After reading and hearing former Ventura Unified School District board candidate Monique Dollonne demean the Ventura district, teachers and students, I want to set the record straight.
Dollonne has repeatedly stated in press releases, mailers and paid VC Reporter advertisements that, "A shocking 44 percent of VUSD children cannot even read and write at proficiency levels for their grade standard."
At first, that statement seems quite startling. What Dollonne doesn't say is that the standard by which she uses to demean VUSD is currently under fire by the federal government as misleading and not representative of actual results. The law set arbitrary annual stairstep increases into place without regard to issues such as demographics, student turnover rates, language or special education consideration.
Most recently, federal Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said on Sept. 24 that the law "unfairly labeled many schools as failures even when they were making real progress ... placing too much emphasis on absolute test scores rather than student growth ... and is overly prescriptive in some ways while it is too blunt an instrument of reform in others."
He further said, "Many parents just view it (No Child Left Behind) as a toxic brand that isn't helping children to learn." Most importantly, in the speech he referred to a proposed "growth" model that more aptly reflects real, measurable results. See www.ed.gov for the press release.
In our county, using Dollonne's now ill-fated standard, there are currently 12 districts scoring below Ventura Unified and seven scoring higher (www.ed-data.org).
While her scare tactics appear shocking at first, the truth is that Duncan realizes that the current measurement system does not in fact measure true results. VUSD has shown consistent, considerable growth in all areas since NCLB was put into place.
-- John Walker, Ventura
(The writer is a board member of the Ventura Unified School District and the California School Boards Association. -- Editor)