Sacramento Gets High Marks in School Reform

If educators are looking to evaluate California’s impending school reforms, they need only visit the state capital.

There, Sacramento’s own campuses have already established the types of bold changes that lawmakers have recently mandated for the state’s 8,000 schools.

Sacramento ranks its campuses by test scores, holds schools accountable for academic progress and requires regimented phonics programs in its elementary and middle schools.

The initiatives are paying off for California’s eighth-largest school system, a microcosm of the state in which 61% of the students qualify for subsidized lunches and nearly one-third speak limited English.

Test scores rose substantially this year in Sacramento City Unified, approaching the national average for the first time.

The primary grades led the way, with second-graders making the largest gains: 15 percentile points in reading compared with 4 points among their counterparts across the state.

The improvements have rekindled the faith of many in a school system once characterized by failure, divisive politics and a revolving door of superintendents.

“The message is real simple: We expect all of our kids to learn at grade level,” said Supt. Jim Sweeney, a former education professor who helped usher in sweeping reforms after taking charge 2 1/2 years ago. “We are not going to back down.”

Sacramento wants 90% of its nearly 52,000 students to exceed the national average--the 50th percentile--in reading and math by 2001.

District leaders admit that the ambitious goal may be unattainable in the three-year window they have set for their reforms to work.

Fewer than half of Sacramento’s students met the 50th percentile on last spring’s Stanford 9 exam, with the district’s eight high schools showing small or no gains. The average 10th-grader, for example, ranked in the 27th percentile in reading and the 42nd percentile in math.

Even after factoring in the recent testing gains, the district still trails schools statewide in reading and math.

Sacramento school officials say they have already taken decisive steps to improve student achievement, reassigning to the classroom 13 principals or vice principals who lacked leadership skills in the eyes of Sweeney and the school board.

“We have a long way to go, but we are determined to get there,” said school board President Jay Schenirer. “I think we have turned the curve. Now it’s a question of continuing to get better.”

If Sacramento’s schools continue to get better, one likely cause will be the district’s new drive for public accountability, officials say.

Sacramento classifies its schools by their test scores, with campuses falling into five categories.

Those at the top, where 80% of students meet the 50th percentile in reading and math, are labeled “exemplary.” Those at the bottom, with fewer than two in 10 reaching the goal, are considered to be in “achievement crisis.”

Campuses in the bottom tier (14 of the district’s 60 elementary schools last year) receive help from teams of experts who study the campuses and write assistance plans with input from the schools. Recommended measures may include extending the school day and using test data to target lagging students for extra instruction.

The district’s accountability plan also sets performance improvement targets for all of its 77 schools. The goals establish the increases expected in test scores, attendance, graduation rates and other measures of progress.

Schools that meet or exceed the annual targets are publicly recognized at awards ceremonies. Those that experience few or no gains get assistance such as coaching for principals and teachers.

If campuses continually falter, their principals and members of their staffs--and even downtown administrators--can be reassigned, a process that Sweeney said could begin after next spring’s Stanford 9 scores are released.

“If we find a school that I think is stuck because of the personnel, we’re going to make some changes,” said Sweeney, who is equally adamant about his own fate. “If we don’t get results, fire me,” he said.

Some See Challenge, Others See Pressure

Teachers and principals have greeted the new focus on accountability with hope and trepidation.

Some treat the new expectations as a wake-up call to reexamine their classroom practices. Others complain about the pressure they feel to produce dramatic results with students who come from homes of poverty and speak English as a second language.

Virtually everyone agrees on one point: The aggressive campaign to raise test scores has changed the culture of a school system that had grown accustomed to mediocrity.

“Throughout the district, there is a can-do attitude,” said Principal Wanda Shironaka of Fruit Ridge Elementary. “There will be no excuses now.”

Marilyn Mazzocco, a second-grade teacher at Elder Creek Elementary, added: “It’s healthy competition. I think it makes teachers work harder.”

District officials hammer the accountability message home at every opportunity, including principal retreats, employee rallies and school board meetings.

“No one goes unnoticed,” said Carol Bly, who oversees the district’s assistance program for its lowest-performing campuses. “Schools know that if their scores are going down, there’s going to be a conversation about what’s going on. If we do that with our employees, it’s bound to happen with our children.”

The accountability system operates alongside the school district’s other major reform: explicit phonics programs in elementary and middle schools.

The district requires a single reading series, Open Court, in 55 of its 60 elementary schools; the other five campuses use a similar program called Success for All.

Both take a back-to-basics approach to reading instruction, emphasizing the sound-letter skills of phonics in the primary grades and requiring teachers to follow daily, regimented lessons.

The district has even produced an Open Court pacing schedule that tells instructors the ground they need to cover each week. Reading coaches funded by a private foundation work at the campuses, training teachers in the program.

