Stakes Get Personal in School Reform

As the new school year gets underway this week, 431 low-performing campuses statewide are taking a chance on a program that gives them money to raise test scores but also promises sanctions if they fail to show significant progress.

These schools have volunteered for a plan that labels them “underperforming” but offers $96 million in aid to improve academic achievement. By doing so, they have placed themselves at the center of California’s nascent accountability system.

If the schools do not significantly improve their Stanford 9 test scores next spring, they could see their teachers reassigned. Campuses that continue to struggle two years down the road could be waving goodbye to their principals as the state swoops in, takes over and, possibly, closes their doors.

Most of these underperforming schools have spent the last year designing “action plans” to improve academic achievement. But the quality of those documents is drawing criticism from state education officials. Leaders in Sacramento complain that too many of the plans fail to clearly diagnose why schools are failing and offer only vague solutions, such as teacher collaboration, rather than precise steps to raise math and reading test scores.

State officials are considering tightening the requirements. Schools, for example, may have to supply detailed information on how they will use the results of the Stanford 9 and other tests to improve student performance.

The high stakes of the state’s accountability system can be seen at Charles Jones Junior High in Baldwin Park.

Despite the state’s misgivings about many schools’ improvement plans, the teachers at Jones are confident that their strategies will drive up test scores. As school reopens Tuesday, they are steadying their nerves and taking a leap of faith.

“We can do better,” Principal Diana Dobrenen said of her school, where only a quarter of the students met or surpassed the national average on last spring’s Stanford 9. “The bottom line is that our test scores are not good enough.”

Last year, Gov. Gray Davis and the Legislature established the state’s school accountability system. It offers rewards to schools and teachers whose student test scores improve by a prescribed amount. Academic growth is measured by a new Accountability Performance Index, which relies on Stanford 9 test scores.

Lawmakers recognized that the lowest performing schools--those scoring below the 50th percentile on the Stanford 9--would need extra help diagnosing and remedying their problems. The new system offered extra money for 431 schools to launch reforms but attached sanctions for failing to meet their targets for improved test scores.

Almost all the campuses received $50,000 to hire outside evaluators, who analyzed barriers to achievement. Along with teachers and parents, the experts designed plans to raise test scores. Schools are now getting additional money--more than $300,000 in several cases--to carry out their plans over the next two to three years.

If the underperforming schools meet their growth targets, they will qualify for the same bonus money that is available to any school in the state.

Despite the threat of sanctions, the program has drawn overwhelming interest from schools. More than 1,400 campuses voluntarily applied. State education officials expect an equally enthusiastic response when they open the program to a second batch of campuses this fall. The program is voluntary, but state officials said that campuses will be drafted if fewer than 430 volunteer.

Teachers at Jones Junior High say they are ready to embrace change after years of frustration.

“If the kids are not learning, you have to do something different,” said Ann Marie Jesmer, the school’s guidance advisor. “I’ve never been so energized or excited. Frankly, I can’t wait to start.”

The San Gabriel Valley campus faces a steep climb. It has lost ground on the Stanford 9 over the last two years--more than any of the other 69 schools in Los Angeles County that have enrolled in the state’s program for underperforming schools.

Just 26% of the school’s seventh- and eighth-graders scored at or above the national average on last spring’s test--a decrease of 2 percentage points from 1998, when the exam was first administered, according to a Times computer analysis.

Last year’s test scores earned the campus a state accountability rank of 3 on a scale of 1 to 10.

Teachers say they must overcome a familiar litany of challenges: poverty, students who speak limited English, paltry parent involvement.

Early last year, the school notified the parents of 187 eighth-graders that their children were at risk of being retained, asking the adults to attend parent-teacher conferences. Only one-third of the parents showed up.

To make matters worse, the school has been a physical mess for the last two years because of renovations. Workers have fenced off corridors and classrooms, leaving some teachers without permanent rooms. A single classroom housed Dobrenen, her assistant principal and the front office staff until just two weeks ago.

