“Let me say at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love…” — Che Guevara
On Tuesday our 2008-09 test results finally arrived. They were packaged neatly in a brown box, arriving on our door step like a UPS surprise. A milk delivery. Like an old Western Union Telegram containing some inevitable message that had to come sooner or later.
So we unwrapped the contents of the box and unfolded the scores like familiar laundry– grade level by grade level– and hung them on the clothesline: math next to the lemon tree… while language arts dried in a Bay-soft breeze that otherwise cools the bouganvilla. We figure if we treat our test results with such reverence, if we handle them gently enough, if we sprinkle them with holy water, if we read them by the light of a crescent moon, if we wait until the tides align, if we rub the rabbit’s foot, if we pay tributes to the voodoo altar… the news might be more favorable.
It wasn’t.
And so disappointment descends and we start to pick through the numeric bones like an autopsy:
“We should have…”
“We could have…”
“This is because the ______ (fill in grade level here) grade teachers neglected to…”
“If only those ______ (fill in demographics here) students had just…”
“It’s all the _____’s (fill in excuse here) fault that we…”
The truth is, of course, we have complete control over our results. El Milagro had record highs in 4 grade levels! Our students are strong in writing and our 8th grade may have been the highest middle school in the South County. There were lots of promising trends. But the NCLB testing game is not just about trends. It is about winning. We are the baseball team that makes great plays and gets lots of hits and looks gorgeous in our uniforms… but can’t score runs. If you can’t score runs… you won’t win games.
So for the first time in the 10-year history of the testing game, Mueller Charter School will join the inglorious club of Program Improvement schools who will be left scratching their heads and waiting for a knock on the door from the local expert who will bring a magic solution on how to terminate your membership from “the club” sooner than later.
We decided not to wait. It is a new season. We are already re-loading. We are organizing to score more runs. We realized that even though we keep getting better results each year, other schools are passing us like we are standing still. We can’t tinker at change… we have to turn El Milagro on its head.
Che Guevara is the face of revolution– but as far as I know he never played baseball. And he didn’t seem like the kind of guy who would belong to any club.
This is the 
It is the first day of school and so our students return. It is mid-summer… most school districts will not call their students back until after Labor Day. Not El Milagro, though. We start early. So ready or not, they are are descending– in droves. Record high enrollment and a long waiting list means business is good.
The Nature Center is our reminder that we are out of whatever “the box” is and our students could be the beneficiaries. 
• SECOND: Beyond basic skills, we would work just as hard to provide a more authentic, thinking curriculum that allows children to discover their natural gifts and interests. A curriculum that features the interesting stuff that engages students every day. Like the Nature Center and all its wind-framed beauty and ocean air; its banks of slippery seaweed, its deep fish tanks that stink. Or the tidepools, tucked snugly up against shallow marshes that splash mud and seawater on kid’s school clothes when the tide is up. Or rare creatures on loan from their fragile ecosystems; sometimes strange life-forms that can make kids smile when they hold them in their hands.
The history of El Patio Restaurant is written in its walls. It is as old as California. Father Serra may have stopped here for handmade beef tamales on his journey north to build California’s first missions. His ghost is still in the corner, plugging the jukebox with strange coins and listening to classic ’60s low rider anthems and tejano ballads.
Meanwhile, I noticed that the state of California still doesn’t have a budget agreement and that there is now a $26.3 billion deficit! The system is broke and it doesn’t appear that we are even 
As a matter of fact, I notice that the further away you get from actual classrooms where children and teacher live every day, the more delusional leadership becomes– like dancing in front of funhouse mirrors. 
In fact I wondered if they had found the Holy Grail. I wondered if maybe my ideas about insuring that kids mastered the standards before they moved to the next grade level… might be a little draconian; maybe even unnecessary.
I read that they have, by design, no lab equipment, no computers, no televisions, no games at PE. They mock multicultural curricula (“the demagoguery of tolerance”) and reject efforts to build children’s self esteem. It shows. The director refers to students of color as “darkies”!
And I can relate.
The API is California’s Academic Performance Index. It is a long and tortured statistical calculation that synthesizes each school’s test results into a 3-digit number. Every student at every grade and every subject area is calculated and “processed” like an elegant wood chipper that grinds otherwise healthy leaves and limbs into useful chips. It weighs the number of students that score proficient and reflects overall organizational growth from year to year. Every school in California is obligated to somehow reach the API promised land of 800 or face the fate of the mastodons.
“
“And we know that if 50% of our students– especially 50% of our English language learners– don’t score proficient on the California Standards Test we will miss the AYP benchmark for the first time and we will go into Program Improvement. We know that. We are climbing a mountain. So we added a full hour to the instructional day and tried to target students who were borderline. And every teacher provided English Language Development to every student for :35 minutes every single day. Damn… that has to count for something!”
Maureen asked: “Is it LEGAL to group kids for instruction– and eventually assign them a standardized test– according to their proficiency levels?” and “Is it ethical?”
Jonathan noted: “There are a lot of ways to demonstrate mastery of state standards other than by a standardized test. Are you giving the CST too much credibility as the main determiner of students moving forward? Are there other ways kids can demonstrate mastery of the state standards?”
So what if we organized our students for instruction according to the martial arts, mastery-based model that is thousands of years old instead of the archaic, age-driven system that we all perpetuate today?
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