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There's More to a School Than Test Scores, Author Says

Posted on: Monday, 27 March 2006, 12:00 CST

Thousands of parents this time of year fret over where to send their beloved children to school. They worry about sending a kid to a school with potential gangs, whether private schools are better than public and a school's test scores. Nancy Ginsburg Gill, 58, of Los Altos has some advice: Look beyond the test scores and consider what environment your child will best succeed. She co-authored a guide for parents on schools in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties. She's also a consultant who helps parents choose schools and runs the writing center at Foothill College.

Parents' Guide to School Selection in San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties, which she wrote with Brendan Pratt, can be found at Kepler's Books in Menlo Park, Books Inc. in Burlingame, the San Mateo Real Estate Board and http://www.prattcenter.com.

Gill recently spoke to staff writer T.S. Mills-Faraudo about what makes a good school, how parents choose schools and the pros and cons of charter schools.

Q: How do you think parents judge a school? Do they just look at test scores?

A: That's the natural thing to do. Certainly there's that tendency to look at the test scores and they'll tell you everything you need to know and it really doesn't.

Sometimes people get so obsessed by the test scores that they forget that what is really important is the leadership of the school, the line-up of teachers and the parent culture.

Q: At Baywood Elementary School, parents camp out overnight to get their kid in the school. How would you explain this when there are other good schools in the district?

A: Demographics drive so much of this. For example, one of the things I try to explain to parents is you have a lot of communities in San Mateo County, especially in the south part, where you have these little districts such as Woodside, Portola Valley, San Carlos or Menlo Park. They have very high test scores and parent involvement and a high socioeconomic background. Those are all K-8. But then when they go to high school, they merge with some of the poorer districts.

So you have some of the kids fromthe poorest communities mixed in with the kids from Atherton, Woodside and Portola Valley. Sometimes parents just worry about that whole demographic: Is that going to mean that there's suddenly gangs? Suddenly there's discipline problems. Test scores drop.

It's not because the smart kids get dumber. It's because you have a much more real world mix. A lot of parents make that leap without any problems. But other parents get much more nervous.

Q: Do you think it's OK for some parents to have this kind of mentality in which they don't want their kids to mix with students from different backgrounds?

A: Of course it's not healthy, but for some of these parents it's natural. It's out of fear of the unknown. It's out of fear of hearing about the problems with gangs.

Sometimes it comes from the parents' own background. Sometimes the parents themselves went to schools with mixed demographics and did fine.

Q: Why do you think there's sometimes a mentality that private schools are better than public schools?

A: I don't think there's quite as much of that now as there used to be. Back then, (around the 1980s) there was some cause for it. There was a lot of experimentation back in the '60s and '70s and when I first got my credential, we were filled with ideas of letting the kids do their own thing on their own time and a lot of unstructured experiments. Some of them worked for some kids and some of them were disastrous. So there was a lot of faith that the kids would learn if you let them do their own thing.

Then these reports started coming out, such as the Nation At Risk, saying our public schools aren't serving our kids well. At the same time you had this Silicon Valley boom so you suddenly had all this wealth that really wasn't around when I was growing up. And people had fewer kids, whereas in the '50s people had four, five or six kids. Then so many of my generation waited to have kids, so it was more like families of one kid or two kids and easier to consider private school tuition because the money was there.

Q: Tell me about the consulting you do?

A: I do a lot of it as relocation consulting. So when companies are bringing families out here, but they've heard horror stories about California's public schools. Or they've been in private schools elsewhere but they don't know if they're going to find the same kind of private schools here.

One of the reasons I got into it (consulting), is I knew what good private schools looked like. But I also knew there were private schools that were really poor quality. There was a need for parents to have someone who could tell them what good private schools could do and what good public schools could do. I could help people sort through these options as objectively as possible.

Q: What do you think of charter schools?

A: I think, in general, the more choices you have, the better. I think that when they offer the alternatives, for example you have a couple new charter high schools in this area, there are a lot of kids who the big public high school experience doesn't work for them. Anything that gives these kids alternatives is really healthy.

Until you had the charter schools or some of these alternatives, you either did public school or you had to be very rich to be able to afford private schools.

Q: Do you think parents are really taking a chance with their children by sending them to charter schools since a lot of these schools are new and are still working out their problems?

A: And some of them haven't worked out. It depends on how well thought out they are.

Where I really admire them is when they serve the kids that don't traditionally succeed and figure out alternative ways to offer them programs that give them a better shot.

The charter schools aren't going to work for all kids because they want the football games, they want the marching bands and they want to be involved in all of these activities.

Q: What makes a school good?

A: I think I always come back to the idea of leadership. Whether it's public or private, the principal or head of the school really can make people happy to be there, can bring out the best in teachers.

Even though, in the end, it's probably the individual teachers your child gets that are going to make or break the education, the leadership can really make people want to do their best, it can make people want to stay in a school and not leave.

Source: Oakland Tribune

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