Classic Battle Over Lincoln High Curriculum

For years, Abraham Lincoln High School in Southeast San Diego has been known for two things: some of the city’s best football and some of its worst education.

While its playing fields have produced the likes of L.A. Raiders running back Marcus Allen, its classrooms last year yielded the city’s lowest high school test scores. The school also has the city’s second-highest high school dropout rate.

Responding to the clamor from parents to improve education, school officials in October announced a radical overhaul of the curriculum. The 36-year-old school on 49th Street was to be transformed into an “Academy of Language and Classical Studies,” emphasizing a rigorous curriculum that required students to take a semester of Latin and study the “classical foundation of Western civilization.”

The school’s medical magnet program--supported by the community because it teaches pre-professional and vocational skills--would be removed, and 7th and 8th grades would be added.

Instead of buoying parents’ hopes, the proposal outraged the predominantly black community that sends its children to Lincoln. During ensuing weeks of negotiations, they have persuaded administrators to retain the medical program and drop the Latin requirement in favor of a broad humanities program that emphasizes African, Asian and Western cultures.

But suspicions remain about the school system’s methods and motives for revamping Lincoln High. The teachers’ union has promised to protest part of the program, and morale at the school has been damaged, according to some teachers. And a new debate over the perennial question of how to educate poor minority students has begun.

The original plan was presented to the Board of Education in closed session Oct. 10. The board has since directed administrators Albert C. Cook and George T. Frey, who wrote the plan, to gather suggestions from parents and staff--who had not been consulted before the first proposal was written.

“I was totally startled,” said Betty Brown, mother of three Lincoln graduates and a daughter who is still there. “How could they make such a decision without community input?”

“I thought it was really worthless. It did nothing to offer students any preparation for the world of work.”

Culbert Williams, Lincoln’s head guidance counselor, took an equally dim view: “Hell, can you see a kid who’s reading at the fourth- or fifth-grade level reading the classics and comprehending the classics, when he can’t comprehend what he’s reading now?”

Cook and Frey said their plan was based on research and suggestions in the literature of prominent educators for a broader, liberal arts education that emphasizes reading and writing instead of the vocational skills that sometimes “pigeonhole” minorities.

“I don’t buy the notion that because kids are poor and because they’re minority that they should not be exposed to, or expected to learn, Latin or any of the great books,” Cook said.

Frey said parents have supported the medical program with statements that their children need to learn how to “make beds and change bedpans.”

“When you train kids for vocations, you tell kids that we have a social order, and you have a station in life, and we are going to maintain that station in life,” Frey said.

Others argue “ . . . that they’re from broken homes, they read at a 2nd-grade level . . . and thus we can’t do anything for them. That’s crap,” he said.

Lincoln English teacher Robin Visconti supported the administrators’ idea. “The original proposal sounded so dramatic that I was going to support it,” she said. “Since the proposal has been diluted and changed, I’m no longer sure this is going to be the best thing for the school.”

Some parents also suspected that the program was designed more to attract white students from other parts of the city than improve schooling at Lincoln, a charge Cook and Frey deny. But with other schools in the neighborhood already converted to magnet programs, some parents said students who did not want to participate in the Lincoln experiment would be forced to look for comprehensive high schools in other parts of the city.

Dimple Santos, who has sent seven children through Lincoln, said: “There’s some of us who just like to have their kids at a school we can walk to.”

There is little disagreement that reform is badly needed. According to the most recent test scores, the average Lincoln student’s reading score is in the 16th percentile; students in the entire district are at the 50th percentile. Students at La Jolla High, with the city’s best scores, are in the 73rd.

About 35% to 40% of Lincoln’s students drop out before finishing high school, compared with an average of 16% in all city schools. Approximately 19% go on to two- or four-year colleges; 58% of the students districtwide go on to college.

More Lincoln students enter or leave the school than any other high school in the city. The school has the second-highest percentage of students poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.

“We have got to do something about our children or we are going to lose them all,” said Vida Van Brunt, chairwoman of the Committee for Education of Black Children, which advises Supt. Thomas W. Payzant.

Parents have responded by sending their children elsewhere. Only 775 students are enrolled at Lincoln, making it the city’s smallest high school, while another 1,053 children from the neighborhood are bused to other schools under the district’s Voluntary Ethnic Enrollment Program designed to integrate city schools.

Parents and school officials said that is partly because the district has spent time and effort convincing them that their children would receive a better education elsewhere.

“You’ve been given the glories of why you should VEEP (bus) for at least 10 years,” said Peggy Stewart-Funches, who has taught at Lincoln for 12 years. “How can you want people to leave, and at the same time say you want them to stay and improve the situation?”

Modeled on successful urban schools in Boston and Los Angeles, the overhaul plan includes many elements that everyone acknowledges will help improve the school. Added staff will allow teachers and counselors to devote more time to students, and the day will be expanded to offer students extra time for “enrichment, tutorial and remediation.”

Parental involvement in the school will be demanded. The Committee for the Education of Black Children wants the district to pay stipends to help poor parents with day care and transportation costs, an incentive that Cook said will not be recommended to the school board.

To staff the school with new and what it hopes are more creative administrators, the district will transfer Principal Laserik Saunders and his vice principals. The new principal will receive extra pay.

To find enthusiastic teachers interested in working with Lincoln’s students, the district will open all teaching positions at the school to applicants throughout the system, forcing current Lincoln teachers to reapply and compete for their own jobs. The system has been used when other city schools have been converted to magnet programs.

While parents appear to favor new blood, the San Diego Teachers Assn. said that forcing teachers to reapply for their jobs is unfair, and it promises to file grievances if the policy is carried out.

“All of a sudden, we’re going to have this high-powered school, with all this support,” said Gail Boyle, president of the teachers’ union. “But (school officials) don’t want all of you (teachers) who struggled all those years to stay here unless (they) decide you’re adequate.”

With administrators leaving, some teachers at the school said that morale has plunged. “We get the distinct impression that Lincoln has been written off for the year,” said English teacher Visconti.

“We’re almost like lame ducks,” said another teacher who asked not to be identified.

In the plan being developed by Cook, Frey and community members, the Latin requirement is gone, and the proposal to mandate three years of a foreign language may be revamped before the plan is submitted to the school board in early December. The medical magnet program will be retained and expanded to include instruction on scientific research.

Education experts agree that reading, writing and thinking skills must be emphasized in high school because today’s graduate will be changing careers several times during his life. The hard part is to do it in a way that interests students.

“What we need to do is make sure that minority kids learn how to learn, so that they don’t get caught in a narrow profession that goes out of business at the end of the 20th Century,” said Donna Shalala, president of Hunter College in New York City, who has researched how to prepare high school students for future careers.

“The problem is that humanities and liberal arts are so loose and imprecise,” said Ernest L. Boyer, one of the nation’s authorities on school reform. “Those terms are like Silly Putty. You can shape them to mean anything you want.”

“It matters not at all what you put on the paper unless you have a brilliant teacher who makes connections between the humanities and the lives (students) are living every day,” said Boyer, author of “High School: A Report on Secondary Education in America.”

Parents and teachers are enthusiastic that the district is devoting its attention to Lincoln’s problems, but retain some skepticism about whether the experiment will work. The school lacks fences to keep outsiders from wandering onto the campus, and needs physical improvements and major work on its public image, they say.

“The district is finally taking the time, effort and money to do something that needed to be done for years,” said Randall Hasper, who teaches literature and history at Lincoln. But “if standards are imposed that are too difficult without extra help and support for students, we feel there will be some casualties.”

If the plan is too experimental to work, Hasper said, “I’d rather not be part of the disaster.”