[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 7 (Monday, January 22, 1996)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E47-E48]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               FAMILY, COMMUNITY, AND OUR PUBLIC SCHOOLS

                                 ______


                       HON. GEORGE P. RADANOVICH

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                        Monday, January 22, 1996

  Mr. RADANOVICH. Mr. Speaker, all too often our public schools are 
dominated by a bloated bureaucracy unresponsive to the needs of 
families and local communities. The more we can return effective 
control over education to localities, Mr. Speaker, the more we can 
enhance the active involvement of parents in our public schools, curb 
costs and bureaucracy, and ensure that our children leave school 
equipped with the adequate knowledge and skills to play their full part 
in American society.
  The Clovis Unified School District [CUSD] in my congressional 
district, makes a welcome contrast to this grim picture. Superintendent 
Walter Buster, building on the foundations laid by the CUSD's first 
superintendent, Floyd V. Buchanan, has demonstrated that public schools 
can provide a good education without inflated costs and with maximum 
parental involvement. The CUSD works actively with its local community 
and is responsive to it. It therefore gives me great pleasure to 
present the following article by Christopher Garcia, published in the 
latest issue of Policy Review: The Journal of American Citizenship 
(January/February 1996).

              Humble Clovis Defies the Education Visigoths

       In 507 A.D., at Vouille in present-day France, the King of 
     the Franks led a band of warriors against the Visigoths, the 
     marauding barbarians who had sacked Rome a century earlier. 
     The king, named Clovis, defeated the Visigoths and broke 
     their hold on Europe.
       Today, a modern namesake--the Clovis Unified School 
     District (CUSD), in Fresno, California--is successfully 
     defying another ominous empire: the education establishment. 
     Despite serving a significant portion of Fresno's urban poor, 
     Clovis is proving that public schools can deliver a good 
     education with a small budget and minimal bureaucracy.
       Clovis has long ignored the prevailing cant about the need 
     for high spending and huge bureaucratic machinery to regulate 
     public education. During the 1993-94 school year, CUSD spent 
     $3,892 per pupil; school districts nationwide averaged 
     $5,730. The district's student-to-administrator ratio is 
     520:1--nearly twice the national average. And although 
     similarly sized districts (like those in Rochester, New York, 
     and Madison, Wisconsin), typically house 300 to 400 employees 
     in their central office, CUSD employs just 167. With no 
     teachers union or Parent Teachers Association (PTA), CUSD is 
     a rarity among public schools.
       In this case, less means more--more students performing 
     above average across a broad range of measures. The 
     district's average score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test 
     (SAT) is 52 points higher than the state average and 42 
     points higher than the national average. CUSD's mean 
     composite score on the American College Test (ACT) stands 
     respectably at the 65th percentile. In 1995, with a senior 
     cohort of 1,606, CUSD students passed 720 Advanced Placement 
     (AP) exams.
       Perhaps one reason Clovis kids out perform their peers is 
     that they show up for class more often: The district's high-
     school attendance rate is nearly 95 percent, and its drop-out 
     rate is only 4 percent. The district doesn't skimp on its 
     extracurricular offerings, either. More than 80 percent of 
     Clovis students participate in one of the most successful 
     programs in California. Last year, the district earned a 
     championship at the National Future Farmers of America 
     Convention and sent its state-champion Odyssey of the Mind 
     team to compete in the world finals.
       Many Clovis children are among the most disadvantaged in 
     the region. Nearly 40 percent of the district's students live 
     in Fresno City. Six of CUSD's elementary schools enroll 
     enough AFDC children to qualify for direct financial 
     assistance from the federal government. And five schools have 
     student bodies with more than 50 percent minorities. In 1989, 
     the median household income of the community surrounding 
     Pinedale Elementary School was $10,000 below the national 
     median of $28,906. And yet Mexican-Americans, who make up the 
     district's largest minority (about 18 percent of all 
     students), outperform their State and national counterparts 
     on the ACT by significant margins.
       Created in 1960 from the merger of seven rural, low-income 
     school districts, CUSD presented its first superintendent, 
     Floyd V. Buchanan, with a significant challenge: Barely more 
     than one in three of the district's 1,843 students performed 
     at grade level. Buchanan wanted to push this figure to 90 
     percent--but how?
       Put simply: competition, control, and consequences. 
     Buchanan reasoned that schools would not be spurred to meet 
     the goals that he and the central administration set for them 
     unless they competed against one another in academic and 
     extracurricular achievement. He established goals for each 
     of the system's 11 schools at the start of the year, 
     ranked them according to their performance at year's end, 
     and established a system of carrots and sticks (mostly 
     carrots).
       Most importantly, administrators and teachers were allowed 
     to choose the teaching methods and curricula they felt suited 
     their objectives. This formula, in place for decades, has 
     allowed the district--now with 30 schools and 28,000 
     students--to place between 70 and 90 percent of its students 
     at grade level.
       Competition in the district exists at several levels. 
     Earning a rating as a top school is its own reward, but the 
     district recognizes high achievement in other ways. The top 
     schools on the elementary, intermediate, and high-school 
     levels are recognized at an annual, districtwide award 
     ceremony. The district's best teachers and administrators are 
     honored at a dinner. And the school's achievements are 
     reported to parents and the community in the pages of the 
     district's publications.
       The friendly, competitive culture at Clovis clearly has 
     helped drive achievement. Because a school's performance at a 
     districtwide choral competition or drama fair influences its 
     ratings, teachers, students, and administrators work hard to 
     give their routines the extra edge needed to push ahead of 
     their colleagues. Schools borrow the winning strategies used 
     elsewhere. Students at Clovis West High School, for example, 
     often score better on SATs and AP exams than those at Clovis 
     High School, so Clovis High has borrowed test-preparation 
     tips from Clovis West. Clovis High is also trying to improve 
     discipline by looking at successful techniques employed at 
     Buchanan High.
       Competition, however, would produce little without local 
     decision-making. Anticipating trends that would revolutionize 
     America's Fortune 500 companies, Buchanan made flexible, 
     decentralized, site-based management a fundamental feature of 
     the school system in 1972. The district office has been 
     responsible for setting goals and establishing guidelines, 
     but schools have worked to meet these goals in their own 
     ways. ``They give us the what and we figure out the how,'' 
     says Kevin Peterson, the principal of Tarpey Elementary 
     School.
       When officials at Pinedale Elementary School determined 
     that parent participation there was lower than at other 
     schools, for example, they realized that immigrant parents 
     felt locked out by language barriers. So they created 
     ``family nights'' to help these parents take part in their 
     children's education. With their children present, the 
     parents are taught games and devices they can use at home to 
     help their children with their homework. The result: 
     Immigrant parents now participate more.
       Such innovation is easier in the absence of teacher unions. 
     For example, the district deploys teachers weekly to the 
     homes of about 100 recently arrived immigrants to provide 
     them English-language instruction and to help them build a 
     bridge to their rapidly assimilating children. Meredith 
     Ekwall, a first-grade teacher at Weldon Elementary School, 
     teaches English at night to the parents of her ESL students 
     to encourage English use in the home. In districts where 
     collective-bargaining agreements stipulate precisely how much 
     time teachers spend teaching, micromanage the amount of time 
     teachers can devote to activities outside of the classroom, 
     and dictate what a district can and cannot ask its teachers 
     to do, such flexibility and voluntarism is rare.
       Along with teacher autonomy and greater parent access, 
     Clovis strives for accountability. All the teachers, without 
     exception, are expected to bring 90 percent of their students 
     up to grade level. If they do not, everyone knows about it. 
     The district's research and evaluation division notifies 
     teachers, parents, and administrators of school and student 
     performance. And with curriculum development and teacher 
     hiring and firing in the schools' hands, knowledge is power. 
     The approach has ``made every teacher accountable,'' says 
     Redbank Elementary School Principal Susan VanDoren. ``[I]t 
     made me sit down and look at all those kids [needing help] 
     and ask, `What can we do? ''
       Parents seem more likely to ask that question in Clovis 
     than in other school districts. Parents and other community 
     members (including the clergy, senior citizens, and 
     businessmen) sit on advisory boards, where they review 
     individual school performance and formulate policy. Last 
     year, some parents were upset that children were required to 
     read feminist author Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird 
     Sings. Parents forged an 

