No Easy A’s in Top South Bay Schools

The South Bay Union Elementary School District found itself once again at the rarefied level of California’s top districts when the state’s closely watched annual achievement test scores for elementary school performance came out earlier this month.

Although no surprise to South Bay administrators--who push tough accountability standards for teachers and who zealously stress basic skills--the scores continue to astound many among the county’s education establishment.

After all, South Bay is a district with 8,600 students whose families are 68% nonwhite (mostly Latino); 57% working poor; 16% on welfare. Its geographical area hugs the backside of San Diego Bay, running through Imperial Beach, Nestor and Palm City. Yet its California Assessment Program (CAP) results rank right up with those of high-rent districts along the North Coast and Interstate 15 corridors.

In gauging the reasons behind South Bay’s performance, discussion soon centers on its physically imposing, hard-charging superintendent, Philip Grignon, a 58-year-old, no-nonsense schools veteran whose passion for improving public education has stirred admirers and detractors.

The history of South Bay during Grignon’s almost five years as its chief is replete with change and controversy. His successful, sustained push for quarterly monitoring of teacher and student progress, for widespread use of computers, new teaching methods and curricula, all is directed toward the payoff of improved achievement as measured by standardized tests.

Student scores in South Bay have jumped by 20% to 30% in recent years, depending on the particular standardized math or reading test.

“Meet my standards, and I love you,” says Grignon, a husky, 6-foot former Marine Corps judo champion with a leathery face he readily admits resembles the texture of a football. “If not, then go be happy somewhere else. . . . For many parents here, the only thing to be proud of is their children, and this district produces test scores that they can be proud of.”

Among those impressed are state schools Supt. Bill Honig, who has used CAP testing to push reform and improve accountability statewide, and who personally congratulated Grignon and his staff at a ceremony in May in Imperial Beach.

“They emphasize curriculum, staff training, organization, and have gotten their kids to read, to do math, to grow (academically) more than (students) anywhere else,” Honig said in an interview. “Grignon thumbs his nose at those who say you can’t have high standards and high achievement everywhere. . . . There are all kinds of personalties and styles, but the bottom line is whether you’ve delivered the goods.”

But Grignon’s role as gruff taskmaster has had its downside as well, arousing critics who point to his blunt style and his single-minded pursuit of better test scores.

After Grignon called the teachers union “a cancer on education” in a particularly angry moment during heated salary negotiations in 1988, California Teachers Assn. chief Ed Foglia labeled Grignon “intemperate, intolerant and confrontational . . . exactly the kind of person we teachers work so hard to prevent our students from becoming.”

Yet Grignon’s only detractor on the district’s five-member board of trustees--he voted against Grignon’s last contract renewal and says he would vote no again today--nevertheless confesses ambivalence because of the superintendent’s many accomplishments.

That trustee, Thomas Teagle, principal of an adult education school in the neighboring Sweetwater district, compared Grignon’s insistence on innovation and high expectations to the methods of Jaime Escalante, the nationally renowned calculus teacher whose creative classroom style has motivated Latino high school students in East Los Angeles to pass college-level courses.

“If I was the education god, I’d stick Phil Grignon in the toughest district in the nation,” Teagle said. “Those urban districts need a tough person willing to shake up the troops, and he’d do that well.”

But, Teagle added quickly, “South Bay doesn’t need that style,” saying that Grignon has offended people for years by being abrasive. Teagle himself ran for the board after his own personal run-in with Grignon, an incident he prefers not to discuss today but which still influences his view of the superintendent.

“He wants to be aloof, he wants to be feared. I just don’t like his style,” Teagle said.

People in the district talk privately about hearing stories that Grignon “dresses down” principals or teachers whose schools show small test improvements or whose instructional methods fall short.

In his defense, Principal Lynda Schultheis said Grignon can be pointed in discussing improvements he wants to see but never personally abusive. Board member Doug Langdon said that Grignon can dispense strong medicine, especially to those relmuctant to change, “but I have never seen him demeaning to people.”

Bayside School teacher Bill Boyd said major changes wrought in the district, rather than Grignon himself, might be the source of much of the animosity.

“It would cause problems in any organization.”

Grignon concedes that he can be impatient with people, and he has tried to soften his handling of personnel in response to board directives. “I don’t think the rank-and-file teachers are as vitriolic against me as the union itself is,” Grignon said, conceding that he regards the union as a barrier to speedy change. “Yes, in general I’m probably not well-liked, but I’m going to hold everyone accountable nevertheless.”

Grignon lives, eats and sleeps education. He shows up at work Monday mornings often talking about three or four new ideas conceived as a result of weekend reading or bull sessions with district colleagues.

Around South Bay district headquarters, the only living being seemingly unaffected by his energy and ideas is his dog, Isabeau. The dog, a rare bouvier des Flandres breed, distinguished by a rough, wiry coat and long used in Belgium for herding cattle, sleeps contentedly in Grignon’s corner office while Grignon alternately strokes and scolds his staff.

Yet even Isabeau is brought into Grignon’s “push for excellence” when the superintendent visits a school. He isn’t content to have the children marvel at the unusual dog: at Pence School last week, he peppered a kindergarten class with questions about Isabeau. For example: “Look at her tail, how is it different from other dogs?” (It’s a bobtail.) He pulled a world map down over the blackboard and pointed out the location of Flanders in an impromptu geography lesson.

