Dear school board members and other concerned district employees:
We have undergone quite a whirlwind of stress and consternation at Huntington Park High School. I know this because I have been a teacher at Huntington Park High School for over 11 years. I have been a School Site Council member for two years and UTLA Chapter co-chair for three years. We are a school that has experienced a rise in its API score in recent years. The state of California gave us 603 last year. We have seen an increase in our graduation rate. There have been no miracles. We still have loads of problems, but reconstitution (or restructuring) in a few short weeks of time will pretty much be the deathblow of the school and bring an end to any real possibilities of good for the future. It’s a shame when you consider that there are plenty of schools in worse shape than we are.
I believe it’s our students working at higher levels who will suffer the most. Teachers qualified to teach AP classes and other advanced courses will disappear under the punishing austerity proposed in the restructuring plan. It is very doubtful that any teachers with an ounce of creativity or insight will survive the mock interviews. The favored “in-crowd,” which will no doubt assume the various redundant and expensive leadership roles in the “small schools” or SLC’s, is a group that is mostly composed of individuals who are the least effective in a classroom and the least qualified to serve as leaders unless one values mindless subservience as a quality to be prized in education. Constant drone-like monitoring from the top-down will shrivel the communicative connection necessary for engaged learning to take place with our students, especially during adolescent years when hypocrisy and disingenuousness are so keenly perceived.
“Restructuring,” as outlined in Mr. Deasy’s plan, is a sure recipe for failure. It is unnecessary, misdirected and springs from erroneous assumptions. As the last student to appear in the now infamous You Tube video that stars our board member complained, “you’re not attacking the real problem.” He and his friends are being accepted to prestigious universities. They are earning excellent scores on SAT’s. These things are happening with the school structured in the way that it is right now. “You should be concentrating on finding ways to motivate other students,” this senior declared. But no, apparently our board member who has never taught in a public school and has no special degrees in education believes that she knows better than the people who spend their lives in this place.
Ms. Flores has already diagnosed the problem and prescribed the answer without any real examination of the situation. Anyone who dares to disagree with her is deemed guilty of not “putting the children first.” She feels they should be subject to punitive action. The prescriptions outlined in the restructuring proposal to be voted on by our board betray the same assumptions, namely, that the problems are bad teachers and bad teaching. Putting a leash on the teachers and tightening it with more punishment when higher standardized test scores fail to materialize is the way to ensure better student academic performance. If you beat the teachers hard enough the CST scores will rise.
Curiously, Libra Academy, a semi-independent entity on campus, has been exempted from this restructuring process. Apparently, Libra is good while the rest of HPHS is bad. I have done my own research on Libra over the past several months using data that is accessible through ISIS, and I can assure you that this claim is simply not true.
Yolie’s Libra Mythology: the truth is not very satisfying.
HPHS as a whole was unjustly compared with Libra Academy, an emerging group of teachers with pilot school aspirations on our campus created through the efforts two key teachers and Ms. Yolie Flores, our school board representative. Ms. Flores and Mr. Cortines have claimed that Libra has made great academic strides in comparison with the remainder of the campus; so that Libra stands as some kind of model for the rest of us. Libra is still a part of HPHS, but they have still pointed to an API of 726 given by someone other than the state of California to Libra with its 124 freshmen last year. They have also claimed that removing these 124 freshmen from the figure would drop HPHS from an API of 603 to an API score of 546. This is a drop of 57 points attributed to the removal of 124 freshmen from the calculation of an API for a school of 4,000? You don’t have to be an Einstein to furrow your eyebrows at the math here.
Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that the 726 API number is correct for Libra Academy. It becomes irrelevant when a closer examination is made of the two student bodies. The 124 Libra freshmen from last year began the year with recorded eighth grade CST scores well ahead of the remainder of the campus. Libra accomplished this by selecting its students using an application process that required a portfolio. What kind of prospective ninth grade student is going to produce a portfolio to get into a smaller school? Will his or her parents be uninformed or uninvolved in their child’s education? Parent involvement is a huge factor in a child’s academic success. We don’t have anywhere near the degree of parent involvement we would like to see at HPHS. Libra obviously received kids with that important factor firmly in place.
The CST scores confirm what I’m saying. Percentages display a good contrast. 33 percent of Libra’s freshmen last year carried with them English CST eighth grade scores at proficient or advanced. 15 percent of the 916 freshmen in the remainder of HPHS scored as high during eighth grade. 28 percent of Libra’s freshmen scored this way in math during their eighth grade year. 13 percent of the rest of HPHS scored as high in math.
