Concerned that a significant number of Palisades Charter High School students are failing math, a group of parents are asking the school board to take action this semester. ’Let’s not wait for the new administration to lead us into the future ‘ there’s more that can be done to stop the bleeding now,’ parent Claudia Harrington said at the February 15 board meeting. PaliHi is seeking a permanent principal to start this summer. Parent Gina Kornfeind then presented the board with 40 letters that she had collected in two days from parents, expressing their desire to see improvements in the math department. ’It saddens me to hear over and over from parents, ‘I have been trying to help with this for the past six years but nothing has changed.” Kornfeind told the board. ‘That is not acceptable.’ In 2010, PaliHi posted low math scores on the California Standardized Tests (CST). At the December 14 board meeting, PaliHi Director of Instruction Richard Thomas reported that 55 percent of all students were not proficient in algebra 1, and 73 percent were not proficient in geometry, according to the CST results. Seventy-five percent of African Americans and 65 percent of Hispanics/Latinos were not proficient in algebra 1, while 86 percent of African Americans and 75 percent of Hispanics/Latinos were not proficient in geometry. Sixty-two percent of white students were not proficient in geometry and 48 percent in algebra 2. Furthermore, Thomas reported that there was a significant decrease by the freshmen on their CST scores from 2009 to 2010 in algebra 1 and geometry. The students dropped from 81 percent scoring proficient or above to 70 percent and from 72 percent to 46 percent, respectively. Parents also report that a large number of students are receiving Ds and Fs in their math classes. ’It’s not just the low testers who are failing in math,’ Harrington told the board. ‘It’s the high achievers, the A and B students, the honors and AP-track kids.’ She noted that seniors are now trying to explain to colleges why they received Ds and Fs in math last semester and As and Bs in everything else. ’It’s literally knocking kids out of the running for colleges where they belong, or forcing them out because they are no longer eligible for merit funding,’ Harrington said. Parent Mike Stryer, a social studies teacher at Fairfax High School, told the board at its November 16 meeting that many students take summer math classes at Fairfax because they fail at PaliHi. ’I urge you to make improvements in the math department one of your highest priorities in this academic year,’ Stryer wrote in an e-mail the following day to the board. Harrington suggested that those teachers who need help receive additional professional development. She proposed teachers be assigned to classes on the basis of their skill rather than their seniority. Some teachers could be better at math analysis, while others might excel at statistics. ’Let’s raise teachers’ morale by empowering them to teach and have them teach what they’re good at rather than closing our eyes and pretending there’s no problem,’ she said. Kornfeind asked that the administration initiate a task force of parents, teachers and students who can work together to discuss math-department improvements. ’We want to be a part of the solution,’ she said. ‘This is not about a specific teacher problem. That is a symptom of a systemic issue.’ Interim Principal Marcia Haskin responded to the parents’ concerns during her report to the board on February 15. ’As an interim [principal], I have probably been in more classrooms than in the last 20 years of the school,’ Haskin said, noting that as a result, the school surpassed 800 on its 2009 and 2010 API scores. ‘I expect this year we will go up as well.’ API is a state standard that measures every public school’s progress from year to year and is based on test results from the CSTs, the California High School Exit Examination and the California Alternate Performance Assessment. Although the school’s API score has improved to 819, Haskin said there are still areas that need improvement. ‘Math is the focus for many people this year because math is maybe the most difficult subject in any school,’ Haskin said. ‘I have been at other schools and the issues with math are not germane to just Pali.’ Haskin told the board that she is visiting math classrooms and working with the department. She has developed a peer-assistance and review team, which will help new and tenured teachers. In response to the Harrington’s suggestion to reassign teachers on the basis of their skill, Haskin said she loves the idea, but ‘we are a union school, we go by seniority. It’s not all by skill. We have seniority issues.’ She thinks Kornfeind’s idea of a task force is novel, but ‘how do you help unless you observe?’ She noted that parents are not trained like administrators to evaluate a teacher. Board member Jason Cutler said he believes that a task force could visit other schools with successful math departments and provide suggestions for how their methods can be implemented at PaliHi. Haskin encouraged the board and parents to exercise patience. She said she believes it’s important to help teachers by building up their morale rather than attacking them. ’You can’t fix in one year what has been going on for 20, and I would just like a little credit for trying instead of just sitting back and collecting a paycheck like most interims do,’ she said.
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