Charles W. Weis

“We have a relatively wealthy county,” Ventura County Supt. of Schools Charles W. Weis has said, “but not a wealthy school district.”

Research would seem to bear him out: Although the local economy is strong, more than 12,000 Ventura County children younger than 5--or 17.8%--live in poverty, says the child advocacy group Children Now. And in the county’s schools, per-pupil expenditures for 1998 were nearly $300 less than the state average of $4,938. In addition, average class sizes exceed those elsewhere in the state.

What does this mean for education in a county known for its high quality of life? And how strong is the link, if indeed one exists, between expenditures and quality of education? These are among topics Weis discussed in a conversion with Times editors. Following are excerpts:

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Question: What are the biggest problems facing schools in Ventura County and what should we do about them?

Answer: There are two major problems that come to mind immediately. The first one is overcrowding. Our schools in Ventura County have been growing pretty consistently between 1% and 3% every year. When you have that kind of slow growth, in many cases you don’t qualify for new schools, and so the schools just keep getting more and more full. With a few noted exceptions, nearly every school district has overcapacity in most of their schools. Ojai is the only school district in the county that had declining enrollment this year. So I think that the No. 1 issue is going to be facilities--finding places to house kids.

The No. 2 issue, I think, is achievement, especially among traditionally low-achieving students. We still have not systematically found ways to enable kids to reach the highest levels that our top kids do. Ventura County is very successful with our average and our top kids. Our kids are competing at all the major universities, we win the Academic Decathlon, we do all that with our top achievers. But we have a portion of our population--depending on where you are, it ranges from 50% to 25% of our kids--that are just not getting out of school all that they need to get.

And so they’re going to move through the system, and they’re not going to be able to compete in society. They’re not going to be able to get the work that they want to get. And that is our major challenge. It’s going to be right out there in front of us this year with the end of social promotion, and with the beginning of preparing for exit exams, with the Academic Performance Index, which will be coming online in the middle of this month. We’ll see where your school ranks. And it’s going to rate basically based on the socioeconomic state of the community that the school sits in.

We found that 85% of variance in achievement at the elementary level is predicted by socioeconomic status; 91% at the junior high level and 93% at the high school level. What that says is that we still have not overcome the axioms that poor kids don’t do as well in school as middle-income kids and rich kids.

When minimum proficiency [standards] came in, we predicted that there would be all these kids who would fail out of school, drop out. But instead, what happened was that for every kid that didn’t meet minimum proficiency, we accelerated our efforts to help: after-school programs, evenings, all the things we needed to help them meet it. That same thing has got to happen with the exit exams.

The key challenge is that it costs more to provide more support. If we’re going to provide kids with counseling, tutorial service, Saturday schools, after-school programs, somebody’s got to be paid. So that’s the third major challenge: Where is the money going to come from to implement more services for kids, to help them reach those standards?

It would be a disaster to have our dropout rates soar. They are at the lowest level ever in the county’s history. If they jumped to around 10% or 15%, we would have 10% or 15% of our kids who would be unemployable. And unemployable kids are scary on the street, because they find some way to stay alive, but they’ll do it at everyone else’s expense. It’s much better to invest and get them on a track to success and get them working.

Q: Does this mean we have to have more state funding, and is it rational to expect to get it?

A: Yes, it is rational. Our economy is booming, and it should come into education. There was a $2-billion surplus this last year. It seems to me that we need to use some of this windfall to rebuild the infrastructure of schools with one-time expenditures, and get facilities back in line. We’ve been neglecting our facilities in California for years. Our schools are aging because California’s boom came about 40 years ago. The average school in Ventura County is 48 or 49 years old, and we’re a microcosm of the state.

We need to get average school funding up to where it is in other places in the nation. Our class sizes are huge because our funding is low. Those people who say that money has nothing to do with the quality of schooling are wrong. There’s good research that shows that money does have something to do with it. And there’s intuitive knowledge. If you walk into a classroom with 40 kids, all 40 are not learning as well as if the classroom had 20 kids. There is no one-to-one correlation there, but when you can’t get attention to get your questions answered to learn something, you don’t learn.

Q: What about private funding? You have said that most schools have some kind of business interest or tie-in. Is that appropriate?

A: I’ve wrestled with that whole issue of the public / private partnership and commercialism with schools. It makes sense to me when we talk about extracurricular activities, like football stadiums, to let Pepsi pay for the sign or marquee or whatever. I see nothing wrong with that, because football is not a basic curriculum. I think, however, we’ve got a problem if our basic and structural program is contingent upon the good will of private industry.

If we really are about public school and being publicly funded, then we need to publicly fund it to a level that’s appropriate. Any contributions that come in should be on top of that. What’s happened in the last 20 years is that if the private industries that contribute to schools pulled out all at once, we’d see schools going under. The art programs, the music programs in Conejo are funded by PTA fund-raisers. But art is critical for kids’ development. It helps them learn to read. It helps them learn mathematics. It should be a basic part of what is funded by the state.