In the spring of 2010, 112 students took the CST’s at Libra. Libra showed gains in English. 65 students tested as “Advanced” or “proficient.”(58%) Their math scores, however, dropped significantly to show only 14 students testing into these categories (13%)while the number scoring at “below basic” and “far below basic” rose from 33 to 55 (49%). Science scores also dropped. Only 30 students demonstrated “advanced” or “proficient” skill levels in the spring (27%) compared with eighth grades scores of 45% at advanced or proficient levels in science. HPHS took on a similar pattern of CST results in the spring with percentages in the advanced and proficient categories checking in at 25%, 6%, and 11% in the same subject areas respectively. According to the tests, both schools gained ground in English and lost ground in math and science.
If Libra were to receive a “value added” score, it would be low. Someone might argue that the students don’t take the CST’s seriously and don’t put much effort into them. I would respond with, “YES INDEED!” Would someone please inform the staff of the LA Times before they start printing high school teachers’ “value added” scores! At HPHS our passing rates on the CAHSEE have never correlated with scores on CST’s. The students take the CAHSEE much more seriously than they take CST’s. Why shouldn’t they? The CAHSEE counts toward graduation. The CST’s do not. Our kids are NOT stupid.
At the present time over 220 students are enrolled in Libra Academy. They moved into more bungalows driving those of us from the regular campus who were using these bungalows prior to September to be shoved into the cafeteria or the auditorium during the last two weeks of an eight week block of instruction while the bungalows were repaired and beautified as preparation for Libra. Currently Libra has a population of special education students amounting to 2% of its enrollment. The regular school has 11% special ed. Libra’s population of limited English proficient students amounts to 17% of its enrollment. On the regular campus, 31% of our students are classified as limited English proficient.
Libra Academy does not teach students who function at similar academic levels as the remainder of the school. Comparisons between the two schools are at best irrelevant and at worst deceptive. When you have an apple pie baking contest between two contestants and one contestant has riper, larger, juicier apples, is it going to be a big surprise when this contestant produces the better tasting pie? Do you BLAME the contestant who lost the contest?
Academics have to do with what is going on inside of kids, not with school configurations and surface methodologies. This is why students from higher income areas and areas with safer, saner, more stable demographics will become more successful in their academic performance. They are better prepared, better able to be receptive to instruction in whatever form that instruction takes. To claim otherwise is to fly in the face of the overwhelming pattern of API scores in schools throughout LA County and the pattern of academic performance in rest of the nation. How does radical restructuring address these issues? It doesn’t address them at all, but once again assumes that the problems have to do with the teacher and the teaching methods. It assumes that the apples have grown up in identical ways to produce identical raw fruit and that any difference in the resulting pie is due to the magic of the pie maker entirely.
An apple that would not have been accepted into Libra’s basket.
As I was talking with Howard Blume of the LA Times when he came to visit our campus on Thursday evening, I introduced him to a few students. One student, let’s call him Craig, is a fairly typical student at HPHS. He is distracted in school. His girl friend is pregnant. His parents are separated and neither of them is educated beyond a few years of high school. They don’t encourage him to excel in school.
Craig never graduated from eighth grade, but he was socially promoted. It didn’t matter. He learned that it didn’t matter, and that idea stuck with him. During his freshman year he learned that he could take classes that he failed later on. He could take them in truncated form during intersession and after school. A former administrator told intersession teachers that 80 percent of a teacher’s students taking intersession had to pass and receive credit no matter what in order for the teacher to be teaching intersession and earn extra money. Craig passed English in intersession by sitting and writing a paragraph each day. He got his credit, and he learned that what he did in his regular classes didn’t matter. He was set to sit back and do very little in his regular classes.
Craig is an athlete and calculates which teachers will be sympathetic enough to pass him with a “D” or perhaps a “C” with minimal class effort on his part. Counselors have been trained in subtle ways to give students whatever they ask without many questions as long as it fulfills graduation requirements. Craig’s calculations are not always correct, but there’s always intersession.
There are plenty of discipline problems at our school, but Craig is not one of them. He behaves well. He is polite. He gets along with his teachers. He especially gets along with students who do a better job at school than he does. He can copy from their work and get credit without using his head in the process. They call it, “cooperative learning.” OH, I know that’s not how this method is supposed to work, but since it’s been abused for so many years in Craig’s past, it gets watered down into mindless copying.
Craig passed the English section of the CAHSEE with a 352 last year. Passing is 350. He hasn’t passed the math section yet.
Craig has naïve plans about going to college when he gets out of HPHS. I’d like to see him go there and actually master a course load of freshman classes. I’m sure you would as well, but I’d very much like to know how the radical restructuring of HPHS will help Craig to learn the things he needs to learn next year in order to fulfill his vague plans for college. If you have no answer, then please don’t try to use the students in your rhetoric. It won’t help Craig or any of the students like him. This has nothing to do with helping students.
Great post. I just went back to see my elaborate websites at Fremont- the new better social studies teacher has up guess what? Just pages from the textbook on the website. It's enough to make you cry. No more lessons on art during the New Deal no more D-Day simulations. It's all test prep now, baby.
Posted by: fremontwatch | August 02, 2011 at 02:42 PM