I voted against the "Blueprint" which was jammed through with a 3-2 vote of the Board’s rubber stamp majority on March 14, 2000 -- after minimal exposure to the public and with no significant modifications after a maiden presentation only three months earlier.

There was overwhelming grassroots opposition to the "Blueprint" from community and teachers who convened by the thousands at three public forums and the March 14 Board meeting.

The "Blueprint" presages a radical and overwhelming restructuring of what you and I know as public education. (The other shoe is about to drop as district administration moves forward unilaterally with its Carnegie Foundation-funded planning grant to "transform" our high schools – without any Board of Education involvement or the active participation of a single teacher or parent.)

To fund the "Blueprint," virtually every district program and school site budget has been raided to pay for this increasingly expensive proposal. The "Blueprint" effectively destroys a comprehensive curriculum of language arts, social studies, math, science, music and art at elementary school, and the comprehensive curriculum at middle and senior high schools that includes electives such as social studies, science, music, art, foreign language and school-to-work opportunities. Schools’ discretionary budgets have been halved – or worse – to pay for the "Blueprint" beginning this Fall.

Curriculum

Under the "Blueprint" the lowest-achieving high school students will have a curriculum of three hours of "literacy" and two hours of basic math. I know about kids, and I doubt that demoralized and struggling young people will choose to stay in school under these bleak circumstances.

Counseling

Counseling programs -- so desperately needed to help our children’s self-awareness and socialization in this era of hypersexuality, violence and alienation -- remain at bare-bones recession-level funding.

Electives

For the 2000-2001 school year, electives have been cut at 29 of 45 secondary schools as a result of the "Blueprint." We have lost Spanish classes, highly-acclaimed AVID classes, music and art and speech. Aides have virtually disappeared.

Drop-Outs

We risk increasing school drop-outs by assigning low-performing students to three-hour sections of "literacy" and two-hour sections of remedial math. In the California Education Code all students are guaranteed the right to access the core curriculum -- a right that is ignored by the "Blueprint." If strugglers drop out, our test scores will go up, and we can claim a Pyrrhic victory!

Good Premise, Bad Practice

The admirable theoretical premise of the "Blueprint" – to raise achievement levels of our historically under-performing Latino and African-American students to the levels of their Anglo counterparts – is subverted in practice to a school day of resegregated remedial classrooms and a high school experience that will take at least five years.

The "Blueprint" -- thrown together without stakeholder input and after only three months’ public scrutiny, with little change except for its increasing price tag, and rubber-stamped by a politically co-opted 3-2 Board of Education -- is an unconscionable experiment on our kids.

"My three school-age children will no longer be a part of Bersin’s misleading campaign. The day after his blueprint was enacted, we put our house on the market."

-- Valerie Sachs, Letter to the Union-Tribune 7/19/00

The harmful policy decisions of the rubber-stamp Board team have produced negative results.

• Weak Mr. Wizard-style "Active Physics" course is imposed on all ninth graders. For strong students, this program will not qualify for University of California admission. For struggling students, its reading level is too advanced.
  
  
• Parent, teacher and principal morale has plummeted. This is not good for schools, classrooms or students.
  
  
• Thousands of K-3 students were required to enroll in summer school because they read below grade level – despite three years' literacy emphasis in elementary classrooms. Is it possible we are using inadequate reading programs?
  
  
• AVID classes for under-represented college-bound minority students are jeopardized because hundreds of instructional aides were fired.
  
  
• Of the high school students slated to take optional-but-recommended summer school "genre studies" literacy classes, in the summer of 2000 only 28% enrolled. Students are rejecting the "Blueprint" with their feet, and not getting help they need. At this unacceptably slow rate, high school diploma requirements may take more than five years to complete.
  
  
• There has been profligate spending on far-flung consultants:
  
  • $500,000 for a Florida-based advisor who was a go-fer for the superintendent, a facilitator of "private/public collaboratives" and a moderator of "board/superintendent dialogues" on superintendent performance evaluations, bonuses and annual goal-setting
    
    
  • $99,900 for A.U.S.S.I.E., Inc. (a consultant group from Australia), to teach our teachers reading strategies without benefit of phonics
    
    
  • $636,500 for a few all-expense-paid four-day junkets to the University of Pittsburgh for 33 district employees, plus reciprocal visits from two Pittsburgh consultants who came to San Diego in the cold mid-winter

"As in all wars, the real victims are the children. Bersin & Co. will move on in a few years, but they will leave behind a multitude of youngsters who have been cheated out of an education."

-- Mary Solsbak, Letter to the Union-Tribune, 8/13/00