Rachel Norton: SF Board of Education

How I really feel about the enrollment fair: The shocking truth!

November 8, 2009 · Leave a Comment

cropped_fairToday was the annual enrollment fair. It’s a kind of amazing, only-in-San Francisco event designed to help parents find a public school for their child. What a scene it is! Every school staffs a table, and most of them have elaborate photo displays, banners and brochures on hand to represent the school’s unique identity. The district’s Educational Placement Center organizes workshops helping parents to understand how our complex enrollment process works; and other agencies and organizations that serve families and children are also on hand.

The first enrollment fair was organized by PPS-SF back in 1999, and it was an astounding success when over 1,000 people attended. Now, the attendance at the annual fair is easily four or five times that. And it’s going to sound mushy (and kind of enrage people who hate our current enrollment process), but I love the fair every year! There is a tremendous positive spirit in the room, filled with people who want our schools to work and who are for the most part volunteering their Saturday to send the message that they are working for many children.

Like the annual Support for Families Information and Resources Conference every spring, this event is a great time for me to catch up with friends at schools across the district, and make some new ones. I had a great conversation with one of our newer principals about the way his staff are using data to identify which instructional strategies are working and which are not.  I met many prospective Kindergarten parents and a number who were looking for high schools and middle schools.

Now, I know that the complexity and uncertainty of our assignment process is the underlying reason why we have an Enrollment Fair in the first place. And that the expense and effort of organizing and hosting the fair every year wouldn’t be necessary if our system were less complex and more certain.  I also know that the current assignment process needs to change, because it is not accomplishing our district-wide goals of closing the achievement gap, and providing access and equity for every child.

All of that said, I still think it is such a positive experience to see so many hundreds of parents, teachers and principals ready to spend an entire Saturday talking about all the good things that are happening in our schools. I wish very good luck to all of the parents who attended today’s fair, and want to assure you that in the end, you WILL find a good public school for your child in San Francisco.

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Lincoln High history teacher named ‘Teacher of the Year’

November 6, 2009 · Leave a Comment

vziegler Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell was on hand today to announce that Valerie Ziegler, a history teacher at Lincoln High School, was one of five teachers across the state to be named “Teacher of the Year.” .

KTVU did a nice piece on Ms. Ziegler, including some very complimentary comments from her students.

The press release on all five Teachers of the Year is here.

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California’s higher-education debacle – LA Times

November 6, 2009 · 1 Comment

This opinion piece from Jeff Bleich, one of the Trustees of the California State University system, really hits home. Three generations of my family were educated in either the UC or the CSU system — both my grandfathers were UC professors and my dad and stepmother still are. Mr. Bleich writes about the opportunities his UC Berkeley law degree has given him, and his efforts to pay it forward through the years. He observes:

My story is not unique. It is the story of California’s rise from the 1960s to the 1990s. Millions of people stayed here and succeeded because of their California education. We benefited from the foresight of an earlier generation that recognized it had a duty to pay it forward.

That was the bargain California made with us when it established the California Master Plan for Higher Education in 1960. By making California the state where every qualified and committed person can receive a low-cost and high-quality education, all of us benefit. Attracting and retaining the leaders of the future helps the state grow bigger and stronger. Economists found that for every dollar the state invests in a CSU student, it receives $4.41 in return.

So as someone who has lived the California dream, there is nothing more painful to me than to see this dream dying. It is being starved to death by a public that thinks any government service — even public education — is not worth paying for. And by political leaders who do not lead but instead give in to our worst, shortsighted instincts.

It breaks my heart that a system that has offered so much opportunity to so many is in tatters. When will we wake up and realize that you can’t have a world-class educational system if you don’t invest in it?

