(Mod: The following "guest editorial" appeared on the Pasadena Now news site last February, and deals with what its authors believe is the cover-up of a cheating scandal at Sierra Madre Elementary School. Despite Pasadena Now's claims of having an exceedingly large readership, I'm not sure very many people in town ever saw this.)
Pasadena Unified School District’s flagship elementary school is
Sierra Madre Elementary School. The
Sierra Madre school has regularly been seen as
PUSD’s highest performing school – #1 when the
API scores used to come out and #1 again when the new
SBAC testing regime scores came out last fall.
The
Sierra Madre school is also rightfully the pride of the
City of Sierra Madre.
Sierra Madre enjoys an active parent support network for the school, and its citizens have long been vocal and effective proponents for resourcing the
Sierra Madre school.
But now there is a question mark hanging over
Sierra Madre as to whether
PUSD discriminatorily protected it against disclosure of cheating at the school while taking a harsher stance toward
Northwest Pasadena schools.
“PUSD wouldn’t get away doing to Sierra Madre what it did to Madison” – True or False?
A constant refrain of the grassroots coalition the
Citizens’ Council for Empowerment and Justice at
Madison is that
PUSD would never get away with doing to
Sierra Madre what it did to
Madison. That refrain arises from the fact that, when
Sierra Madre had to recently select a new principal,
Superintendent Brian McDonald of course gave it the right to have a principal selection committee of Sierra Madre stakeholders that selected three applicants for the position — from which
McDonald selected the new
Sierra Madre principal.
At the same time, he refused to form a principal selection committee for
Madison Elementary School; instead, he unilaterally imposed
Juan Ruelas as its principal with no site input.
Madison is the most heavily-Latino, most heavily English second-language, and the poorest community in
PUSD, while
Sierra Madre is the most heavily-White, the lowest Latino, the lowest ESL, and among the richest communities.
Saying that
PUSD would never get away with doing to
Sierra Madre what it did to
Madison is just another way of saying that
PUSD treats
Madison, a
Northwest Pasadena school, in a racially-discriminatory and wealth-discriminatory manner.
Some
Pasadena leaders say that
Madison’s grassroots organization should change its message and stop saying
PUSD would never get away doing to
Sierra Madre what it did to
Madison. Rather than concluding that those critics are saying we should stop repeating that refrain because they don’t want to hear the unpleasant truth that PUSD is acting in a racially-discriminatory and wealth-discriminatory manner, we’ll make the more benign interpretation that they believe the accusation of differential treatment is untrue.
There’s a long history of
Madison being under-resourced and
Sierra Madre being well-resourced that might support the differential treatment assertion. But let’s look to a different issue to illustrate the unpleasant truth about comparative
PUSD treatment of
Sierra Madre and
Northwest Pasadena elementary schools – i.e., the treatment of elementary schools when they are caught cheating on student testing.
The treatment of Northwest Pasadena’s Roosevelt school when it was caught cheating on state testing
On January 10, 2012,
PUSD issued a press release indicating that
Roosevelt Elementary School – a PUSD Northwest school closer to Madison’s demographics than to Sierra Madre’s – was caught cheating and having to forfeit its nomination as a
National Blue Ribbon school. PUSD’s press release was followed by embarrassing news stories in
Pasadena Now and the
LA Times which reported on the Roosevelt cheating disqualification from the National Blue Ribbon honor.
Significantly,
Roosevelt’s principal at the time the school got caught cheating was
Juan Ruelas, the principal who
McDonald later imposed on
Madison. McDonald’s rationale for denying Madison stakeholders’ involvement in selecting a new principal was that Roosevelt’s test scores during Ruelas’ tenure showed that he had accomplished educational miracles at Roosevelt and that he could do the same thing for Madison.
The 2012 bad publicity has come to haunt
Ruelas because it has led to the recent more searching examination of Ruelas’ record that is the basis for the grassroots coalition’s contention that Ruelas’ reputation for educational achievement at Roosevelt is built on quicksand.
Unlike Roosevelt’s cheating, Sierra Madre’s is kept under wraps
Our public records requests for documents related to the cheating at
Roosevelt forced
PUSD to disclose to us a smoking gun – a September 2, 2011, email that
PUSD’s Chief Technology Officer at the time,
Dr. Gary A Carnow, sent to 6 other PUSD administrators. In Carnow’s email was the following statement: “Roosevelt, …, and
Sierra Madre will not be eligible for any awards for two years based on the filing [sic-finding] of irregularities.”
Based on
Carnow’s email, we realized that
Sierra Madre had cheated on test scores like
Roosevelt had, so we filed a public records request with the
California Department of Education. A document produced to us by the Department of Education confirmed that Sierra Madre was caught cheating around the same time that Roosevelt was caught cheating.
But unlike the public exposure of
Roosevelt’s cheating,
Sierra Madre’s cheating was not publicly revealed – until publication of the February 18, 2016,
Sierra Madre Weekly story on Sierra’s cheating based on documents we gave it. Its story reports that PUSD Associate Superintendent
Mercedes Santoro confirmed that the
Sierra Madre school was caught cheating (albeit by doing her best to minimize it).
The
Board of Education was apparently informed on September 13, 2011, that
Sierra Madre had been caught cheating, but they learned about it in closed session. By telling the Board in closed session, the
PUSD administration prevented Board members from publicly disclosing Sierra Madre’s cheating because it is a criminal misdemeanor to disclose information learned in closed sessions unless the Board as a whole votes to release the information.
Apparently no Board member has ever thought that
Sierra Madre’s cheating was important enough for the Board to publicly disclose it like
Roosevelt’s was disclosed. Insofar as we can determine,
PUSD never issued a press release on
Sierra Madre’s cheating like it did for Roosevelt, so there was no media coverage of the cheating like there was for
Roosevelt until 4 ½ years later on February 18.
Thus,
PUSD’s Sierra Madre flagship skated through the last 4 ½ years without its reputation for sterling educational achievement soiled by the fact that some of that achievement was earned only through cheating. The
Northwest Pasadena school
Roosevelt was accorded no such protection from public disclosure. PUSD would never get away with doing to Sierra Madre what it did to Madison.
The grassroots
Madison coalition is going to keep repeating that
PUSD would never get away with doing to
Sierra Madre what it did to
Madison.
Mod: This piece was written by Dale Gronemeier and Skip Hickambottom. They are described as "local civil rights attorneys who represent the Citizens Council for Empowerment and Justice at Madison." Dale Gronemeier lives in Sierra Madre. Link to the original here.
sierramadretattler.blogspot.com
