A District at Risk The Desert Independent

The Desert Independent

A District at Risk By ROBERT E. JENSEN The Desert Independent March 14, 2010 BLYTHE, Calif – Back in 1983, the Department of Education under then-Secretary Terrell H. Bell published a study of the educational morass in the United States entitled “A Nation at Risk.” Its headline-grabbing prologue stated that: If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament. Couple this observation from 27 years ago with the current state of education in California and, especially, in the Palo Verde Unified School District and read on. The (Riverside) Press-Enterprise printed an article on Saturday in which it declared numerous schools in the Inland Empire to be among the “worst in California.” To wit: Sixteen Inland schools made a list of the lowest performing campuses in the state, but officials said Monday they are working to reverse the trends. The schools are on the preliminary list of the bottom 5 percent in academic performance. The California Department of Education released the first-ever list on Monday. Each campus must choose one of four school improvement models required by state and federal law. Most of the schools are listed because of low test scores, but five were identified for low graduation rates. These schools were mainly located in San Bernardino with mentions of Alvord, Coachella, Moreno Valley and Perris as far as Riverside County goes, but there was no mention of the Palo Verde Unified School District. To read the entire article, click HERE. Why no mention of the schools in PVUSD? Well, as observers of this newspaper would report, over the past 15 years the Press-Enterprise has concluded that Blythe is apparently not located in