Q: The siting of schools in Ventura County has become enormously controversial, as a result of schools being near farmland where there is at least the potential for pesticide or other farm chemical drift. Are students at risk because of farm chemicals?

A: That’s the $64,000 question. I’m not certain, but I have seen reports that suggest that the chemicals used on campus are putting kids more at risk than the chemicals used around campus. That’s why we did a retraining to teach our custodial staff how to use pesticides better, how to use integrated pest management.

Even when we teach our custodians the right stuff, when ants show up in a teacher’s room, she goes out and buys a couple of cans of Raid and sprays the room up, and that put kids at more risk than if we’d used a proper treatment.

The problem is a problem of authority. Nobody has really said this, but it should be said: It’s up to the cities and city councilmen to make sure that their schools are safe when they allow homes to be built, and it’s not happening. A good example is Oxnard. Oxnard now is landlocked. The city has no room set aside for schools, and the kids keep coming, and the houses keep getting built. But where are the schools going to go? They’ve got to go on the edges of the city. What’s on the edge of the city? Agricultural land. There is really not any other solution, unless we want to go to urban, inner-city type schools, multilevel schools, and start to look like San Francisco. I don’t think anybody really wants that. We really need a better way of planning our communities. In planned communities, where schools are built appropriately, like Moorpark, schools are sited where the houses are. What happens is this division of authority: A city councilman will say that schools are not my problem, that’s the school board’s problem. But the school board has no authority to negotiate where developers go. They don’t get to say, “I’m sorry. You can’t put that development there because we don’t have a school site yet.”

Q: Amid all this concern about overcrowding and the need for more facilities, how many of our schools are fixed on year-round programs and what’s the barrier for more of them?

A: Only one [district] is year-round, and the barrier is tradition. When Oxnard started to move toward year-round, there was tremendous controversy. There are pros and cons to year-round schools. One is that you expand the school year. One of our issues right now is that we’re expected to teach more and more but we have the same 180 days a year. And year-round school has 196 days a year. And they’re locked in. [At one year-round school,] if they even add one day to the school year, they lose track. They’re that tight. The schools are closed only one or two days a year, other than weekends. You get greater capacity but you restrict the ability to expand your school year.

Q: Have other districts talked about going to a year-round calendar?

A: Yes. Typically what happens is they get an outcry from the parents and the teachers. They don’t want to do it because we’re bound by tradition. The one thing everybody wants is for schools for their kids to be exactly like they were for them, but they want their kids to learn a whole lot more than they learned. Inevitably, schools will change. It’s just going to take time. It’s especially hard to change high schools, with their traditions. The school year is one of the major traditions that has been around for about a hundred years now.

Q: If you could change some of the sacred traditions of high school, what would you change?

A: There’s so many! The thing that needs to be changed, not just in high school but in all schooling, is the way we group kids by age. It’s really counterproductive to learning. Humans learn in social groups, and humans don’t have litters. The only place that you are with your age-mates is in school. In college and in the workplace, there are all kinds of ages. We artificially group kids in their age groups and expect them all to be the same. It’s irrational. One of the things that would help kids learn more, is family grouping, or multi-age grouping.

In high school, that would mean that kids could take courses at whatever level of knowledge they had, rather than lock-step through freshman, sophomore, junior, senior. Kids could also go off campus and do more things in the community and in the community colleges. There are so many ways we could open up high schools to make them more productive, more personal for kids to enable them to learn a lot more. What I hear from kids is that they’re either bored or they’re lost. There ought to be something between bored and lost that is exciting about learning.

Q: Let’s talk about bilingual education, post-Proposition 227: We seem to have two very different ways of interpreting how to put this measure into effect. A couple of districts in the county have virtually done away with bilingual education. Others are operating much as before, using the option that allows parents to put their children back into bilingual education. Is this appropriate?

A: When I first started in this field in 1973, one of the first things I got involved in was the federal government’s emphasis on the fact that proficient students were not learning up to their potential and that we needed to find new ways of instructing them. We tried various methods of bilingual education: concurrent methods, reading methods and a whole bunch of other methods. We found out that there were some that were more productive than others, and when it was most appropriate to intervene, and how you could intervene at different grade levels. That became basically this web of bilingual education. It was implemented over the last 20 years in a variety of ways. And then the political movement came through and supposedly wiped it out. But the reality, as I see it, is that it hasn’t had a tremendous effect. Where there were strong bilingual programs in this county, there are still strong bilingual programs; where there were weak bilingual programs, there are now more options to try different ways to help kids.

