UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
NORTHERN DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA
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Plaintiffs, vs. SAN FRANCISCO UNIFIED
SCHOOL DISTRICT, et al, Defendants |
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(Related Case: Ho v. SFUSD, No. C-94-2418 WHO) RESPONSE OF CONSENT DECREE MONITOR TO 3/2/01
WORKING DRAFT OF COMPREHENSIVE PLAN |
As the SFNAACP
v. SFUSD Consent Decree Monitor
for the State of California, I am filing this response to the SFUSD Draft
Comprehensive Plan, pursuant to the February 27, 2001 order of this Court.
At the
outset, the monitoring team would like to commend the district for its efforts
in drafting a substantial and thorough comprehensive plan. A tremendous amount of time and effort has
been expended, and the entire process – facilitated by this Court under the
Consent Decree – promises to benefit all students in the district.
We were
particularly pleased with the level of specificity included in this working
document, especially in the sections relating to literacy goals, on-site staff
development, and programmatic changes.
The district has moved from the preliminary steps articulated in the
parties’ Third Joint Report to a much more concrete set of directions.
In light of
these positive steps, we would endorse the district’s goal of extending the
Consent Decree beyond the December 2002 target date to enable district
officials to meet their step-by-step objectives. Unforeseen circumstances occurring since the adoption of the Ho
Settlement Agreement have significantly delayed the anticipated transition to
unitary status. The district has seen
two major changes in leadership over the past three years. First came the unexpected departure of
Superintendent Rojas and the sudden exodus of most key members of his
leadership team. A year later,
Superintendent Ackerman replaced Interim Superintendent Davis, and a
substantial transformation has taken place, both with regard to district
leadership as well as with regard to policy.
The district legal team has also undergone significant change during
this time, as has the leadership and composition of the School Board. In addition, SFUSD was hit with a series of
unexpected financial crises that have necessarily dominated the day-to-day
decision-making process.
During these
past two years, we were consistently frustrated by the lack of any active
intervention on the part of the district to address resegregation by creating a
viable new student assignment plan. Now
that the leadership situation has stabilized, however, and new directions have
been set forth consistent with Consent Decree principles and goals, it is
certainly appropriate to consider an extension of the decree so that the young
people of the district can fully benefit from its mandates and the City can see
this through to a positive conclusion.
Yet while it
is clear that additional time is needed, it is not clear from the Draft
Comprehensive Plan that SFUSD would require five full additional years to meet
its objectives under the decree. We
urge the district to bolster the draft by including the additional evidence
that would warrant such an extension.
In particular, such bolstering would require more specific and complete
timetables. While
some portions of the plan already contain step-by-step timetables, others are
very general, with little guarantee that anything concrete will happen. We urge the district to review the plan –
especially the health-related inquiry (Page 47), the WSF Pilot Program (Page
48), and the Accountability for All section (Pages 91-93) – and set forth more
specific timetables in this context.
*******
In addition,
we would offer the following recommendations for strengthening the document.
While many of
the district-wide goals and strategic steps identified in this document will
necessarily help address low-performing schools, the document lacks a fully
articulated vision regarding specific steps that must be taken to turn around
SFUSD’s chronically low-performing schools.
At the present time, these schools include – but are not limited to –
Starr King Elementary, Gloria R. Davis & Potrero Hill Middle Schools, and
Balboa, McAteer, and Mission High Schools.
From the
beginning, a central feature of the Consent Decree has been its focus on
turning around low-performing schools.
As documented in the recent reports of the monitoring team, this focus
was initially manifested in the efforts directed toward improving the so-called
“Phase One” schools.[1] From 1993 through 1997, pursuant to the
recommendations in the 1992 Committee of Experts’ report and the mandate
specified in the parties’ Second Joint Report, the CSIP/Reconstitution process
was implemented district-wide…under a requirement that three schools per year
were to be reconstituted “until the task is completed.”[2] The revised and updated Special Plan for
Bayview Hunters Point – released in 1995 – provided a vision for extending the
original Consent Decree principles and goals throughout the entire district,
and this vision clearly informed district practices during that era.[3]
Negotiations with the teachers union from 1997 through 1999 focused on modifying this process and identifying new directions for addressing low-performing schools, but these negotiations were suspended when the new Immediate Intervention/Underperforming Schools Program (II/USP) for low-performing schools was adopted in SFUSD pursuant to the new Public Schools Accountability Act.[4] The district is now in its second year of II/USP, and most – although not all – of the chronically low-performing schools are involved.
A separate section of the Comprehensive Plan -- informed by this recent history, addressing the role that II/USP will necessarily play, and identifying additional strategies both for the II/USP schools and for those low-performing schools not involved in the program – would be an essential component of such a document.
The importance
of identifying additional strategies to turn around low-performing schools is
reflected in the focus on McAteer High School in the monitoring team’s
Supplemental Report to this Court, dated February 12, 2001. While the district’s comprehensive plan does
include two ideas aimed at turning McAteer around, these ideas by themselves
offer little chance that anything will change.
The Comprehensive Plan envisions the re-locating of the Curriculum
Improvement and Professional Development (CIPD) offices to the McAteer grounds,
and discusses exploratory steps that may lead to the establishment of a teacher
academy at the school. But there is no
evidence that district offices at the same sprawling and underutilized facility
will have any positive effect whatsoever.
