Editorial: The perils of innovation

“It’s also why we haven’t seen the enormously popular “Ohlone Way” philosophy implemented across the district.”

That, and the very minor fact that those in neighborhood schools don’t want it.

Someone forget the word “disruption”. I guess that is not a good word right now for a school system but it seems like a good word for every other scheme going on out there.

When Greendell closed my son ended up at what was then Ohlone on Charleston. That was billed as an open school. Turns out that works better for girls than is does for athletic boys. Onward to Fairmeadow – a standard elementary school. Ohlone is now located in a different area of the city, presumably a standard elementary school.

That aside I am happy that Cubberley is being put to good use as a school. We desperately need more schools and that site has good fields. The facilities can use a touch-up but that is all to the good. Congratulations for a good use of the obvious location for the school.

Resolving the overcrowding of the MS and HS campuses trumps anyone’s need for a special program at it’s own publicly private campus.

I’d love to see specialized programs – but not the “Oholone Way” as presented above.

The first priority is solving the problem that affects all students. Then develop a template where the possibility of tailored programs can be implemented at any of the three HS campuses. It may turn out that one campus specializes in journalism, another in performing arts, another in science/math… If so, allow transfers within the district — but at the same time, integrate these students into the typical HS environment — clubs, teams, events, etc. that every kid enjoys.

I watched the board meeting on Monday where this was discussed. I am also uneasy.

The room was stacked with parents complaining about the lack of stimulation and interest in our middle schools, and praising the idea of a choice middle school with Stanford D-school help as the solution. But it’s not the solution, at least for most kids. Big disconnect for me.

The committee’s response? “Harry Potter” like “house” system for middle schools (and high schools). That really seems like a throwaway line to me. It was like, “we have to toss some kind of a bone, otherwise everyone will realize it’s gruel for the masses, cake for the few.”

Board members Caswell and Dauber did raise the “why choice” question and it wasn’t answered.

I would like to see McGee get excited about making our existing schools better, along with a new school that we need. As it is, it looks like he is bored by the problem of fixing and wants to start over with “clean piece of paper.” He is not the superintendent of innovative new schools, though. He is the superintendent of PAUSD and needs to solve the problems our students have now.

Three of the four existing PAUSD “choice” programs (Ohlone, Mandarin Immersion, and Hoover) are in the southeast. They have had awful impacts on traffic and neighborhood school cohesiveness–largely because of the exclusive lottery system.

Example: Families who live near Ohlone are assigned to the Palo Verde (PV) Elementary school, but PV is oversubscribed. So if they are unlucky in the Ohlone lottery, then they very likely will be overflowed from their so-called “neighborhood school” which has a HUGE attendance boundary because it has to encompass the Ohlone area. Then they have to apply to get into another neighborhood school, hoping to at least stay in the southeast cluster…but those neighborhood schools are also over subscribed. The district report dismisses this as problem, saying most of them get into schools in the southeast cluster–but some do not and many of them now have to travel more than two miles to get to cluster school rather then a block or two to their former neighborhood school. similar problems occur around other lottery schools.

If PAUSD is going to put yet another new so-called “choice” program in this cluster for 700-1050 students, please draw an attendance boundary around it (at least a mile around the campus) and give the impacted residents of the neighborhood 100% priority placement if they want it. Also give those residents the option to go to their assigned comprehensive high school if the new “choice” is not palatable to them. In fact, this should be done with all choice schools. This would minimize the traffic impacts of schools that draw from the ENTIRE school district.

Cubberley is ONE block away from Hoover Elementary School, a “choice” program where the vast majority of students are driven to school (only 7% bike) and Challenger School, a private school that draws from Mountain View and Sunnyvale primarily–and is non-compliant with its CUP TDM agreement. These neighborhoods are already impacted by lottery school traffic. Seriously, the city should be concerned about impacts on school routes to Fairmeadow, JLS, and local neighborhood streets…so should Max and the school board. School routes in this area overlap a lot, so choice school car trips hit the same streets where local elementary school and middle school children walk and bike to school.

The staff report suggested two program options for Cubberley. Students would have to “apply” to get into this future PUBLIC school (an appalling prospect). One of the options was an International Baccalaureate program. (read: exclude all but the best and brightest). One was a project-based learning program that would be somehow guided by the Stanford d.school. (pandering to the Ohlone and private money crowd much?) How do these programs address our #1 problem, the achievement gap?

