In Search of Solutions - Marin IJ - June 13, 2006 - By Don Speich and Jennifer Gollan

In search of solutions
Marin IJ - June 13, 2006
By Don Speich and Jennifer Gollan

The day's lesson was about food costs and utility bills and rent and car payments and, of course, gas prices, and math teacher Dave Wetzel was using it as a way to introduce his Marin City students to the Xs and Ys of rudimentary algebra.
Wetzel is a pioneer, the first Tamalpais High School teacher to teach part-time at Martin Luther King Jr. middle school in hopes of stemming a high school dropout rate of more than 50 percent.

In an effort to kick-start an educational program that has failed for decades to teach its students the basic skills needed for academic success, the Sausalito Marin City School District is embarking on a plan to succeed where previous efforts have failed.

It has named a new superintendent who has a track record of raising performance as measured by standardized tests. It will begin construction later this year of a state-of-the-art middle school in Marin City. It is studying preschool programs to ascertain which is best to assure success in district schools, and it is refocusing its curriculum in a way that will better meet state standards.

Bringing a high school teacher to the middle school is an effort that requires a special brand of teacher with the patience to kindle interest among students, some of whom, Wetzel says, come to class feeling that because they would no doubt fail, why even try.

Wetzel recently used the cost of living as a tool to get his 15 students to within striking distance of algebra by adding and dividing and subtracting the amount of money it takes daily, weekly, monthly and yearly to keep them and their families afloat.

The Tam math teacher, assisted by six Tam High seniors who have volunteered their time, said that since he first arrived last fall the students had made great progress.

"It's like night and day," he said.

At work are short attention spans - 10 to 15 seconds, he said - "which is directly related to success in school." He keeps them focused through a subtle blend of leniency and discipline - giving them a short rope to momentarily mentally roam and then pleasantly but firmly pulling it back to the subject at hand.

A group of students was sitting at a table with Wetzel figuring the cost of bread and pizzaand collard greens and juice, when one of them got up, moved to an empty table behind and laid her head on the table. Wetzel didn't even look up, but after a minute or so, said, finally looking at her, "We need you over here. Will you add this?" The student moved back to the table and added up the items, correctly.

It is this program that Sausalito Marin City school trustees point to most frequently as a sign of forward movement.

But other efforts considered important by most educators - such as increasing parental participation and improving classroom instruction through hands-on involvement from administrators as well as teachers - are less defined.

In all, say officials, solutions are a work in progress - much as they have been, with little to show for it, stretching back several decades.

Still, there appears to be no lack of commitment on the part of district officials to make it work. It is virtually all they talk about.

Seeking solutions

At a recent Sausalito Marin City trustees meeting, for example, the questions were often and varied but always aimed at the same thing: finding ways to unlock all possible doors to learning for a bunch of kids who not infrequently go on to high school reading poorly if at all.

Trustees George Stratigos, Whitney Hoyt, Shirley Thornton and Tom Clark asked question after question of staff about programs to reduce suspension and improve retention rates, enhance instruction, involve parents and broaden the educational experience of the district's 285 students.

The mood was familiar, informal, cordial but intensely focused - not on budgets, not on facilities planning, not on the endless bureaucratic demands so often the subject of trustee meetings in other less troubled districts. Here the only subject was low-achieving kids and learning, and how to overcome the socio-economic handicaps of the former so they can be unimpeded in their pursuit of the latter.

"Only 13 percent of eighth-graders are reading at grade level," said Hoyt, who also is principal at Mill Valley Middle School.

And referring to what all too often is the case, she said, "In the seventh grade if a kid can't read they are going to fail (in high school). I've seen too many kids go to Tam (High School) who can't read."

Said Carolyn Paxton, the district's assistant superintendent: "At MLK too few students have demonstrated improvement. I feel like we are dooming them not to be successful in high school."

It's a challenge as old as Brown vs. the Board of Education, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling that separate is not equal, unlocking desegregation across the country in an attempt to give blacks the same chance at a quality of life enjoyed by others. But what was not immediately understood, experts later would agree, were the complexities inherent in providing something so seemingly fundamental as education to a group that had been denied so much for so long.

It was like giving someone a treasure chest filled with gold but not having the key to unlock it, experts say.

Fifty-two years later, the challenge to one degree or another remains - including in Marin City, where experts say many children have no frames of reference or parental models to provide the foundation for learning that is essential. So, alternatives either have to be tried or ways found to engage parents - often a single parent who may hold more than one job and no time for anything else.

Parental involvement vital

Bruce Fuller, a professor of education at the University of California at Berkeley, said there is evidence that the earlier parents are involved in the process the better it is for their children.

"I think Head Start, in trying to work with kids at younger ages, is potentially promising for poor African American kids," he said.

"If (educators) can work with parents as kids are going through toddlerhood and try to encourage them to read with their kids and see child development as a project that needs to be attended to, it can encourage growth and maybe even de-mystify schools for poor parents."

