The school year has begun one week earlier than last year. San Francisco, San Jose, and my district are starting in order to cover the curriculum standards before the school days zip by and state testing looms before us.

Not that I haven’t been in school most of the summer. If one wants a Master’s degree, summer is the time to finish two more classes. I did take a vacation, but not before I wrote a literature review, synthesizing 30 peer-reviewed research articles; planned my research project for the second year of the MA program; and wrote up the project’s organization–research on how well students perform non-fiction writing when reading science and social studies books, not the textbook.

California schools received the results of the summative tests taken last spring. Our school did well, though not the highest scoring school in the district. On the Academic Performance Index (API), the state’s scoreboard, the school has maintained its 900+. Any school in the state would be overjoyed with such a score.

I’ve been reading the newspapers and it’s a good thing our school is high-performing because school budgets in California are still wobbly. The 188 low-performing schools throughout the state will be earmarked to receive any state and federal monies left in the bucket.

Those schools would benefit from the waivers that the U.S. Department of Education is offering if California shows a plan that will demonstrate progress to reach benchmarks. Friends in my MA program at San Jose State University who teach in low-performing schools are hoping the state will adjust the benchmarks. Even our school won’t reach the No Child Left Behind law’s Annual Yearly Progress scores by 2014. Already our Hispanic and African-American students are falling behind.

The San Francisco school described in the San Francisco Chronicle, August 16, 2011, article “State schools closer to making the grade” will certainly benefit from a plan to celebrate gains students have made. Wouldn’t the wise move be to provide resources to continue improvement rather than punish the school for not making benchmarks that were unrealistic to begin with?

According to the article, the students at San Francisco’s John Muir Elementary are spending the year on strategies to become good readers. My students can read well; they need to improve their ability to write non-fiction compositions. Maybe one genre for my research project can be simple persuasive essays. My students can persuade Tom Torlakson, new California Superintendent of Public Instruction, to apply for a waiver from the U.S. Department of Education. Relieve the stress on students to reach unrealistic benchmarks. Every class has at least one student who would benefit from a compromise.