We need more high school space. We should open Cubberley. Large schools and large class sizes restrict creativity and promote bureaucratic rigidity. Smaller schools enable teachers to creatively adapt programs based on the shared passions of individual students and teachers. Administering “programs” from a central office is counter productive and will result in the hiring of more central office administrators. A wasted expense.

A choice program for the new school might be the way to go since it won’t FORCE parents to attend a new school that has zero brand name recognition compared to Paly or Gunn. Imagine Cubberley was designed to re-open as a neighborhood school instead of a choice program: that would force certain addresses to go there even when the kids or parents don’t want to. How fair is that?

I want to add that adults who immediately raise “traffic concerns” as an objection to change are NOT thinking about what’s best for our students. It feels like they are thinking about themselves first.

You can’t compare a self-selected population in a Choice school like Ohlone to a neighborhood population at a school like BP. There are unobserved variables that drove the selection of the choice that are affecting the outcomes. This is a well-understood and thoroughly studied phenomenon regarding magnet schools, charter schools, and other self-selection programs.

I just watched the video of the “Behind the Headlines.”

The publisher asked Joe Lee why the middle school should be a choice school. He had no answer. That’s because there is no answer. It should not be. McGee is building his dream and he wants a pseudo-private school. But that is not at all what the community wants, as the publisher noted in describing the survey results. There is no justification for creating a third middle school that is a choice school. it will snarl traffic across the city. People in that neighborhood will curse this school board for decades to come.

I will actively work to oppose any bond measure to fund increased traffic for a choice middle school. I would love for people to weigh in here on whether they want to raise their own taxes to pay for a choice program.

OK, I’m demoralized. You’re right. I was also disappointed when the Weekly wrote that editorial that was like “everything is broken and there are bad signs about McGee but PAY UP!” on Measure A. Now here we are.

You convinced me. It’s hopeless. Now all we can do is watch poor Ken Dauber up there like a wrongfully convicted inmate, with the inmate in the next cell to his left having already long ago lost her marbles.

Parent,

If you’ll note, I compared Ohlone’s SED scores to Hoover, the other choice school, and one that generally averages higher test scores than Ohlone. Most of our SED kids are Tinsley kids and, thus, all self-selected.

And if the self-selection bias is so important, why doesn’t it apply to the non-SED kids? Ohlone doesn’t lead the way in CAHSEE scores in the district–it’s in its usual lower third/middle spot. Except for SED (and Hispanic) kids.

I grant that BP has some special circumstances that create issues–an unstable student population. So my intention was not to single out Barron Park, but show how different the achievement gap was at different schools.

Traffic is *already* snarled across the city. 90 out-of-area kids attend Barron Park–a third of the student body. Kids from the south cluster travel across town to get to Gunn along the Charleston corridor.

Therish is right about the spending on projects at Gunn and Paly–though the joke is that there’s *so* much construction at Paly that the school is more crowded than it would be otherwise. Skelly was very much of the build-it-bigger school of thought–even though bigger-is-better is not ideal for education.

It’s pretty clear to me that Cubberley won’t be reopened as a neighborhood school–at least not any time soon. As I’ve pointed out, plenty of people in the South cluster bought because they want their kids at Gunn. Choice means voluntary instead of involuntary transfers.

Audit,

All of the choice programs are required to be revenue-neutral. Maybe an audit is appropriate, but the existence of choice programs doesn’t make it so. Having been an Ohlone volunteer, I know for a fact how much money we had to raise each year to keep the Farm going.

I do suspect the construction costs–but that money is pretty much bond money and the bond measures specify where the money goes.

Fred, Agree that Barron Park is not well treated by the district. Its neighborhood boundaries look to have been poorly drawn with the result a bunch of the kids in the area attend schools that don’t require crossing El Camino. The district then uses Barron Park as the overflow depository, making for a transient student body.

My point is not to harsh on Barron Park, but to point out that project-based learning isn’t some fad, but an effective form of education.

So, I’m curious–Barron Park was originally on the table as the location for MI. BP parents fought it and MI ended up at Ohlone. Given that BP has 90 out-of-area kids at it and the district’s now nattering about a choice program there to make the school more attractive, would MI at BP have been a good thing or a bad thing? I think it was definitely a bad thing at Ohlone because of the overcrowding and waitlist issues and, given what was happening at Escondido (SI bumping neighborhood kids), it seemed like a bad idea at BP, but looking back, I wonder . . . not being a BP parent, though, I have no idea.