And a teacher academy – even if it is ultimately established – may or
may not change anything. These ideas
are good starting points, but they cannot replace the sort of detailed vision
for turning low-performing schools around that is embodied in the original
Special Plan for Bayview-Hunters Point – a plan that achieved significant
success at the time.[5]
The district
is to be commended for its detailed and substantial efforts to come up with a
new student assignment plan that would be consistent with both the original
mandate of the Consent Decree and the requirements of the Ho Settlement
Agreement. As we stated in the February
2001 Supplemental Report (at Page 17), “A new student assignment plan is an
absolute necessity at the present time.”
One point in
the draft document, however, bears particular scrutiny. The district proposes a series of steps that
may include the use of race if and only if, after the seven-factor process is
implemented, a school becomes racially identifiable. The implication is that the district will act unilaterally in
this regard. Yet it must be noted that
Paragraph G of the Ho Settlement Agreement includes a step-by-step process that
would involve all the parties in the event of
“identifiable racial or ethnic concentration at a particular school.”[6] It may be appropriate, therefore, to re-work
this feature of the student assignment methodology so that it might be situated
within the framework that has already been agreed upon by the parties and
approved by this Court.
b.
Parent
& Community Participation – In the 1983 decision by this Court approving
the original Consent Decree, it was noted that “the
District must continue to encourage and improve participation by parent,
students, staff, and other members of the community in developing programs for
desegregation and academic excellence.
The parties are authorized to submit further recommendations to the
Court to assure adequate community representation in the implementation of the
Decree.”[7] Yet this Draft Comprehensive Plan contains
little or no direction in this regard.
At selected school sites over the years, we have noted the success of
PTA programs, beacon schools, and community outreach in general. We urge SFUSD to replicate these successful
strategies district-wide.
c.
Principal Staff Development – It is clear that much of this plan
depends on the ability of principals to implement professional development
programs and devise new monitoring techniques at the local school site
level. Yet there is virtually nothing
in the document regarding the training of the principals for these complex and
multi-faceted tasks. In previous
reports, we have urged the district to strengthen principal staff development,
and a first step in this process would be the inclusion of specific steps
toward that goal in the revised comprehensive plan.
*******
Pursuant to the February 27, 2001 Order of this Court, we
look forward to the responses of the parties and to the further positive steps
that the district will be taking to revise and update its comprehensive plan.
Dated: March 26, 2001 Respectfully submitted,
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STUART BIEGEL Consent Decree Monitor |
[1] The first schools to be targeted at the beginning of the Consent Decree (1983-1985) continue to be called ‘Phase One’ schools. They include George Washington Carver, Charles Drew, and Malcolm X (formerly Sir Francis Drake) elementary schools, Martin Luther King and Horace Mann middle schools, and Phillip & Sala Burton High. King and Burton were brand-new schools, created by the Consent Decree. The other four were reconstituted.
[2] See Report #17 (at Page 162): “As documented at great length in previous reports, the Comprehensive Schools Improvement Program (CSIP) and the accompanying reconstitution process for schools that did not improve were at the center of an explicit SFUSD plan to improve academic achievement in the 1990’s. Under this process, low-performing schools were placed on a CSIP list and targeted for close monitoring and additional reform efforts. Most "graduated" from the list after two years, but 9 were reconstituted from 1994 through 1997…with district officials bringing in new administrators and substantially new staffs to replace existing personnel. In addition, during this same time period, three new Consent Decree schools were established, and one other low-performing school was disestablished. These actions brought the total of dramatic changes for the entire fifteen-year reconstitution period (1983-1997) to 15 schools reconstituted, five new Consent Decree schools established, and one high school disestablished.”
[3] The report
by the Committee of Experts in 1992 had concluded that the implementation of
the Consent Decree’s Special Plan for Bayview-Hunters Point Schools was the
major cause of success at Phase One schools.
Thus the committee recommended that the district update the plan for use
in the 1990’s, and that this plan be implemented in all targeted schools under
the decree. Pursuant to this
recommendation -- and consistent with the recommendations in the parties’
Second Joint Report -- the district moved forward to update the Special Plan
for Bayview-Hunters Point and to implement it throughout the City. See Special
Plan for Bayview-Hunters Point Schools, Draft Update, SFUSD Division for
Integration, April, 1995.
[4] See Public Schools Accountability Act of 1999, Immediate Intervention/ Underperforming Schools Program, Cal. Educ. Code, Article 3, Sections 52053-52055.5. See generally Report #17, at Pages 162-172.
[5]
Comments in this regard, set forth in Report #17
(at Page 172), bear repeating at this time:
“In past reports, we have found that the two most
successful reform efforts targeting low-performing schools over the entire
17-year period of the Consent Decree have been the Phase One reforms of 1983-1985
and the CSIP/Reconstitution program of 1993-1997. Although the more recent efforts were not uniformly successful,
most of the schools that participated in CSIP did indeed improve. Yet not every one of the schools that did
improve has been able to sustain the momentum, and some have given up their
original gains.
“It
must be emphasized that there is no magic formula in the world of education
reform. No one silver bullet has yet
been found in this context. Research
has shown that turning around a low-performing school requires -- among other
things -- the right combination of people, interpersonal communication,
programs, funding, and relationships.
It requires a great deal of hard, day-to-day work over
time...establishing partnerships between and among the district’s educators,
the school’s students, and the local community. Such efforts -- even if successful -- do not continue
automatically. People change, students
change, circumstances change, and new relationships must be built. Turning around a low-performing school is
thus an ongoing process, not a one-time operation that can then be expected to
last indefinitely.”
[6] See SFNAACP v. SFUSD et al, Ho v. SFUSD et al, Opinion & Order, 59 F. Supp. 2d 1021, 1026 (N.D. Cal. 1999).
[7] SFNAACP v. SFUSD et al, Opinion & Order, 576 F. Supp. 34, 42 (N.D. Cal. 1983).