Public Eye

This was the scene at the John Muir High School quad on the opening day of school this month. The Northwest Pasadena school is being reinvented as an all-academy academic venture in an effort to reverse the last, oh, decade or so of steadily downward achievement there.

I was thinking of Muir this morning at a breakfast meeting with leaders of the Teach for America organization, which puts some of America's most talented and driven graduates from our nation's top-rank colleges into teaching for at least two years.

It turns out that Muir's new school improvement facilitator, Timothy Sippel, got into the profession through Teach for America.

Mustangs, I'm rooting for y'all.