What do you think?

The main concern at BP is that Kevin Skelly evaded the accountability rules of the federal government in order to conceal what was happening in terms of achievement and test scores there. In fact, under No Child Left Behind Rules, BP would have been a failing school. It would have been placed on an improvement plan long long ago. It never has made Annual Yearly Progress as required.

What Skelly did was remove the Title I funds from BP and shifted them to Terman and then shifted non-Title I money back to Barron Park in order to prevent the school from being placed on an Improvement Plan. Skelly memorably told Barron Park parents that he would never be able to close the achievement gap between whites and Latino/as and that he thought Barron Park was doing fine for white and Asian kids so there wasn’t any real problem.

The school board at the time — Barb Mitchell, Camille Townsend, Melissa Caswell, Dana Tom, and Mandy Lowell all thought that was just hunky dory. Yeah, why do anything about achievement if the problem is just the poor and the brown kids? They all signed off on the financial shell game, and yay! Problem solved.

Skelly then had a succession of ineffective principals who adopted an unproven and unevaluated program called “college bound.” It was not available to disabled or very low performing students (I guess they were receving the memo that they are not college bound. Hmm could that low expectation have anything to do with the low performance?). No one knows if it works. Maybe it does and maybe not. Many teachers are skeptical. It was not a tested program based on research.

People care very much and there are some great teachers at Barron Park. But the methods they are using are not evidence based. Inclusion has strained their already overtaxed staff. They need more teachers, and they need evidence-based practices. They need money and resources. Some of the best teachers in the district teach at BPES but they have thus far not been supported by this school district.

Hiding the problem is the “Palo Alto Way” but it ended up hurting the school and we can blame Townsend and Caswell who let it happen along with Skelly and his ilk.

As for the Enrollment Committe report, I agree with what OPar said that all choice programs have to be revenue neutral. It needs to be said that there is no possible way that the McGee academy can possibly meet that charge with respect to the high school. How will this district create a high school using the same per pupil dollars but with only 600 students? It can’t be done. The economy of scale that allows a rich curriculum at Paly and Gunn will be absent. They will get only the basics. It is just not possible. And if you want to see the community flip its lid, create a tiny choice high school where we spend twice as much per pupil as we do at Paly and Gunn. I would love to see that. Yet without that, no one would ever send a child there. I doubt very much that there would be demand for this high school at all. I suspect no one will want it unless their kid has already failed out of Paly or Gunn. That sounds like a tough situation.

We would do better to expand the Middle College program.

In terms of the high schools being too large, too late. That ship sailed when Caswell and Townsend decided to build out the high schools. One of Skelly’s first decisions (not his worst but among them) was to kill the third high school and decree that we would build out Paly and Gunn. He did that due to the costs of running a high school and said we just couldn’t create a small high school that would be sufficiently good if we had the same per pupil dollars (revenue neutral). You can’t educate a student in a school of 600 for the same price as in a school of 2000.

We can’t have the new high school, and you can blame Kevin Skelly for that. We could have had it but that is over now. We have to live with the terrible decisions that Caswell and Townsend made. You all should go thank them at a board meeting. It’s their fault for sitting there praising Skelly while he destroyed our district.

I also take strong exception to what I see happening which is that parents are saying “our high schools are horrible, creativity destroying homework machines.” I guess if you are rich enough and connected enough you can just say anything. But usually that kind of harsh criticism of our schools brings some rebuke in its train along with impassioned defenses of staff. Yet in this case, the board applauded. I found that surreal and disorienting. Parent after parent (white, connected parents) got up and just SLAMMED our high schools. You would think they were describing the DC public schools. They are so horrible in fact, that we are to believe that the only thing we can do is just wad them up in to a ball, throw them into the trash (with 4000 kids inside) and start over with our new, shiny penny McGee Academy which will be full of all the good things and will be BOLD and INNOVATIVE and EXTRA GREAT WITH AWESOME ON TOP.