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Brain food: Interesting stuff I keep meaning to post

November 5, 2009 · Leave a Comment

I’ve been busy of late and the “stuff to blog about” list is getting longer. Here it is, without my usual editorial finesse or opinions. Hopefully, others will find these links of interest until I have time to write about some of them:

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Notes from City Hall budget hearing

November 4, 2009 · 1 Comment

(Updated below with hearing vote, clarifying details)
Today I attended the Budget Committee hearing at City Hall to speak in favor of a resolution that would restore eliminated jobs in the Department of Public Health, and therefore keep a number of essential school secretaries from being bumped.  What I learned from listening to the questions and commentary from Supervisors, budget and Mayor’s office staff was that there is an unexpected surplus in the Department of Public Health budget that could be used to restore positions. Ben Rosenfield, the City’s Controller, testified that there still may be shortfalls in other departments, and cautioned against using a larger-than-expected revenue figure in one department as a justification for restoring spending cuts in that department.

There was also a little drama when Supervisor Campos reported that he’d been prevented from subbing for Supervisor Mirkarimi as a member of the Budget Committee,  a substitution that requires the signature of the President of the Board of Supervisors. However, an observer later reported that it was all a misunderstanding that was sorted out later in the meeting, and that Supervisor Campos was ultimately allowed to vote in Supervisor Mirkarimi’s place.

The City’s head of Human Resources, Micki Callahan, testified that the City is not convinced that many employees will bump into positions at the school district, since those positions are paid at a lower level than their City jobs (I was somewhat confused by this, because the Chronicle reported this morning that the school district would have to pay larger City salaries of City employees who bumped into school district positions, but according to testimony from Ms. Callahan and Steve Kawa, the Mayor’s chief of staff, this is not the case. I’ll have to investigate further.)

The hearing lasted several hours, and I had to leave before I had an opportunity to testify. I’m guessing, though I am not positive, that the Budget committee voted to restore the positions, but I’m not sure what comes next. I’ll report as soon as I have definite information. In the meantime, here’s the statement I intended to deliver during public comment:

Good afternoon Supervisors.  If the principal is the head of a school, the secretary is the heart of the school office, supporting staff, parents and children. They welcome visitors, answer phones, translate for parents who don’t speak English, comfort sick children and administer Band-Aids or ice packs, sort the mail, handle essential paperwork for school staff and generally keep schools running from day to day.

I am grateful to Supervisor Daly for bringing for this resolution and seeking to restore City positions that would in turn restore employment to school district workers. This resolution will certainly bring relief to workers who have been in imminent danger of being bumped out of their jobs.

However, I would be remiss if  I did not point out that this is, at best, a temporary fix. There is no guarantee that essential school district employees won’t be bumped in the future, and I believe we must give some consideration to the idea that the work of the school district is fundamentally different from the work of the City. I will grant that some jobs are the same, whether they are performed on one side of Van Ness or another, but others are not.  Without taking anything away from the important work of a clerk who works in the Department of Public Health, school secretaries perform work that is fundamentally unique to a school environment.

I strongly urge that the two entities, the City and the School District, work together on creating school district-only job classifications for many of these positions. This work would save school district jobs, and put an end to the current spectacle that is pitting our two institutions against each other.

UPDATE: The Chronicle reports that the Budget committee voted 2-1 to pass the proposal that would restore 150 City jobs. The proposal now moves to the full Board. I also asked why the school district says that employees who bump into our positions will cost us more, when the City says they will not. According to school district officials, City employees will come with increased benefits costs, so accepting bumped City employees in place of school district employees will result in increased salary and benefits cost to the school district.

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Save our secretaries! City layoffs endanger school workers

November 4, 2009 · Leave a Comment

If the principal is the head of a school, the secretary is the heart of the school office. Secretaries welcome visitors, answer phones, translate for parents, hand out band-aids and ice packs, comfort sick children waiting for their parents to pick them up, sort mail, handle essential paperwork for the principal and other school staff, and generally keep the school running from day to day. At my daughter’s elementary school, “Ms. Grace” greets children and parents with a warm smile and a “Hello darling!”; when the playground felt too chaotic she would let my oldest “visit” and bang on her typewriter.

