Conejo Schoolchildren Thrive in Special Project

WASHINGTON — Just a few years ago, Conejo Elementary School in Thousand Oaks suffered from problems distressingly common to public schools throughout Southern California--crowded classrooms, confused curricula and little teamwork among teachers.

But on Friday, the National Education Assn. cited the newly restructured school as a case study in how to make schools better by giving teachers more say in setting school policies.

Much has changed since the 400-student school was picked in 1985 to become part of the NEA’s experimental Mastery in Learning Project, whose participants are meeting in Washington this weekend to assess its effectiveness.

“We have learned the long and hard way that if we can put more authority, more responsibility and more resources into the faculties of those schools, the greater will be the benefit for youngsters,” said Robert McClure, director of the NEA’s school restructuring program.

So far, the program has 26 participating schools nationwide, including Conejo and Hillside Junior High in Simi Valley.

At Conejo, where students in the same grade levels until recently studied together while slower students were segregated in other classrooms, teachers have redesigned the curriculum.

They now offer more in-depth study, employ assistants to help slower learners in academically integrated classrooms and use a special computer network that allows them to communicate with education researchers nationwide.

As with other schools in the program, test scores have improved at Conejo. The gains are most noticeable among less gifted students, whose scores have increased by an average 90%, the association said.

The NEA’s goal is to show that teachers know best which programs work for their often distracted, disadvantaged students. The organization hopes to expand Mastery in Learning to hundreds of schools through a combination of NEA funding and private foundation support.

“I’ve seen major changes at our school, all of them good,” said Anita Barrett, Conejo’s special-education teacher in mathematics and sciences. Barrett was in Washington Friday to participate in the conference.

Barrett arrived at Conejo five years ago to teach in the school’s segregated “special ed” classes, which taught children who scored below the 50th percentile on standardized national tests. To most of the other students, she recalled, her students were branded as “the dumb ones” and generally were shunned socially.

Conejo’s problems were compounded by the limited English-language ability of many of its preschool to sixth-grade students, about a third of whom are sons and daughters of Latino immigrants.

Another problem was classroom overcrowding. While Barrett’s classes held as few as 10 students, other “normal” classes were packed beyond capacity, averaging 35 to 40.

And many students were crowded into “combination classrooms” containing more than one grade level. That practice forced teachers to stagger their instruction from fifth- and sixth-grade texts while trying to cover 14 subject areas each week.

Today, Barrett teaches 114 students a day. The figure sounds high, but it includes every fifth- and sixth-grader at Conejo. They rotate in and out of her classroom; she teaches only math and science.

In February, state officials gave Conejo teachers the go-ahead to let special-education students sit alongside “normal” students and read from the same texts. Students often work in four-member teams, with more able students serving as “masters” to their less gifted counterparts, dubbed the “pre-masters.”

“Everybody learns more that way,” said Barrett, sporting a Roger Rabbit “I Conejo” button. “The top students reinforce their knowledge and can earn extra credit, while the lower-level students learn things more effectively. They ask questions and get answers.”

The school’s teachers go on annual spring retreats to shape school policy and have had a say in the hiring of two new teachers, a secretary and a janitor.

The source of many of these ideas was an IBM computer network that links all of the program’s schools with each other and with top educational researchers nationwide.

Teachers in the network can swap innovative class exercises and get questions answered from experts thousands of miles away.

“Since we’ve had the computer we’ve been able to expand the ways we teach at Conejo so much,” Barrett said, noting that a few Conejo teachers often put in an hour or so each day at the lone computer terminal in the teachers lounge reading about ideas generated in classrooms from Maine to Hawaii.

For another teacher at a St. Petersburg, Fla., high school, the program works because it empowers teachers to work together to change methods.

“It’s had such a profound effect on us as teachers. . . .,” Doug Tuthill, a psychology and philosophy teacher at St. Petersburg High School, said of the program. “We aren’t simply working on an assembly line.”