“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.
It’s Week 2 of the California Standards Test and students are fingering their math facts like an abacus. Many of 
And this morning, they will each complete question number 21– a pre-algebraic word problem with one absurd possible answer choice, one answer choice that will trick a number of children who aren’t yet test-savvy enough to smell a rat, one answer choice that is correct and one answer choice that goes down smoothly…a sugar sweet placebo to remind us all that standardized, multiple-choice tests are to the disadvantage of the children that actually think. But they don’t know if they got question #21 right. They don’t know if they fell for the tricks and the traps so they cannot make mid-flight adjustments like they do on their video games. They’ll never know.
But imagine what our teachers might do with the data if they could get it back next Tuesday. As they unwrap the tangled trends: 
This is also the time period in which we cease to philosophize about the wisdom of standardized tests and what the pre-occupation with language arts and math might be doing to our students’ broader abilities to think and innovate and solve problems and reason. This is not the time to engage in the political debate. An NFL coach may not like the rules for sudden death overtime, but when you are out of downs on your opponents’ 20-yard line, you better just trot out your kicker for the game winning field goal and argue about the rules of the game later.
So we are playing to win. And when we win, we expect that there will be some interesting headlines in the morning newspaper. Something like:
"El Milagro Weblog" 