But some of our school secretaries are in danger of being bumped out of their jobs by more senior City workers who have been laid off by their departments as part of the City budget crisis. For almost a century, certain public jobs in San Francisco have been governed by the Civil Service System, a system of complex rules and job classifications intended to make the hiring, seniority and layoffs of government positions work in an orderly way.  There are arguments in favor of the Civil Service rules, including the fact that having these objective rules allowed women and people of color to advance into positions offering them secure futures and a living wage.

However, even though the school district is a state agency, we are considered to be a city department by the City’s Human Resources department, and some (but by no means all) of our jobs are considered interchangeable with other City positions (the history and reasons behind this are too complex to go into here, even if I were able to fully explain them). When layoffs happen, either in the school district or in the City, laid off workers may use their seniority to “bump” less senior employees from their positions.  This year, the City laid off a number of clerical workers, but the school district did not. Now, more senior “Clerk/Typists” who lost their City jobs are bumping into our school secretary positions (the duties and requirements of both positions are considered to be equivalent by the Civil Service Commission). Some of those secretaries may be able to “bump” less senior City or school district workers and stay employed, but the end result will still be devastating, because schools will lose their beloved secretaries and at least some less senior school district employees will lose their jobs — even though we did not lay them off.

secretary rally

Keep reading →

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NY Times: Teach your teachers well

November 2, 2009 · 1 Comment

This morning’s New York Times features a provocative Op-Ed on teacher training programs. If you were a teacher, how would reading this make you feel?

Our best universities have, paradoxically, typically looked down their noses at education, as if it were intellectually inferior. The result is that the strongest students are often in colleges that have no interest in education, while the most inspiring professors aren’t working with students who want to teach. This means that comparatively weaker students in less intellectually rigorous programs are the ones preparing to become teachers.

I am not sure that bashing the rigor of teacher training programs does anything to advance the author’s suggestion that the profession should attract students with better academic records. Instead, we should create policies, programs and compensation schemes that will convince the best and the brightest that we will give them respect and a decent standard of living if they choose teaching as a career. The piece does, however, go on to make some great suggestions, such as:

  • Spend “less time studying specific instructional programs and learning how to handle mechanics like making lesson plans,” and instead encourage prospective teachers to continue studying the disciplines they want to teach – “It makes no sense at all to stop studying the thing you want to teach at the very moment you begin to learn how.”
  • Take a page from programs that train therapists, which encourage students to videotape their sessions and go over their work with mentors and peers. Similarly, “young teachers need to record their daily encounters with their classrooms and then, with mentors and peers, have serious, open-minded conversations about what’s working and what isn’t.”
  • Help prospective teachers learn “how to watch children, using research and theory to understand what they are seeing,” because disregarding “the developmental needs of our students  it’s unlikely we’ll succeed in teaching them.”
  • Finally, hire new teachers in groups of seven or more. “This way, talented eager young teachers won’t languish or leave teaching because they felt bored, inept, isolated or marginalized. Instead, they will feel part of a robust community of promising professionals. They will struggle and learn together.”

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The parent role in triggering school reform

October 28, 2009 · 3 Comments

Well, this is interesting. In August, the board of behemoth Los Angeles Unified approved a motion directing Superintendent Ramon Cortines to come up with a plan that would allow parents and other stakeholders to trigger significant reforms–reforms that could culminate with the conversion of low-performing district schools into charter schools. Yesterday, that plan was unveiled at a LAUSD board meeting.

The plan designates certain sites as “Focus Schools” that would be eligible for significant reorganization, and possibly dependent or independent charter status. In addition, schools in Program Improvement Year 3 or higher could become Focus Schools if 50 percent plus one of parents whose children are currently enrolled or enrolled in a feeder school sign a petition asking for Focus status. (The plan would also allow staff at a particular school to trigger Focus status).

