By George Manthey

In a recent visit to California, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings informally reviewed California’s plans for tiered “corrective actions” for California’s 97 school districts in Program Improvement. She referred to these districts as “raging fires.”

Knowing that raging fires are significant events, I thought I should visit one, so I set up a visit to a some folks likely to be consumed — a group of students and the superintendent of the Visalia Unified School District. [Visalia USD is one of the 97 California Program Improvement districts for which the State Board of Education must order corrective action based on the No Child Left Behind Act.]

To prepare for my visit, I checked out the district Web site and learned they describe themselves with terms quite different than “raging fire;” in fact, the district feels that its more than 2,000 certificated and classified staff make it the “jewel of the Central Valley.” The district motto is “Raising Expectations.”

In Superintendent Stan Carriozosa’s letter to his community, he writes: “In 2006-07 VUSD had 97 percent of all seniors in our traditional high schools pass the California High School Exit Exam and earn their diploma. Our district-wide state API score of 716 is the highest for all unified school districts in Tulare County. We achieved an average daily attendance rate of 95 percent. More than 78 percent of all high school students were enrolled in at least three classes required for admission to college and students taking Advanced Placement tests district-wide achieved an 88 percent pass rate.”

Obviously, something was amiss. A district identified for corrective action must be in decline. But checking the API for past years I learned that there has been a rise each year — and that in the past five years the district-wide API has risen by more than 92 points. Hopefully, my visit could get to the bottom of this discrepancy.

Neither the superintendent nor the students I visited were aware that they had been described as a “raging fire.” In Visalia, no one could remember that there had been a visit from Secretary Spellings (because there hadn’t been). My visit revealed a different story. I think it’s told best in the words of the students I visited and Superintendent Carriozosa.

I interviewed seven students, all members of the Class of 2008 at Redwood High School. As you’ll soon realize, these are exceptional students. Somehow the raging fire managed to jump them.

Maribel Luna plans to enroll in Mount St. Mary’s College or the College of the Sequoias and then transfer to a UC campus after two years. She hopes to major in nursing. Maribel’s first language was Spanish. She learned English and is studying French while in high school.

Elizabeth Vang will attend the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, where she will earn a bachelor’s degree in fashion design. Elizabeth’s first language was English, then Hmong. She picked up Spanish at school, and, because of her friends, she has been able to exchange a few lines in Lao, Thai, Japanese and Chinese.

Reena Flores plans to major in English at a private east coast university to launch her career in journalism. She will leverage that into the position of editor for a major publishing house. Reena’s first language was Filipino; however, she’s now only able to understand rather than speak it. She shared that she’s become “too assimilated into the American culture.” She is able to understand some Spanish.

Esmeralda Gonzalez will attend either San Jose or Fresno State University, preparing for a career in education or social work. Esmeralda learned English at school and Spanish is her first language.

Liliana Valdez would like to have a career in education and will attend either Fresno Pacific or the University of Redlands. Liliana is bilingual in Spanish and English. She’s had three years of high school French.

Moses See will major in urban studies and then pursue a career in city planning. His first language was Lahu and he has mastered English.

Steven Leal will major in physics at one of the UC campuses. His goal is to solve the problem of energy dependence. Steven’s first language was Spanish and he learned English in pre-school, although he claims he hasn’t completely mastered it.

These students observe that not all students at Redwood High have been as successful as they have been. And not all of them have always been as motivated as they are now. Esmeralda said, “I was a student that was failing my classes in junior high. It still got me here, so that was good enough. If I went ahead it was OK. If I got Cs it was OK — until I got here. I learned it is not OK to fail any classes. In your classes you can’t have any Ds or Fs — you have to retake those. It took me awhile to adapt to that, but my school has helped me in that way.”

Reasons students struggle

The students also noted that not all of Redwood High students have been lucky enough to learn that lesson. It’s also clear to them that there are many students who struggle for a variety of reasons:

• “In our school, we do have students who need more help because of language barriers, because of learning disabilities. We have a lot more students who need that kind of help.”

• “I think that we shouldn’t only help the kids that are ‘smart.’ I know there are some potential students that just aren’t getting that push, and it’s not because our teachers aren’t willing to give it, it’s because the student doesn’t know how to connect to it yet.”

Nearly all of the students interviewed pointed out the incredible differences that AVID (Achievement Via Individual Determination) had made in their lives:

• “AVID gives you the idea of what to be expecting from college. It helped us make good study practices, like note-taking, a habit when before they became a struggle.”

• “If it wasn’t for AVID, I would probably be lost.”

The students most appreciated classes they described as “experiential.” They did observe that you are more likely to find those types of learning experiences in AP classes and expressed concern that “too often classes are just ‘read the book and do these worksheets.’” But, more than their classes, the students appreciated teachers. One student summed this up best when she shared, “It’s not only the classes, it’s the teachers that really impact your life. They have pushed us to do better.”

The students did have ideas about how to improve Redwood High School:

• “We need to have labs in all our science classes.”

• “Learning is supposed to be fun. A lot of the time it is just so boring. There are real-life applications for almost everything.”

• “You have to incorporate different ways of teaching in class because there are different kinds of kids.”

