Trustees Seek Ways to Gauge School Goals : Education: City schools won’t meet district objectives by the June deadline, but some board members say specifics are needed before a new target date is set.

Teachers and principals in all 180 San Diego city schools are obliged to follow district goals to boost student achievement, improve the curriculum, expand racial integration, and cooperate better with each other and with parents.

But the district’s five trustees agreed Tuesday that they really have no idea to what extent individual schools are meeting those objectives--only that none of the current objectives can be met by the original target date of June.

When asked Tuesday by Supt. Tom Payzant to extend the date to June, 1994, they argued over how to put more teeth into the goals by making them more specific, yet remain faithful to their other major new policy of allowing individual schools decide how best to teach.

The debate Tuesday over how to retool public education in San Diego touched all the same notes as those being heard across the country from educators trying to work through similar quandaries and restore confidence in their product.

“All of these things (as now written) are predictably ambiguous,” complained Trustee John De Beck, who argued strongly for clear measurements--quantitative if necessary--so that the board can judge key areas annually, such as whether schools are teaching more of their students to read and whether more Latino and African-American students are improving on now-dismal academic performances.

Board member Shirley Weber agreed in large part, but said teachers and principals get upset when specifics are suggested, such as how many students should be succeeding in core academic courses or by what percentage each year secondary schools should be reducing the number of their dropouts.

But board president Ann Armstrong demurred, saying that, “if we are too specific and too picky, we’re taking away the school’s right to decide on how to do things.” Armstrong said such specificity would allow the public to compare academic performance from school to school, “and I don’t want” to do that.

Armstrong said the existing goals, along with a planned board policy on holding schools accountable for their success, or lack of it, with students would be enough “so that things will all work out.”

But Weber, who serves on a long-running district committee to work out specifics on accountability, said she is not “real optimistic” because of intense controversy over what such a policy would mean.”

For example, teachers at a school with many limited-English-speaking students object to being held to the same testing or grade standards as their colleagues at other schools with few or no foreign-born children--if the results would be used to determine pay and other perks.

“So we end up saying we’ll improve, that we’ll do better but that means nothing, like having one person less dropping out or showing a one-half of 1% improvement in reading,” Weber said. “I’ve seen too many schools write goals and objectives that anyone could achieve even if they were dead.”

Payzant anticipated the sharp questioning of his goals and prepared a memo promising to add focus to the list so that trustees can better determine year-by-year how schools are doing.

He said, for example, that test scores could be reported according to student language fluency to address teacher concerns about being held responsible for improving Latino student test scores.

“I know there is evidence we have not achieved” our goals, Payzant said, but “I want to have some continuity of effort (in extending dates) because otherwise we will achieve nothing meaningful before the ground rules shift. And, when that happens, (there’s not) much accountability.”