The committee chair Mr. Lee on behind the headlines also said that it would be impossible to improve our current schools. This plan is McGee’s plan and Lee is basically articulating McGee’s view. McGee should be fired for holding that view. He should be given a box, put his stuff in it and drive himself back to Illinois. That is a totally unacceptable perspective in the district superintendent. “We need to start over.” Well maybe in the Superintendent situation we do. But don;t you come here and take our $1.5 million dollars and your wildly inflated salary and your free car and say you aren’t man enough to do the job. Get it done or get out of the way.

@slow down That’s not what project based learning means. It doesn’t mean “go rake the leaves.”
@Therish I will explain the economics that concern me:

It should be noted that the EMAC recommendation is for 100-150 per grade, meaning school size at the high school could be as small as 400.

On the subject of equality, the per student cost would have to be the same, and that means that the class sizes would also have to be the same, because per student cost is 95% based on class size.

The only way to make the math work is to severely restrict the choices in the curriculum. That means that it might be difficult to even meet a-g requirements, but certainly there would be no way to offer many advanced math electives or many foreign language electives. It would be very very stripped down. It would have to be in order to provide the same per student cost as Paly and Gunn.

We have a lot of wasted teaching cost in excessive laning. We need a proof of concept. It could be that if we eliminated laning, then you could have more choices of subjects at a single level.

I do not personally believe that there are 600 families in Palo Alto who want their high school student to attend a school without laning and with very limited course selection. There is proof of this in the district’s own EMAC report, which says that 75% of parents surveyed do not want this option. They want “choice programs” not in a choice school but “expanded in our existing schools” (page 65).
https://www.pausd.org/sites/default/files/pdm-meeting/materials/pkt_151026.pdf (page 168). Parents do not want to drive their child to a choice program — they want their own school to be better.

Furthermore, many families who might be interested in the benefits of a smaller school or project based learning can afford private school, which charge twice as much money and provide smaller classes along with more differentiation and more choice. You cannot reduce the class sizes of this smaller new proposed school. To do so would incite a parent/taxpayer rebellion that would make Measure D look small by comparison.

That is because school funding is zero sum. If dollars are flowing to McGee Academy then they are being subtracted from Gunn and Paly. There is no other way to do it. That’s just a fact. So smaller classes and more choice at McGee Academy means larger classes and less choice at Paly and Gunn.

We should spend our high school dollars making our current schools better, and not with some rhetorical fig leaf of “Gryffindor” and “Syltherin.” It is absurd and insulting to say that reforms are not possible within our schools, as the EMAC Committee says in its report on page 55 that our current schools are too hard to change because “our current system’s ability to respond innovatively to new demands” is very low. There was an extended discussion on the Beyond the Headlines in which the head of this committee stated that they believed that our current schools were too hard to change.

This is belied by the Social Justice Pathway at Paly. It just happened, and it is enormously successful. Parents and students are thrilled with it and the survey results of the EMAC committee show that parents are clamoring for more of that — not for a new school. I believe that it is McGee who doesn’t want to change our current schools because he thinks it will be too hard.

This new high school will quickly become the choice of last resort for students who are bombing out at Paly and Gunn. It will be the choice of students who have been hospitalized and need a smaller place to go when they get out, or those who have been suspended or expelled from Paly or Gunn for truancy or other minor violations (or maybe major ones). We will literally be building a second chance school for our students who are broken by the grind and the excessive laning, rather than fixing our schools so that they don’t break students. It’s actually morally reprehensible when you think about it.

I also think if you read the EMAC survey and focus group data carefully you can see that what people really want is smaller class sizes. There is a ton of evidence in the report that what people want is higher connectedness through smaller classes and more counselors. Just read it. It’s clear as a bell.

We should not chase after the chimera of “innovation” and “bold” whatever. These are buzzwords. Bringing a letter from Sal Khan was a cheap, almost laughable trick, particularly when it was clear from his letter that he had no idea what the proposal actually was. He said it would benefit “all the students of Palo Alto.” Let’s examine.

As McGee imagines this, it would be actually a K-12 McGee Academy. That means that every year there will be a lottery for 100 kinder slots. There will be sibling preference so that in future years, the number of slots for kinders will be substantially reduced. After that, there will only be attrition. If the high school is not very attractive, as I predict it must be, then there will be a resorting at that point, with students who succeeded at McGee heading off to Paly and Gunn where there are more friends and more choices, and those students who cracked under the pressure of Jordan or who had social difficulties opting in to their vacant seats. This will make the high school even less desirable. Very quickly students will know who goes there and why. That reputation will be established and stigma will form.