[[Page E48]]
     agreement with the district that allows them to review books assigned 
     to their children and help develop alternatives. Other boards 
     recently voted to institute a voluntary uniform and a fee-
     based home-to-school transportation program. Teams of parents 
     issue critiques of schools on the basis of data culled from 
     parent surveys; these reviews are posted in every staff room 
     in the district.
       These boards function the way PTAs are meant to, but 
     without the stifling hand of teacher-union influence. ``The 
     reason for the success of Clovis,'' says Superintendent 
     Walter Buster, ``is that these schools are truly governed by 
     elected lay people.''
       Ultimately, it seems, success in CUSD is driven by 
     community expectations. ``There's a corporate culture that 
     has been established that requires more of people, expects of 
     people more, and gets of people more,'' says H.P. Spees, 
     executive director of Fresno-Madeira Youth for Christ and 
     member of CUSD's clergy advisory council.
       This culture of expectation is impressed upon teachers even 
     before they pick up a piece of chalk. A lengthy, multi-tiered 
     interview process incorporates parents, teachers, community 
     leaders, principals, and administrators and signals to 
     prospective teachers that the Clovis community demands much 
     of its teachers. According to Ginger Thomas, the principal of 
     Temprance-Kutner Elementary School, some teacher candidates 
     quit the interview process, saying ``you guys work too 
     hard.'' Assistant superintendent Jon Sharpe contends that 
     Clovis sustains ``a work ethic in the public sector that's 
     almost unsurpassed.'' He may be right: In 1992, CUSD, 
     teachers even voted down their own pay raise to channel the 
     money into books and supplies.
       In an education system under assault for its academic 
     failures, Clovis has produced a winning formula. CUSD schools 
     have won recognition by the state of California 15 times and 
     earned national blue ribbons from the U.S. Department of 
     Education 13 times. The prestigious Phi Delta Kappa Center 
     for Evaluation, Development, and Research has featured Clovis 
     in two works, Clovis California Schools: A Measure of 
     Excellence and Total Quality Education. Even outspoken 
     critics of public education recognize the district's 
     accomplishments. ``If we are going to limit ourselves to the 
     Prussian system of education, Clovis is the best we are going 
     to get in a tax-financed school,'' says Marshall Fritz, the 
     founder of the Fresno-based Separation of School and State 
     Alliance and the father of four Clovis students.
       Awards aside, the real lesson of Clovis is that good 
     education depends not on bloated budgets but on creative and 
     committed teachers and administrators held accountable by 
     engaged communities. Clovis's success also suggests that 
     quality in public education will not be the norm until 
     resources are channeled to classrooms rather than 
     bureaucrats, and parents wrest control over education from 
     teachers unions.

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