Swimming in the Pensieve

It’s so cool when district-types leave auto-responders up while they’re on holiday; because it makes confirming the successful receipt of emailed documents a slam-dunker.

I sent a more completely filled-out copy of the following document to both “Jeffrey Cornejo” and “Guillermo Jiminez” , of Millikan High, this afternoon:

…and got the following automated response back from “Jeffrey Cornejo” :

################# BEGIN QUOTED TEXT ###############################
Return-path:
Envelope-to: [My private email addy masked]
Delivery-date: Sat, 22 Oct 2005 17:57:30 -0600
Received: [receipt trail and SPAM scanning sequence masked]
. . .
Received: from GWRoute-MTA by smtp.lbusd.k12.ca.us
with Novell_GroupWise; Sat, 22 Oct 2005 16:57:23 -0700
Message-Id:
X-Mailer: Novell GroupWise Internet Agent 6.5.2
Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2005 16:57:12 -0700
From: “Jeffrey Cornejo”
To: <[My private email addy masked]>
Subject: Re: Transfer of Records for [full student name masked] (Out of the Office)
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline
Status: R
X-Status: NC
X-KMail-EncryptionState:
X-KMail-SignatureState:
X-KMail-MDN-Sent:

1. Contrary to the rumors running around LBUSD, we’d rather do what’s right for our children, instead of litigate against the district.
   1. Idiots can’t be taught, even through the use of lawsuits.
   2. Our children don’t deserve to be targets for more of the kind of district retaliation that they have already been subjected to.
   3. Despite the fact that the district more than deserves to be punished for it’s illegal actions, the students do not deserve to be deprived of the resources that such monies would provide for their education. No matter how inefficiently the money has been spent in the past.
2. CAliVA@Kern works for our 3^rd and 5^th graders, so there is no reason to believe that it will be inappropriate for our 9^th grader.
   1. CAliVA@Kern provides all instructional materials at no cost to students and parents.
   2. The curriculum provided by CAliVA@Kern is approximately 1.5 years ahead of the public school curriculum offerings at the same grade-level placement.
   3. CAliVA@Kern provides a zero-cost computer system and printer to all enrolled (multifunction scanner/printer/fax machine for high school) students.
   4. CAliVA@Kern pays for the necessary Internet access for each family enrolled–to facilitate the online study for each CAliVA student.
3. LBUSD will actually feel more pain because we’ve placed our children in a better public school setting.
   1. LBUSD was complaining because of a drop in enrollments of only 1122 students for the 2005-2006 academic year.
   2. This drop of only 1122 in student enrollments cost LBUSD something between 5.5 million dollars and 7.8 million dollars this year.
   3. We’ve cost LBUSD more than 20.5 thousand dollars by enrolling our three children in CAliVA@Kern.
   4. Our experiences and advocacy will convince other parents to remove their children from LBUSD, and enroll them in CAliVA@Kern.
   5. Every child enrolled in CAliVA@Kern will cost LBUSD over six-thousand dollars each.
   6. That’s going to add-up fast.
4. Jeff considers Millikan High to be his personal property–to be used or abused, as he sees fit: “I will return to my Millikan on Monday, October 24, 2005.” Freudian slip?
5. Jeff’s Millikan High is obviously below the academic standards our son holds for himself.
   1. Unlike CAMS, Millikan High can’t seem to manage a positive slope on their API plot; and the -10 isn’t the whole story either.
      The negative-10 API for the period 2004-2005 is 47 points under the district’s average for all high schools over the same period.
      In short, not only does Millikan suck, academically speaking, Millikan SERIOUSLY SUCKS!
   2. Quote from our son, “They’re only teaching us the same stuff we had back in the end of 6^th or the beginning of 7^th grade, and the architecture teacher has been gone since the second week of school; so it’s not like we’re learning anything new.”
   3. Millikan High has plenty of time to harass their students over inconsequential variances in clothing color.

   Take a bow, Jeff. You’re ten-down from ‘no-improvement’ over the last year! How many more good students will Millikan chase away with your “The packaging is more valuable than the contents”^[**] policies this academic year; and, just how far will your students’ academic performance fall before you’re done with them?

At any rate, our son is now learning what he needs to learn to succeed in college, and Millikan is no longer an impediment to him–or a gnat-like irritant to us.

As Geoffrey Holder used to say in the old 7-Up commercials, “Life is good! Ha-ha-ha-ha!”

^[**] This is a distillate of the American perversion of the Kaizen-based notion of “Fixing a customer’s negative perceptions.” American managers often refer to this Kaizen-perversion as “TQM” (Total Quality Management); wherein it is regularly espoused that perception is a far more important goal than true, absloute standards-based, quality of product or service.

By contrast, the Kaizen-based definition of of the importance of perception has its roots in a high-quality product or service; which may be misperceived because of poor communication or understanding of the true attributes of same, on the part of the customer or prospective customer.

The Kaizen-based approach attempts to bring customer-based perceptions into convergence with reality.

The “TCM” approach spends inordinate amounts of time and fiscal resources to cause customer perceptions to diverge from reality.

It is through this fallacious paradigm that you find executives who believe that promotions should be based more upon candidate appearance, instead of demonstrable , pertinent, candidate merit and ability.

The manifestation of the “TCM” philosophy in the public school sector manifests symptoms in many ways; most notably in the redefinition of standards of quality or qualification; and, in appearance-only-based policies–like mandatory uniforms or workplace dress codes which border upon the ridiculous.

In all cases, educational outcome (long term) is ignored or actively suppressed; as absolute standards invalidate standing political policy or questionable administrative actions.