I don’t need to finish this story. The ending is pretty clear.

I agree that our high schools should not have been turned into mega schools and I suggest you send hate mail to Kevin Skelly and Melissa Caswell and Camille Townsend about it. Everyone is acting like that never happened. Well it did happen, and we have been doing construction at Paly and Gunn for the last 8 years to make them bigger. You cannot unring that bell. This is a dumb conversation that can only happen with a board that is so addled it doesn’t even remember what it just did — a massive building campaign costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars to enlarge our current 2 high schools.

Five years ago a different super had a different vision and this board made the choice to do what he said. Now they have a different guy with a different vision so they are literally pretending that they didn’t do the thing that they already did. It’s astonishing. It was more than a little disapointing that no one from the Weekly mentioned that in their Behind the Headlines discussion or their editorial: hey people we just built up our high schools. Remember?

“a roomful of monkeys are to hash out Macbeth on typewriters”

Well if that isn’t a fantastic description of some of our school board members (Dauber and Godfrey excepted), I don’t know what is. Kudos for capturing the dynamic!

I feel that recent posters on this thread are jumping to imaginary conclusions not warranted.

The EMAC committee recommended looking at 1000 students but ALSO said Cubberley could be much bigger. They recommended a separate task force be formed to provide specific recommendations to the Board. The exact number of students at Cubberley, along with whether it should be “choice” or whether boundaries should be redrawn for Jordan / JLS / Terman / Paly / Gunn / Cubberley is a job for the task force, with community input, and rightly so.

Also a job for the task force is whether there might be a “neighborhood preference” for Cubberley — even if it is a choice school — or indeed whether all three high schools (Paly, Gunn, Cubberley) should be “choice”…. i.e., students can attend whichever one they want. Again, there are a lot of implementation details that were not mentioned in the EMAC report that I saw. Did you read something different where the recommendation were already set in stone? I understand the details are important, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves in shooting down options prematurely.

The main thing that I saw EMAC suggest is that the District’s secondary schools are too big, and ought to be downsized by opening another middle school and high school. There is widespread community agreement on that. Full stop.

The EMAC folks also suggested that if there is to be a new secondary school or schools, then it ought to be a “choice” since you don’t necessarily want to force the parents / kids who are perfectly happy with Paly or Gunn to attend a new, unknown, no-brand-name school. That makes sense to me too, although the follow-on task force will need to dive into that more deeply.

Remember, “choice” doesn’t have to mean Ohlone-style learning. It could simply mean that you are not forcing parents to redistrict and attend the new Cubberley if they don’t want to, for the reasons listed above. Maybe the right answer is for Cubberley to be a comprehensive school, just like 90% of our current middle and high school programs. Again, a great topic for the task force to vet other further with the community.

Then, the EMAC folks noted that, even with a new Cubberley, our remaining middle and high schools will still feel too big and so their suggestion was to make them feel more small by adopting small learning communities, i.e., a house system, much the same as what Hillsdale High School has done. Another decent idea, but needs to be vetted in greater detail by the forthcoming task force. Good to hear it works for Hillsdale, but not everything that Hillsdale does is applicable to our community.

At any rate, there are a lot of good ideas worth exploring in the preliminary EMAC presentation. But to form immediate conclusions and to shoot down well-intentioned brainstorming ideas without talking through pros and cons simply isn’t right. This is like the 2nd inning of a 9-inning baseball game, and there is a lot more work remaining.

I say let’s agree to keep an open mind and agree on the following: a) our secondary schools are too big and we should not continue the status quo, and b) we need more brains — in the form of a dedicated task force chartered by the Board — to look into these implementation options more deeply.

Let’s get the PAUSD Board to agree on at least these 2 things, instead of just sitting on their hands and waiting a few more years. And let’s pitch in, all of us, on the pros and cons of each other. We are no where near ready for final recommendations and conclusions.

Parent,

First, “revenue-neutral” does not equal zero-sum. Revenue-neutral means that the district can’t budget more for a school. As I mentioned, Ohlone’s Farm costs thousands to maintain, but all of that is parent-funded. MI seems to have some mysterious pools of funding (where did that $60K come to fund that feasibility study? PACE never said.)

For that matter, the over-the-top gym, theatre and media center at Paly aren’t the sole result of bond money, but of some hefty donations. And, of course, there’s PiE, which at least means that parental donations at least get spread around.

