Hats Off to Larry: Apartheid Schooling Comes to the Franklin-McKinley School District

Arguably the most important book on public education published in the past year is Jonathan Kozol’s “The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America” . Kozol details how a rampant governmental push for standardized testing and school ranking systems modeled after business performance indexes has created two tiers in America’s schools. Schools in more affluent neighborhoods are not under the same pressure to succeed as lower-ranked schools serving poor and working class families, offering the upper-echelon schools access to a wide array of creative and appealing curricular options. Schools in poorer neighborhoods are, by default of the system’s business competition model, forced to teach test-preparation and thus adopt canned reading and instructional materials with little intrinsic educational value beyond developing standardized testing skills. The end result of this lopsided system not only blocks a low-income student’s access to a well-rounded education, it demoralizes an entire education community forced to sacrifice instructional creativity for test score improvement.

Members of The Unruly Advocate have witnessed the progress and fallout of middle schools caught in the test score improvement quagmire in San Jose’s Franklin-McKinley school district. The local media never bothered to cover this story; our knowledge of these atrocities is first-hand (hence the lack of links).

In early June Larry Aceves, the retiring superintendent of the Franklin-McKinley school district, received an educator of the year award from the Franklin-McKinley Education Foundation honoring his years of service to the district. Prior to his Franklin McKinley stint, Larry served as the superintendent of the turbulent Alum Rock School District and as Deputy Superintendent of the Pajaro Valley district in Watsonville. Larry’s career also demonstrates a deep involvement in professional organizations, serving as president of the California City Superintendents Association, the former president of the California Association of Latino Superintendents, the former president of the Association of California School Administrators (ACSA), board member of the Silicon Valley American Leadership Forum, and other local civic groups like the YMCA. In 2005 he received the Marcus Foster Memorial Award from ACSA that described Larry as a “skilled manager of change whose style involves broad community and professional involvement.”

Receiving awards from groups he once served in a leadership capacity does not an effective leader make, however. Larry’s oblique characterization as a “skilled manager of change” fails to specify the type of change Larry manages successfully enough to be award worthy. When administrators tackle the abstract concept of “change,” raising standardized test scores in K-8 schools remains California’s most expedient agent of curricular change. As an elementary district superintendent Aceves felt constant pressure to increase test scores. Like any other California district, raising the API drove Franklin-McKinley’s policy decisions the moment schools faced punitive action for failing to increase test scores. However, California’s testing regulations offer parents the option to opt out of the testing requirements, a frustrating reality given the additional threat of losing federal funding if a school fails to test 95% of its student population. When a middle school teacher at J. W. Fair informed her ELL students about the opt out clause, as she perceived state law required her to do in California’s early high stakes testing days, Larry demonstrated his award-winning management style that “involves broad community and professional involvement.” He suspended the teacher for two weeks, offering this rather wishy-washy answer in his defense: “While I don't think those tests are measuring the students properly, I am legally required to give them"

California’s complex school performance ranking system, the Academic Performance Index — not to be confused with mixed business metaphors like the Consumer Price Index, the Gross Domestic Product, or the Dow Jones Industrial Index — is predominately based on standardized test scores. When other items are factored into the statistics, like the number of students whose families receive federal assistance, a single number is determined on an ascending scale of 1 to 10. The purpose of this single number, according to the state’s Superintendent of Instruction Jack O’Connell, is to simplify the quality of a school’s academic program for concerned parents and the California real estate industry . Schools that fail to show “adequate yearly progress,” the term used in Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation, must take immediate action to improve their academic program (read: test scores) or face a takeover by the state, as is currently happening in Oakland Unified (see this month’s related story, “The Haliburton No-Bid Contract of Public Education Reform”). Part of taking “immediate action” as defined by state policy means hiring an outside monitoring agency to assist in developing an action plan for either the whole district or specific under-performing schools within a district.

Critics of the state’s testing system routinely point out that higher-ranking schools serve affluent communities. By contrast, Franklin-McKinley serves a community designated a child-poverty zone by county officials. At some schools over 80% of the students come from families receiving federal assistance. Over 90% of the students come from homes where English is not the primary language. A three-bedroom home on a 5000 square foot lot in these neighborhoods fails to match the comparative value of a similar home on the west side of San Jose.

In 2005 when the Franklin McKinley school board had to approve an immediate intervention plan for some of the district’s schools, they listened to a few proposals from the groups authorized by the state to provide monitoring services. A representative from the Santa Clara County Office of Education touted a program she had helped to spearhead in other districts, most notably at James Lick High School in the East Side Union High School District. The plan, modeled after research showing standardized test performance gains by under-performing students immersed in phonics-based remedial intervention courses, called for students to take a period of English, an additional period of English/language arts support, a period of remedial reading, a math class and an additional period of math support. Because of state physical education requirements, this plan eliminated all elective offerings, social studies courses, and science classes for low-performing students — in spite of President Bush’s call for the hiring of more math and science teachers in his State of the Union address .

Franklin-McKinley’s board had to make a quick decision and could not wait a few months to consider the logic behind the more math and science classes push from a man who once said at a campaign stop, “I know how hard it is to put food on your family.” Instead, they looked to their neighboring high school district for guidance. The plan in its first year at James Lick High School showed strong gains in spite of the support from a totalitarian superintendent who thought the logical way to stave off a budget crisis was to fire all the employees and hire them back three weeks later . Of course, when James Lick’s second round of scores showed stagnating progress in spite of the multi-period remediation plan, no one chose to revisit the decision. Scores of professional teachers who spoke out against the “3 periods of English 2 periods of math” concept went unheard.

Maybe that had something to do with the fact that the County Office of Education representative championing this model at the Franklin McKinley board meeting was Linda Aceves, Larry’s wife.

From the start the plan disturbed veteran teachers. A few chose early retirement. Others chose to leave schools where they had worked for ten or more years, taking jobs in neighboring districts. Most, however, decided to remain out of a sense of loyalty to the community and the school they dedicated their careers to serve.

That is, until they actually started delivering the canned curriculum.

Administrators at Sylvandale Middle School, for example, targeted close to 70% of the students for the remediation program. The school, which once offered an array of academic and elective classes like woodshop and dance, found itself with a surplus of science and social studies teachers instructing remedial reading. To make matters worse, the district appeared to be stalling on contract negotiations. Talk of declaring impasse traveled through to union members. The Advocate learned that at least 6 teachers accepted positions in other districts after the start of the school year. By the end of September, Sylvandale alone had 13 open teaching positions.

School administrators found themselves in a difficult position. Most credentialed teachers, especially the dynamic teachers politicians want to see teach in low-performing schools, already had positions in other districts. One school was forced to hire a teacher who failed the teaching credential program. Team Unruly learned that at least two positions remained open at one of the middle schools the entire year, taught by a succession of rotating substitutes.

By January talk turned to the second exodus teachers foresaw on the horizon. To exacerbate that problem, contract negotiations stalled. Teachers and parents staged marches and filled board meetings as the second semester drew to a close. Cars in the J.W. Fair parking lot sported signs declaring Franklin-McKinley doesn’t care about teachers. As of this writing, impasse has been declared and both sides are preparing for strike.

While contract negotiations stalled with teachers, the board spent thousands of dollars on a headhunting firm to find a replacement for Larry Aceves. On June 1st, the board hired Dr. John Porter, a superintendent from New Jersey, to lead the district. Team Unruly wonders if the board used Leadership Associates, a headhunting firm affiliated with Larry Aceves . Team Unruly found no evidence in board meeting minutes and none of our contacts could confirm or deny our question. Oh wait a minute, yes we did! Take a look at the 02/07/06 agenda .

Forcing students into an academic program dominated by remedial courses seems excessive, but the practice itself is not worthy of a Kiko nomination. Nor is the egregious placement of 70% of a school’s student population into those courses. While admittedly absurd, the practice has become the rule in urban education, not the exception. In spite of California Superintendent of Instruction Jack O’Connell’s recent unrealistic comment that teachers no longer teach to the test, (read here: http://www.edsource.org/pdf/oconnell.pdf ), improving test scores dominates curriculum discussions in districts and schools throughout California and the US— especially underperforming districts serving poor and minority students. The practice is a central focus of Kozol’s book. Perhaps a journalist with access to resources far greater than ours can determine if the textbook companies selling these canned curriculums are sending campaign contributions to politicians that champion their remediation cause. That would be a disturbing conflict of interest, as disturbing as hiring the superintendent’s wife to force a program with questionable results into the district’s middle schools, causing a mass exodus of veteran teachers leaving students in the hands of incapable substitutes. Team Unruly does not know if Mrs. Aceves was paid directly for her consulting service, but the nepotistic favoritism is hard to ignore. Someone made a bit of a profit from this non-profit school district. Whether that money went to the County Office of Education or the Aceves’ joint bank account remains to be discovered.

The great tragedy of the Franklin McKinley debacle ultimately lies in the decimated employee morale. A system that treats student test performance like a stock market future by its very nature never values the well-being of its workforce. In that system teachers are employees, not professionals, as replaceable as the teenager working a drive-thru register. Though a movement is afoot to turn the nation’s poorest students into a class of number 2 pencil test bubblers, students bond with teachers, and teachers, unlike other professions, are not pencil pushers. A beloved Sylvandale teacher with almost thirty years of experience received an invitation from his former students to attend a high school performance. When a high school colleague asked him how things were going at the middle school, he hesitated before despondently asking, “Are you hiring next year?”

Team Unruly cannot award a Kiko to an administrator for following a widely practiced trend. Bucking bad trends in education is akin to a feudal rebellion, and when’s the last time you saw one of those? Nor does Larry have much of a reputation for being a tyrant. Except, perhaps, for the teacher he suspended, no evidence of dictatorial behavior exists. Nepotism, however, is quite award worthy. So is destroying employee morale by failing to bargain in good faith, a sad trend that is rapidly converting the education profession into professional serfdom. Therefore, for practicing random acts of nepotism, imposing an unpopular curriculum on students and teachers, creating a mass exodus of teachers seeking greener pastures, gratuitous displays of conflict of interest, receiving a 15k contractual incentive bonus in January in addition to the added bonus of hiring your search firm as the consultant to find your replacement, and decimating morale with the one-two punch of a lifeless curriculum and protracted contract negotiations, Team Unruly says hats off to you, Larry Aceves— and, what the hell, all the members of the Franklin-McKinley School Board. Congratulations on finally winning an award from a group with whom you have no professional or personal connection.