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| Since December 22, 2004 |
Program Improvement or Program Impediment?
No Child Left Behind—the dreaded legislative nom de guerre driving policy decisions at all levels of public education governance. Because this punitive attack on public education is tied to Title I funding, school districts across the nation are scrambling to develop and adopt instructional battle plans in attempts to keep hold of the dwindling resources tied to and affected by NCLB mandates. Program Improvement, or PI, is the official umbrella under which these plans fall. There are also two flavors of Program Improvement: school-level PI, which targets individual schools, and district-level PI, targeting an entire district.
The PI debacle has come under intense criticism over the past year. Schools with impeccable track records suddenly find themselves failures under NCLB (
). School districts in politically diverse areas of the nation have openly rejected NCLB and its array of punitive mandates: blue state Vermont did () and so did red state Utah: (). Furthermore, Program Improvement requires schools and districts to provide intensive remedial intervention for students, which has led to some questionable conflicts of interest between those who design the NCLB policy and those who profit from NCLB instructional materials ().
The ESUHSD has four schools currently designated “PI.” The district itself is entering its 4th year of Program Improvement. Dan Moser, the Associate Superintendent of Instructional Services, is the man in charge of overseeing the development of the district’s PI action plan, which details the interventions to be used for low-performing students in math and language arts district-wide. While Moser doesn’t design the specific plan, he does oversee its development and ultimately chooses the type of plan to be implemented. Yet instead of choosing a more daring and novel approach, he has chosen a plan that serves as a fine example of Einstein’s axiom defining stupidity — do the same thing over and over again and expect different results.
No school in East Side has been designated PI as long as James Lick. Now in their 5th year of P rogram Improvement, James Lick has been at the forefront of every state-approved, research-based remedy that the Santa Clara County Office of Education, California Department of Education, and the federal Department of Education could mandate. One PI remedy, now informally called “the James Lick Plan” by teachers and administrators throughout the district, has been implemented for over three years. The idea is rather simple: take students below-grade level according to standardized test data, and expose them to more instructional time in those particular subjects. Also require all teachers to use “research-based” instructional materials from an approved list provided by the California Department of Education. Yet despite the tacit approval of a number of bureaucrats at all levels of school governance, the program has not proven effective. Last year, James Lick’s Academic Performance Index (API) base score dropped -22 points.
It’s no secret that schools and districts tend to be run by administrators who achieved nominal if any success in the classroom. Schools run by failed teachers is an unspoken, well-known irony of public education. Some, like ESUHSD’s Nunez, openly admit to having no classroom experience. Add also the influence of textbook corporations on education policy (), and one sees why the “James Lick Model” becomes the expedient solution for a preponderance of district and state administrators rapidly searching for a quick, state-approved fix.
The cronyism and conflicts of interest surfacing in federal and state education circles happen locally. Two years ago the Unruly Advocate awarded former Franklin-McKinley Superintendent Larry Aceves a Kiko for hiring his own wife to oversee the district’s Program Improvement plan: the James Lick Model (). East Side’s Moser hired two friends of another district administrator to serve as PI consultants, a fact Moser himself verified when asked that question at a contentious school meeting. How much bang for the buck did this minor investment in cronyism get the district? The proof is in the plan, and the plan is to implement the James Lick model district-wide.
Moser also appears to be using the guise of Program Improvement to impose other changes that benefit the district while circumventing the Collective Bargaining Agreement. During the second to last week of school, Moser went to Andrew Hill High School and told the staff that because of Program Improvement the district would mandate Andrew Hill change its bell schedule for the 2008-09 school year. This action directly violated contractual timelines and processes for school-wide change. Admittedly the education code defining whether or not PI can supersede a collective bargaining agreement is a grey area at best. However, Team Unruly has learned that administrators in East Side’s human resources department wanted Hill’s schedule to change so they could make eliminating part-time teaching positions easier by using a single teacher to fill part time positions at different schools.
The James Lick model has ultimately failed, not only at Lick, but at nearly every district that has implemented this remedial model. Odder still is East Side didn’t have very far to look to find a district that abandoned it only to find success with a more ambitious, visionary concept. East Side’s feeder district Franklin-McKinley, the district formerly run by Larry Aceves, hired a new superintendent, Dr. Porter, whose first major action was to throw out the old PI plan. He saw that it was ineffective and detrimental to staff morale. The district’s two middle schools lost a significant number of veteran teachers due to the almost total elimination of science and art programs under the James Lick model. Porter’s replacement PI plan was far bolder. He petitioned the state to let his 8th grade students take the high school exit exam. He used district funds to run af ter-school math preparation classes while working to restore science and art classes. The state rejected his proposal, so they developed their own math test that was purportedly harder to pass than the High School Exit Exam. 70% of the students passed.
In contrast, East Side officials seem to relish in doing the same thing over and over, hoping that one day the James Lick model that Dr. Porter eliminated and has yet to demonstrate effective results in the district that created it might just work.
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