Saratoga News

Minoru Sam Araki: On state committee

Saratogan tells LWV how state schools could change

By Michelle Alaimo

Saratoga native and former Lockheed Martin Missiles & Space president, Minoru Sam Araki, is working to change the way California schools run. Araki is part of a committee working on a plan to reinvent the K-12 educational system under the guidance of Delaine Eastin, state superintendent of public instruction.

Araki, who recently spoke to the Los Gatos-Saratoga-Monte Sereno League of Women Voters, was hand-picked by Eastin to chair the "Incentives for the Improvement of Pupil Academic Achievement," along with Chuck McCully, superintendent of the Fresno Unified School District. The committee, which includes a group of nearly 40 educators, business persons and parents, began meeting in May and has since broken down into two subcommittees.

"Our goal is not to set standards," Eastin said. "This committee's task is to ensure that when the state Board [of Education] adopts those standards, we have a standards-based accountability system with high performance incentives to propose to the governor and the Legislature."

Araki, who is on the Rewards and Intervention Advisory Subcommittee, told the LWV that California schools are in the last quartile for reading, writing, spelling, math and science. He suggested several reasons why this is so, including lack of standards, defocusing on core classes, forced integration and busing and loss of accountability.

The committee has been working toward the design and implementation of an accountability system based on models which are in effect in several states, including Kentucky and Texas.

In order to correct problems in the California educational system, Araki said the committee agreed that a set of standards should be developed and approved by the state, and that the state also needs to set up standardized testing so that all students are measured equally. The committee will likely suggest that accountability for low test scores and other school problems be placed back on schools, teachers and the community.

The most controversial part of the proposal is called "Rewards and Interventions." Under this 10-year plan, all schools must achieve a 90 percent passing rate on standardized tests. The testing plan would take about a year to implement once standards are approved by the state. One percent of the state's educational budget would be set aside to fund the rewards program, Araki said.

Two "grades" would be given to a school based on the tests' outcome. The first would be determined by how many students pass the test, the second by how close the school came to meeting its growth or improvement target for the year. Schools that do well would receive monetary awards, while schools that don't reach the growth target would not receive any awards. Instead, those schools would be assisted with a recovery plan to help them achieve their goal the next year.

Critics of the plan fear that teachers will simply train students to pass tests in order to receive monetary awards for the school, instead of challenging students to learn. Araki said that the goal is to build a school system based on team effort where students aren't being pushed through just to reach a goal but to improve the learning system.

"You want every student to improve, not necessarily every student to pass," Araki said.

He added that the California school system needs to change. The K-12 educational system is our lifeblood, Araki said. "If our lifeblood begins to fail," he said, "we will become a third-class state over time."

The proposal is being finalized and will be presented to Eastin and the state board. The board hopes to present it to the Legislature by the end of the year. If the plan is approved, the state-board-adopted standards are expected to begin application in the spring of 1999.

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