By Dianne Anderson

Under pressure, the state’s 188 persistently lowest performing schools are trying to play catch up to better test scores for students by implementing tough new federal intervention measures.

Out of the state’s 10,000 public schools, San Bernardino Unified School District came in strong at the bottom five percent with 11 of its schools on a lowest achieving list. They must be brought up to academic par soon.

States are now scrambling in different ways to fix the problem. Not long ago, California was turned down for $1 billion, part of a $4.35 billion federal national allocation of Phase 1 Race to the Top funding.

But another pot of money awaits schools within that “lowest performing” category. They can compete for $50,000 to $2 million in grants, part of the state’s $415 million fiscal stabilization and Stimulus funding.

Schools must apply by June 1 to the California Department of Education for the School Improvement Grant. Separately, the deadline for Phase 2 of the Race to the Top program also falls on June 1.

Hilary McLean, spokesperson for the California Department of Education, said that low performing schools that receive a School Improvement Grant are entitled to $50,000 up to $2 million for three years in a row.

Starting next September, individual schools could receive a total of $150,000 to $6 million if they take drastic measures outlined by the federal mandate toward academic improvement.

The plan calls for low-performing schools to choose whether they want to transform the troubled school into a charter school, fire their principal and half of the teachers and restaff those employees, shut down the school and shift students to a higher achieving schools, or replace principals with several steps toward improvement instruction and operations.

“I think the majority of schools will try to get the funding. Unfortunately in this economic climate, schools are really desperate for resources to keep quality educational programs going. There’s a recognition that most of these schools do need to serve their students better,” McLean said.

However, she noted that both the federal or state law doesn’t mandate a penalty or a specific time line for better outcomes in student test scores.

“Not at this point, there’s not an exit criteria,” she said.

In the past two years, budget cuts have amounted to over $17 billion to K-12 education, and the governor has proposed another $2.5 billion to come. So far, teachers and personnel statewide have received over 23,000 preliminary notices of layoffs, on top of the 16,000 teachers laid off last year.

When the final budget dust settles, she said that not all of those teachers and employees will be laid off, but the expectation is that a large portion will be jobless due to the state budget.

Because the money and the three-year plan doesn’t mandate exit criteria, the plan has  been criticized for not having actual teeth.

Walter Hawkins, education advocate and past president of the Rialto School Board, has looked at performance issues for black students over the years, and his big concern is that several good solutions have been presented to the school district, but fallen by the wayside.

Hawkins, a member of the Westside Action Group, said that the black community pushed hard for one promising academic program in the past to help shore up better test scores for black students, but the district never implemented it.

A spokesperson at the San Bernardino School District was not available for comment by press time.

Hawkins said that the district has spent a lot of energy and time holding up Richardson and Middle College as success stories that, in ways, is a false positive for the district as a whole.

“We’re happy that Richardson is doing better, it’s the exception and not the rule,” he said. “If you can do those things at Richardson, why can’t you do that at all schools?”

Measuring success is another problem.  As it stands, Black students are measured against whites, he said, instead of measuring achievement purely by the numbers.

As an example, the minimum expectation on the API is a score of 800. Right now, if black students as a group average 645, he said the focus should belong on the difference between 645 and 800, and how to boost students above that 800 standard.

Both black students and white students should be held to an actual standard number as a benchmark of academic achievement, not to each other, he said.

“We know that the highest performing group of students is Asian. Comparing black students to white students is not a good model because in San Bernardino County, the white students as a whole aren’t doing that great.”

Hawkins said that Arroyo Valley High School, Rio Vista Elementary, and  Martin Luther King Middle School all have the  highest concentration of black students, and also brought back the lowest test scores.

The best fix to bring overall tests score up and mend academic disparity is to prioritize the new funding that comes down where it’s needed the most.

“No matter how much money or how little you have, the goal is to focus on the students that have the greatest need and how are you going to move those kids up. If you move them up, you move the whole school up,” he said.