Santa Rosa high schools mull ‘regular’ vs. college prep

Two years ago, Elsie Allen High School English teacher Erika Raffo participated in a trial program to put students from regular classes in a college-prep class along with her higher-achieving students. She said it wasn’t long before she couldn’t tell one sort of student from another.

“The kids who would have been in (regular) class performed far better,” she said. “The discussions were at a higher level, and the students gained a lot of confidence.”

Based in part on the success of that pilot effort, her school is now doing away with many of the so-called regular classes. Such classes aren’t necessarily remedial, but rather are intended both for students who do not plan to go directly to a four-year college and those who are so far behind in their studies that they couldn’t keep up with a class geared toward college-bound students. Students headed to college tend to take a mix of college-prep, honors and Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses.

Several miles north at Santa Rosa High School, many teachers have a different perspective on regular classes.

Mark Wardlaw, director of instrumental music, said he sees students with such a range of interests and abilities that narrowing course offerings to only college-prep classes would do them a disservice. He questioned whether all students need to be college-ready, pointing to students interested in welding or viticulture careers.

“These kids want to work with their hands,” he said. “We’re not very good about talking about these kids.”

Talk to almost any high school teacher in Santa Rosa and you’ll get a passionate opinion about the value of regular classes, which allow students who take them to graduate from high school without being eligible for admission to a University of California or California State University. Admission to those schools requires students to take and pass, with a C or higher, a series of 15, UC-approved college-prep classes that meet what are termed A-G requirements, named for seven different academic disciplines in which students must demonstrate competence.

Historically, most Santa Rosa City Schools high schools have offered regular classes as an alternative to the college-prep curriculum. Students who take that route can attend a community college, but once there they are often required to take catch-up classes that bring them up to the college level.

But over the past couple of years and especially this fall, three of the district’s five high schools have moved significantly away from offering the classes, especially in ninth and 10th grades. That’s prompted a districtwide, philosophical debate among teachers and administrators about their value.

Opponents of the classes say their existence leads to discriminatory practices where primarily low-income and Latino children are placed as freshmen in less rigorous classes while more privileged students opt for the college path. Students can later choose to switch gears and take college-prep classes, but at that point they are behind peers who have been taking the classes all along.

Meanwhile, advocates for regular classes say doing away with them could do more harm than good by requiring instructors to teach less challenging material or give more students failing grades.

“I really believe every kid has the opportunity to be prepared for college,” Raffo said. Her school, Elsie Allen, offered no regular classes when it was founded, but implemented them several years ago when the school’s state test scores put it in a mandatory program-improvement mode. For many teachers, the change did not go well, and last year the school began phasing out the classes.

“At Elsie, we recognize that not everybody goes to college. We totally get that. But it’s kind of a philosophical stance we have, we really feel an obligation to make sure that no matter what their background, kids have had all the possible opportunities.”

She added, “With regular classes, we had a lot of kids failing. It was not a good way to raise graduation rates. You lower your expectations, and so do (the kids).”

Will Lyon is an English teacher at Santa Rosa High School, which has so far kept all its regular classes. He was one of a number of teachers who advocated at an October school board meeting to keep the offerings.

“If we eliminate (regular) classes without any other types of supports or changes, I think it’s real likely there would be an increase in D’s or F’s,” Lyon said.

The debate comes at a time when large school districts around the state are adopting A-G graduation requirements for all their students, partly in response to groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, that have raised concerns about students from different socio-economic backgrounds lacking equal access to college-prep classes. Beginning with San Jose Unified in 1998, six large school districts around the state, including Oakland and San Francisco, have done so, prompting Santa Rosa teachers to question whether their district will move in the same direction.

No local high school district surveyed for this article has gone so far as to adopt A-G as its exclusive graduation requirements, though some, such as Santa Rosa, are looking to expand college-prep offerings. Steve Bolman, superintendent of Petaluma City Schools, said the district’s school board has set a goal of increasing the number of students who graduate meeting state university requirements.

Keller McDonald, superintendent of West Sonoma County High School District, said the majority of students in his district take A-G classes, even if they’re not planning to go to college.

“Our schools believe that we need to prepare students for success in both career and college. It’s not one or the other; it’s both,” he said.

At Rohnert Park-Cotati?Unified School District, Superintendent Rob Haley took a slightly different perspective. He said his district has no plans to reduce the number of non-college-prep course offerings.

“We believe we can have a rigorous A-G program with AP classes and also have great electives and career technical education classes,” he said.

Diann Kitamura, assistant superintendent of secondary education for Santa Rosa City Schools, said the district does not intend to adopt “wall-to-wall” A-G requirements any time soon.

“We’re not ready,” she said. Nor do administrators plan to create a uniform policy for all high schools. However, Kitamura said she is working with each school, meeting with teachers in each subject area, to find ways to provide more college-prep and fewer regular classes in grades nine and 10.

“We want to make sure all ninth- and 10th-grade students have every opportunity to access college-prep classes,” she said, asking, “Is a ninth-grader really ready to choose if they want to go to college?”

She said the assessments are driven by a number of factors: concerns raised in school accreditation reviews about a lack of rigor at some Santa Rosa high schools; a statewide move to Common Core standards that are “naturally aligned to A-G”; and the fact that a disproportionate number of students in regular classes are Latino.

Latino students made up almost 35 percent of students graduating from Santa Rosa City Schools in 2013, but only 17 percent of Latinos graduated with the courses required to be eligible for a state university, according to California Department of Education Statistics.

In contrast, 36.6 percent of white students met the requirements.

Santa Rosa City Schools’ numbers compare unfavorably to those of the county and state. Countywide, nearly 21 percent of Latino students met A-G requirements. Statewide, the number was 29.1 percent.

