By José Escarce Member, SMMUSD Board of Education
Regarding ‘Samohi houses in disorder’ (SMDP, March 13, page 1), the Samohi redesign is a work in progress and will remain so for some time to come. Redesigning large comprehensive high schools is difficult, and the available research suggests that appreciable beneficial effects should not be expected until the third or fourth year, at the earliest. Despite the shortcomings identified by the external evaluation, the Samohi redesign is considered a visitation site for other schools by the U.S. Department of Education, which provided grant funding to help get the project started.
It’s also important to underscore that the evaluation compared Samohi with a nonexistent ideal school featuring a fully implemented, mature redesign, not with itself prior to the redesign. A major concern identified by the evaluation is reduced communication and collaboration among teachers in different houses but in the same academic department (e.g., English, science, etc.) Correcting this problem is a priority of the board. Lack of uniformity in discipline across houses is already being addressed.
Low and decreasing grade point averages for Latino and African-American students at Samohi remain one of the major challenges facing the high school and the district. However, it is inappropriate and unwarranted to attribute these GPAs to redesign without further analysis. A concurrent phenomenon during the period of implementation of redesign has been a substantial increase in the rigor and difficulty of the courses taken by Samohi students. For example, according to California Standards Tests data, 93 percent of freshmen and 1,029 total students took biology in the 2004-05 academic year, compared with only 46 percent of freshmen and 872 total students in 2002-03. Similarly, 68 percent of sophomores and 878 total students took chemistry in 2004-05, compared with only 23 percent of sophomores and 485 total students in 2002-03. In mathematics, 51 percent of freshmen took geometry and 40 percent of sophomores took intermediate algebra (algebra 2) in 2004-05, compared with 39 percent and 32 percent, respectively, in 2002-03. The number of college-level advanced placement courses taken by Samohi students has nearly doubled in the last five years. At the same time, Samohi has eliminated several low-level courses, such as general science and half-year beginning algebra (algebra 1), that many students used to take, but that are not recognized by the University of California as college-preparatory courses. Although the board and administration are gratified by these trends in course-taking, which will make more students eligible for four-year colleges, we have not examined whether taking harder courses ear-lier might be responsible for decreasing GPAs. We need to do so immediately.
We also need to determine at what point in their schooling those Samohi students with low GPAs begin their academic decline. Approaches to addressing the problem of low GPAs for Latino and African-American students would differ depending on whether these students first experience academic failure in high school or, instead, bring low GPAs with them from middle school. Accordingly, at the last board meeting, the board requested an analysis of middle-school GPAs for students with low GPAs at Samohi.
I remain optimistic that the Samohi redesign will benefit many students while harming none. Although only time will tell if my optimism is rewarded, Samohi teachers and administrators are working extremely hard every day to achieve this goal.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 20, 2006. Read the original PDF.