Above: Cynthia Rapaido, school principal at South San Francisco High School.
SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – Cynthia Rapaido is the first Filipino-American Principal at South San Francisco High School and 2013’s California Assistant Principal of the Year. Despite her tenured career, she said she “froze” while watching one of her teachers during a recent Common Core math class.
“[The teacher] had an equation with the answer on the board,” recalled Rapaido, “then asked the class, ‘what is the question?’ She was asking them how to express the mathematical equation as a word problem.”
As Rapaido struggled to come up with an answer, a student in the class declared that “if you ate X number of doughnuts in Y number of days, you would have eaten a total of Z number of doughnuts.” Another student then came up with a way to determine the number of consumed calories using an iteration of the same equation.
“This is how we want to teach math,” said Rapaido, whose school, like others across the state, has been working to implement the Common Core State Standards since they were adopted in 2010.
The CCSS replaced the previous California State Standards, putting a greater emphasis on skills like critical thinking, reasoning and analysis. Students are encouraged to work collaboratively, communicating their ideas verbally and in writing.
Supporters say the shift to the Common Core will help ensure students are prepared for the demands of college and career. But the new standards also mean that, as with students and teachers, administrators like Rapaido have some learning of their own to do.
No more erasers
Cregg Ramich is a Curriculum and Instruction Specialist for South San Francisco Unified. He’s worked with both teachers and principals in helping them prepare for the Common Core and acknowledges it’s a heavy lift, though he says the effort has led to closer collaborations between the two.
“So much change so soon is very stressful,” Ramich explained during a press call with ethnic media reporters last month. “[but] that stress has helped principals and teachers to see themselves in this together… It’s drawn them together because the challenge is so great.”
Ramich added that in working with teachers to implement the standards, the role of the principal had shifted from “instructional leader to lead learner.”
At South San Francisco’s Los Cerritos Elementary School, the principal-teacher partnership has led to some unique strategies. Philippine-native Kennelyn Celeste took over as the school’s principal three years ago.
“I’ve been training my teachers to tell the children that even if you’re wrong, mistakes can make you stronger. You can learn from mistakes,” she said.
To make sure that lesson gets through, teachers at Los Cerritos actually discourage use of erasers in class. “We found that it would be better for kids to cross out and add to what they already wrote, rather than erasing everything and starting all over again,” explained Celeste, noting that by doing this students are better able to track and articulate their own thought processes.
Celeste said, “This is another shift from thinking there’s only one answer and there’s only the teacher’s way.”
Teachers are also now looking for more ways to help students make connections between what they learn in class and the real world. That means a class on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, for example, might now include discussions on inter-racial marriage or gang violence.
“Beyond the structure and discussions of plot and denouement, teachers now ask students to express the lines in their own words and tie the play to something relevant [in their own lives],” said Rapaido.
Getting parents on board
Being able to make those kinds of connections, and to communicate them in a coherent way are just a few of the skills that students are now expected to master under the Common Core. But while most say the role of the parent in fostering these skill is critical, both Rapaido and Celeste have struggled to communicate this need to some in the Fil-Am community.
Celeste began talking about Common Core with parents at Los Cerritos in the spring of 2013. “I talked about the shift to Common Core very early and I gave them very clear examples … I showed them videos of how this may apply so they knew what to expect.”
In addition to these efforts, Celeste also continued to inform parents at school orientations, monthly PTA meetings and at convenings of her school’s English Learners Advisory Committee.
Still, she said, for some parents it’s been a struggle. “I think some parents have a tough time supporting their children because they lack the knowledge to teach them at home,” she explained. “Their knowledge of math, for example, may not be up to date, and now they have to help their children reason out and go deeper into math.”
Unlike the previous standards, described as a mile wide and an inch deep, the Common Core covers fewer areas but takes students deeper into each. In math, for example, that means more time spent learning multiple approaches to a single equation, something many parents may not be used to.
Rapaido says for Filipino American families, there are also cultural obstacles to helping them better understand what their kids are expected to know under the Common Core.
“Maybe the student loses interest or loses heart because their career path has already been decided for them,” she explained. “In Filipino culture, the family always comes first. So, often their best and brightest is the sacrificial lamb to go into [a career like] nursing.”
Rapaido also says that like other Asian communities, many Filipino families don’t encourage their kids to communicate freely enough. “In our culture, you don’t get to ask why because it can be seen as disrespectful,” she said. “We don’t want parents to come back to our teachers complaining about situations where our students are ‘challenging’ them.”
But Lori Musso, with the San Mateo County Office of Education’s Curriculum and Instruction Services, is adamant educators “would never encourage a student to be disrespectful to any parent.” She says the new standards are “really about being able to talk about your thinking and problem solving… to be able to speak and present findings based on evidence, not on passion or arguing.”
That ability, she adds, is key to future success. “This is something they’ll be asked to do over and over again in college and in their careers.”
The career theme is one Rapaido has stressed in her meetings with parents.
“I make them aware of fulfilling careers and resources for financial aid and scholarships,” she noted, pointing to a recent partnership with the bio-tech giant Genentech involving internships for some students.
That kind of communication, says Rapaido, “definitely needs to happen with parents” to ensure they understand exactly what their children need.
This story was produced in collaboration with the Silicon Valley Community Foundation and New America Media as part of a series looking at Common Core in Silicon Valley. See part one here.