School Strains Under Effort to End Social Promotion

Standing at the front of a classroom, hands on hips, Principal Marylou Amato faced a group of uneasy eighth-graders. “Your ticket to this meeting was getting an F in English,” she said.

The students chewed their nails and squirmed in their seats as Amato made it clear that it was time to get serious about schoolwork. The alternative, she warned, was to repeat eighth grade while their peers at Nightingale Middle School moved on to high school.

She also gave them rays of hope during the meeting in mid-February. To help them pull up their grades, the school was offering after-school and Saturday classes and summer school. They could get counseling and even medical examinations to spot emotional and health problems that might interfere with learning. Their parents, she said, would receive weekly updates on their progress.

Next year, California will require all school districts to end the practice of advancing failing students to the next grade.

Nightingale Middle School, in Cypress Park, like schools across the Los Angeles Unified School District, is in the vanguard of that statewide move, struggling to implement a new policy that requires every child in second and eighth grade who gets an F in English to be held back. District officials have estimated that thousands of children are at risk of flunking this year.

Amato closed the meeting with the Nightingale eighth-graders by issuing an order for every student to write her a letter--due the following day--listing three things they were going to do to improve their grades.

The letters dribbled in days late. One of them, submitted unsigned, underlined the challenge facing Amato and her staff: “What I’am planing to do for I can go to Hischool is my homeworck and my class worck o and I am goin to improve on my reating and raightin skills. Does are my plans”

Fifty-one eighth-graders were informed at the beginning of the semester that they would be held back if they didn’t lift their English grades at least to Ds. Another 98 students who earned Ds last semester hover near the fail zone.

To step inside the lilac walls of Nightingale is to feel the weight of the challenge bearing down on Amato, her staff and similar staffs statewide. They have launched a nearly nonstop series of meetings, initiatives and programs in a rush to shore up the grades of their failing students. In the process, Nightingale has made some surprising and painful discoveries.

A reading test of sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders revealed that their skills were far worse than the staff had imagined. An analysis of test data showed that no single strategy would be effective with all the students; in fact, it became clear that each failing student presented a unique set of academic and emotional issues. And apathetic parents undermine the staff’s best efforts.

Retention Could Worsen Crowding

The end of social promotion has profound implications. With nearly 2,000 students, Nightingale already is so crowded that holding back even a dozen eighth-graders could mean busing an equal number of higher-achieving students to another school. Also troubling to many is how being held back might affect adolescents emotionally and academically.

Through it all, Amato and her staff search for signs of potential and improvement. But they are frustrated by a lack of time.

“I have every educational reform program known to man here; I have counselors and psychologists and a $400,000 budget surplus,” Amato said. “My teachers are doing their level best to help our kids promote.

“What I don’t have is time to do this right,” she said. “The speed at which this change is being implemented is mind-boggling.”

Nightingale’s war on social promotion began in November when the school administered a reading test to get a better understanding of eighth-graders’ basic skills and to sharpen remedial techniques.

School officials discovered that roughly three-fourths of their eighth-graders were reading at the fourth-grade level or below--far lower than the levels suggested by their Stanford 9 test scores. The same could be said for roughly two-thirds of the sixth- and seventh-graders.

No one anticipated such abysmal reading levels in the school, which for four years has operated under the guidance and financial support of highly touted reform programs with such names as LEARN, LAAMP, Parent Learning Partners, L.A. Bridges, Healthy Start and DELTA.

“We are astounded by the results of the reading test. They’re appalling,” said Assistant Principal Byron Maltez. “But, then, we now have a clear picture of the immensity of the problem we face [in] ending social promotion.”

Even before the reading exam, school officials knew they had their work cut out for them.

Nightingale’s ranking on the state’s new Academic Performance Index is among the lowest in the city.

Four of its six eighth-grade English teachers are first-year instructors with emergency credentials and little or no training in teaching adolescents how to read.

Eager to spot patterns in the test scores of the lowest-performing eighth-graders that could help the school focus resources and teachers’ attention, Assistant Principal Cynthia Cordova, who is in charge of counseling, flipped on the portable computer in her cramped office and began crunching numbers one day in early March.

But as the data for one student after another rolled past her professional eye, she grew increasingly frustrated. There were no discernible trends.

One boy tested far above average in reading, yet flunked first-semester English. A girl scored at the 21st percentile in reading in last year’s Stanford 9 exam--not that far below the average 30th percentile scored by eighth-graders districtwide--but bottomed out in a separate test that pegged her reading level as early first grade.

In follow-up talks with the youngsters and their parents, Cordova learned that one student’s parents were in divorce proceedings. Another shared a tiny apartment in a nearby housing project with seven brothers and sisters and a mother on welfare. Several formerly above-average students were suddenly adrift in the awkward period of life that school officials referred to as “eighth-grade funk.”

Getting Teachers on the Same Page

A few days later, Cordova and Amato shared the results of the data analysis with the school’s eighth-grade English teachers, whose assessments would weigh heavily in deciding which students should be held back.

“Your judgment will make or break these kids,” Amato said. “Therefore, I want you to prepare a syllabus detailing exactly what it will take for each student to pass your class with an A, a B, a C and a D. Parents will be given a copy and you will keep parents informed of their child’s progress once a week.”

“That way,” Amato said, “there will be no surprises in June.”

That meeting was followed by others held after school with the parents of the failing students. Only about half of those who had been invited showed up.

They were encouraged to applaud the children’s efforts and to find children a quiet place to do homework. They also were reminded that, even if they struggle with math or reading, they should not give their sons and daughters the impression that these skills will be hard to learn.

In one meeting, parents sipped hot coffee and munched on Mexican pastries as Cordova handed out data sheets on their children. “You need to know what level your children are performing at so we can make a plan for improvement,” she said.

The parents expressed surprise at their children’s abysmal test scores and grades. One woman even asked, “My daughter says she never gets homework from her teacher. Do you ever assign homework at this school?”

Cordova shot back: “Every day.”

That night, in the living room of their modest wood-frame house just down the street from Nightingale, Francisco Callejas, his wife, Sara, and their 13-year-old son Alexander faced the tough facts.

Staring into his father’s eyes, Alexander confessed, “I didn’t do my homework because I thought it was too hard.” But he promised that “everything is different now. I’m going to intervention classes. I want to graduate.”

His father, a watch repairman from El Salvador, responded with a lecture. “One of my dreams was to go to the United States and raise a family in my own home with a clean room for every child. I have all that now, but my dream is incomplete because I want you to go to college.

“But I’m worried,” he added. “You don’t drink, smoke or belong to a gang and you’re a happy youngster--all great. But you won’t do your homework! What’s wrong? What can we do for you?”

“I’m not going to stay behind, I promise” Alexander said. “I’m really trying now.”

That kind of talk delights eighth-grade English teacher George Gund, one of the first-year teachers with emergency credentials. Gund has had more failing students in his classes than any of his colleagues.

Packing his briefcase at the end of a long day in a classroom that had not been swept in days, Gund said, “Sometimes it’s hard to be optimistic.”

Gund, 27, says he works with a surprisingly large number of students who “are not apathetic toward instruction; they’re resistant to it.”

He must clean up after students who spit on the floors, and Gund has to beg their parents to take an active interest in the children’s schooling. He must comfort students who come to him with tears in their eyes, pleading, “Teacher, I’m sorry, but I can’t read and I’m dumb.”

During a recent “Welcome back to school week” meeting, the mother of one failing student asked, “My son watches five hours of television a night. Do you think that’s bad?” Gund replied, “Look at it this way: Your son is in my class less than five hours a week.”

‘It’s Just School,’ Student Says

A struggling female student strolls into class on most days about 10 minutes before class lets out. “I recently said to her, ‘How long do you think you could get away with that at a job in the real world without getting fired?’ ” he recalled. “She looked me right in the eye and said, ‘This isn’t my job. It’s just school.’ ”

Then there is the 14-year-old whose refusal to remove her backpack in class--or to read or do her homework--has led to a months-long standoff.

Overwhelmed by the generally low level of academic skills among his students, Gund has asked for advice from his mentors and principal. They suggested that he not spend so much time fighting with students over such things as backpacks, and make literacy his priority. They also urged him to take a hard look at his grading practices to ensure that he has not been holding his students to an impossibly high standard.

Applying that advice in class quickly produced results.

“In first semester, about half of my students were failing; now, I have about a dozen kids who probably aren’t going to promote,” he said. “Personally, I think it’s better to hold a child back a year than have them grow bitter that the school district let them down.”

Mentor teacher Margaret Andrews, who is regarded as one of Nightingale’s most effective intervention instructors, is opposed to retention.

As soft jazz played on a boombox behind her desk between classes, Andrews said, “One year of retention will not make up for every negative variable in a student’s life.

“We run a tight ship at school, but their home life may not be so tight--but that doesn’t mean I accept excuses,” she said. “The parents of my after-school intervention students must sign their children’s homework folders every night. And the students must arrive [in] class on time with a positive attitude.’

That is, if they attend after-school intervention classes at all.

Only 18 of the 51 students who received grades of F in English last semester showed up for the first day of such classes, which began March 6. Each of those students is required to attend at least three hours of intervention during the week or on Saturday.

Although the intervention materials that Amato had ordered months before had yet to arrive, the teachers pressed ahead with instructional tools geared to sixth- and seventh-graders.

In one of those intervention classes, where only two of the 13 students assigned to it showed up, English teacher Brenda Chan read a ghost story aloud and then discussed its plot and vocabulary.

Down the hall and around the corner, nine intervention students sipped black cherry punch and ate cookies as Dennis Greninger, department head for social studies and a mentor teacher, lectured on the ethnic history of the region.

Midway through his lecture, a boy stood up, walked to the blackboard and wrote an expletive with chalk, then drew stars around it. Greninger gently admonished the student, who returned to the blackboard and erased the marks.

In a firm yet friendly voice, Greninger ended the class with a reminder.

“Next time, I want to see you here at 3:05 sharp,” he said, as the students dashed out the door. “Attendance is really important.

“You can’t get anything out of this by staying home,” he said. “I don’t want to see you back in the fall.”

Four weeks after that mid-February meeting with the principal, 13 of the 51 failing students had nudged their English grades up to Ds.

However, an additional 14 students who had been getting Ds saw their grades slip to Fs. They’re now in mandatory intervention classes.