San Diego County, CA November 7, 2000 Election
Smart Voter

THE "BLUEPRINT"

By Frances O'Neill Zimmerman

Candidate for Board Member; San Diego Unified School District; Trustee Area A

This information is provided by the candidate
The "Blueprint": experimenting on our kids
I voted against the unmodified "Blueprint" which was jammed through with a 3-2 vote of the Board's rubber stamp majority on March 14, 2000 -- after minimal exposure to the public and with no significant modifications after a maiden presentation only three months earlier.

There was overwhelming grassroots opposition to the "Blueprint" from community and teachers who convened by the thousands at three community forums and the March 14 Board meeting.

The "Blueprint" presages a radical and overwhelming restructuring of what you and I know as public education. (The other shoe is about to drop as district administration moves forward unilaterally with its Carnegie Foundation-funded planning grant to "transform" our high schools -- without any Board of Education involvement or the active participation of a single teacher or parent.) Public education needs strong leadership for thoughtful change to occur, but authoritarian mandates without community information or support cannot work -- massive public relations "spin" notwithstanding.

To fund the "Blueprint," virtually every district program and school site budget have been raided. This increasingly expensive proposal, now $62 million this year -- up from $49 million -- effectively destroys a comprehensive curriculum of language arts, social studies, math, science, music and art at elementary school, and the comprehensive curriculum at middle and senior high schools that includes electives such as social studies, science, music, art, foreign language and school-to-work opportunities. Schools' discretionary budgets have been halved -- or worse -- to pay for the "Blueprint" beginning this fall. Classroom aides have been dismissed.

  • EARLY WARNING SIGNS

Only 28% of high school students who need improvement in literacy chose to sign up for summer school literacy classes ("genre studies") in 2000.

  • CURRICULUM

Under the "Blueprint" the lowest-achieving high school students will have a daily curriculum of three hours of "literacy" and two hours of basic math. In the California Education Code all students are guaranteed the right to access the core curriculum -- a right that is ignored by the "Blueprint."

  • COUNSELING

Counseling programs -- so desperately needed to help our children's self-awareness and socialization in this era of hypersexuality, violence and alienation -- remain at bare-bones recession-level funding.

  • ELECTIVES

For the 2000-2001 school year electives have been cut at 29 of 45 secondary schools as a result of the "Blueprint." We have lost Spanish classes, highly-acclaimed AVID classes, music and art and speech. Aides have virtually disappeared. The full impact of their absence will be felt this fall.

  • DROP-OUTS

We risk increasing school drop-outs by assigning low-performing students to three-hour sections of "literacy" and two-hour sections of remedial math. I know about kids, and I doubt that demoralized and struggling young people will choose to stay in school under these bleak circumstances. (If the strugglers drop out, our test scores will go up, and we can claim a Pyrrhic victory.)

  • GOOD PREMISE, BAD PRACTICE

The admirable theoretical premise of the "Blueprint" -- to raise achievement levels of our historically under-performing Latino and African-American students to the levels of their Anglo counterparts -- is subverted in practice to a school day of resegregated remedial classrooms and a high school experience that will take at least five years -- if the students stick with it.

The "Blueprint" -- thrown together without stakeholder input and after only three months' public scrutiny, with little change except for its increasing price tag, and rubber-stamped by a politically co-opted 3-2 Board of Education -- is an unconscionable experiment on our kids.

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ca/sd Created from information supplied by the candidate: October 19, 2000 15:42
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