Second, project-based learning allows for differentiated instruction. So, no, you don’t need the same number of lanes. Instead of having everyone write the same one-page essay on To Kill a Mockingbird, you can have kids who write five page essays comparing Mockingbird to Native Son, while another kid works on vocabulary and writes a two-paragraph essay. In math, you have kids who work on advanced topics and kids who repeat some fundamentals–and you also have those kids work together on joint projects. Yes, sometimes the faster kids get frustrated by the slower kids, but not nearly as frustrated as they get with a curriculum that’s far too slow and repetitive for them.

Also, most of the time, the difference is not nearly as big as people tend to think. Advanced readers won’t have perfect grammar; kids who excel at understanding mathematical abstractions misread problems and add instead of subtract.

McGee isn’t the mind behind the McGee Academy. He was approached by different people about it. I think one of the reasons he’s backing it is because there *is* support for it in the community–I’d guess that mention of help from Stanford isn’t just wishful thinking, but an indication of some interest from people at Stanford.

And, really, there’s no reason the school couldn’t expand later if the demand is there. But during the first few years there will be a wait-and-see approach as there have been with other experiments.

I feel that once again the only way this can be done is to “grow” a school.

I can’t see a fully functioning high school of any type suddenly coming into existence with four functioning grades and a full curriculum plus electives and extra curricula.

The only way it can be done is to grow from a small beginning. I suspect it will have to start with a 9th grade group who will be on board probably from 7th grade as to be the freshman class. However many the first 9th grade contains, the following year’s 9th grade will be bigger and once again on board from 7th grade. As each year’s freshman class gets bigger, more electives and more extra curricula will be added. For the first four or five years, sports if any will not be competitive and that’s why the students will have to be happy with that type of arrangement. As the years progress and the school becomes more established, a fully functioning athletic department will also be established.

As for the academics end, colleges will definitely be watching from the get go. As the first freshman raise to senior status it will be interesting to see how the colleges perceive the new school. However, it won’t be the first time a new high school is opened particularly in a growing school district.

Yes of course the first four or five grades will be to some extent an interesting group of cohorts to watch. I suspect with a dynamic principal and some backing from places like Stanford and perhaps a commendation from the UCs as to how the students will be treated for these first five grades to graduate and succeed beyond high school, a manageable progression will be made.

All in all, I suspect that with about 8 years, the new Cubberley could be just as comprehensive with some choices available as both Gunn and Paly and additionally could have extras such as an IB program. I believe it will take about that number of years to reach that stage, but afterwards it will be as though PAUSD had always had 3 high schools, which of course we did at one stage.

The big question of course is which year the new incoming freshmen will start. Will it be the present 5th graders, or 4th graders, or will we just have to wait a bit longer.

Innovation in the real world must be initiated with two key aspects that are notoriously absent from this committee:

1) a clear definition of the problem to be solved.

2) a full understanding of current best practices and why they don’t solve the problem.

With regards (1) the committee clearly doesn’t like something about our current schools, but seems too coy to clarify what that is. Innovating without a problem to solve is dangerous – it appears as random attempts with no guide, no goodness criteria, and essentially undirected education of children while spending good money. While I am no fan of current schools, I relish chaos even less. So, Max, what’s the problem?
What are we solving?

With regards (2) if there are best practices that solve the problem, no innovation is needed – only execution of state-of-the-art. Adoption of current best practices is always the necessary precursor to innovation. Right? Why take an unknown risk with experimentation before one examines what is already known somewhere else?

So where are these best practices? Probably throughout our district in many cases. Perhaps outside as well. So this is the first litmus test for an “Innovative” school: do they identify best practices that already exist and publicly proclaim as such? Then will they incorporate the best practices of others?

You see, I don’t believe they will spread the innovative ideas outward through the district just as much as I would not expect them to incorporate best practices into the new school. Education is too insular and treated as an individual act; not a system of many. It is only a systems view that allows(directs, dictates) an examination of best practices.

The lure of a fresh start and blank slate will be too intoxicating – I predict it will be grasped by existing entrenched ideals of what a few insiders believe is “right”.

First evidence when this has gone wrong: no clear statement of the problem with existing methods.

Ready, set, … stumble.

@slow down is wrong. The first report was from the elementary subcommittee and the second from the secondary subcommittee. The fact that it reads like an innovation committee report is because it’s off the rails, like Fred says.

