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Berkeley Unified School District has been put on a list of 150 California school districts needing “program improvement.” 

The district’s public information officer said that the listing is part of bureaucratic wrangling between state and federal agencies and is not indicative of the quality of education in the district. 

“It really doesn’t mean anything different as far as the district is concerned,” said Mark Coplan, district spokesperson. 

Schools and districts are subject to severe penalties under the federal No Child Left Behind Act if they stay on the so-called Program Improvement “watch list” for several years. 

Coplan said that entire districts can be put on the “watch list” if the district is considered a low-income Title I district and the district’s students fall below state-monitored Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) for two consecutive years. 

In Berkeley’s case, however, the district was one of several state districts put on the list because a certain number of schools have been placed on the Program Improvement list. 

“The state superintendent and members of the state school board went up to Washington recently to lobby against that provision,” Coplan said, “but the federal government has insisted that districts under that category—like Berkeley Unified—are placed on the watch list.” 

Eight Berkeley public schools are on the Program Improvement list: Berkeley Alternative High, King, Willard, and Longfellow Middle, and Oxford Elementary are in their first year on the list; Cragmont Elementary is in its second year; Washington Elementary in its third year; and Rosa Parks Elementary is in its fourth year. Schools face escalating mandated corrective action the more years they remain on the list, with restructuring of the school beginning in the fourth year. 

“All of our corrective efforts and money are already being put into the individual sites,” Coplan said, including the “dedication of 10 percent of the district’s allocation to high quality professional development” as required by the federal government for Program Improvement schools. 

He also said that several Berkeley schools are on the watch list not because of poor academic performance, but because they did not meet the No Child Left Behind requirement of 95 percent participation in state-mandated tests. 

“A lot of Berkeley parents choose to have their children opt out of state tests for political reasons,” Coplan said. “We can inform the students about the tests, but state law requires that we not make them take the tests. To show you how absurd the situation is, if Berkeley High were a Title I school and came under the PI program, the school would be put on the Program Improvement list because it didn’t meet the testing percentage requirement. And last year, Berkeley was named one of the top one hundred high schools in the country.” 

After negotiations with the U.S. Department of Education, the California School Board passed new criteria at its March 9 meeting for school district inclusion on the PI list. Coplan said that new criteria should have taken Berkeley Unified off the watch list “and we’re still looking into why it did not.”Ã