No excuses: We must improve our schools

There is only one word which properly fits the quality of education offered most students in the Lodi Unified School District — mediocre.

And when it comes to the future of our children, there is no room for mediocrity.

“Making the Grade” is a probing and in-depth look at LUSD academics by the News-Sentinel. The preparation of this series took hundreds of hours of staff time and was brought about by our alarm at the disappointing Academic Performance Index results for LUSD schools. Our schools are generally lagging behind those districts with similar socioeconomic conditions.

Indeed, despite years of optimistic “We are moving ahead” promises from district officials, the API rankings showed students slipping toward the rear of the pack instead of forging ahead.

What our investigation showed is a district which, while struggling to improve, remains on the verge of floundering academically due to a combination of past mistakes, lack of community support and, until lately, an unwillingness to put into place much-needed reforms.

That, as they say, is the bad news. There is good news as well. As our series showed, change and improvement are possible, even at schools serving poor and disadvantaged schools.

In fact, at the schools that are progressing rapidly, there is a can-do spirit that is irrepressible.

Lodi Unified seems poised for such success.

Here are the priorities we see here:

Scuttle Concept 6. Any meaningful reform program must begin with the scrapping of the ill-fated Concept 6, the year-round school calendar which the LUSD adopted some years ago.

Here’s a persuasive tidbit: The only other district in California now using Concept 6 is the Los Angeles Unified School District.

Concept 6 is simply the Edsel of year-round schedules.

In the world of Concept 6, there are only 163 school days — 17 fewer days than the 180 days found in almost every other district in California. Moreover, the breaks between sessions are much too long, usually two months. Educators in the main hold that six weeks is the absolute limit. After that, both knowledge and continuity are lost.

However, what is most disturbing about Concept 6 is that the educational needs of the students played second fiddle to the district’s need to free up classroom space due to chronic overcrowding.

We can understand the frustration of district officials faced with ever more students on one hand and an electorate that has repeatedly refused to pass much-needed bond measures which would have allowed new schools to have been built. There is another bond proposal on the November ballot that, if passed, will do much to accelerate the process of getting those much-needed schools built.

But whether the bond are approved or not, the district must move forward with the switching to a better and universal school year calendar.

Superintendent Bill Huyett, who is approaching his year anniversary in that post, deserves praise for his efforts to turn things around and lift at least a couple of schools off out of the Concept 6 swamp. However, his efforts are — and must be — only the beginning.

Groom excellence in leadership. The district must have at its priority the attracting, training and, above all, retention of excellent principals who are, in turn, given the resources and authority to turn the academic performances of this district’s students around. (Concept 6 is a factor here, too, as it places unrelenting pressure on principals to juggle classrooms, teachers and programs over a year with longer school days.) In the age of API, principals must be the instructional leaders.

Align the curriculum. Another area that is in need of immediate reform is the LUSD curriculum. What we have is not a well paved educational highway that successfully leads a student from kindergarten to 12th grade, but a rutted road to nowhere filled with the potholes of ill-conceived expediencies.

In real estate the three keywords are: Location, location and location. In the LUSD, those three key words must become: Align, align and align. The district must create a seamless garment that is focused on the state standards.

Get the kids reading, right away. Among fundamentals, reading must be first among equals. Nothing has emerged as critical to success among the high-performing schools and districts. Unfortunately in California, this subject has been lost in a blur of debate and experimentation. In Inglewood, a poor district in Los Angeles, good results have been achieved with a single-minded focus on reading. The reading curriculum is standardized, simple and effective. In Texas, reading has been emphasized in a statewide reading initiative. Test scores and academic success have soared.

Get the best teachers at the toughest schools. There is currently no district-wide effort to attract and retain teachers at the poorest, most challenging schools. There must be. If excellent teachers are given excellent leadership, professional nurturing, financial incentives and plenty of resources, we think they will be attracted and retained at such schools at improved levels.

Become a data-driven organism. How do you chart progress without the charts? The districts that are moving swiftly, such as Sacramento City Unified, are so-called data-driven districts. They take pains to track the performance of each student, each teacher, each school. This is not done punitively, but constructively, so that weak spots can be strengthened and strengths celebrated.

That is the least — the very least — that the LUSD owes to the children it is trying, and has so often failed, to properly educate.

We are optimistic Lodi Unified’s leadership is turning the corner on improvement. And we would urge them to adopt the philosophy of at least one educator we profiled in this series:

“No excuses.”

— News-Sentinel