When the 2007 High School Task Force met, it sounded oddly familiar! It considered exactly what the new committee has just recommended: http://www.paloaltoonline.com/print/story/2007/05/18/high-school-task-force-eyes-cubberley-center-for-third-high-school

It thought this would be really exciting:

Another option is creating a “magnet” or a “biotech” specialty school situated on a new 6-acre site, according to Superintendent Mary Frances Callan. The district could build a 500-student facility, possibly on “Strawberry Hill” on the Gunn High School playing fields. The projected cost of about $20 million (not adjusted for inflation) does not include the cost of installing utilities, she said.

“We have time to be thoughtful about how we want to house students that we will be unable to hold,” Associate Superintendent Marilyn Cook told the task force.

It is a “rare opportunity” to create a “forward-looking program,” she said.

Was that written last week? No. It was written in May 2007.

Did Marty McGee ride his skateboard here from 2007?

No matter, because by October, they had decided not to do it and decisively rejected building a third smaller school in favor of (guess what) enlarging Paly and Gunn by 500 students each, and then putting in “schools within a school”. In other words, Harry Potter Houses. Guess which of those two things did not happen?

Watch the video of the Blue Ribbon Task Force deciding not to build the third small high school:
http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2007/10/18/video-specialty-high-school-a-no-go-for-palo-alto-group-says

Folks. Folks. We need a school board that did not Rip Van Winkle the last $100M of what it did with your money.

Time for Melissa and Camille to ride off into the sunset and we need new management. Melissa Caswell as Board President should have told McGee this question has been asked and answered. You cannot build this because we enlarged Paly and Gunn. Your job is to make them better, so do that. But instead she just said how exciting yay show me the pretty pictures!

The board approved making Paly and Gunn bigger, by using the lion’s share of the $378M bond to do it. They voted to expand each school for 500 more students, to a total of 2500 each school.

Right now, we are still at roughly 4000 in both schools, so we have by the end of the construction, 1000 space excess capacity. The very idea that these schools are being called “too big” when we just spent well over $200M making them bigger than they currently need to be at the moment is asinine.

Just to drive this point home a bit harder, in 2009, the Board heard the proposed construction to the high schools and approved it. Dana Tom yelled “You have knocked it out of the park,” and then said “”If you build it, the students will come. You’ve just addressed so many questions and uncertainties in our minds with these presentations,” he said. This made me really miss Dana Tom said no one ever.

The board approved making these schools bigger in 2008-09, and in 2009 approved the building. Everyone was very excited and enjoyed all the pretty pictures.

Except one person (not me, I promise) who insisted on raining on Dana’s parade with boring and irritating facts and research:

“Preschool parent A.J. Lumsdaine asked the board to reject the plans, arguing that the 2,300-plus enrollments projected for the campuses are simply too large.

She cited a litany of research concluding that enrollments of more than 2,100, even in high socio-economic areas, have poor effects on learning, leading to more discipline problems, lower morale, lower math performance and a bureaucratic, alienating environment.

Lumsdaine urged the board to consider re-opening Cubberley High School, which closed 30 years ago due to declining enrollment at that time.”

Link: http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2009/09/23/teachers-energize-building-plans-at-gunn-paly

This was asked. and. answered.

The School Board, including Camille “my fingers are tingling” Townsend, and Melissa Caswell, who was — incredibly — board president both times this has come up, voted to make the schools bigger. They voted to build the media center, the performing arts center, the gym, the two story classrooms, the Gunn central project — all of it. They voted to make the schools bigger.

What needs to be done now is to figure out how to make them better.

It is the height of irresponsibility to take $200M from voters, enlarge the schools, then say “eh, not so much, let’s start over with a blank sheet of paper.” Why? Well because some dude from VMWare says to. Well, no thanks.

We badly need a middle school. It would have been nice had the “enrollment mangament” comittee stuck to its charge and set attendance boundaries for a fourth middle school. “Choice” is not an option. We cannot have 700 students in cars twice a day. Are you kidding?

We badly need elementary schools. Where will they be and who will go there? Stop talking about achievement at Barron Park School — that, like Project Based Design Thinky Post-It Note Curriculum Redesign for an Innovative Bold Sal Khan-Based Future — is not the charge of the Enrollment committee. One would think this does not need to be said yet here it does.