According to the Los Angeles Times, the authors of the original motion had originally envisioned that any parent — even those with children not yet enrolled in the public schools — could sign a petition asking for Focus status for a particular school. But in the end, Superintendent Cortines (who led our district for six years during the late 1980s and early 1990s) pushed back:

[Cortines] said he didn’t want the views of parents currently attending a school trumped by those of parents not enrolled, especially those who might be ill- informed. He stuck to that position Tuesday.

“Those same parents . . . won’t even go and visit the middle school,” Cortines said. “What they’re doing is making judgments based on rumor or what they’ve heard.”

There is a war going on in LAUSD over the role of charters, and charter operator Green Dot Public Schools has been a major player. Among their more effective tactics has been to engage parents in the fight to take over failing schools, a strategy described in a recent New Yorker article about Steve Barr, the founder of Green Dot (I wrote about the article in a post last May). Green Dot is closely aligned with a group called Parent Revolution (formerly the Los Angeles Parent Union), which is doing the work of organizing parents at failing schools to fight for change.

I love the idea of parents in underserved communities organizing for change,  but I’m uncomfortable with the idea that charter schools always represent something better. As one retired LAUSD teacher pointed out in a recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Daily news,

Charters are not in themselves either better or worse than public schools. They are what the operators, staff, parents and students make them. So it would seem to behoove those in Los Angeles with a stake in education to make sure that the charters are better than the public school they are replacing.

Exactly. One of the hot button issues in the LAUSD-charter war is whether charter operators should be required to accept any student who lives in a school’s attendance area. From the charter schools’ perspective, the charter movement is all about parent choice – so parents who choose a particular charter school should be able to attend, no matter where they live. But as our own experience demonstrates, the most troubled and educationally-deprived families sometimes fail to take advantage of options because doing so requires resources (transportation, for example, or time during the day to tour schools) that are beyond their reach. If the charter operators are truly committed to turning around dysfunctional schools, wouldn’t they want to welcome any student from the school’s surrounding neighborhood?

Still, I think it’s a revolutionary idea for parents to be given the power to trigger significant reforms at troubled schools, even if I disagree with aspects of LAUSD’s current reform formula.

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Oct 27: Board meeting recap

October 27, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Another meeting that seemed like it would be short but then wasn’t. Probably the most noteworthy topic at the meeting was a presentation from Budget Director Reeta Madhaven on budget development for 2010-11 and beyond. This presentation is an attempt to demystify the budget, but I think it still needs more detail in what the numbers really mean for schools. It also lacks a clear statement that every dollar we cut NOW will save us from cutting even more later.

The key take-away points:

  • We end this year with $16 million on hand after setting aside our required 2 percent reserve (more about that reserve later);
  • At today’s level of spending, we end  2010-11 with a deficit of $17.8 million — that deficit grows to $33.6 million once we set aside the required reserve ($15.8 million);
  • It gets worse from there — with no cuts to today’s level of spending, by 2011-12 our deficit is $67.6 million ($83.4 million after we set aside the required $15.8 million in reserve);
  • Failing to set aside the required reserve triggers serious consequences: for one thing, an almost immediate downgrade in our bond rating (which hurts us when we sell facilities bonds and other short-term instruments that help us maintain cash flow between payments from the state). It also makes it more likely that the district would lose local control and be taken over by the state. In short, even though the reserve is in theory supposed to get us through the bad times, actually using it could make matters even worse. Crazy, right?

The Superintendent said that schools are being urged to save whatever they can in this year’s budgets and promising that whatever is saved can be rolled over to cushion next year’s budget. But Commissioners urged that the numbers above be presented in more concrete terms: what does a $33.6 million deficit mean to the classroom?

Stakeholders and the public also need specific information about what options are on the table. The sooner we all know what is being contemplated, the better input we’ll be able to give. But it should be noted that in these dire times, “don’t cut my program” isn’t what I would call constructive input. Something — probably many things — must be cut, and I think its a safe bet that any option will be painful.

