Teachers Told to Stress 1st ‘R’

San Diego city school teachers will be asked for a full-court press to improve reading instruction and turn around dismal achievement, Supt. Tom Payzant vowed Tuesday to trustees.

The school board, meanwhile, asked that Payzant explore ideas such as contracting with private reading firms and borrow ideas from other districts that have shown greater success with reading programs.

And in a plea for trustees and administrators not to use poverty as a crutch to explain away poor Latino and black achievement test scores, board member Shirley Weber said, “The district cannot survive half-literate, half-illiterate.

“That (attitude) will eventually creep into all of our standards and affect all of the district’s quality.”

Added Weber, who is herself black and rose from a poor upbringing in Watts to become a San Diego State University professor: “If I did not believe that our public schools have to be the American equalizer, I would burn all 155 (in San Diego) down” out of frustration.

Payzant said he wants all schools to address the problem of stagnant reading achievement, and in particular those schools with heavy Latino and black student populations where reading scores are especially poor.

In trying to balance his directive with district moves giving schools more power to choose how they teach, Payzant said that without setting “some clear expectations for action, we ignore our responsibility for leadership.”

He asked all schools to submit a one-page summary of their plans to him by Oct. 30. They can include new reading programs, the switching around of teachers and money to emphasize reading, as well as additional parent and non-school reading efforts, he said.

“The focus should be on the improvement of reading achievement in the early grades and poor or non-readers at all grade levels,” Payzant said.

He added, “It cannot be business as usual. Over the past three years schools have worked to improve achievement results, but success has been uneven and the achievement gap persists.”

While Payzant conceded that the ideas in his plan aren’t necessarily new, the way he wants schools to pull them all together at once is different, he insisted.

“We haven’t done enough in the past in having the seriousness of follow-through,” he said.

Payzant acted simultaneously as trustees officially received 1992 data from ASAT, the Abbreviated Stanford Achievement Test, which measures knowledge of basic skills in reading, language and mathematics for all district fifth- and seventh-graders. The data was released last Wednesday.

The academic achievement of black and Latino students continues to lag significantly behind that of their white and Asian counterparts. Only whites scored consistently at or above the national median in areas of the multiple-choice test, and whites make up only 35% of San Diego Unified’s 125,000 students.

Weber, professor of African Studies at SDSU, said that the district needs to do even more than what Payzant laid out.

Weber suggested that Payzant might take a look at special reading programs such as those in the South Bay Union School District, where students of low socioeconomic backgrounds score much better than those in San Diego Unified.

The South Bay district devotes its summer and intersession programs to innovative reading instruction, and Weber said San Diego needs to do that.

“It seems a waste of time for students in our (current) summer programs where they put in four hours a day and still don’t get any better in literacy,” she said.

Ron Ottinger, an incoming board member for next year, also asked that San Diego commit itself to a South Bay program that guarantees parents that all children will be at least average readers by the third grade.

Weber also proposed contracting with private educational firms such as Sylvan or Brittania which promise that children enrolled in their programs will end up reading at grade level.

“They guarantee results and obviously our system isn’t working,” Weber said.

Weber said that Payzant’s action plan, while it represents a move forward, lacks rewards or punishments to spur schools to act faster.

“What happens to a school that bites the bullet and” lowers class size by eliminating aides and putting the money into having smaller classes, she asked. Such a school is acting for the best interests of students even though there is pressure to keep other people employed, she said. “Will that school be rewarded somehow with extra help?”

Weber disputed the view of trustee Sue Braun, who said the district’s achievement scores “actually are an improvement” because they have generally remained stagnant at a time when “our kids have gotten more difficult to educate.”

Braun cited the growing number of single-parent families and other socioeconomic factors which she said make the teacher’s classroom role more difficult to carry out.

Responded Weber: “I’ve been told that for an urban district, our data looks good . . . but we can’t accept that, to allow socioeconomics to determine our level of aggressiveness.”

Board vice president Susan Davis agreed, calling the data “grossly unacceptable.”

Davis expressed puzzlement at teachers who say they can identify students at the beginning of a school year who read below grade level and who say that those same students will probably be at the same level at the end of the school year.

“Schools ought to be able to do better than that,” Davis said.