Cleo Gordon Elementary School "stumbled from the get-go" with the state's Immediate Intervention/Underperforming Schools Program (II/USP) and has been struggling ever since, say members of the Fairfield-Suisun Unified Teachers Association (FSUTA).
At the beginning of the 1999-2000 school year, teachers were informed by the principal they had "volunteered" for the program. It was painful to be suddenly branded a failing school. To make themselves feel better about the whirlwind of bad publicity, staff wore T-shirts announcing, "We Are The Chosen - II/USP." Many veteran teachers moved on.
From the beginning, teachers felt excluded by the process. Administrators, not teachers, selected three teachers to serve on the school site team.
An external evaluator came in for three days, staying after school for four hours each day to talk with staff. At a touchy-feely workshop that was supposed to improve morale, the evaluator put a candle on the table and asked teachers to visualize their school in five years. What they likely did not envision was that, four years later, things would be much worse and the school would be facing state sanctions.
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Los Medanos teacher Carol Woodrow and her second-graders return from a field trip. |
Teachers had no idea what a comprehensive school reform model even was, but, under pressure, they selected a program called America's Choice. "The external evaluator shoved America's Choice down our throats," recalls Leeanne Purdy-Martinez, a first-grade teacher, adding that the evaluator "wanted us to go with a canned program."
Before America's Choice could be implemented, scores went up 30 points to 617 on the API, and the state gave teachers $500 each as a reward. Teachers figure the growth was a result of the "planning period" when teachers came up with their own strategies to align instruction with standards. During this time, full-time math and reading specialists were utilized in the classroom and the effort paid off.
But when the school was pressured to abandon the plan - even though it was working - and go with America's Choice, scores began to drop. By 2002, the school had a base of 612 and ranked 3 out of 10 on the API.
In hindsight, America's Choice may not have been the best choice for Cleo Gordon, say teachers. But once they realized it wasn't a good fit, it was too late. Administrators would not let them pull out of the program.
"When the America's Choice people were making their pitch, they told us we could vote it out after a year if it wasn't a match," recalls third-grade teacher Steve Hartley. Staff members were told repeatedly that the program takes five years to work, even though teachers only had three years to raise test scores before being sanctioned.
"America's Choice assumes teachers come in with a real understanding and wealth of lessons already tucked into their brains," says FSUTA member Beth Krumenacker. "But half our staff were first-year teachers and didn't have some of the prior knowledge to make the program work." More problems ensued. The teacher who had been trained to serve as the literacy facilitator of the program resigned halfway through the year. Then came the strike at the end of 2001. Eventually, half the teaching staff left. A new inexperienced principal arrived.
"We had two separate plans running," says Krumenacker. "We had one improvement plan associated with Title I money and another associated with America's Choice. The two plans did not connect. The district shouldn't have let that happen, but the district didn't take the whole process of II/USP seriously. It didn't provide support to teachers."
Last year the SAIT auditors determined that the district and site leadership did not effectively promote the implementation of standards-based education. Corrective action called for replacing the administrators and implementing standards-based curriculum, professional development and on-site coaching. Staff members were told that the 2004 test scores would be used to determine if the school would be taken over by the state.
SAIT auditors also determined that the district and school had not provided an environment conducive to learning and that some teachers were "ineffective" and unable to improve student achievement. Krumenacker wonders how teachers could be judged as "ineffective" after only a few hours of observation.
"Their observations were supposed to be confidential and not identify specific teachers. How are they determining who is ineffective if this is supposed to be confidential?"
Krumenacker and others say they feel betrayed and abandoned by their district. "A school that is in II/USP should get the very best, but we haven't gotten that," she says. "I feel that, instead, we have been an afterthought for our district. Our district administrators have seldom shown up for meetings in the last few years. They should have given us a dynamic principal, not someone who was learning the ropes. For us, this whole thing has been a nightmare."
Last June, on the Saturday after school ended, teachers received notice they could all be reassigned in the fall, even though no such recommendation was in the SAIT report. For teachers, it is the ultimate irony: The district that has been indifferent to helping them is now threatening to punish them beyond the SAIT's recommendation - before they have had time to put the SAIT corrective actions in place.
"I don't know what's going on here," says Krumenacker. "I feel as if they are playing some kind of a game. But I don't know what game it is and I don't know the rules."
