SAN DIEGO — San Diego Board of Education Member Shelia Jackson congratulated KPBS for its recent KPBS “Envision San Diego program, “Building Expectations: Portrait of Lincoln High School.”
“This informative program provides us with a wonderful teachable moment for why accountability and stability is paramount to the success of Lincoln and other urban schools,” said Trustee Jackson.
According to Jackson, the student achievement record at Lincoln High’s stems from the fact that the Gates Foundation, American Institutes of Research (AIR) and the executive staff of the San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) were not held accountable for the success of the small school model at Lincoln High School. The Gates Foundation gave millions to the SDUSD to experiment with small schools. In Lincoln’s case the school was designed and built as four individual schools on one footprint. The community dynamics and/or long term consequences were not considered. So as the experiment started to fail, Gates Foundation just walked away. AIR lined its pockets with over one-third of the funding provided by the Gates Foundation and formed a Lincoln advisory committee whose membership included a founding member of a nearby competitive charter school.
“There has been no stability in the oversight of Lincoln,” said Jackson. “The SDUSD executive staff has changed the supervision of Lincoln more than three times in the last four years.”
Jackson believes that the School Board commitment to community-based schools and the development of Area Superintendents has finally provided necessary accountability and stability needed for success at Lincoln and in the community. Jackson is calling on the community to join in her efforts to improve Lincoln High School by contacting other School Board members to ask them to support the current Area Superintendent model with Dr. Brenda Campbell and Dr. Shirley Wilson as our leadership team.