Some instructors say the pace is too fast for children who are new to English. But teachers also say that a single program lends continuity across classrooms and campuses.

“I like it because the whole school is using the same lessons, the same words, the same sounds,” said Pauline Zapata, a second-grade teacher at Mark Hopkins Elementary. “It’s consistent.”

District officials say that Open Court has played a significant role in the rise of test scores, particularly among first-, second- and third-grade classes, which posted the largest gains in the Sacramento district this year.

The three primary grades have used Open Court for two years, one more than students in grades four through six.

At Mark Hopkins Elementary, Open Court is part of the daily routine. On a recent morning, Zapata, the second-grade teacher, wrote words in bright red letters on an easel, pronouncing each one sound by sound.

“L-I-S-T . . . L-O-S-T . . . L-I-F-T,” she enunciated. The 20 students chanted along in a ragtag manner.

Then Zapata dictated words and asked the students to write what they heard. And finally, they used their new words to read sentences aloud. “Tom lost the list,” the children read. “Ted can lift the raft.”

Mark Hopkins represents the intersection of Sacramento’s reforms. The school was among the 14 campuses ranked in the bottom tier of the accountability system last year.

As a result, district staffers visited and recommended that the campus extend the school day for its lowest-performing students and use off-track time for staff development.

Teachers at the school also were encouraged to continue using test scores to analyze the instructional needs of their students, a prevalent strategy in the district.

The school, where 91% of the children qualify for subsidized lunches and 59% speak limited English, produced some of the most dramatic gains in Sacramento this year.

Its composite reading and math score jumped 15 percentile points, the fourth-largest increase among elementary schools. And it tripled the number of students reading at the national average between 1998 and 1999--going from 8% to 24%.

“We did the things that people said would work,” recalled then-Principal Edna Mikell, who has since transferred to another school.

Josiah Donaldson is one of the beneficiaries. The fourth-grader stayed at school an extra hour three times a week last year to work on reading comprehension.

His reading score jumped from the 11th percentile to the 60th percentile, an astounding gain for the toothy 9-year-old, who mentions his love for books the way other boys talk about baseball cards.

“It makes me feel good to know that I’m learning more,” said Josiah, who likes biographies about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and former President John F. Kennedy. “I read every book, even the newspapers.”

Josiah’s teacher said the after-school instruction, along with strong parental support, made the difference for her student, who started the year apathetic but finished with a flourish.

“We just opened up doors for him,” said Jo Shellooe, Josiah’s third-grade teacher. “He was one of my shining stars.”

The seeds of such change were planted three years ago--not by school district officials but by the mayor of Sacramento, Joe Serna Jr.

Mayor Engineers Electoral Takeover

Fed up with a school board known for placing internal politics over the needs of students, Serna engineered an electoral takeover similar to the one led by Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan last spring.

Serna, like Riordan, has no jurisdiction over the district, but he rallied business leaders behind four candidates handpicked by his own education commission.

All four won in November 1996.

“I told them our expectations are very high and to put their own personal politics aside,” Serna recalled. “It was going to take a lot of hard work on their part, a lot of diligence to turn the district around in a positive way to benefit the children.”

The new school board appointed Sweeney, then a deputy superintendent, to the top job.

At the urging of its staff, the board adopted Open Court in May 1997. That same month, the board reassigned to the classroom four principals and three vice principals whom Sweeney believed were unable to effectively manage their campuses--the first of 13 such reassignments over three years.

Sweeney also reorganized the district’s downtown headquarters, reassigning 25 administrators, some to lesser jobs.

The staff changes came to be known as the May Massacre.

The district’s actions have triggered 13 lawsuits from school and downtown administrators, and a storm of criticism from community leaders, who accuse Sweeney and the school board of targeting minority administrators, a charge the school officials deny.

Despite the turmoil, school district leaders have moved forward with reforms. Last year, they adopted their ambitious, three-year plan to improve test scores, attendance, graduation rates and other measures of achievement.

In the process, Sacramento has suddenly become a model for other districts eager to duplicate its success. Droves of teachers and administrators from Los Angeles, Long Beach, Fresno and other cities around the state have begun flocking to its classrooms for insight. Los Angeles Unified is especially interested in Sacramento’s use of just two reading programs and is considering a similar approach.

The state, which has already mandated phonics in textbooks, also has studied Sacramento’s accountability system in designing its own measures to hold schools responsible for student improvement.

The excitement in Sacramento was apparent this month at a retreat the district held for its elementary principals at Lake Tahoe.

Sweeney and his assistants handed out awards for school performance on the Stanford 9. Principals cheered one another. They hugged. They sang. They even poked fun at Sweeney, who closed the evening with a short pep talk.

“When you do the right things,” he told the 60 administrators, “you get results.”