Bersin's critics fight real reform

By: JIM TRAGESER - Staff Writer | Saturday, October 23, 2004 12:27 AM PDT ∞

It would be easy to dismiss San Diego Unified School District Trustee Frances O'Neill Zimmerman's repeated forays into crude Nazi epithets as the meaningless ramblings of a distant official.

The local Jewish community is outraged by what can most charitably be described as insensitivity: The Anti-Defamation League and other prominent groups protested her most recent comments comparing a proposed reform effort to Jews selling out to the Nazis.

But her insensitivity is only a side show: If Zimmerman's Nazi comparisons are the most viscerally offensive part of her role as trustee of the largest district in our county, her continued efforts to block meaningful reform that would benefit the district's most at-risk students are much more dangerous ---- having repercussions that ripple far beyond the borders of SDUSD.

For more than two generations, this state's public schools have systematically robbed Latino and African-American children of equal educational opportunity ---- pushing them through school via "social promotions" that advanced them in grade without a commensurate advancement in learning. The arrival of Superintendent Alan Bersin in San Diego helped change that. He showed that a back-to-basics approach that refused to sell minority children short could succeed in raising not only their academic achievement, but their educational expectations.

With the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation providing millions of dollars in funding for Bersin's reform efforts, the SDUSD program has become a model for how to refocus schools' attention from high-achieving, middle-class white students to an approach that refuses to sell any student short.

Bersin's leadership is already providing dividends here in North County. It's difficult to imagine the Oceanside Unified School District's own back-to-basics approach having been taken were it not for the existing SDUSD example. Today, of course, nearly every district in our area has some sort of similar program to ensure that every child, no matter his or her socioeconomic background, leaves school with a real education.

And yet Zimmerman and school board ally John de Beck have continued to fight Bersin's reforms, claiming to defend the interests of minority children while opposing every proposal that would benefit these very students.

Instead, in concert with the teachers union (which has continually endorsed and supported both Zimmerman and de Beck), this board minority has cast literacy programs as a "remedial stalag."

Why? Because the teachers who support them prefer to teach the college-prep and advanced placement courses that the high-achievers take. And who wouldn't rather teach kids who are self-motivated, for whom learning comes naturally?

But that's not why our public schools exist.

And so if the immediate, short-term effect of Bersin's reforms is to de-emphasize college prep courses at schools like La Jolla High, taking a longer view forces us to recognize that revamping our schools to ensure true equal opportunity for all students requires a large, agenda-setting district like SDUSD to take the lead.

Contact staff writer Jim Trageser at (760) 740-5424 or jtrageser@nctimes.com.

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