Getting Schools on the Right Track

Ten years ago, talk of school reform often boiled down to a single theme: Autonomy. Scrap the one-size-fits-all, top-down prescriptions and give classroom teachers and individual schools the freedom to tailor instruction to meet students’ needs.

Campus councils were formed, and meetings were held and “stakeholder” teams of teachers, parents and principals debated such things as class schedules, attendance rules, book purchases and discipline ... while thousands of students continued to move from grade to grade barely able to write or read.

Then the big-footing began.

Sacramento stepped in and ordered schools across the state to reduce class size in the lowest grades. Social promotion was to stop; a child who couldn’t do the work of one grade would no longer be moved on to the next. Voters scrapped bilingual ed and decreed that every child be taught in English. Standardized tests would be given annually in each grade, to track the progress of every student in every public school in the state. And teachers would no longer be guaranteed the flexibility to teach reading and math as they pleased.

Somewhere along the road toward reform, the watchword changed from autonomy to accountability. And if you’re looking to quantify success, the first set of verdicts came in last week: Rising scores on the annual Stanford 9 exam show that the state’s public schools have begun to do a better job teaching the basic skills of math and reading.

In some places, the numbers wouldn’t be much cause for celebration. But in beleaguered Los Angeles Unified, there was jubilation at the improvement shown by elementary students in every subject--reading, math, language and spelling. They still rank below the national average, but this year’s rise has heartened parents, teachers and administrators frustrated by years of stagnation and exhausted by the recent pace of change.

None of the changes came without tumult and controversy. The class size reductions triggered a mad scramble for space and the hiring of thousands of inexperienced teachers. The end of bilingual ed and social promotion led to a frenzy of testing amid concerns that struggling students would be left behind. And the focus on annual high-stakes tests--whose scores will be used to reward or punish schools financially--raised complaints that too much class time was devoted to test-taking tricks and too little spent on meaningful lessons.

But over time, practical problems were resolved, ideological debates quieted, and teachers and administrators buckled down to make the changes work.

That sparked a “culture shift” in the giant school system, says Gordon Wohlers, chief of staff for LAUSD Supt. Roy Romer. No longer were school-governance issues and battles over power the trademarks of reform. “Instead of focusing on how schools were run, we began putting all our power and energy into how we could better deliver what kids needed to learn,” Wohlers said. And each step seemed to lead toward success.

For example, the adoption of the Open Court reading program was an indirect result of class size reduction. Open Court has been credited with raising achievement in school systems across the state, with its scripted lessons and steady pace. The district adopted it primarily to help the inexperienced teachers coming in “who didn’t have the tools or the skills” for teaching reading to first and second graders, Wohlers said. It proved so successful that it is used in virtually every school in the district and will be expanded next year to third through fifth grade.

And, to the delight of teachers and administrators, reading success seems to have carried over into other subjects. “I think when a student sees himself as a good reader, he has a better attitude toward school and works harder in other subjects,” Wohlers said. “So our reading scores went up, but so did math.

“What we got was not just better readers, but better students and better schools. Now what we’ve got to do is find a way to carry this success on up to the higher grades. That’s where the challenges lie.”

It’s hard to know what “works” in education. We tend to vacillate between extremes, embracing--then discarding--whatever fad fits the current ideology.

For years, “whole language” was considered the only right way to teach children to read. Its focus on literature and language would induce children to love books, the thinking went. Now the technique is being blamed for producing high school students who don’t know how to sound out words, and struggle to read. Maybe one day we’ll look back on Open Court and complain that it stifled our kids’ creativity. Maybe we’ll regret allowing a single test score to dictate what our children need.

But for now, we embrace the world of standards and testing and scripted lessons because we have numbers that suggest that maybe we’re headed down the right road.

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Sandy Banks’ column runs Tuesdays and Sundays. Her e-mail address is [email protected].