Local School Officials Back State Plan for Partnership : Education: Recommendation for a more cohesive system--from kindergarten to college--garners praise, but some say much work must be done.

Ventura County’s school and college officials gave cautious praise Monday to a state blue-ribbon panel’s recommendation that they all work together to untangle California’s educational crisis.

The California Round Table on Education, a panel of five top officials from the state Department of Education and the three public college systems, called for all branches of education to work together on improving schools from kindergarten to college.

“Having closer ties is an excellent idea,” said Supt. Jerry Gross of the Conejo Valley Unified School District. “We couldn’t be hurt by a collaboration with the university system, CSU, UC and the community colleges. . . . I think the collaboration would be helpful.”

Even officials at private institutions agreed that education in California should be treated as a whole system, not a sum of its parts:

“It is important that we view education as a continuum all the way from kindergarten through college and the postgraduate level,” said Carol Bartell, dean of Cal Lutheran University’s School of Education, which educates teachers.

But Bartell, who came to Cal Lutheran’s teaching school in August from a staff job with the state Commission on Teacher Credentialing, said that much work must be done to achieve this unified approach.

“Partnerships, in my experience, take time,” she said. “There’s more meetings to go to and more conversations to be held if these partnerships are to be nourished and developed in a positive way.”

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The panel, led by state Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin, issued a five-part action plan for improving California’s education system, from kindergarten to college. The plan’s recommendations:

* Standardize graduation requirements for all students. Within a month, the panel is to appoint task forces--one for math and one for English--to agree on how to establish what California students should know, understand and be able to complete in all subjects.

* Expand and accelerate plans to strengthen teacher education programs.

* Use technology to improve education and streamline the application process for college applications.

* Draft and train volunteers from among senior citizens and college students to help with remedial teaching that keeps students in school and studying harder in grades kindergarten through 12. Outreach programs tying universities with secondary schools should be expanded.

* Standardize testing to measure students’ progress. Two more new task forces--one on English and one on math--will work with the other two task forces to determine whether and how tests need to be improved.

“While the ideas, none of them, are new or revolutionary, our commitment to work together is what’s important,” said Dave Jolly, an educational consultant and liaison for the state Department of Education. “The heads of these institutions are sort of together saying, ‘We recognize we have common problems, and as a group we’re committing to each other that we’re going to work on these problems.”

Not surprisingly, school officials throughout the county praised the convening of the round-table panel, saying they hope it is a sign of things to come.

But some partnerships between secondary and higher education have already been forged in Ventura County, said Gross.

Cal Lutheran’s School of Education recently launched a partnership with the Conejo Valley Unified School District to synchronize the high school students’ classroom needs with the training that student teachers are getting at the college, he said.

“We sit down with them, and we tell them what skills we’d like our teachers to have when they begin teaching,” Gross said. “And they tell us what they’re teaching, and we try to correlate what they’re teaching with what we want.”

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Oxnard school officials said they are already working to standardize tests that will smooth the transition from one level of education to the next.

Bernard Korenstein, superintendent of the Oxnard Elementary School District, and Oxnard Union High Assistant Supt. Gary Davis point proudly to a $193,500 federal grant that eight Ventura County school districts--including theirs--won earlier this year to develop standardized tests for students in grades seven through 10.

School officials need to communicate with each other at all levels of education, said Davis and Korenstein, who added, “We all want the same things for the kids.”

The two said they do spend time meeting with each other, and Davis said he has frequent discussions with his counterparts at the three Ventura County community college campuses.

But Davis said that he hardly ever meets with his counterparts in the state’s two public university systems.

Supt. Charles Weis of the Ventura County School District said that turf wars and political battles often have cut communication lines between college and secondary education leaders, Weis said.

One such communication breakdown caused University of California officials to change academic requirements for admission without consulting state high school officials.

Weis said that it only makes sense to have officials meet and confer often.

“It would be logical and that’s kind of what we are getting to,” he said. “I’m optimistic we will all come together. We have to in order to survive.”

Mack Reed is a staff writer and Paul Elias is a correspondent.

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