Other highlights from tonight’s meeting:

  • Parents for Public Schools – San Francisco was honored — the organization is celebrating its 10th birthday and its great legacy of helping parents be involved in our public schools;
  • Facilities Director David Goldin presented the annual update of the district’s 10-year Capital Plan – the Board decided to wait to approve the plan until after a more in-depth discussion of facilities planning at a Committee of the Whole on Nov. 18;
  • A group of parents with a plan for implementing a French immersion program in the district addressed the Board during public comment and asked for support in getting a program started;
  • First reading of a petition asking the Board to approve a charter boarding school;
  • First reading of two resolutions: In Support of Sustainability in SFUSD (Mendoza. Kim); Supporting a New Day For Learning in SFUSD (Norton);
  • The Board appointed Derek Turner to the Elections Commission.

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The evolution of school choice

October 26, 2009 · 9 Comments

The American School Board Journal is often a good source of education policy information, and this month’s cover story, “The Evolution of School Choice,” is no exception. The article focuses on the charter schools vs. traditional schools debate, but has some truths that I find applicable to our efforts to redesign the assignment system:

The truly important factor that will remain unclear for a time is whether school choice really lives up to its promise. If history is any guide, students with engaged parents and affluent backgrounds will have no difficulty making the most of the educational opportunities made available.

If policymakers aren’t careful with future policy decisions, however, they might find that school choice simply will perpetuate that reality, say Jonah Liebert, assistant executive director for the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Those that can abandon low-performing schools will, and those already trapped in poor-performing schools will remain there.“Unless you find a way to mix affluent and suburban school systems with poor school systems,” he says, “you’re not going to do anything other than reshuffle the deck.”

In San Francisco, our lowest-performing schools are concentrated in the southeast corner of the City, which also happens to be an area where more children live. The pattern we have seen in our all-choice enrollment process is that some families from those southeast neighborhoods are opting out of the schools nearest to them, in favor of higher-performing schools in other parts of the City. Less-advantaged families, however, stay put — perpetuating the problem of high-poverty, high-need children being concentrated in a few schools.

The whole idea behind school choice in our district was to level the playing field — to give families good choices no matter where they lived. The hope was that decoupling school assignment from home address would combat segregated housing patterns; the irony was that our system was lauded by Libertarians as being a model of free-market ideals.  In the sense that our choice system helped some parents realize that there were good school choices out there, the Libertarians were right — over the past decade a number of schools have shot up in popularity and API scores, and the perception of the district as a whole has improved .

However, segregation has increased markedly, which is bad enough. But what has also happened is that there are a handful of schools that serve large concentrations of high poverty, high need students — and those schools, no matter what we do, are failing.  They’re failing because their teachers leave every year to work in less challenging situations. They’re failing because their students come to school with emotional and physical needs that the schools were never set up to address. They’re failing because their families are either under so much stress or so dysfunctional that they aren’t involved in the school. They’re failing because they are under-enrolled. And they’re failing because our system provides all sorts of inducements (busing and open enrollment) for families who want to opt out to attend schools in other neighborhoods (and who have the werewithall and awareness to do so).

Getting rid of choice seems like the easiest answer, and indeed there seems to be a consensus on the Board that choice will need to be more limited under a new system than it is now if we are serious about narrowing the opportunity gap for all students. But what do you tell the families in the southeastern neighborhoods who have taken advantage of choice?  For the most part, these families are not middle-class — the Bayview, Visitacion Valley and the Mission have among the lowest median household incomes, the highest participation in free/reduced price lunch, and the largest number of public housing units.  Being able to choose higher-performing schools in other areas has, in the view of families living in these neighborhoods, leveled the playing field and offered their children opportunity.

If limiting choice is the truly the best way to fulfill our goal of diversifying schools and offering every student better academic opportunities, then we’d better be sure we can follow through in coming up with those better academic opportunities (past efforts are not encouraging).  Otherwise, we’re just closing off one more avenue of opportunity for families in the Bayview and Visitacion Valley.

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