A survey of principals and teachers in 257 California schools serving low-income students by EdSource, an independent not-for-profit educational think tank in Palo Alto, concluded that success as measured by the state's Academic Performance Index scores is dependent on a focused educational program, hands-on principals and teachers who emphasize curriculum approved by the state.

Additionally, the survey, conducted last year, found that academic success was more likely than not if a district had highly motivated teachers who took "responsibility for student achievement and believed the school has well-defined plans for instructional improvement and wide alignment and consistency in curriculum and instruction that is based upon state academic standards."

Stronger PTAs sought

All efforts at academically improving schools, educators say, require both patience and persistence and, most importantly, an understanding that progress must be measured in the smallest of increments - Parent Teacher Associations, for example.

Most public schools in California and elsewhere have PTAs, most of them filled with an overflow of parents eager to be a part of their children's education. At Sausalito Marin City, the PTA has been struggling with one or two parents.

PTA President Juanita Edwards said that over the past few weeks membership had grown to six parents of children at both Bayside and MLK.

She said she has been working with the head of the 16th District (Marin County) PTA representative, who has been offering suggestions aimed at increasing membership.

Included, said Edwards, the parent of an MLK seventh-grader, is providing child care for parents who attend PTA meetings and convincing parents that they can provide help in a variety of ways - stuffing envelopes, making phone calls - that does not require them to leave their homes in the evening.

Edwards, a director of Marin Network, a Marin City group aimed at helping parents and others in Marin City, said that at a recent potluck dinner meeting "packed" with parents she recruited three who were "excited" to become PTA members.

Trustrees at a recent school board meeting were enthusiastic when Edwards told them the news.

"It's a good sign when parents are getting more active," Hoyt said.

Stratigos said the district for years has been overly involved with state and federally funded programs, many of them products of President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society legislation of the 1960s, which he said are often at cross purposes and ill-defined.

His idea is to create a district focused on one thing only: the notion that all children are capable of obtaining a quality education as long as expectations are high and teachers and administrators are capable and committed to successfully teaching the skills basic to critical thinking and essential to academic success through college.

It is a deficiency in these skills - reading, writing, mathematics - that has doomed most of the district's eighth-grade graduates to failure in high school, say officials of both Sausalito Marin City and the Tam high school district.

Moving forward

Marin Schools Superintendent Mary Jane Burke said she believes things are on the upswing at Sausalito Marin City schools.

"In my mind the district is in fact making progress and moving forward," she said. "The challenges, while long-standing, are being addressed. It feels different. They are setting a target (of high test scores) and looking at both ends of the district." She was referring to trustee decisions to use Tam High School teachers at MLK and to examine the quality of preschool programs.

Trustees say they are committed to raising the expectations of teachers as well as students, believing that academic excellence is possible if students are made to believe they can be successful in school.

Debra Bradley, the district's new superintendent, who has been on the job for six weeks, declined to detail what she hoped to accomplish in her new position, even though trustees are known to have wanted her, at least in part, because of a reputation for being able to raise the test scores of districts with a high concentration of minority students.

Bradley would say only that she was meeting with teachers, students, other administrators, and parents to gain an understanding of what might be needed.

Trustees have adopted the slogan "Vision 900," a target of 900 on the state Academic Performance Index, a student test score achievement that would put the district in the rarified air of the best in Marin and California. The district's API this year was 692, the lowest in the county.

"If teachers believe all kids can learn and place high demands on kids it goes a long way," said UC Berkeley's Fuller, who lives in Kentfield. "The death knell in a lot of districts like Marin's is that idealistic teachers had expectations 20 to 30 years ago that were high. Now they have plummeted."

Segregated and excellent?

How to successfully teach minority students from poor economic backgrounds is a question that has vexed educators for decades. Busing was aimed at breaking down the barriers to learning by placing black children next to white children in classrooms, but it became the casualty of more than three decades of fiery emotion, overextended promises and premature proclamations of failure.

The end result of various attempts to turn things around at Sausalito Marin City schools since 1964 - including a brief attempt at desgregating its schools when there were enough white children in the district to do it - is a racially segregated, low academically achieving district.

Stratigos acknowledges the district is attempting to prove the exception to the Warren Court ruling that separate is not equal - he hopes to spin the legal and educational axiom on its head by taking it a step further and making the district better than any of Marin's other, predominantly white school districts.

To a suggestion that decades of experience and research augur against this, Stratigos replied: "The board is blind to history."

Contact Don Speich via e-mail at dspeich@marinij.com

FOCUSED: Tam High math teacher Dave Wetzel works with Rodneisha Earl (left), Whitney Polk (second from right) and Christine Celestine (right) at Martin Luther King Jr. Academy middle school as part of program to better prepare Sausalito Marin City students for high school. (IJ photo/Robert Tong)