In a Daily News article that ran this week, there was a mention of the new Woodland Hills Academy, formerly known as Parkman Middle School. The LAUSD site is not a charter school, but the district allowed the name to be changed to make the school more competitive with the areas charter and private schools, also giving the middle school more freedom in curriculum and budget.I guess the question really is: was Francis Parkman the wrong name to label the school back in 1959 when it opened?
Parkman was an American historian with an interest in Native Americans and forest ecology. His contribution to our nation's annals was his writings in the manifest destiny period. (Many will recognize his most notable book, The Oregon Trail.)
Does school success hinge on the name change? Does Parkman get eliminated now, to be lost to school reform? I hope the Parkman legacy will not completely be annihilated from the community for the sake of budget control. It's not like they renamed the school after another national figure. Perhaps they should transfer the Parkman name to one of the new schools being built.
There must have been a reason it was named Parkman to begin with - let's hope it wasn't so haphazard that no one cares that it is lost.
5 comments:
Well, there's still Parkman Avenue in Silver Lake...
Very true...
My brother would be all over this. Manifest destiny is something he is reading about and he blames government for creating poverty etc.
Does the SL Parkman have the same namesake? How can you find out whom streets are named after?
LAUSD does this frequently. They hope a name change will change the perception towards the school.
Remember the "Belmont Learning Center". The incredible boodoggle built on an former oil field, a school that was supposed to "include a retail component, housing and a shared district gymnasium and pool" and eventually cost roughly 500% more than the average California high school at $240 million.
Well, Belmont became Vista Hermosa Learning Center
Then there was Washington High School with its poor academic performance and problem discipline. They thought that by giving it a high brow name like Washington Preparatory it would reverse direction. It didn't. It's forth lowest scoring school of the districts high schools on the API.
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