Really the mystery here is why none of the board members — including Townsend and Caswell, who WERE THERE AND VOTED FOR THIS — mentioned that it had happened. That is appalling.

Let’s see, so Skelly and McGee made recommendations on the schools and those recommendations differ.

Well, why wouldn’t they? A superintendent is supposed to oversee the general direction of the district and different supers can have different opinions.

I don’t understand raging at McGee because his views of how to handle growth aren’t the same as Skelley’s. We wanted a change, yes? I’m not going to fault the current super for not falling in line with Skelley or Callan–both of whom were awful, secretive superintendents.

As for similar lingo–of course there’similar lingo. I don’t doubt that McGee’s every bit as capable of reading earler reports than Parent.

The board, as has long been the case, has been pretty weak and feckless.

Pretty new buildings don’t automatically make a large high school a right-sized high school. We have highly competitive high schools, the size of which actually limits opportunities for kids–yes, there are some cool electives, but the competition for those spots (or on various sports teams) means many kids don’t get the opportunity to take those classes.

When you have 500 kids in a class, you don’t build the same sense of community as you do with 200-300. We have plenty of kids who get lost.

@Fred, my read of the EMAC secondary report is that there is a compelling case for more middle school capacity that is based on the actual capacity of the schools, taking account of factors like wanting teachers to have classrooms they can meet students in during prep periods. There is a minority report to the elementary task force that makes a strong case that the south east quadrant, including Palo Verde, needs more capacity (plus elementary schools that are much larger than in the past, accomplished through portables and class size increases). And there is the problem of the new Stanford construction.

The case for more high school capacity is the weakest, and isn’t really based on capacity. It’s more like buyer’s remorse. We built and paid for high schools that are big enough, but McGee and his committee don’t like them that big. Plus they want a moonshot. Neither of those adds up to a good case for another $100 million of taxpayer money.

@parent,
If you read educational literature, schools within schools don’t really work unless they are totally separate schools that function as distinct actual schools. Harry Potter houses is not it. The reason to do schools within schools is because you don’t have anyplace to expand when it’s time to break up a too-large school. SWS’s can be costly. The best scenario is being able to open an old defunct school site. Hmmm.

Our district has a way of treating that kind of information like it’s dispensible. They’ll give the appearance of doing something, but really, they’ll just be spending money without enough accountability. Speaking of Harry potter, too much magical thinking in the real world also hurts our kids.

@Opar, a couple questions:

“kids are still getting moved around” – do you mean overflows? Note that overflows went down by 50% this year, and only 27 were out of cluster, also down by 50%. As enrollment shrinks, particularly at the kinder level, overflows are going way down. 27 out of cluster students doesn’t seem like a lot.

“Elementary schools with 600 kids are too big” – there’s only one, Ohlone, and of course no one is required to go there and there is a long waiting list to get in. So that’s a choice families can make. All the others are 4 strands or less (Barron Park and Briones are 2.5 strands). Do you think we should make Ohlone smaller and just have 5-6 empty classrooms there?

“McGee academy would … create an alternative to the large schools … without a huge initial expenditure.” – maybe I misunderstand the proposal. I thought McGee Academy involved renovating Cubberly to set up a 6-12 school, which would cost $75+ million to build and $5M to run (plus lost Cubberly revenue). What’s the proposal to avoid the large initial expenditure? That sounds interesting to me.

Fred you are correct that there would be a large initial expenditure for McGee Academy.

I think we just disagree (hopefully a friendly disagreement) about the “how big is too big” question for the elementary schools. The answer there is really aesthetic. Over half of the elementary schools are currently more than the prior board policy of 450 students. The research says that smaller is better and that the ideal size of an elementary school is 300-400 students. You could disagree, but you would have to disagree with that research.

I think many people in Palo Alto love our small neighborhood feel and small neighborhood elementary schools. Back before our prior Boards started selling off the real estate we had more than 20 elementary schools, all small. Now we have 12. I think there is a big difference. You can disagree — that’s a judgment. I expect that there will be a diversity on the board about this, with Dauber and Godfrey supporting more and smaller schools while Townsend just wants everyone in a car driving to their personal “choice.”

I do not personally like choice schools because they create inequalities, and also traffic. They are bad for neighborhood cohesion. They create winners and losers and hard feelings about lotteries. McGee Academy is that on steroids.