Will Schools’ New System Pass or Fail? : Education: The common-core curriculum that pushes all San Diego students to achieve at high levels continues as a topic of vigorous debate.

At Mira Mesa High School, veteran biology teacher Naida Groff says that new graduation standards requiring all students--even those with little or no academic ambition--to take tougher courses have caused an unprecedented 50% failure rate in her classes.

Her math colleague Jerry Sandlin says that while he loves teaching geometry, “a lot of technical and service jobs will never require that sort of thing and it’s a mistake trying to make everyone learn it.”

But at Kearny High, math teacher David Watson believes that the requirement for all students to take algebra and biology is a good idea because in past years too many students were allowed to “skate” through easy classes such as “career math” and “business math” that are now being eliminated.

And in experiments at Bell and Kroc middle schools, students who normally would have repeated a grade because of poor performance have been promoted to the next grade but given more individual attention from teachers to help them succeed in more difficult classes.

From secondary school to secondary school, across the sprawling San Diego city schools district, an intense debate over the wisdom of the “common-core” curriculum continues apace, more than 3 1/2 years after it was first proposed and well into its second year of full-scale implementation.

Its value occupied much of the give-and-take between school board candidates in this fall’s election for two open seats on the five-member board of trustees, and it remains a topic of high interest at educational gatherings across the nation.

Retired teacher John de Beck, the winner in District C, openly questions the philosophy of trying to educate all students at a rigorous academic level. The District B winner, Sue Braun, supports the idea but criticizes the lack of preparation afforded teachers who are suddenly faced with students less motivated than the typical student taking college-prep classes.

Proponents, led by a majority of trustees and Supt. Tom Payzant, argue that all students need a minimum level of math, science, English and social studies in order to survive in an increasingly complex world-- whether they go on to college immediately or enter the work force.

Payzant, who originally labeled common core the “college-prep” curriculum, now prefers to call it a “minimum” graduation program. He cites new research from employers nationally--from corporations to small businesses--that shows an increasing demand for the same scholastic preparation from high school graduates required by college-admissions officers. In particular, Payzant believes that expectations for black and Latino students must be raised if the district is to improve those students chances of becoming successfully employed adults.

Trustee Jim Roache, who first proposed the new curriculum along with Dorothy Smith in May, 1987, said no one “ever believed it was going to convert a failing student automatically or be a quick fix to turn the whole educational system around.

“Yet it is a fair idea, and it has and will continue to improve the quality of education for all kids by ensuring that they receive the bedrock academic foundation everyone is entitled to,” said Roache, who was elected county Sheriff this month and will be replaced on the board by Braun.

But strong skeptics remain throughout the district, the nation’s eighth-largest urban system with an enrollment of 122,000 students, 63% of them black, Latino or Asian.

“We’re implementing it, we have cut out all of the (low-level) classes we were told to do, and we’ve got every kid taking algebra, geometry and biology with the result that our failure rate has increased tremendously, our kids are floundering and our teachers are frustrated,” Jim Vlassis, principal at Mira Mesa High, the city’s largest high school with 2,400 students, said.

“We’ve got after-school tutoring, but you can’t force the students to come; we’ve got programs to pull students out of class (for extra help) but too many kids are just unprepared for these harder classes; we have no money for smaller class sizes which might help; and you can’t expect miracles when they have no study or reading skills.”

Vlassis reflected the views of many teachers in saying that the program should have been implemented first at the elementary level so that a greater number of students will be reading at grade level by the time they reach common-core subject courses in junior high or middle school.

In addition, teachers in vocational and fine arts areas continue to complain that the additional “hard academic” requirements have eliminated chances for many students to take courses in those areas.

Even at Kearny High, which features the district’s high-powered industrial arts magnet program, an experiment to combine common core with vocational classes, such as putting English and media technology together, has been implemented only in the ninth grade.

An evaluation of common core from last school year reveals no clear pattern as to whether student achievement is being helped or hurt, according to a district report being circulated among secondary school principals but not yet sent to trustees.

While evaluation department administrators found all schools putting the common core into practice, “the achievement and grade indicators of students participating are too inconsistent (as yet) to allow judgement,” the report says.

In taking a middle ground in the debate, outgoing board president Kay Davis said “the verdict is still out” on the idea.

“On paper it sounds great, that philosophically all kids need to be stretched intellectually to take hard courses, even if they are going to be gas station attendants, but on a practical sense, I still wonder whether it is doable” given teacher attitudes, she said.

But Kermeen Fristrom, who oversees the common core as district director of basic education, takes heart because fewer teachers tell him today that the idea “can’t work” but instead ask, “How can it be made to work?”

Fristrom bemoans the lack of money available to train teachers in new ways of presenting their material to “reach” more students, a point made by many people throughout the district.

“Look, I think that many veteran teachers can learn that they haven’t lost all of their professional skills, that they can get results out of some youngsters (the type of which) some years ago they could not get any work out of,” Fristrom said. “But we are still a long way from getting all of them the help they need.”

Vlassis agreed that not enough secondary teachers have changed their methods to deal with having three or four levels of student preparation in a single class.

“But after 20 years of teaching, it’s not enough for a teacher to go to a workshop or two and hear somebody speak on a new idea, and then be able to go back to the class and implement it,” he said. “It just doesn’t work that quickly.”

Mission Bay High principal Maruta Gardner, new at the school after six years at Mann Middle School, finds that many students are struggling with the tougher classes. But she says that the students can’t be blamed totally for the situation.

“A lot of high school teachers pride themselves by saying they teach subject matter, not kids, and that’s terrible,” she said. “They have to adopt more of the middle-level school philosophy of showing that they care for children” and understand their problems, social as well as academic. “They haven’t been trained for it.”

Gardner said that she told a teacher who had given 78% of his students failing grades “that he couldn’t just tell me that it’s all the fault of the kids . . . there’s something wrong with the teaching at that point.”

At Kroc Middle School, principal Isabelle Skidmore took two of her best teachers this fall and paired them with an experimental class of 15 eighth-graders who normally would have been held back in seventh grade because of poor achievement. Skidmore said that past experience has shown that such students fail to improve significantly after repeating a grade, so she decided that less-traditional teachers might be able to have better results, even with a higher-level curriculum.

“It’s difficult, it’s frustrating so far, but there are some small successes,” said David Pelton, who is teaching science and math to the students while colleague Barbara Rejebian tackles history and English.

“We’ve been trying a lot of different ways to reach these kids, playing it day-by-day,” said Pelton. Rejebian spent much of the summer thinking of new ideas to make history and English more exciting to the class, yet threw out much of her initial preparation the first week when she realized it wasn’t working.

“Some of these kids have never been taught how to study,” Pelton said. “They don’t do the homework, they just sit in class with no participation, and since they’ve seen themselves as F students for so long, they are easily satisfied with improvement to a D minus while I want them to get a C or higher.

“Yet I realize that when the entire class walks in with no homework, I’ve blown it as a teacher and have to find another approach.

“One parent told me that she thought her child is happier about being in school this year, yet I worry that next year, they’ll go on to high school and go back into a larger class when the teacher will have no time for them as an individual.”

While Payzant concedes that more money for retraining and smaller classes would help spur the willingness of more teachers to change, he argues that teachers must change “regardless of the curriculum.

He hopes that the district’s on-going restructuring effort to give teachers and principals more responsibility to design and carry out their own ideas will win over more people to the common-core philosophy.

“But I know the dollars to do this are insufficient and that makes it more difficult to get people to alter their styles, to more easily accept the common-core (idea).”