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City Beat
Preliminary report says the district diversifying its schools
Consultant says some changes could improve the program
By Kate Carter
A consultant to the San Jose Unified School District told board members Feb. 21 that their desegregation policy and its implementation are working well but could use some improvements.
John Grate of JH Grate Associates later told the Willow Glen Resident, "In general, we feel the district's process is probably one of the most productive in the country, but we don't think it should rest on its laurels."
He also said that many of the challenges faced by district schools, especially those in Willow Glen, of attracting students could be alleviated by improving the schools' efforts in marketing and recruitment.
"I think Willow Glen does need to nurture their relationships with the community," he told the Resident.
Grate's presentation before the board was one of his consulting team's preliminary reports on a two-year study it is conducting on how well the district is accomplishing the two-pronged goal of its court desegregation order--improving Latino student achievement and using a school choice process to create an integrated ethnic makeup in the schools.
The district was found to be voluntarily segregated in the mid-'80s and has since been receiving state money to establish better methods of getting the largely Latino population in its northern region to mix with the largely white population in its southern region. The district opted to do this by creating magnet schools at both ends of the district and allowing parents to choose where to send their children, hoping that choice would attract ethnically mixed populations to schools.
About a year and a half ago, though, the district board began to look more closely at its desegregation policies, especially how its recent return to neighborhood schools at the elementary level affected its goals. In addition, board member Carol Myers, who represents Willow Glen, and Willow Glen parents began to criticize the district's choice policy, saying it favored segregated schools over Willow Glen's "naturally desegregated" ones and caused Willow Glen youth to attend schools elsewhere.
The board hired Grate and his team in December 2000 to create an in-depth report of the effects of desegregation efforts and suggestions for how they could be improved.
"We needed to come up with the facts from an external viewpoint," SJUSD Superintendent Linda Murray said.
The full report is due in June, but Grate provided the board members with a preliminary report and explanation of his early findings. The team has visited each school site and met with individual principals and administrators, met with the district's board and desegregation office, conducted a parent survey and compiled and analyzed demographic, school choice and academic performance data.
"We are still working, and we have a lot to do yet," Grate said.
The team also separately analyzed information pertaining to Willow Glen and compared it to information gathered from the whole district, to get a better understanding of Willow Glen's situation and concerns, Grate said.
In particular, he presented the board with responses from Willow Glen parents about the quality of the district's education and policy of school choice and compared those to responses from district parents. In Willow Glen, 73 percent of white parents and 89 percent of Latino parents rated the district's quality of education as "good" or "excellent." Districtwide, 80 percent of whites and 81 percent of Latinos rated the quality "good" or "excellent."
In Willow Glen, 74 percent of white parents and 86 percent of Latino parents supported the district's choice policy. District-wide, 77 percent of whites and 84 percent of Latinos supported choice.
Grate also said that, if the district were to restrict or eliminate school choice, 22 to 34 percent of white parents, 25 percent of Latino parents and 26 percent of others would definitely or probably remove their children from the district.
At the meeting, Myers requested that the responses from Willow Glen parents be analyzed by whether or not the parents sent their children to schools outside Willow Glen. Grate said he would have the team work on that.
Myers also responded to Grate's suggestion that schools promote themselves more, saying that schools with popular programs will be automatically more attractive to students, and others without them are at a disadvantage.
"You need to have a product that somebody wants to buy," she said. "That's one of the downsides of desegregation."
Board member Richard Garcia suggested, though, that district students and parents choose schools for many different reasons than just the programs they offer.
Grate agreed.
"In open choice programs across the nation, students make decisions based on what they hear from others," he said. "In many cases, [the schools they choose] don't have a special program."
Grate acknowledged that Willow Glen schools do lose significant numbers of their neighborhood students to other schools. However, he told the Resident that Willow Glen middle and high schools do reflect what the district is trying to accomplish with desegregation, and that the students who don't choose Willow Glen are balanced by those who do.
The report data showed that there were significant declines in students choosing Willow Glen High School and San Jose High Academy in the spring of 2001.
Grate suggested that the district review how it prioritizes interdistrict transfers by students from their neighborhood school to another school and possibly come up with a more flexible program that would create better ethnic mixes.
In the district, a student choosing to attend a school is given priority if he or she will contribute to the school's ethnic mix. By ethnicity, students are classified as "majority"--white, or "minority"--Latino. Schools are also classified as "majority" or "minority;" however, that classification is not made based on the school's actual student population but on the population of its surrounding neighborhood.
Willow Glen elementary, middle and high schools are three of the district's five schools classified as majority by their surrounding neighborhood populations but have minority enrollments, the report showed. Cory Elementary School and Lincoln High School are the two schools classified as minority but with majority student populations.
Of the district's three elementary magnet schools, Willow Glen's River Glen School is the only one that maintains itself at close to the district's minority/majority profile; Hacienda Elementary and Hammer Montessori do not.
"This is where targeted recruitment and marketing needs to take place," Grate said. "Public perception plays an important role in the choice process." Grate told the board to emphasize the need some schools have for actively seeking out more diverse populations.
Grate recommended that the district retain its school choice statistics longer to track trends and help make decisions on where to place students.
In terms of Latino student achievement, Grate said the team is still working on the standardized test data, but said that overall achievement in the district is improving at higher averages than statewide. He also said that more Latino students are enrolling in advanced classes than before.
One problem the team identified, he said, is a lack of collaboration between bilingual teachers and English-only teachers to prepare students for the transition between the two programs.
Grate also said that the district could do a better job of allocating its desegregation dollars, which were budgeted as $31 million of state money for this year. While the district is freeing up some of that money by covering other expenses with general fund money, there exist some "vestiges" of the district's previous desegregation efforts, still receiving desegregation money, that no longer conform to its current plans. In addition, the district continues to spend the same amount on transportation as it did before it switched to elementary neighborhood schools. Grate suggested the district look at cost-cutting measures in that area.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
