By John Fensterwald - Educated Guess

Trustees of East Side Union High School District in San Jose voted earlier this year to make the 15 courses required for admission to a four-year state university the district’s standard curriculum.

That was the easy part.

Preparing and guiding the predominantly low-income students in the state’s second largest high school district to succeed with higher standards will take a long-term commitment, raised expectations, and more resources in an era of less public money for schools.

Over the summer, the 19,000 student district took an initial step: Stepping Up to Science, a four-week preview to Biology for up to 200 incoming ninth graders at four of the 11 high schools in the district. For many, it was the first exposure to hands-on science they had missed in middle school. For some, it was a clean break from the self-reinforced view of their own failure in middle school.

The curriculum was designed by science teachers in the district; the program, which will include three years of training that will reach all of East Side Union’s 120 science teachers, was co-funded by National Semiconductor and the Silicon Valley Education Foundation. The Foundation, which had championed the adoption of A-G and promised trustees that it would help them make A-G work, administered the program.

It’s a smart idea. As my colleague at the Foundation, Vice President Manny Barbara, put it, by filling in gaps of knowledge that teachers know the students have, Stepping Up to Science “front-loads students instead of waiting for them to fail and then doing remediation.”

For East Side Union, the adoption of A-G will require a switch from Integrated Science to Biology as the standard course for ninth graders – “a huge increase in rigor,” said Paul Kilkenny, the district’s science subject area coordinator. For decades, the district limited access to biology and chemistry, resulting in a de facto tracking system of Latino and African American students. Integrated science, a non-lab survey course that’s heavy on earth science, has not engaged students or attracted the district’s best science teachers, Kilkenny said.

Standardized tests results verify that it’s a dead-end option. In 2011, 43 percent of East Side Union’s ninth graders took Integrated Science, with only 17 percent testing proficient or advanced; 31 percent took biology, with 60 percent proficient or advanced; one school offered physics in ninth grade; 14 percent took no science class at all.

David Porter, whom I can attest is a fine teacher, said he taught 10 sections of Integrated Science, with three-quarters of the students failing and 50 percent repeating the course in tenth grade.

“I tried to kill Integrated Science six years ago,” he said. Porter is the science department chairman at James Lick High School, which, under Principal Glenn Vander Zee, has pushed all students to take biology in ninth grade. It’s been a struggle; 70 percent took it in 2011, but only 22 percent were proficient or advanced on the California Standardized Test.

Kilkenny knows biology for all will be a stretch. Students coming from middle schools feeding into schools like James Lick that were designated Program Improvement under No Child Left Behind had double courses in math and English. Science was squeezed out, because it assigned less of a weight on a school’s API score. The incoming students had never used a microscope, made observations, and organized data. The vocabulary of science was a foreign language; science for them had been largely memorization.

A new start for low achievers

Each of the four high schools could choose eligibility criteria. James Lick chose students who had tested below basic and far below basic – the lowest performers in middle school, not the ones on the cusp of academic success.

These were kids “who needed a new start to school in a subject they had not had before,” Vander Zee said.

Or, as Porter put it, “These are students who already assumed they would be failures in high school – and were expecting to have that view of themselves  reinforced.”

Porter was a lead writer of the summer curriculum. The idea, he said, was to expose students in depth to a few concepts – DNA, cells, photosynthesis – to get them to make observations, draw conclusions, and write them up in coherent sentences. At the end of four weeks of five-hour days, lab work wouldn’t be new or confusing, and their newfound confidence would rub off on others in their class in the fall. At least that was the hope.

It wasn’t easy. Between no-shows, quitters, and behavior problems, one of the two classes at Lick was down from 25 to 13 students by the third week; attendance at Porter’s class was steadier.

And there were breakthroughs.

On the day that I visited, students were calculating the voltage of photovoltaic cells under a hot July sun. They had to read instructions to connect the voltage meter and attach extra photovoltaic cells in a series, experiment to get the optimum angle of exposure to the sun, then graph the results to see if there was enough electricity to light a light bulb and if the additional cells proved their hypothesis that they would generate more power.

In the classroom, Porter helped them make the connection between photovoltaic cells and the photosynthesis they’ll study in biology.

For Isael Navarrete, all of the hands-on work with the equipment “makes sense to me” – something that didn’t happen in middle school, where “you didn’t get to do the real stuff.” As an English learner, he has struggled with reading and writing. But he had no trouble following the instructions, which intuitively came to him.

“Isael has logical thinking,” Porter said. “Following procedures is simple for him. He can watch a lab once and get it.”

Isael’s aunt is a nurse and has interested him in becoming a doctor. He’ll enter James Lick believing – perhaps for the first time – that it’s possible.

Kilkenny acknowledged there was a high attrition rate, but no worse than the average for summer school. Most students continued to come to class for noncredit work; an informal assessment found that two-thirds of the students were kinesthetic learners, “yet we continue to lecture to them,” he said.

Harder data on the course will be available next month; the district plans to track the students’ progress in biology.

Porter is already confident enough to start planning  the next step: Stepping Up to Chemistry, with the goal of introducing it at James Lick next summer.

In coming days: Most of the state’s 30 largest school districts cut back – while a few  expanded – summer school this year, according to  an EdSource survey. Also, a look at SMASH, an overnight summer program at Stanford and Cal for promising minority high school students.