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In This Issue...
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BREAKING NEWS - Another 'Low-Performing' School List Means More Confusion for Parents
Live Oak School Superintendent Was Blind Sided by Surprise News
By Linda Fridy
California has drafted another list of low-performing schools throughout the state and six Santa Cruz County schools landed on it. What does it mean? The short answer: Not much or at least not much new.
Other than discouraging educators and confusing families, local officials do not believe this latest designation will have much of an impact.
Officially known as the "open enrollment" list, one local administrator dubbed it the "Scarlet Letter list." The State Board of Education approved it under emergency procedures on July 15 and sent it on the Office of Administrative Law.
That means this list is not final.
This compilation of 1,000 schools across the state, which is again still a draft, comes on the heels of an earlier and different effort defining 188 schools as persistently low-performing.
Part of Attempt to Get Federal Funding
The lists – the emergency list in July and the 188 persistently low-performing schools, are a result of the state's attempts in early 2010 to beef up its application for the federal program: Race to the Top. Even though California did not make the finals for first-round funding, the regulations remain in place.
In this case, parents of children attending the sites must be notified by Sept. 15 that they can transfer their students to schools with higher test scores, including schools in other districts.
The just released list includes Gault Elementary in Santa Cruz; Live Oak Elementary in Live Oak; Landmark Elementary, E.A. Hall Middle School and Pajaro Valley High in Watsonville; and Hall District School in North Monterey County.
Parents in every school but Live Oak Elementary have already been reminded of their right to move their children because those schools are in "program improvement" status, the state's longest standing identification for a school with sub-par test scores.
However, administrators say parents historically have not chosen to take their children elsewhere.
Brett McFadden, who worked for a statewide association before joining Pajaro Valley as chief business official, said the trend is the same across California and locally.
In his district, which has a majority of its schools in program improvement, no more 24 children have moved over the years. Live Oak also reports only a handful of requests.
Santa Cruz City Schools has not had any such requests recently, and superintendent Gary Bloom said he does not expect that to change.
"Gault's a very fine neighborhood school. There's certainly room for improvement and staff is working to achieve that. We don't anticipate much demand from parents to exercise their right to move their children," he said.
Bloom said that being on the list doesn't necessary mean a school is doing a bad job.
Uniformly, certain students, especially English Language Learners, have great difficulty passing standardized exams given in English.
"In some situations, especially in big, urban environments where there are schools doing an unacceptably poor job, the [open enrollment] option makes sense. In smaller districts like ours, there are not many viable options for moving a child from school to school," said Santa Cruz's Bloom.
Confusion Reigns
Superintendant Tamra Taylor of Live Oak was flabbergasted to hear that Live Oak Elementary was on the list and that her small district of only four traditional schools was even included.
"It's unbelievable," she said, taking exception to the state's finding that releasing the list met the criteria for an emergency.
She was especially upset by comments released from State Board of Education member and charter school advocate Ben Austin that these are "bad schools" where students are "trapped."
The proposed regulations exclude charter schools from the list.
"Why are we letting charter schools off the hook?" asked Taylor, whose district sponsors two charter schools.
The hurriedly drafted emergency regulations reflect politics more than genuine attempts at education reform, said Bloom.
The method the state used to come up with the list resulted in schools chosen based on dated test score and seemingly random selections.
It uses the state's academic performance index (API) score. However, this year's results are not available yet.
"The list is based on API from tests taken a year and a half ago, so if Gault got a nice bump in its scores this year, it's still on the list," said Bloom.
Restrictions also affected which schools were listed.
Each district could have no more than 10 percent of its schools on the list. That means if a district with 10 schools has two very poorly performing sites, only one made the list.
Instead, a higher-achieving school from another district would be added to reach the required 1,000.
Statewide, some schools above the target and higher range API score of 800 must send out letters saying they are failing.
Improvements Already Underway
Some of the local results are just as surprising.
While Pajaro Valley's Hall District School was included in the earlier persistently lowest-achieving schools tier one list, the other two in that group were not listed this time. Instead, two different elementary sites in the Pajaro Valley Unified School District were.
The Live Oak School District has four non-charter schools, two of which are in program improvement.
Live Oak Elementary is not one of them, but it's on the list.
"It's been the most consistent school in the district," said Taylor, who spent her first year there fine-tuning ways to identify and help struggling students. "If a child is in need, we're set up to help them, and we spent a lot of time in the last year on that."
If the state goes forward and Live Oak remains on the list, she said her district will include information about support programs in the letter about open enrollment.
"It's disheartening. I'm concerned about the morale of staff," she said.
Pajaro Valley's McFadden agreed that he could see little benefit in releasing the list when teachers have been working to improve student achievement in the face of record cuts.
"There's a morale issue. Our staff hasn't had raises in two years, they've taken furloughs, and you tell them, by the way, your school is failing," he said.
Districts with schools on the list haven't been getting much in the way of help or information.
"We have not received any notification from the state," Bloom said.
Unlike the previous list, the open enrollment designation does not make schools eligible for any extra funding or aid.
All three administrators said their districts already know which schools and groups of students need help and have been working toward finding successful interventions.
"We are taking the list very seriously, but are we going to significantly alter reforms and initiatives put in place over the last two years? No. We need to give time to see if they work," said Pajaro's McFadden.
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