“I’d say his only weakness is that he needs more balance in his life . . . he is all school, school, school, although I don’t know if a normal person could have gotten all the changes through,” board member Nancy C. Yturralde said of Grignon.

Grignon has had a zest for action since he joined the Marine Corps as a high-school dropout from the lower East Side of New York in the early 1950s. He was posted to Japan, where he gave judo demonstrations to Japanese as the U.S. military champion in 1955.

Entering community college in Southern California on his return, Grignon eventually became a biology teacher in south Orange County, winning state and national laurels as “biology teacher of the year” and helping to initiate a “Save the Whales” campaign as well at the Orange County Marine Institute.

His South Bay stint was preceded by 3 1/2 years as superintendent in the smaller Carlsbad system, where he received high marks for rescuing that North County district from insolvency and beginning a host of programs to raise sputtering academic standards. In 1985, Carlsbad was named one of 17 districts nationwide that had met recommendations in a 1983 Carnegie Foundation report that castigated American public schooling.

But Grignon left a sour taste among many teachers in Carlsbad because of his hard-nosed wage bargaining and temporary layoffs to stop the red ink. He was also criticized for being too much a perfectionist.

Similarly, Grignon wasted little time in shaking things up after taking over the 12-school South Bay system.

Grignon instituted a rigorous, quantifiable evaluation of teachers four times a year, examining their instructional methods and the performance of their students. Under the setup, the principal or assistant principal reviews written goals set both for the teachers and each individual student. Principals are expected to spend 50% of their time observing in the classroom.

The district’s curriculum has been aligned closely with the academic frameworks in math, English, science and writing recommended by the state Department of Education and used by the state as the content basis for CAP testing.

Grignon has invested heavily--more than $2 million--in computer equipment and programs for every grade, including a “write-to-read” program specifically for kindergartners and first-graders. Each teacher and each school has specific plans for raising test scores annually, and test records are kept year-to-year on students so schools can determine how much growth a child has made annually. A new reading and writing competition among schools will reward teachers monetarily whose students show the most improvement on a combination multiple-choice and essay test.

Teacher salaries rank in the top three of the county’s 37 districts, with a 1987-88 salary of $36,300 for a teacher with average senority. The district runs an extraordinary number of teacher training programs for its size and prefers to promote from within. Seven schools run year-round, with three more to begin year-round in July, each with proposed different schedules under a Grignon idea to give parents an option of sending their children for more than the state-mandated 180 days a year. All schools have free pre- and after-school education activities.

All of Grignon’s changes are tied to his belief that schools can make a difference for students and that achievement is not controlled by economic or social status. His administrative staff strongly backs his ideas, themselves working 60-hour-a-week shifts, in addition to occasional weekend retreats at which Grignon and his cabinet brainstorm other innovations.

“Good students test well,” West View principal Lowell Billings said. “And traditionally, our students were not expected to test well compared to those in Bonita or La Jolla.”

“For years, socioeconomics has been used to explain why kids don’t learn,” said Marilyn Wheeler, South Bay’s testing coordinator who left Carlsbad for South Bay. “It’s one thing to say we have high expectations, but quite another to work consciously to carry them out.”

Helen Steel, assistant principal of Nicoloff School, said she was skeptical when Grignon first put his plans into effect. Now she supports his program.

“I was never held accountable as a teacher,” Steel said. “Today, the principal is a partner with the teacher, and fewer students are allowed to fall through the cracks.”

Nestor School teacher Jeff Knox, although by no means an unabashed admirer of Grignon, respects the high standards the superintendent sets.

“Grignon demands that I know my stuff . . . and a lot of the staff development has been very, very good. There is more substance than gloss, although I hate to admit it.” But Knox said that Grignon also has reaped the benefits of the many good teachers already in South Bay when he arrived.

Knox also said he doesn’t argue with the results from test scores, although he is uncomfortable with the amount of skills reviews that teachers are asked to do.

“You pass on a lot of anxiety to the teachers and to the students,” Knox said.

Boyd of Bayside School said that, although perhaps 70% of the district improvement in test scores results from improved curriculum and the rest from regular review--estimates also cited by trustee Doug Langdon--he dislikes Grignon’s use of the scores to push the district’s visibility and publicity agenda.

Grignon makes no apologies for wanting high standardized scores, saying there is nothing wrong with emphasizing skills measured on tests such as CAP--skills that California educators have agreed are important. He also points out that the district’s new reading curriculum is ahead of other districts in carrying out state changes for literature-based instruction, and away from rote-skill learning that some have accused the district, without specifics, of doing to raise test scores.

“I agree that tests don’t measure everything, but they do tell me if the kids know reading, math and social studies,” Grignon said. “I’d rather have increased reading proficiency than increased playground mechanics or socialization techniques.”

He uses that argument in his latest campaign, a fight to take over two junior high and two senior high schools from the Sweetwater district and unify South Bay as a kindergarten-through-12th-grade system. Grignon cites low test scores in the Sweetwater system, saying that the skills his students take away from the sixth grade in South Bay dissipate after several years in Sweetwater-run schools.

Sweetwater officials oppose the idea, and want to analyze computer data to compare the performance of South Bay students with that of students in the San Ysidro, National and Chula Vista elementary districts who also attend Sweetwater secondary schools.

South Bay, nevertheless, will push the issue to a vote if necessary. “We’re being attacked because what we are proposing makes (Sweetwater) nervous . . . that with attention to detail and hard work, anyone can do what we have done,” Grignon said.