment to interview their parents about the event,
13­-year­-old Nahom Seifu learned for the first time that
his mother was caught in the streets with no
transportation and survived the violence only because
a stranger invited her to spend the night at her
home.At Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences in
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