Curriculum Reform Debate : Move to Excellence Plan Goes to School Board

A sweeping proposal to revamp curriculum in San Diego city secondary schools and provide all students with tougher, college-preparatory classes comes to the Board of Education today. If carried forward, the plan would put the country’s eighth-largest school district in the forefront of the nationwide educational reform movement.

During the next several weeks, the expected debate over the core curriculum proposal will crystallize locally the many issues involved in the reform cause, and in particular whether strengthening course content and graduation requirements is the best way to improve the quality of education.

Other key issues will include the need for better teachers and for money to give them more professional training, the question of how to motivate students to work harder on more rigorous schedules, and the survival of vocational education and other subjects often not considered part of a move toward academic excellence.

Lack of Funds

But underlying the debate locally will be the district’s lack of money to carry out new programs, especially one as potentially expensive as the core curriculum. Supt. Tom Payzant will recommend today that teaching and student support--the most costly yet most critical aspects of the plan--be carried out more slowly than supporters would like because Payzant says a poorly funded effort could cost the plan its credibility among teachers.

The common core plan results from efforts by two board members, Dorothy Smith and Jim Roache, to give all graduates of San Diego city schools the basic skills in reading, writing and reasoning believed necessary to cope in society.

Both Smith and Roache have argued that the current secondary system awards a small percentage of students with access to challenging college-prep courses while relegating the majority to so-called regular classes that provide neither preparation for college nor motivation for high productivity in society.

Their original proposal, introduced last spring, has been examined during the past six months by a series of committees whose members have included school district officials, principals, teachers and community representatives.

The plan before the board today results from the committees and will be presented by Payzant with his monetary warnings.

The committee draft agrees with Smith and Roache that all students should receive a broad, solid liberal arts education in math, science, English and social studies that allows them greater options for work or advanced study upon graduation. It also calls for easier access to advanced courses for all students and for elimination of remedial courses as credits for graduation.

But in cautionary phrasing, the report warns that implementation will require time to redo individual course content and realign courses logically with each other, and to provide necessary tutoring for students ill-prepared for higher quality courses because of years of “dumbbell” classes.

In its strongest conclusion, the report says that success will depend on the ability of teachers at individual schools to carry out any board directives, and says that adequate funds--initially perhaps $500,000 but as much as $2 million over a two-year period--are vital to ensure both teacher competence and enthusiastic support. It recommends pilot projects at schools willing to attempt all or part of the core curriculum’s specifics.

Push for the Most

Smith and Roache served on the committees that drew up the draft document and both believe that more can be done to carry out parts of the plan than district officials believe, even given funding constraints.

“Tell me how much it costs and then let’s see how much support we can work out,” Smith said in an interview. “Maybe we can tie this into (business-school partnerships) . . . I want to work at problems after given specific data.”

For Smith, the curriculum problem has festered for too long.

“For years, we have had a philosophy--unwritten but prevailing nevertheless--that some students can’t learn, can’t handle real course work, so we created a schedule of courses that they could handle to get them through high school,” Smith said. “The diploma itself became so important that the end justified the means, that we needed to get such students through by giving them remedial courses even though they might not have learned anything.”

At the same time, Smith said that artificial barriers were set up to keep such students from taking college-track courses, even if the students showed motivation and a willingness to try challenging classes. So they would be stuck in remedial-level courses, which do not progress logically from one level to another, until their record became a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure and lack of self-esteem, said Smith, herself a teacher in the community college system.

“I say that all students should take college-prep courses and be able to exercise the option of perhaps going to college or going into the workplace and later returning,” Smith said. “And I stress that courses that make students eligible for college absolutely will also make you a better citizen . . . let’s give students in low-level, or remedial classes, today the same exposure to quality that we give our advanced kids.”

Roache’s Experience

For Roache, his own high school experiences form the basis for his alliance with Smith on the core curriculum issue.

Roache, a commander with the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, said he avoided difficult courses during high school “because I didn’t want to exert the effort to be successful.” As a result, after several years of military service, marriage and a child following high school graduation, Roache found himself ill-prepared when he decided he wanted to go to college.

“I had no foundation, no skills, nothing to develop a profession . . . and I don’t want today’s kids to go through the same thing, if at all possible,” Roache said.

Yet his first year on the school board has convinced him that barriers do exist to many students achieving their best, due in large part to low expectations from teachers and counselors that the students themselves come to believe.

“And that’s wrong, since if a course is good for a college-bound student, it is good for all students: to be an informed, well-rounded individual who is allowed to develop a sensitivity to the world,” Roache said.

Roache, conscious of criticism that he is de facto calling for the end of shop, consumer and other elective courses, said that he and Smith decided not to press for additional course requirements in order to preserve electives. Rather, they want existing course requirements improved.

In devising strategies for carrying out a core program, Roache and Smith point to programs carried out by teachers such as Byron King, who helped shape a Bell Junior High effort to eliminate remedial math courses and put all students into college-prep courses like algebra by the ninth grade. Traditionally, if students do not take algebra by their freshman year, they end up in a series of courses called consumer math, general math and career math, which school officials concede have no progression and in which most students do poorly.

Difficult Work

The program took several years of difficult work, King said, especially in convincing teachers how to deal with often-difficult problems of getting all their students to achieve.

“Not that I am trying to make everyone go to college but I feel that all kids should be contributing adults in society and that is why I am comfortable saying that everyone should be in algebra, because knowing how information is accumulated (like building blocks) in a sequence enriches you later for society,” King said.

But teachers must have the support of other teachers and of the school administration. “It’s hard to do,” King said. “At Bell, teachers may spend two days a week after school tutoring and retesting kids and that causes a lot of stress . . . one teacher at Bell with a general math class told the kids the first day that he thought they were better than general math level and wanted to see if they would try pre-algebra. They agreed and most are handling it well, meaning the net effect is to give a much better quality experience.”

King recommended smaller class size more than any single other teacher-related item as a key to successful implementation, stressing the family atmosphere that takes hold in smaller classes where a teacher has galvanized students and in schools where individual teachers have begun to collaborate on lessons and new projects. Reducing class size would cost a lot of money, however, and King recommends that small pilot projects in individual schools be used initially for any core implementation.

‘Instructional Strategies’

Kermeen Fristrom, director of basic education for the school district, pointed to the district’s slow but intensive efforts with training teachers to teach writing in all subjects as indicative of the task to be faced in the core curriculum.

“As much work as we have done in that one area, we still have a long way to go before we (are done with writing), and one of the main points of the common core is that teachers would need a lot of help in instructional strategies to teach a wide variety of students,” Fristrom said.

Longtime community activist Katie Klumpp, who served on a staff development subcommittee, said that without a great deal of support for teachers, the plan will collapse. “It is absolutely appropriate for an individual school to have a strong role,” Klumpp said. “If teachers have a say in this, if this isn’t all laid upon them, then I think it can be done because teachers would love to be successful too . . . they don’t want classes of non-achieving students either.”

But King despairs of strong teacher support for a new program as long as the district looms as a strong antagonist, as symbolized by an increasingly acrimonious dispute over the lack of a contract since September, 1987.

“It is lunacy to recommend this at the same time there is no settlement on a contract,” King said, “since so much of its success depends on teachers.

“It really makes me wonder about whether everyone comprehends the implications of what a common core means and how critical teachers are to it.”