Curriculum Institute spotlights practical strategies for governance teams 

More than 15,500 hours of instruction time—5,500 more than what’s available—would be needed to meet the 3,500 different academic benchmarks established for some 255 different academic standards that are now in place throughout the country, participants learned at the outset of CSBA’s Curriculum Institute in Monterey July 7-8.

“We’d have to change schooling from K-12 to K-22” to meet all the requirements, Marzano & Associates consultant Maria C. Foseid lamented. The answer is to focus on an achievable, guaranteed and viable curriculum. Academic specialists, public school educators and more than 120 board members and administrators did just that for the next two days, guided by the observations they shared, experts’ presentations and insights gleaned from CSBA’s own task forces on high school reform and science education.

Ida Oberman and Catherine A. Townsley of Springboard Schools, a nonprofit network of educators formerly known as the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative, reviewed the results of a 2005 Springboard study of three school districts in California that made great strides with high populations of English learners and low-income students. Oberman, Springboard’s director of research and evaluation, said the keys include transparency—setting explicit goals for student performance and offering public progress reports; using testing to identify and remediate gaps in learning instead of as an end in itself; and investing in administrators’ and teachers’ professional development.

The messages were reinforced in the Curriculum Institute’s workshop sessions. Del Alberti, a longtime educator and a governance consultant for CSBA, advised board members to make allies of community members. “You want to encourage the public to participate,” Alberti said. “Put your biggest critics on your key committees.”

Rob Roberts, principal of Los Altos High School in the Hacienda La Puente Unified School District in Los Angeles County, also had practical advice for governance teams. “If there’s something you can do as a school board member, you invest in books,” Roberts advised during a workshop on high school reform. Los Altos was one of four “high impact high schools” that have made great strides with previously under-performing students, as featured in a national report last year from the Education Trust. The school also figures prominently in “Governance Matters: The School Board Guide to Reinvigorating High Schools,” produced by CSBA’s High School Reform Task Force.

“If you have [unsatisfactory] results, and you do it the same way, do you expect different results?” Roberts asked, applying Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity to ineffective instructional practices. Instead, Roberts said Los Altos has incorporated many innovations in support of the high expectations it sets for all its students, including adoption of the University of California’s “a-g” college prep curriculum as its default curriculum.

Dean Gilbert, a science education consultant to the Los Angeles County Office of Education, encouraged conference participants to apply scientific methods to their work on education governance teams. That includes challenging state restrictions on curriculum and instructional materials.

Many state standards emphasize recall of facts when what students really need to learn is scientific inquiry, Gilbert observed. “We tend to restrict instructional material rather than open it up. ... We want to add to the toolbox rather than take away from it.” He challenged his audience to press the state for change, reflecting recommendations of the Joint Task Force on Science formed by CSBA and the California Science Teachers Association. Gilbert is president of CSTA.

Denise Clark Pope of Stanford University’s School of Education concluded the Curriculum Institute with a focus on “stressed-out students” who suffer anxiety, depression and sleep disorders as they strive to succeed, even though they often are alienated from their studies and fail to see their relevance.

School reform can help, but that requires students, parents and the broader community of stakeholders to be involved. “Unless you get the parents involved, change is not going to happen,” Pope said. “I know we can’t change the world, but we are not just educators of students, we are educators of parents,” Pope told the institute participants. “Because of who you are, you’ve got to start the dialogue.”