The research is very clear. To introduce new subjects, new concepts, to a student, you must use a language the student understands. So if you want to wait to teach something until the language is acquired, you can do that; it just puts the student behind for the time it takes to acquire the language. For some kids that’s quick, and for some kids it’s long. If you want to have them continuously learning other things while they’re acquiring the language, then you must introduce something in the language they can understand. It’s very simple. And it’s certainly not political. Yet it has been lowered to that political level. In pedagogy, its a nonissue; in politics it’s a big issue.

Q: What kind of relationship can we look forward to the public schools having with Cal State Channel Islands?

A: It will be a very, very tight relationship. The educators in this county are excited about having a public university here. And they are excited about being able to design the content of that university because we all have experience with university that could have been better if. . . . The laboratory school is the thing that I’ve been working hard on. It’s a valuable tool for teacher training and even pre-teacher training. We’re looking at taking things beyond having undergraduates there and having kids in their freshman year working with youngsters, to doing research with special-needs populations, having a real microcosm of Ventura County there so we have all the range of the kinds of kids, and having a state-of-the-art facility. We will be able to show schools and districts that you can go beyond the boxes.

Q: Do you think this will end up being a charter school?

A: Yes, I think it makes sense. The biggest problem we’re having right now is figuring how to fund it. There’s so many needs there that if the university gets some [funding] it probably won’t go to this school. But we’ll get there. One of the benefits to doing it with public funds is that it shows schools that you can do this with the funds you have.

Q: What can this county do to attract and keep better teachers?

A: We can do what we’re already doing. We do a pretty good job of attracting teachers. Our salaries are fairly good, the working conditions are good. At some places they need to be better, but those are the two things that attract teachers. I’ve been an advocate of the statewide salary schedule, so we can get out of that whole negotiation thing and save the state a lot of money. There’s a mandated cost for negotiating salaries in every district. There are over a thousand districts in the state, and they all get reimbursed for doing the same thing. It’s stupid. There should be a statewide salary schedule. Then we could work on working conditions, including professional growth. If we could really focus on recruiting teachers in Ventura County because you can grow as a professional here, because of our connections to the university and because of the professional development that our office does, that could be how we attract teachers. I don’t think it’s going to happen in my lifetime, but it would sure save a lot of money.

Q: Where do you see the role of teachers going?

A: Very simply, becoming more professional. We really need to move together toward the vision of an association rather than a union. Unions were essential at one point, and it’s still critical to work together, but I think we need to work toward teachers helping teachers become better, teachers weeding out teachers who are not doing a good job. Because any time we have a weak teacher, it affects all of us. And same with administrators. We need to police each other. We need to help each other grow as professionals, and that is where the association, the unions, need to move next.

Q: Do you think we’ll see a time when Ventura County doesn’t have 20 separate school systems?

A: I’m torn on that one because one of the problems with the way schooling is right now in California is that nobody owns the schools, because the state provides 95% of the money. When communities used to be kind of self-contained on their schools, they’d say, “OK, what do our schools need? Let’s raise the bar. Let’s go do it together.” Now communities are saying, “C’mon, Sacramento; do it for us.” And Sacramento says, “Do it for yourself.” Or they say, “We’ll do it for you, but we want you to do A, B, C, D and E.” Well, that’s not what we want. We want our money back but we want to do E, F, G and H. So the issue with small school districts is ownership. When you get to a larger system--like Los Angeles Unified--nobody owns it, nobody cares about it. Even though there’s an economy of scale, there’s no passion, no emotion around it. So there are pros and cons to having 20 school districts in Ventura County.

Q: Anything else you’d like to add?

A: Did I answer your first question about priorities? I hit two. I didn’t talk about school safety, which is an ongoing priority. Drug use is on the rise again among teens. That’s a big concern. The whole issue of tolerance is a critical issue in this county, so I put all that under the issue of school safety. There have been lots of articles, back-and-forth dialogue, about pockets of hatred and people who dislike other people for their religion, race, whatever reason. It seems to me that an educated individual shouldn’t be able to maintain those vibes. We need to work on making sure we educate, so that kind of ignorance--and I really see it as ignorance--doesn’t prevail.

Tobacco use also continues to be on the rise among kids. Why aren’t we teaching kids that it could kill them and that they shouldn’t be doing it?

The other big issue in this county is preschool education. I’m on the Proposition 10 [the 50-cent tobacco tax] task force. In the next four or five years, I think we’re going to see the expansion of acceptable child-care and preschool, because we’re going to be able to explain to parents and to the public that an investment in this age group is the best investment we can make for the long-term future of the individual.

There is a shortage of preschools. And we’re completing a study for the task force. I think what’s going to happen is that we’re going to say, “Here’s the need--and it’s much bigger than we have money for.” Investing in young children is probably the only solution to turning around the outcomes that we’re currently getting.