Put Community First Forum (continuation)

By Jolanda Schreurs, Ph.D.

Forum question #5. What are the two most important issues in this campaign that are most important to you and why?

Answer
#1. Resources & Revenues. Maximizing & Leveraging assets, ideas, and talent-
#2 - Student Achievement, Achievement Gap, Diversity and No Child Left Behind

Issue 1. Resources. Leveraging assets, ideas, and talent-

One of the largest upcoming issues in future years is/will be the recruitment/retention of teachers and staff and top talent. Housing costs are prohibitive and we routinely lose teachers because they cannot afford to live here or because they find higher paying jobs elsewhere. Lack of revenues also limits our ability to fund the array of courses which would fully serve the very heterogeneous community that we live in. For years, I have lamented that our high school should offer more depth and breadth (technology, theatre arts, drafting/architectural/CAD, virtual business, honors math, physics, etc)

Because we have been unsuccessful in passing a parcel tax, we must consider other means and approaches. Having participated in the Strategic Plans' Resource Committee I was a contributor to several of the ideas and am fully conversant with the options spelled out therein. I have always believed that there are creative alternatives for our district; they are not as substantive as the parcel tax, but by patching many smaller sources of revenue together, I believe that we can significantly and fruitfully enhance our programs.

Resources can be financial, but they can also be assets - real property, people talent, intellectual property, etc. To that end we can make a partial list of how our district continues to work to enhance programs by...

• Expanding District's Educational Foundation, i.e., Back-to-Basics
• Endowment Fund
• Collaborations- with other agencies to provide resources such as
• San Mateo Community College (classes at HMBHigh School & the Middle College Program)
• Stanford's Gardner Center/Stuart Foundation (Cunha)
• Columbia University Teachers' College (literacy)
• UCOP- University California- on-line programs (HMHS)
• PTAs/AAUW- College Planning, Essay Writing, Scholarships
• Grants (federal, state, private) ∑
• Community Talent (Mentorships, Internships, Speaker Bureau) ∑
• Using technology- (School Loop, Scholastic Reader, on-line classes)

There are other resources in the district that we must take advantage of...For example, our excellence in the Noyce Literacy Program, Every Child a Reader/Writer has been successfully leveraged. How? During the Strategic Plan, staff (Mike Bachicha and Madeline Shearer) proposed that we host Literacy/Writing Conferences and team with Teaching Universities- we have done so, working together with Columbia University to host a 250 person week-long conference, thereby enhancing the classroom teaching skills of our teachers for free.

Issue #2 - Student Achievement, Achievement Gap, Diversity and No Child Left Behind.

This is a highly interwoven set of issues. NCLB demands that every child be "proficient" by the year 2014. It sets milestones on that time-line and every state has its own standards. The California standards are among the highest in the nation, yet our funding is in the bottom-third. No one has ever demonstrated that all students can/will be 100% proficient, nor 80%, nor 50%, etc (according to the Standards). We are in the middle of one of the biggest educational experiments of this nation's history. Despite the uncertainty of the achievability of the goals, the relationship between resources and outcomes, and the strategies required to achieve these goals, the experiment sets definitive and discrete outcomes.

At issue is that every child does not have the same resources, whether that be socioeconomic, language, or abilities. Thus the starting points, the trajectories, the strategies, and the tactics may and do differ for each and every child.

In our district, one defining feature is that we have two major ethnic subgroups- Caucasian and Hispanic. Socioeconomic factors are highly correlated with ethnicity, with near complete overlap between those who are disadvantaged (below poverty line) and non-English speakers and Hispanic. And to top it off, most of our socioeconomically disadvantaged non-English speaking parents also have a minimal level of education in their native Spanish, (many only have 3rd to 6th grade educations). Thus compared to other Bay Area districts, our disadvantaged parents have a triple whammy, making similarity comparisons suspect at best.

All test scores are an aggregate, a composite of the results from all children, simply put, an averaging of the two large groupings. The achievement gap between the two groups is very large (50-60 percentage points on the proficiency scale).

Our district has striven to meet the challenges inherent to this gap, setting goals, studying the problem, implementing programs, collaborations, and training staff. The result of this concerted effort has been a doubling in the level of proficiency in the non-English speaking groups in the past four years (25% improvement every year). Despite this dramatic improvement, we have not met every criteria demanded by NCLB leading to labels such as "fail". Negative labeling is always damaging, particularly to the general public who does not understand the nature of the aggregate groupings, the 23+ benchmarks or statistics. But because, perception is 9/10th reality, we do have those who exit the public school system.

Dealing with the aforementioned problem demands a multi-pronged approach.

1) Be honest, up front and explain the data well and properly. Have a good public communication network. Be positive and know the good things we do, are doing, and will continue to do. Educate parents and the community.

2) Understand the data. Know how each individual child is doing using our cruncher programs. Measure progress on an individual basis and group basis. Set bars. Provide interventions.

3) Continue to ensure that our programs have differentiated instruction... in other words, that all students are taught at their own level, and challenged at their own level. All students should be helped with better, more challenging, and enriched curriculum. All should benefit; no one group should be the only focus. To that end, we must continue to better the differentiated instructional programs, K-12. And, we must offer the variety of classes necessary such that there is instructional breadth and depth in our middle and high schools.

4) Decide what are district priorities and take action. In 2005 we started the implementation of a 5-year Strategic Plan.

A) Our non-English speaking parents tell us that the most important thing is for their children to be proficient in English. To that end, we have put in place a host of improvements, both academic and supportive, including:

• School-to-parent liaisons people who speak Spanish,
• Regular meetings with the principal in Spanish,
• Data-driven assessment, intervention models,
• Alliances with the Noyce Foundation - literacy and writing programs,
• Teacher training programs with Columbia University,
• Movement to a full-day kindergarten program,
• First Five, pre-kindergarten summer programs,
• Primary groupings (differentiated- leveled instruction),
• Restructured the schedule at the middle school so that if a student has not met proficiency thresholds, they will have 2 periods of English and math giving them more of the core subjects.
• Compass program- 8th to 9th grade summer transitional program.

All students should be given these opportunities. Through collaborations we are adding courses to the high school curriculum. Through initiative on the part of staff we are also adding new courses (Broadcasting, web design, student newspaper) .

5) Find the resources to enable teacher preparation and training, breadth and depth in curriculum, and dealing with the achievement gap.