Do schools need intervention or relief?

[George Sheridan <learn@jps.net>]

Dan Walters remains skeptical of the state's accountability system - of the 
tests on which it's based and of the notion of sanctions as a means of 
motivating educational improvements.

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Dan Walters: Do we need intervention or relief for low-performing schools?
By Dan Walters -- Bee Columnist
Published Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Story appeared on Page A3 of The Bee
http://www.sacbee.com/content/politics/columns/walters/story/14233222p-15055171c.html


When California school districts get themselves into financial trouble - an 
increasing trend, unfortunately - there's a time-tested intervention 
mechanism in place.

A Bakersfield-based organization called the Fiscal Crisis and Management 
Team is on call to provide a troubled district with tough-love financial 
advice. And in a more serious situation, the state superintendent of 
schools may appoint a trustee, analogous to a bankruptcy receiver, to take 
over the district and run it until its fiscal health is restored.

These interventions are not without controversy; locally elected school 
boards and their appointed administrators often resent losing control. But 
ordinarily, outsiders step in only after a years-long pattern of fiscal 
mismanagement.

What happens, however, when a district's troubles are academic, rather than 
financial? Assemblyman Juan Arambula, D-Fresno, is proposing that a similar 
intervention system be established for school districts that persistently 
rank near the bottom in their students' academic achievement test scores - 
and his hometown district, Fresno Unified, would be the largest district 
that would be affected.

Fresno Unified is one of 21 districts, according to a computer analysis 
done for Arambula by the state Department of Education, with half or more 
of their students classified as being in low-performing schools based on 
the state's 2004 Academic Performance Index (API) scoring of state-mandated 
tests.

Although the state schools superintendent can intervene with individual 
schools that fail to meet academic improvement standards, and 
Superintendent Jack O'Connell cracked down on six schools the other day, 
there's nothing in law that covers academic failure by an entire district.

One Arambula bill would provide extra supervision for a troubled district 
by the county superintendent of schools, who could waive some sections of 
the Education Code deemed to inhibit the district's ability to raise 
academic performance, or redirect students who test poorly into extra 
classes. If a district doesn't improve its academic scores markedly, an 
academic trustee could be appointed to oversee teaching, or an academic 
administrator with broad authority to implement broad programmatic changes.

The second Arambula bill would create an Academic Crisis and Management 
Assistance Team, similar to the financial assistance team, to help 
low-performing districts raise their academic scores. Arambula says he 
wants to target help to districts "where it (low performance) has been 
going on for years" but not low-performing districts that are making 
demonstrable progress.

Academically troubled districts tend to have large concentrations of 
non-white students, especially Latinos, whose first languages are not 
English - with Coachella Valley Unified, which sits at the very top of the 
list at 99.1 percent low-performing, a classic example.

Coachella primarily serves Latino students whose parents work in the fields 
or fill service jobs in the lavish golf resorts, hotels, restaurants and 
homes of wealthy communities around Palm Springs. And the district's 
assistant superintendent, Bob Bailey, says that the state should overhaul 
its own testing procedures before cracking down on Coachella or other 
low-scoring districts because, he says, the tests are "very discriminatory 
toward people of second-language origin."

"The help we need from the state is to change the testing system," says 
Bailey, complaining that California, alone among the states, requires 
testing in English for students who have barely begun their English 
studies. "It takes four to seven years to teach English," he adds, pointing 
to Coachella's good scores for children who have been schooled in English.

Arambula is undoubtedly sincere in wanting to improve conditions for kids 
in the state's lowest-performing school districts, but Bailey's point about 
testing kids in skills that they have had only minimal time to learn, and 
then using the results as the basis for intervention, is equally valid. And 
the juxtaposition of the two exemplifies California's persistent 
educational quandary, one that also hangs over the state's high school exit 
exam; we seem to be working at cross-purposes with ourselves.

About the writer: Reach Dan Walters at (916) 321-1195 or 
dwalters@sacbee.com. Back columns: www.sacbee.com/walters.




George Sheridan