City Educators Collide Over Accountability : Schools: Approaches to improving black and Latino pupils’ academic performance appear to clash.

City school board President Shirley Weber was angry as she pressed her point last week about holding teachers responsible, by threatening punishment through transfer or loss of position, if their students fail to graduate or do well.

“There are two different districts here,” the San Diego State University professor of Africana Studies said, noting that, of the almost 200 students who had been called before trustees earlier in the day to receive academic awards, only one was black and one was Latino. The rest were Asian or white.

“Yet when we have our athletic (awards), we’ll see tremendous numbers of Latinos and African-Americans. . . . That is the reality of San Diego city schools.”

For Weber, and for many Latino and black community activists, the dismal figures regarding academic success for their children argue for making teachers and principals more accountable.

They want the central school district office to spell out precise goals for how schools should go about better educating black and Latino students, and to make it clear that there will be consequences if they do not succeed.

But their idea of motivating district improvements through fear runs counter to restructuring plans by Supt. Tom Payzant that give staffs at individual schools more autonomy over budget and curriculum in deciding how best to go about improving instruction.

“It comes down to your view of what motivates people--fear, or persuasion and support,” Payzant said, while conceding that schools must do better with Latino and black children.

The issue is complicated further by disagreement over how far schools can realistically go in boosting minority achievement without additional money--or with even less, especially when trustees just completed axing $37 million from the budget because of state government money woes.

Weber represents the view of many outside the district who fervently believe that teachers can do better with what they now have, in terms of salary and supplies, by changing negative attitudes toward blacks and Latinos and holding those children to higher standards.

Most teachers just as fervently disagree, saying they do their best given poor parent involvement, crowded classrooms and lack of trust from principals and top administrators. Backed strongly by trustee and retired teacher John De Beck, they resist placing the onus for society’s ills totally on schools.

Although the truth probably lies somewhere in between, the lack of consensus has led both sides to question the impact of key policies that community activists have put before the board for approval in the past two weeks.

Those policies talk about holding schools more accountable for the success of their students and for giving students who already are doing poorly in school or are in danger of dropping out methods of instruction different from those the students have done poorly with.

But trustees have learned that it’s one thing to talk of having all students achieve and to work better with at-risk students, and another to put those beliefs into everyday practice. The frustration is mirrored in educational debates nationwide over whether public schools can improve voluntarily or need the specter of choice--where private schools can compete with them for students using public funds--to force change.

“We’ve got these policies but no teeth,” Weber complained, noting the lack of specificity over time-lines and details for rewarding schools that do well or punishing those that do not.

“They don’t resolve much, they’re very vague, that’s why they’re so easy to pass,” Trustee Sue Braun said of the policies. Without teachers trusting that the school board really believes they can do a better job without a lot of coercion, there will not be much change, she said.

“That’s why I don’t get excited over all of this. . . . At this point, we’re just saying, ‘Hey, guys, try a little harder, this is just another goal.’ ”

Even those educators in the forefront of trying to improve academic achievement who take risks under restructuring express ambivalence over which side has the moral high ground.

Principal Adel Nadeau has shepherded a host of changes at Linda Vista Elementary School during the past three years, to give teachers more control over classroom teaching but also to take responsibility for teaching that doesn’t result in student progress.

“I don’t believe money alone is the real answer,” Nadeau said. “Rather, (improvements) are the result of teachers feeling ownership in the school, believing in themselves and in rearranging resources” so that the available money is spent where teachers believe it will do the most good.

For example, Linda Vista now sends people out to visit parents on a regular basis--without there being a crisis or problem with their particular children--to talk about things such as the school reading programs and the library, or to encourage attendance at parent workshops.

The school now has an elaborate system of measuring whether its students are doing better, using tests and individual student projects and based on state Education Department guidelines of what students should know at each grade level. The data will be used to show what happens with the students over several years.

“Shirley Weber is right in saying that reform that doesn’t focus on student achievement isn’t valid,” Nadeau said, noting Weber’s fear that schools, if left on their own, will not willingly tackle the toughest issues of improving academics, or will set low goals.

“But let me say that, at least at Linda Vista, people do change,” Nadeau said. “This school has had a phenomenal turnaround from being one of the worst, because teachers were given permission to make decisions, to be professional again. Sure, there are those who chose to leave, and the bottom line is accountability. . . . But I think they have to be trusted in order to have change.”

Nadeau served on the committee, along with parents and community activists, that seeks rewards and punishments for schools, depending on whether they are successful or not.

“Accountability is meaningful if you have a variety of ways to look at whether students are learning more,” she said, citing the multiple criteria drawn up by her teachers.

But Nadeau criticized a previous board policy, now rescinded, to require schools within two years to show that Latino and black students had closed by half a testing gap between them and Asian and white students, using a single standardized test measurement.

“That was mathematically unreachable,” she said.

Melinda Martin, an elementary school principal temporarily heading the district’s new elementary literature reading program, helped put together the policy on when to hold back a student from the next grade, and what to do differently when the student is held back.

“Teachers do want to make a difference, and I think as a principal I could go to my teachers and say, ‘OK, here is a list of kids who aren’t making it; what can we do?’ ”

Martin said there are a variety of things schools can do, from spending their special federal funds differently and lowering class sizes for some teachers to setting up a one-on-one tutoring system and having teachers and secretaries adopt individual students as “buddies,” increasing personal attention to students that are in trouble.

“More fundamental changes, such as having children move at their own pace between kindergarten and Grade 2, cost money,” Martin said, “and it’s (unrealistic) to expect those types of changes without additional costs.”

Educational research shows that students who start out more slowly in early grades do not suffer in the long term as long as they read normally by the end of third grade. If they learn to read well by that point, they will be less likely to drop out later, data indicates.

But Martin said she resists putting all of these strategies in a “must-do” list for schools because “I don’t think we want to say, ‘This is the only way to do things.’ ”

Yet, without those specifics, Weber despairs that nothing “will come from the policy because kids (will not) get the benefits of all of our wonderful thoughts.”

Payzant cautioned that critics should not assume that nothing of value is being tried in the school system. He pointed out that he has changed principals and allowed transfers of large numbers of teachers at schools such as Gompers, Linda Vista, Wilson, Baker and others to force new approaches to students doing poorly.

“We’ve got things going on at Linda Vista, at other schools, but it’s still very early to say what will happen regarding student achievement,” Payzant said. “I don’t know how I can have the district break out of its present mold if everyone has to show something new works or not within six to 12 months. A two- to three-year period is more realistic” if teachers are going to be willing to take risks, he said.

Shu Swift, a longtime Point Loma parent active in integration efforts, told the board last week about a black student doing well at Gompers Secondary, in large part because of the new African-American male advocate program providing him one-on-one assistance.

The student suddenly had a drop in grades, which puzzled the student advocate until the advocate found out the student’s older brother--a negative influence--had returned home.

In this particular case, family influences threatened to overwhelm anything the school was doing, Swift said.

“I just wanted to show how complex these things can be,” Swift said.