Higher Education : Rural School Has a Plan, and Could Help San Diego Upgrade Secondary Class Load

Hanson Lane School in Ramona may have a few suggestions for San Diego city school officials wrestling with ways to carry out a sweeping plan for making regular secondary-school courses more rigorous.

For two years, half of the pupils at the North County elementary school have been studying certain subjects using the Paideia Proposal, a plan by longtime U.S. educator and philosopher Mortimer Adler for a common one-track system of public schooling for all students.

Expects Same From All Pupils

“We started (Paideia) under the ideal that all children can receive the same curriculum content, that expectations can be the same for all children, that we don’t say that one child can read Shakespeare but a second can’t, that one child can understand the Declaration of Independence but the second child cannot,” Hanson Lane Principal Darrel Cheely said.

“Essentially, we are talking about a core curriculum.”

That is what San Diego Unified School District board members Jim Roache and Dorothy Smith are talking about in their “core curriculum proposal,” which is up for discussion before the Board of Education today.

The two members want to revamp the regular curriculum--those courses taken by 80% of the district’s 116,000 students--so the courses will satisfy college preparatory requirements of the state university and state college systems. Both say that the current curriculum fails to prepare the majority of students for a productive future.

Teachers Must Be Involved

In presenting their first detailed response to the Roache-Smith proposal, top school administrators today will cite Adler’s Paideia plan as one possible strategy for curriculum improvement. The report says teachers must be involved from the start in any curriculum changes, in large part because solutions to many basic problems plaguing schools nationwide must include improved teaching at the primary level.

A report from Supt. Tom Payzant says: “A first step in the process to implement curricular change should be to identify successful teaching practices where the curriculum is clearly defined and effectively taught and results in student mastery of desired skills.”

The report recommends that the district look at the Paideia plan as it is now practiced in several cities in the country.

“We were looking for ways to upgrade our curriculum,” Gary Hoban, assistant superintendent of the Ramona Unified School District, said in explaining how the Paideia plan got started there. “Adler came to Ramona, talked to us about his ideas, and (principal) Cheely and his staff at Hanson Lane became very receptive to trying it.”

Adler, the former chief editor of Encyclopaedia Britannica, essentially says that “the best education for the best is the best education for all.”

With that philosophy, he has proposed three goals for organizing school learning.

“Acquisition of organized knowledge” involves the standard lecture and textbook system used in most classes but with more-challenging books and materials.

“Development of learning skills” requires coaching and supervised tutoring to master needed skills.

“Enlarged understanding of ideas and values” centers on seminars for children with discussions on topics growing out of the classroom.

At Hanson Lane, for example, the fifth-graders this spring studied the Declaration of Independence, learning about its historical background as well as its meaning and content. But rather than just being tested on the knowledge, the students were then asked to talk about the concept of independence in one of the ongoing seminars held at all grade levels once or twice a week.

“Then, they had a post-seminar activity of writing about what they understood, as if they were children living during the pre-Revolutionary period,” Cheely said. “And as a further spinoff, they saw the different kinds of writing and paper used for the original document, and so we integrated art and language into the activity as well.

“I think that their use of the knowledge that was built up was probably greater than if there had been no (Paideia) class.”

Literature, History Stressed

Ramona emphasized literature and history materials in its adoption of Paideia plan.

Ramona officials all emphasize that the students in the program were not selected on the basis of ability.

“I agree with Adler that all children can learn the material,” said Molly Hosking, the Paideia resource specialist at Hanson Lane. “Even lower-functioning children have benefited from the kind of reading material we’ve used.

“And some children have been turned on to school who otherwise might not (have been).”

Hosking praised the enthusiasm of teachers as a key to making the program work. “We have worked closely as a team, and that accounted for a great deal of the success,” she said.

Cheely said, “And while I don’t know if (differences) can be measured with a standardized test, I know that motivation has increased. And we have definitely noticed an improvement in speaking and writing skills.”

Plan Is Expensive

But the Paideia pilot has proven expensive, costing the Ramona district almost $80,000 the past two years for extra equipment and staffing. Cheely hopes to continue some seminars next year, but the overall program will be cut back.

Cheely said he would recommend that other districts consider parts of the Paideia concept.

In recommending a look at Paideia and other programs, Payzant says that “standardization of curriculum (should not) result in the standardization of teaching but rather the development of alternative teaching approaches which can effectively reach the students in the San Diego city schools.”

Otherwise, strengthening the curriculum could both increase the number of college-prepared students and the number of dropouts who cannot handle increased requirements if they are not accompanied by innovative techniques and increased tutoring, the report says.