School board member Jenni Klose recently referred to this discrepancy as “de facto institutional racism” in an opinion piece that ran in The Press Democrat, calling for the district to do away with what she referred to as tracking.

Kitamura said the district is not just focusing on shrinking the achievement gap at the high school level. Elementary and middle schools this year are beginning to look at where they place students as well, including reducing remedial course offerings and providing additional training to teachers in how to work with English-?language learners. Students often get placed in different “tracks” in third grade based on their reading levels and continue on that path all the way to high school.

“There’s a lot of work we have to do,” Kitamura said.

Kitamura said the district is considering providing more summer and weekend programs for struggling students to help them keep up in college-?prep classes.

Elsie Allen and Piner high schools have largely embraced a shift away from regular classes in the past couple of years. Maria Carrillo already offered few regular classes.

At Piner, they’re shifting away from regular classes in phases, Principal Sally Bimrose said, adding that the move was driven by her teachers.

“We want everyone to get the best possible education, rather than settle for lowest common denominator,” she said.

“Teachers weren’t sure how it was going to work for kids,” Bimrose said. “But what we’re seeing in the classroom is that if students have higher-level students as models, they can perform at that level, too.”

Montgomery High’s approach has been more divided, while Santa Rosa High has so far resisted the change.

Montgomery’s shift began about three years ago when the school was reviewed for accreditation and officials raised concerned about “a lack of structural rigor and the sheer number of regular classes,” Principal Laurie Fong said. “Out of that, we came up with an action plan that included putting more kids in academic classes and increasing the A-G graduation rate.”

From there, the different departments began reducing their regular ninth- and 10th-grade classes, she said.

But social studies chairman Jim Rudesill said his department had no say in the matter when the school did away with regular 10th-grade social studies classes this fall. The transition has been hard for teachers and as of the first-quarter report cards, more students were on track to fail as a result, he said.

Simone Harris, a Montgomery High School English teacher, had a different perspective, celebrating an end to what she described as tracking.

She advocated for doing away with the old policy, which “does not do right by our kids.”

She told a story about how she was impressed last year by a complex discussion taking place in one of her regular freshman English classes. She told her students it was the kind of discussion that takes place in college, and that prompted several of them to ask whether they could sit in on one of her more advanced, college-prep classes to see what it was like.

She agreed, and her regular students who attended ended up joining the advanced class in a nuanced conversation about philosophy.

“In the other class, they didn’t really want to talk,” she said. “Kids tend to be really distracted. But for whatever reason, they had a degree of self-assurance that day, and each of them said moving, wise things. I was so choked up with emotion. It was such a beautiful thing to see them express themselves that way.”

This year, she has a sophomore class mixed with students who previously would have been on both regular and college-bound tracks. It’s been a challenge, but also satisfying, she said. Students have risen to the higher expectations and while it has taken extra work on her part to teach students of different abilities at one time, she says she has not had to water down the curriculum for the higher-level students. Her highest-performing students can still choose to take even more rigorous Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate classes.

At Santa Rosa High School, teachers maintain each high school is different and that regular classes work well for them. They are also adamant their regular students are getting excellent educations.

“We have high expectations for our regular kids,” Lyon told school board members at the meeting where a crowd of Santa Rosa High School teachers showed up to plead that they be able to keep their current classes. “We may have different goals, but the expectations are still high.” That might include trading some of the focus on academics for a greater focus on life skills, he said.

“My (regular) kids are on the way to college, they’re just going to go to SRJC first,” Lyon said. “Our reg classes are not a cesspool of apathy. We have vibrant classes that help prepare kids for life.”

The Santa Rosa Teachers Association has not taken a position on the issue, President Amy Stern said.

“If you talk to 60 teachers you’re going to get 60 different answers,” she said. She said the union has been working with the district to encourage discussions between teachers and administrators on the issue.

Meanwhile, school board members said they’d like a chance to weigh in on the district’s policy. Some cautioned against a “one-size-fits-all” approach to high school course offerings and said they saw regular classes providing a valuable option to students unable to or not interested in going to college.

“I definitely think regular classes have a place,” board member Laura Gonzalez said. “We can’t assume all students have the same skill sets, desires or capabilities.”

She acknowledged she was concerned about the “abysmally low” number of Latino students being placed in honors and college-prep classes, but she said she wanted to learn more about why that was happening before supporting a specific policy change.

Board member Frank Pugh expressed a similar sentiment.

“The district needs to make the best decision based on data” about student performance, he said. “If kids are really incorrectly placed, that’s not right and we need to fix it. But to just eliminate (regular classes), that’s an extreme move.”

He added that he does not want to see an emphasis placed on college-prep classes to the detriment of career training. “We need to realize that not all students will be transferring on to UC Berkeley or Santa Cruz. To even assume everyone is is a problem. It misses the point of what’s best for students.”

Board member Larry Haenel said districtwide discussion was “a good opportunity to look at this and see if what we’re doing is best for kids.” But, he said, each school should be able to make its own policy based on input from teachers.

In an interview, Klose supported moving away from regular classes, though she said it was important to have teachers on board before doing so.

“I personally believe we should make the change district wide as fast as we can while maintaining the best efforts to ensure it’s successful,” she said.

She said such a policy fits with the goal the board recently established of making each student college- and career-ready - emphasis on the “and.”

“In my mind, we can’t say we want to graduate students college- and career-ready and continue to have tracking systems in place that, practically speaking, put kids out of the running for college when they’re 13 years old,” she said.

Staff Writer Jamie Hansen blogs about education at extracredit.blogs.press?democrat.com. You can reach her at 521-5205 or jamie.hansen@press?democrat.com. On Twitter @jamiehansen.

EDITOR’S NOTE: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Simone Harris as department chairwoman of the English department at Montgomery High School.