Will state school board stand tough?

[George Sheridan <learn@jps.net>]

In this column one of our opponents connects "tough" standards, Reid Lyon, 
English-only, Open Court, and standardized testing. She's afraid they are 
all at risk. (Actually, she doesn't say Lyon is at risk.)

Will state school board stand tough?
Jill Stewart
Friday, March 3, 2006
SF Chronicle
Page B - 11
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/03/03/EDGU9GJEP11.DTL


AS TOUGH AS I've been on former Gov. Gray Davis, I've taken pains to single 
out his remarkable efforts to fix the public schools and their disastrous 
teaching methods, even in the face of intense opposition by labor unions 
and his own California Democratic Party.

With Davis gone, leading Democrats in Sacramento are shamefully gearing up 
for another major assault to roll back public-school reform. And it's not 
at all clear that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is as focused as Davis was on 
stopping them.

Led by Assembly Education Committee Chairwoman Jackie Goldberg, an undying 
apologist for the discredited fads that helped send California to near the 
academic bottom among the 50 states, Sacramento's far left has mounted 
another of its bizarre efforts to lower standards and dumb-down kids.

Their favorite target is, again, Latino kids, who many far-left Democrats 
just cannot seem to see as equals in the classroom. California's Latino 
kids have proved they are equal to it, showing big academic gains in 
reading, writing, math and English in statewide testing over the past five 
years.

The gains by children now immersed in English, thanks to Proposition 227 (a 
measure virulently opposed by the far-left), are historic. It's a quiet 
miracle that poor immigrant children show sustained gains on tough 
statewide tests that can't be gamed.

But now, on March 9, the old anti-reformers will pressure the California 
Board of Education to adopt a plan that dumbs down Latino children. With 
Schwarzenegger's education-policy people snoozing, the rollback has at 
least a chance of approval from the Schwarzenegger-appointed state Board of 
Education and its confused president, Glee Johnson.

What an unmitigated tragedy, if the board caves.

The dumbing down is being pushed by the usual suspects, including Goldberg 
and state Sen. Martha Escutia, both Los Angeles Democrats, and people who 
wrongly mourn the end of the "bilingual" disaster they helped invent, 
including anti-Prop. 227 guru Shelly Spiegel-Coleman.

Ever since they lost at the polls, this old "Spanish-first" crowd has been 
trying to wrest control of California's big, well-funded English-reading 
program away from the real reformers.

Under a backroom plan pushed by Goldberg, California's excellent 2 1/2 
hours-a-day reading program for kids who are learning English would be 
diluted and probably ruined, with lower standards that are not 
research-based and with too-easy content that fails to keep a child's 
learning at grade level.

The dumbing down "garbage," as one reformer described it to me, is 
contained in a smaller side program where it does less harm to kids. Now, 
it would be incorporated into the hard-fought, Davis-backed, successful 
reading program.

Think about what is going on here: When kids show major gains at Los 
Angeles' Ninth Street School on Skid Row, or in schools that serve the poor 
in San Francisco, that puts the lie to long-standing excuses by 
anti-reformers like Jackie Goldberg that "poverty" was to blame for 
persistent low achievement.

Poverty is a corollary, not a cause, of low achievement. Poverty causes 
children to be warehoused in bad schools with the worst teachers -- thanks 
to labor-union contracts that let senior teachers pick the easiest schools 
and stick green teachers in the toughest schools.

Today, we finally understand that disadvantaged students can thrive at 
school, regardless of whether society ever beats poverty. If only somebody 
would just teach them.

That's precisely what the schools are doing -- finally. They have miles to 
go, but what a contrast, today, to the previous two decades, when 
California embraced "whole language," the "self-esteem" movement, "fuzzy 
math" and other interesting-sounding but horrifically failed fads.

In the 1980s and '90s, teachers were desperate to stop downwardly spiraling 
academic achievement. They grasped at the fads, and scores spiraled down 
even more.

Thankfully, along came gutsy experts -- like reading expert Alice Furry of 
the Sacramento schools, reading and learning disabilities researcher Reid 
Lyon of the National Institutes of Health, and mathematician Jim Milgram of 
Stanford University. Jumping into the education wars, some of these experts 
began to forcefully argue that kids were failing to learn math or English 
because teachers' abilities to impart basic skills had been lost in a fog 
of political correctness.

And more than anyone else, disadvantaged children were the guinea pigs.

The pressure now being brought upon the state Board of Education by 
Goldberg & Co. is a continuation of the guilt-ridden psychodrama that has 
been unfolding ever since. One core mission of the embarrassed far left is 
to regain power from sensible pragmatics who created the (at last!) 
successful reading program.

I can't predict what will happen when these adults turn their politics 
loose on Latino kids on March 9 -- but how ironic if the 
Schwarzenegger-appointed board of education caves and Davis goes down in 
history as the guy with the guts.

Jill Stewart is a print, radio and television commentator on California 
politics. Her Web site is www.jillstewart.net.



George Sheridan