Planning Begins in Oak Park on a New System of Teaching : Education: Teachers and administrators at the award-winning high school are using a state grant to restructure next year’s ninth-grade class.

Cheryl Shankel, a math teacher at Oak Park High School, hopes to say good riddance to the “two-page spread,” the “drill-and-kill” and other teaching routines.

These routines haven’t changed for years--and that, Shankel said, is the problem.

Some teachers spend each class plodding through the “spread”--the facing pages of the textbook that give the lesson on one page and the exercises on the other. The teacher just has to flip the page to the next spread for the next day’s class.

And others love the brain-numbing drills of rote memorization.

“We do a good job right now of teaching the wrong stuff,” Shankel said. “Just teaching them how to memorize information doesn’t work. You have to teach them how to access information.”

Next school year will be different at the award-winning high school, Shankel promises. But just how different, no one knows.

Shankel is one of a team of teachers and administrators who are using a state grant to restructure next year’s ninth-grade class. But she said even the team members won’t know what the new system will look like until later this summer after the team has finished its planning.

The new program will be called the Academy, and school officials hope it will offer the high school’s 160 ninth-graders a new way of learning.

Instead of a lock-step schedule of classes, a typical day may have students gathering in the morning for a group lecture, then breaking into small groups to work on an ecology project, gathering for a standard two-hour class, then splitting off in the afternoon for more group work.

Instead of taking standard tests, a student may be expected to demonstrate knowledge by giving a presentation, which could be a memorized performance, a magazine published in the school’s computer lab or an essay written on demand.

Instead of a curriculum based on what the teacher is supposed to teach over the semester or the year--say, pages 5 to 200 of the biology textbook--the Academy will focus on what a student should know by the end of the year.

And instead of offering an English class that is unrelated to the California history class that is unrelated to the geometry class, all Academy teachers will incorporate broader themes--conflict, for instance, or heroes and heroines--that will cut across each subject. And, sometimes teachers will be teaching together and combining other subjects on their own.

Principal Jeff Chancer said schools are one of the few institutions that haven’t changed for decades.

“If Rip Van Winkle were to wake up today, the only place he’d probably feel comfortable is in schools. And that’s pretty sad,” Chancer told school board members of the Oak Park Unified School District recently.

Later, Chancer elaborated on the need for a new structure in school.

“I think kids basically hate school when they get to high school,” he said. “It’s boring. Kids sit in a chair and listen to someone talk to you for a couple of hours.”

The high school’s desire for change may seem surprising because, by traditional measures, it is doing quite well.

Just last week, Oak Park High School received a National Blue Ribbon Award as one of the nation’s outstanding secondary schools. It was one of only 260 U.S. public and private schools--37 of them in California--to win the award, which is granted by the U.S. Department of Education.

It was the second Blue Ribbon in two years for the Oak Park Unified School District. Oak Hills Elementary School, less than one-half mile from the high school, received a Blue Ribbon last year.

The high school has superior test scores in Ventura County and is on the verge of another distinction: It is on the verge of its second consecutive year without a dropout.

But Chancer said even a good school needs to change.

“We looked at ourselves and decided we were pretty stale,” he said. “And we’re pretty good.”

Ninth-graders won’t be the only students seeing changes next year. Chancer said the entire school plans to adopt a new standard for grades, where students will no longer be allowed to get by with average or substandard work.

Students who submit anything that is considered C-level work or below will be asked to redo it, Chancer said.

“What we’re going to say is, ‘Sorry, this isn’t good enough. Do it over again,’ ” Chancer said. “It’s not that our students can’t do it, it’s that, at times, they don’t do it. They choose not to do their best.”

The goal is to teach students that sub-par work is not acceptable in the working world and shouldn’t be in school either, he said.

“In real life, that’s not how it is. What we’re trying to do is give these guys some real-life experiences,” Chancer said. “If you were flying from A to B, would you like your pilot to be 80% accurate or 100%?”

The idea of the Academy came from the book, “Horace’s School,” by a leader of the education reform movement, Theodore Sizer.

Sizer, a professor at Brown University in Providence, R.I., described the fictional Franklin High School to outline his ideas for reform.

“I thought, God, this stuff is just fantastic,” said Chancer, who bought several copies of the book for his staff.

Inspired by Sizer’s book, the staff successfully applied for a school restructuring grant from the state. The state awarded $364,000 spread over five years, although state budget cuts have reduced the amount that Oak Park High School actually is receiving. In the first year, the school was scheduled to receive $90,000, but instead received half that amount.

The high school plans to introduce the Academy to a new grade level every year. By the time next year’s ninth-graders are seniors, all four grades should be using the new structure, Chancer said.

To garner support and soothe worries among Oak Park parents, teachers and administrators have hosted 14 meetings for parents at homes in Oak Park.

Kathy Becker, whose daughter Jennifer will attend the new Academy, said the meetings helped her overcome her initial skepticism.

“For the first half an hour, I was like ‘No, no, what are you doing? Whoa!’ ” Becker said. “But after we talked about it, I felt a little bit better about it.”

Becker said she is willing to try the new system because of her faith in the school district.

“The teachers are very excited about it,” she said. “If you can get the teachers excited about something, that’s half the battle.”

Parent Jim Prior said he is “ecstatic” about the Academy, which his son Russ will enter next year.

“If you can learn to learn, it’s something you can use whatever you do,” Prior said.