• “Some teachers lose their drive because you get a wage and that’s it. There is no incentive. Sometimes how well [teachers] do is based on a standardized test. That’s ridiculous. Some kinds can’t speak English. Good teachers should make more money than bad lawyers.”

• “We are pressured to do everything to pass benchmarks and, therefore, we are concentrating on passing benchmarks instead of actually learning the material.”

These students exhibited a sense of pride in their school not dissimilar to what you would expect to hear at schools that have not yet been identified for Program Improvement:

• “What we are learning here is the kind of people we are going to be — and actually incorporate into our society.”

• “We can have bad things happen. We can struggle. But we’re still Redwood. We’re that kind of traditional school that you would like to go to.”

A fire within

The fire raging in Luna, Van, Flores, Gonzalez, Valdez, See and Leal is a fire within — a fire fueled by the desire to reach their full potential and contribute mightily to society. Certainly that is also the “raging fire” Secretary Spellings was referring to. My hunch is that it’s possible to find this fire in all of California’s 97 corrective action districts.

Superintendent Carriozosa has embraced the concept of Program Improvement to focus the Visalia Unified School District in some very specific pursuits. Many of his observations about the district parallel the thoughts and feelings of his students.

Carriozosa believes that “the notion of accountability has been very, very positive. I like the spirit of No Child Left Behind. I know that there are a number of kids that the school as a system didn’t pay enough attention to. We could always talk about the average scores of our school or the overall scores of our school, or the ways our highest achievers compared to other high achievers in other schools. But that really didn’t pay attention to the subgroups of kids. I like the fact that [NCLB] casts a bright light into places that were shadows before.”

He knows that “the school needs to be tooled to meet the needs of all of those different learners. What that requires of us is to differentiate our resources and our approach. The two categories of children that have caused us the most intense review are English language learners and our special education children.”

Conversations about assumptions

In our interview Carriozosa spoke eloquently of the changes in his district spurred by the bright light on the shadows:

“I think that the unfortunate label of program improvement is not accurate. It can be disappointing. But we’ve hardened our shell enough to realize that it’s a by-product of the act and not a real reflection of the structure of our district.

“[NCLB] forced us to have a very difficult but important conversation about the assumptions we have about kids. . . . We recognize that as important as it is to have rigorous curriculum, quality instruction and good formative and summative assessments, it’s equally important to establish every student feeling a sense of significance and belonging and connectedness to school. School still has to be a place that welcomes kids, that meets their needs. And the two are not mutually exclusive.

“We don’t believe that there is a concept of the whole child that would exclude their academic improvement. We don’t believe there is this concept of the high achieving child that would exclude their personal needs. The ‘whole child’ really means that we are about test scores and a sense of belonging; we’re about student achievement and making sure that students feel significant; we’re about increasing their academic achievement and enriching them in the arts and their personal development.

“To take a big system and move everyone ahead is a significant accomplishment. We are doing that. It’s a compliment to our teachers, our parents, our students. . . . We’re going to move from teacher as independent contractor, sage on the stage, to a kind of collective force — a group faculty, a collaborative faculty all working for academic and ‘educational’ goals together. That’s been some of the hardest, most challenging, but also most rewarding work that we’ve done.”

A different kind of accountability

Rather than throwing out NCLB’s emphasis on accountability, Carriozosa would like to change its emphasis so that there is accountability for the growth of all students. Just as he embraced Program Improvement for his district, he has some “program improvement” suggestions for NCLB.

“I would suggest that we take what each individual school is doing, somewhat as the API was originally attempting to do, and compete with ourselves — and be accountable for a school’s ability to continue to grow over previous performance. There was good momentum when we started the API system before NCLB rolled in. But the 5 percent initial growth targets were too small. I think that API model with greater growth goals can be effective.

“I’d like to see NCLB relaxed in that there is flexibility in time for special student populations, like special education and EL kids. And I would like to see an emphasis on each school making a growth target for themselves over the year before, rather than a standard line.”

Carriozosa knows that there are real students behind both AYP and API numbers. He’s using this knowledge to point out what API growth can mean for a society. “We’ve calculated it out and learned that when we reach 800 as a district that will mean there are 5,000 students more who are proficient than there are right now. Our growth these past couple of years means that there are 2,000 more proficient students.”

In Visalia Unified School District, there is a very different definition of proficient than one determined by California standards or CASHEE cut scores. Carriozosa believes proficient means that “you are ready to move ahead to the next level. Isn’t that what we want for everyone — to be ready to move ahead?”

That is an understanding of what’s most important that has been around for many years and somehow forgotten by the writers of NCLB. If I probed long enough I know more than one of the students I interviewed could have recalled at least the last four words of these lines from Hamlet:

“Not a whit, we defy augury; there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.”

Ready to move ahead

That is the fire that rages in educators — the burning knowledge that “the readiness is all.” Thank you, Secretary Spellings, for reminding us, however circuitously, of the immediacy of the need to ensure that all students are ready to move ahead — wherever ahead may be.  n

(It is with great admiration that I thank these seven members of the Class of 2008 at Redwood High School and their district superintendent for sharing their insight and wisdom. GM)

George Manthey is assistant executive director of ACSA’s Educational Services Department.