Educators Tout Standards, Foresee Slow Progress

With California reform measures in place, education leaders said Friday that schools are primed to improve student achievement, but urged administrators, teachers and parents to be patient during the bumpy process.

As state educators continue to work on determining standards-based curriculum, hundreds of parents, teachers, administrators, professors and some of the nation’s top education officials met to discuss reform during a conference at Cal State Northridge, which continues today.

“[The standards] are the beginning of a new world,” said Marion Joseph, a member of the State Board of Education who is known nationally for promoting phonics and in California for helping to establish basic reading requirements in the state’s public schools. “It marks an end to when teaching reading was a psycholinguistic guessing game.”

Weary of all the fads in education during the past decades, some parents wondered if the academic standards would last and worried about older students who can’t read or multiply.

“Are they damaged goods?” one parent asked. “Are we going to throw away a generation?”

California is looking into ways to help students who have failed academically, Joseph said, investing millions of dollars in intervention reading classes, for instance.

Another parent said that if students and parents are to take reading seriously, districts should set a good example by proofreading fliers and business letters.

“I got a flier from the district that had a number of punctuation and grammar mistakes,” the parent said. “If this is what [the district] is sending out, how can we expect children to read?”

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During a session on overcoming illiteracy, teachers and administrators warned that academic standards won’t work without the proper classroom materials and teacher training.

“If you don’t have this, I don’t care what standards you have,” said Patrice Abarca, a third-grade teacher at Heliotrope Avenue Elementary in Maywood who helped write drafts of the language arts framework. She is also a member of the state Curriculum Commission.

State education leaders need to make it clear to teachers--particularly new ones--as well as administrators and college professors what needs to be taught, teachers said. Anyone who veers from the state standards should be held accountable, they agreed.

Educators need to view “every instructional moment as absolutely precious,” said Carol Jago, an English teacher at Santa Monica High School and director of the California Reading and Literature Project at UCLA.

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Jago was applauded when she said that too many teachers waste time in the classroom, citing teachers who ask students to make posters for history or literature assignments instead of writing thoughtful, complex essays.

Other speakers at the conference include Bill Honig, former state superintendent of schools; Sandra Stotsky, research associate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; R. James Milgram, professor of mathematics at Stanford University, and some members of the Los Angeles Board of Education.

Earlier this year, the state passed an accountability law requiring that most public schools be ranked based on test scores, attendance and graduation rates. The lowest-ranking schools will be eligible for assistance programs, but continued failure to improve can mean the principal’s removal.

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Largely because of years of abysmal scores on national tests in reading and math, California adopted academic standards in November 1997 designed to improve student achievement. In math, for example, the state calls for algebra to be covered in the eighth grade instead of ninth.

In the language arts standards, the state stresses phonics as the foundation for reading instruction, a method officials say is research-proven. In high school, the standards call for students to be deft at literary criticism.

“We constantly hear the call for reform in this state, and really, it’s growing louder,” said Janet Nicholas, a member of the State Board of Education. “. . . We have a long and exceedingly difficult road ahead.”