School Doesn’t Sound Like an F

We all can probably describe an F student. Underpowered in the smarts department or simply unmotivated. Class-cutter, maybe. Or maybe the kid’s after-school life is a nightmare.

But what does an F school look like?

Ever since the state’s Public Education Department released its school report cards last week – assigning letter grades A through F to every public school in the state – I’ve been thinking about those F schools and trying for an invitation to spend some time at one.

Sandia Base Elementary School was one of the 89 schools Secretary of Education-designate Hanna Skandera stamped with a big, fat F. On Thursday, the folks there agreed to let me hang around for the day.

So come along with me while I show you what you already know: An F school doesn’t look and sound and feel much different from an A, B or C school. It’s just a little more demographically challenged and a little more demoralized right now.

Sandia Base sits behind the security perimeter of Kirtland Air Force Base. About 10 percent of its 525 students come from low-income neighborhoods outside the base, and 90 percent come from families on base with an active-duty member in the military. That means a few things: Students come from families that are generally working-class or low-income, many are undergoing the stresses of deployment, and they move around a lot. In the past two weeks, eight students left, and 15 new students arrived. In one third-grade class I attended, only a fourth of the students had been at the same school since kindergarten.

In Amy Susan’s kindergarten classroom, you would never know all that. Most kids were busy practicing writing letters, while a group of seven was seated on the floor around Susan sounding out the words in “Rod Can See It.”

	Child-abuse forum rescheduled The date of a brainstorming meeting about approaches to child abuse that I announced in last Sunday’s column has been changed. The original date – Feb. 5 – presented a conflict for Super Bowl fans. So it has been moved to Jan. 29. The time and address are the same: 1 p.m. at 4606 McLeod NE, Suite C. For more information, email settlejb@comcast.net.

Down the hall, in a first-grade class, the kids were engaged in a retelling of “The Three Little Pigs,” showing their reading comprehension by talking through the story and rewriting it in their own words.

The 50-year-old school was spotless, the kids were bright-eyed and shiny, and the teachers seemed fueled by some mood-lifting energy drink.

I asked Ann McBroom’s third-graders what they thought about their school and was met with a wall of sound: Good! The best! Awesome!

What did they like? Teachers! Math, reading, science, spelling.

It was a little ironic, Principal Blair Kaufman told me, that Sandia Base started the school year with a spring in its step. The school’s test scores fell short of the “Adequate Yearly Progress” that Skandera’s letter grades are meant to replace. But over the past four years, the school had improved steadily on the standardized tests that measure a school’s achievement. It went from 40 percent of students testing proficient in reading in 2008 to 59 percent in 2011. In math, the school shot up from 24 percent proficient to 49 percent.

Obviously, Kaufman told me, everyone at the school wanted those scores to be even better and believed the team and curriculum were in place to continue to improve.

Then came the F.

“It’s the only F that I’ve gotten in my life, and it hurts deeply, deeply,” third-grade teacher Peggy Bustos told me.

Teachers I talked to were mostly confused. The letter grade is supposed to reflect improvement, and despite low scores, the school was improving. But the grades were based on a point system that also gave credit for certain grade-level test scores increasing over the past three years and for the highest performing students improving – two categories in which Sandia Base scored very poorly.

“It’s disheartening. It’s discouraging,” Kaufman said. Over the course of the week, teachers and administrators went from shock to confusion to anger. Now, Kaufman said, it’s time to roll up their sleeves and figure out a way to do better. “I think it is a wake-up call for me and for everyone in the school,” he said.

The state Public Education Department says its letter grade calculations controlled for poverty, minority status and mobility, among other factors that are associated with lower performance. But it’s hard to look at New Mexico’s letter grades and not see a rough correlation between unfavorable demographics and unfavorable grades – as has been the case in Florida, where Skandera was part of another statewide letter-grade movement.

At North Star Elementary in North Albuquerque Acres, an A school, only 6 percent of the students qualify for free and reduced-price lunch, and its student body is among the most Caucasian in APS.

At Sandia Base, 47 percent of students qualify for free and reduced-price lunches, and more than half the student body is minority.

I chose North Star as a comparison because Alissa Galik used to teach there before coming to Sandia Base.

“The staff at North Star and the staff here, they’re the same,” she said. “They care about the kids as much. They work just as hard. It’s hard for me to understand why this school gets an F. I don’t see a difference.”

Becky Medina has children in second and fifth grade at Sandia Base. Her husband is a master sergeant in the Air Force who will be deploying again soon. I ran into her on the playground and asked if she was surprised to find out her kids attend a failing school.

“I was upset,” she said. “It doesn’t fit. I would give it an A. My kids are happy here. They have great teachers. They’re both excelling.”

Kids in APS elementary schools don’t get letter grades; their report cards reflect a 1-5 scale. So I wasn’t sure the kids at Sandia Base knew their school got an F, or, if they did, had any idea what that meant. But the third-graders in Ms. McBroom’s class did.

When asked if they knew the school’s grade, they answered with a hushed “F.”

And what does that mean?

“It’s bad.” “We need to start studying more.” “Do better.” “Have a better attitude.” “Try your hardest.”

Bradley Padilla looked up from his worksheet and said they would just have to bring the grade up.

To a B or a C?

“No,” he said, “A.”

UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Leslie Linthicum at 823-3914 or llinthicum@abqjournal.com.
— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal