Monrovia School Link

Monrovia School Link ~ Number 96 ~ October 20, 2004

Most of Monrovia's schools have been improving markedly on the various standardized tests. The elementary schools in particular have done great, and now the middle schools are beginning to do better. And Monrovia High School? Welllll... its scores on the standardized tests have been - to put it charitably - "lackluster." So I was interested to chat with the new MHS Principal, Frank Zepeda. What exactly, is he going to do?
~ brad@sacklunch.net


We met in his office and he didn't know me from Adam, which was probably just as well since, uh, who knows if I would have got the interview otherwise. He wanted to make it more of a discussion than a question and answer interview, so that's cool. I let him go at it.

At first what he was saying sounded somewhat ethereal, and I was a bit concerned, but the more I listened and the more we talked, the more I could see that he wasn't just repeating educational acronymns - though he did that - but could back up what he was talking about with concrete examples. I came away pretty impressed. I think this is a man who should be given a serious chance to make MHS a stellar school.

He started off guessing my age too correctly (which of course got him off on the wrong foot). He told me that the old high school format I was probably familiar with - of six periods with rows of chairs and a period of this subject and a period of that - is "antiquated." He said it grew out of the Ford assembly line and was promoted by industrialist Andrew Carnegie through his educational foundation. He said he has been a teacher, counselor and (I think he said) principal, and has had experience working with the Panasonic Educational Foundation, which funded the Leadership Associates Program, which trains administrators in effective school leadership.

So far I'm not impressed. I don't really care about the high school format's pedigree. I'm happy if it works effectively and humanely. I'd hate to see something thrown out just because we prefer Panasonic to Ford. But maybe he's suggesting there's something better. If so, I'm all ears.

Schools, he said, rarely look at their internal structures. He said Monrovia High needs to do that. He said he has worked with the Schlechty Center, which looks at best practices - arrived at by studying what really effective teachers have done and puts them into a "framework" of ten design principles.

I ask for an example.

He said one of the principles in the framework is "affirmation," which means, "Will someone else - other than the teacher - be looking at the students' and teacher's work?"

Hmm. Seems like a good principle to me. But what he said next made me nervous.

"Education," he said, "should be free of consequences so kids can explore. If there is fear of failure," he said, "it hurts the ability for critical thinking."

Now I REALLY want this clarified. I understand his point, but too often I believe it has been used to excuse rotten grades ("Well... sigh... you know, you really can't measure creativity."), and I'm hoping he isn't using it in this sense. So I ask...

No grades?

"Grades yes, fear no," he said. "We want students to take chances with assignments." There are still right and wrong answers, he added. Math is math and you need to get the answers right, and there are spelling and grammar rules, but there also needs to be room for creativity.

Okay, that makes me feel better, though now I'm not sure what's supposed to make the fear go away. Oh well, that's not high on my priority list anyway. But now, on to specifics.

Zepeda said that at Norwalk High, where he worked for six years before coming to MHS, he introduced a program called Senior Projects.

He said the idea of a senior project is that the student chooses a topic to study and makes a big study project out of it. This project, primarily overseen by the student's English teacher, involves multiple disciplines: writing, math, stats, science, research, whatever. And because the topics are student-selected, the students are hopefully more committed to them.

For example, he said an African-American student at Norwalk did a study of sickle cell anemia, which was particularly important to her because she had the disease in her family. Another student, he said, did a successful search for her birth mother.

"We want to generate an experience that will stretch them," Zepeda said.

But still, he said, senior projects are all "standards based," meaning that through the process the students need to learn the things they're required to learn. Things like research, writing, math, and statistics. And in the end, the projects are judged by a panel. (That oughta take fear away - not.)

He said, "There is a real sense of accomplishment when a student walks out (after successfully completing a senior project). We've even had students come back and say how prepared they were for college."

Zepeda said it takes about a year to put senior projects into place, and he's planning to bring up the idea with the faculty. Any decision whether to go ahead with senior projects, he said, will be decided upon with the contribution of the staff, and not by himself alone.

While I'm all in favor of this stuff, at this point in the conversation I'm a bit concerned about the standardized tests. I'm fully aware that they are not perfect and that creativity is hugely important. In fact, I'm convinced that we are in - and are increasingly moving further into - a creativity-is-king economy. But creativity needs building blocks to play with, and to a great extent those building blocks are the basics: readn' writin' and 'rithmitic, so to speak.

So what about them standards?

"Absolutely!" he said. "Curriculum needs to be wrapped around standards."

He said teachers need to be trained and there need to be good standards. And yet he doesn't want teachers "teaching to the test," by which he means that students need to understand the concepts that will be covered on the test, but not do drills on mock tests over and over. Schools "can do test-prep every day," he said. "And, yeah, you can get a bump in scores, but you can do better than that."

Zepeda said the standards, however, are not imposed, but the staff will come up with their own standards. So, English teachers might come up with their standards, counselors with theirs, and so forth. In fact, he wants to see them posted on the walls of classrooms. So a language arts class, for example, might have as item 2.1, "Effective use of synonyms, antonyms and homonyms." Whatever the teacher teaches should relate to the standards on the wall. It's right up there to remind the teacher and the students. With that accountability, the teacher might spend a bit less time chatting about his trip through the Moselle Valley of France and a bit more time on homonyms. (My example, not his.)

"You get good scores," he said, "with good strategy." And, he added later, "I adopt the philosophy, 'We do everything else well. We'll test well, too.'"

In fact, he looks at test-taking as a "life skill." He said that if students know how to take tests now, it'll help them in the future, whether they take the state bar exam, the state cosmetology exam, the state's plumber's exam, or whatever.

Although he doesn't want teachers teaching to the test, he thinks it's a good idea for teachers to format their own tests in the format of the standardized tests, so the format becomes familiar to the students. Hmmm. Clever idea.

"You can have it both ways," Zepeda said, "creativity and standards."

Another of his ideas, which he also implemented in Norwalk, are what he calls "Academies."

Academies are courses focused around a topic, such as communications or business or medical services. The idea is that students would join, say, the Communications Academy. As part of the academy, they would kind of be part of a smaller school within a school, learning and working together as a group.

For example, in Norwalk, he said the students in the Medical Services Academy learn all the standard requirements, but with a slant toward medicine. So their study of statistics, for example, might relate to medical statistics. Also, students would have internships available in the community. In Norwalk, he said, the Medical Services Academy works with the local hospitals, and the students rotate through them.

It used to be that Norwalk was loosing students, he said. But now there are people wanting to transfer in, and there isn't enough room for them.

He said Norwalk even has a donated flight simulator (Norwalk being under the flight path for LAX, there is a natural aviation connection) and this year the students are building an actual airplane on campus. The amount of science and math that go into something like this, he said, is "unbelievable."

As for his impressions of Monrovia High, he says, "I'm blown away by the quality of the staff. There are a lot of talented people." And of the students, "These kids can perform much better (on the standardized tests) than they're doing."

He said it is often the brightest kids who do not do well on the standardized tests. Why? Because they're the ones smart enough to know that these tests have no bearing on their lives. Pass or fail, it doesn't affect their grades or their chances of getting into college. Nada. Part of the task, he said, is to convince the kids that these tests are important, to "get them in the mindset of, 'Give us your best shot.'"

And now we're wrapping up, and, well, I feel a bit embarrassed to ask this question... I think I know the answer, but it seems kinda core to the whole discussion: "Did standardized test scores go up during your tenure at Norwalk?" Yes, he said, they did, but, he hastens to add, they went up "as a byproduct of good pedegogy."

Ah, good. Just checking.

"My vision," Zepeda said, "is that an MHS diploma means something" - that the students have a "rigorous academic grounding."

"This is a world-class school," he said. "It just doesn't know it yet."


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