But Dobrenen and her teachers acknowledge their own shortcomings. Teachers say they need to collaborate more--exchange ideas, share tips, model lessons, coach one another.

The Jones action plan is intended to address many of these key hurdles. It calls for teachers to:

* Follow a checklist of common practices and strategies in their classrooms, such as effective techniques for taking notes during classroom lectures.

* Align classroom instruction to the state’s new academic content standards.

* Offer tutorial programs before and after school for students who need help. One teacher will devote her efforts during school hours to teaching basic reading skills to struggling eighth-graders, a program she started last year.

* Create an interdisciplinary team--with one teacher from math, language arts, science and social studies--to work with 150 seventh-graders. The team members, known collectively as the Pod, will coordinate lesson plans, attend parent-teacher conferences together and use the same classroom management strategies.

* Give periodic assessments in reading and math to monitor progress and analyze the results, rather than waiting for the release of Stanford 9 scores at the end of the year.

In addition, the plan calls for a team of administrators and a guidance advisor to visit parents at home to offer the school’s many services such as counseling and parenting classes.

“The challenge is to bring student achievement up,” Dobrenen said. “I want to see kids moving forward.”

But one top state education official questioned the quality of the Jones plan. At the request of the Times, interim Secretary for Education John Mockler reviewed the Jones document.

Mockler said the plan would have benefited from a more refined analysis of Stanford 9 test scores. The school could have pinpointed specific academic deficiencies among different groups of students. That way, teachers would know which skills--such as punctuation or vocabulary--they need to concentrate on in the coming year. Mockler also said he found the proposed solutions to be vague.

“Their strategies seem to be too general,” he said. “They are generic ideas for organizing instruction.”

Dobrenen said her school would have benefited from a deeper analysis of test scores than what was provided from the outside evaluator. She said her staff plans to revisit the matter.

As to solutions, Dobrenen described the Jones plan as a broad framework to guide teachers, who in turn have been meeting to flesh out the “nitty gritty” details.

“It’s vague with a deliberate intent,” she said.

Mockler and other state officials have raised concerns about the quality of many achievement plans that were submitted to the state this year.

Because of those concerns, the state Board of Education is weighing a proposal to tighten requirements for the batch of action plans that will arrive next spring.

On Wednesday, the board will vote on a plan requiring evaluators to submit additional information about the schools they are reviewing. The reports will have to show that each student at a campus has a complete set of books aligned to the state’s new academic standards; that teachers’ training is linked to the standards; and that schools use the results of state and local tests to refine their instruction.

“Any plan to ameliorate these problems must be right on course, must be detailed on how to deal with children who are performing low in reading and math,” said one top state education official who reviewed many of the documents. “These plans, insofar as I saw, failed on that almost universally.”

Dobrenen said she remains confident that her school will succeed in raising test scores. Several teachers echoed Dobrenen’s optimism, saying they feel invigorated by the new plan and the self-examination that produced it.

The process has opened important new conversations about the most effective ways to improve student achievement, they agreed.

“We’re marching and I’m motivated by that,” said Eric Levi, a social studies teacher who is a member of the Pod. “Either march with us or we’re going to trample over you.”

The willingness of the staff to take risks was evident at a meeting Dobrenen held last week with more than a dozen teachers who are leading the charge. After reviewing details of their plan, they shared their hopes for the year to come.

“The time for passivity has passed,” Brian Dickie, a science teacher and member of the Pod, told his colleagues. “It’s risky, [but] bring on the challenge. Let’s see how it goes.”

Dobrenen brought the strategy session to an end with a pep talk meant to inspire her troops.

“We have a tough job ahead, but we can lift each other and help each other,” she told her staff. “It’s going to be an excellent school year. Each day we want it to get better and better and better.”

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Richard O’Reilly, Times director of computer analysis, contributed to this story.

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Snapshot of Charles Jones Junior High

Total enrollment for the 7th and 8th grades: 804