School Board Supports Plan to Raise Standards

A sweeping proposal to toughen the regular secondary-level curriculum in San Diego schools picked up speed Wednesday when the Board of Education applauded a staff plan to apply more-rigorous standards in January, 1988.

By that time, a planning group of school officials--in concert with teachers and parents--will have addressed several concerns raised during Wednesday’s public hearing: to what extent a strong college-preparatory curriculum for the majority of students will require more counselors, will increase the dropout rate, and will limit vocational and fine-art electives.

Overall Agreement

The board and top San Diego Unified School District administrators found themselves in overall agreement Wednesday on the thrust of the proposal, intended to give more students access to courses improved through better material and teaching.

“It’s time to put our money where our mouth is,” said board member Jim Roache, picking up on the line of local educator Gil Chavez, who praised the plan as a “bold and exciting” way to boost academic achievement among the many minority students.

Roache and colleague Dorothy Smith introduced the “common core curriculum” plan last month as a way to counter what they consider inadequate requirements for and inadequate performance by too many of the district’s 116,000 pupils not in gifted or advanced classes.

Not Prepared for College

“I graduated from Hoover High School yesterday, and I do not feel I was prepared for college, even though I want to go,” Linda Jackson told the board. “I wish I could have done more, but I didn’t think about college until the end of 11th grade, which is too late in my opinion.

“I wish that I would have been part of a common core plan, that someone would have been pushing me and have me thinking about college earlier, and I would have been better off today.”

Supt. Tom Payzant said the proposal can address the key issues of equal access and instructional quality, central to almost all of the problems confronting the district, from motivation to teacher quality to adequate counseling.

“And we can start to move on those without waiting,” Payzant said.

In his staff report that the board praised Wednesday, Payzant sketched out a time line calling for preparation of pilot projects by January of next year in one or more schools to carry out some of the proposals.

Some Methods Being Used

His staff will also look closely at tougher courses and new instructional methods already under way at Lincoln High School and Memorial Junior High to boost motivation and achievement. Those two schools have had some of the poorest performance records in the district.

Under the Roache/Smith plan, students could take any course for which they had successfully completed a prerequisite. Remedial courses would no longer count toward graduation but would be geared as special, short-term classes intended to support students in succeeding in more rigorous regular courses, such as algebra, geometry, chemistry and history.

Advanced or gifted courses would be upgraded to contain material substantially beyond that needed to meet post-graduate requirements.

The board emphasized Wednesday that the plan would not gut vocational and fine-arts courses but that it could limit the number of elective choices a student could make.

Dropout Concern Downplayed

“But the fact that we will have potential problems with (dropouts and electives) are not reasons for not pressing ahead,” Roache said. “When they occur, then let’s direct resources to assist the children but not use (the problems in a) ludicrous way to tell young men and women that they are preordained to study in certain tracks” that leave them unprepared for college or a change in career.

Added Smith: “It’s cruel to track students into low-level courses just because at grades seven or eight they have not said yet that they want to go to college.”