Express yourself

That’s always a good idea, depending of course on where and how.
We want to remind our readers of the opportunity next Tuesday, Oct. 13, to express their opinions. The school board is scheduled then to consider the proposal by Gary De Smet, one of the five elected trustees, for a new mission statement: “Every student at grade level.”
Readers know that we’ve bemoaned the poor academic performance of Sonoma students, with more than half of them not being “proficient” at doing the reading, writing or reasoning called for in the state standards for their own grade level. This is a true tragedy, one that leaves many students ill prepared for their lives after high school. Data released this week by the high school shows that nearly half of the freshman (49 percent) and nearly two-thirds of the sophomores (65 percent) are getting a D or F in one of their classes.
And this low level of achievement was expected, as the high school administration actually designated some 45 percent of incoming freshman this year, before the students had even set foot on campus, as likely to be in this D or F category. The expected figure for sophomores was 56 percent.
Why this expectation of failure? Because everyone involved knows that some large number of students who cannot do grade-level work nevertheless are promoted to the next grade each year. It happens for students leaving fifth grade and going on to Adele or Altimira middle schools. It happens for students moving from second grade to third. It happens at every grade level all the way into high school.
We’re pleased to see this matter of low expectations tackled head-on by the school board. Focusing the district’s efforts clearly on student achievement in this way – “Every student at grade level” – would also have the benefit of being an easily measurable goal, so that progress toward its attainment can be tracked. This allows decisions moving forward to be informed by hard data so that course corrections can be implemented, as appropriate.
It doesn’t mean that half of every class is to be held back. Rather, the new mission statement would mean that the high expectation for student success invigorates every decision about resource allocation; it would make the whole government education enterprise dependent on getting individual students to be proficient at their own level. For whatever reason, the data shows that this isn’t happening now.
We doubt that anyone really believes that every student will reach that goal. There are students with severe learning disabilities or other difficulties that realistically prevent them from becoming proficient in the work expected of other students their age. There are also students arriving from out of the country who have little formal education or limited English fluency and who enroll in, say, eighth grade; realistically they cannot make up the lost years.
But those limitations shouldn’t mean that the goal itself is not adopted, any more than we should not adopt the goal of world peace just because the Middle East seems intractable, or that Rotary International should not have adopted its goal of wiping polio off the globe just because it was still rampant in many locales.
Low expectations lead to low achievement, which the data shows we have here. The school board should model the opposite, by setting high goals and persevering in their pursuit. In our view, that is its role.