DATE: Thursday, November 20, 1997           TAG: 9711200470

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B5   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY PHILIP WALZER, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: NORFOLK                           LENGTH:   67 lines

TOP TEACHERS GIVE LOW MARKS TO NEW VA. CURRICULUM STANDARDS

The state's new Standards of Learning and Accreditation, acclaimed as trailblazing by some politicians and educators, got a tougher reception Wednesday at a gathering of some of the area's top teachers.

The teachers said the detailed curriculum standards would crowd out innovation, such as combined teaching of two subjects. And they declared the accreditation rule requiring that 70 percent of a school's students pass new state exams unrealistic.

``All that fun stuff will go out the window because we don't have any time,'' said Shelley Deneau, a fourth-grade teacher at White Oaks Elementary School in Virginia Beach. ``The committee that made the standards never came into my class to see what's what.''

Twenty teachers - many of whom have been named school or city teacher of the year - are in Old Dominion University's Institute for the Advanced Study of Education. They gather monthly to hear guest speakers and swap ideas to improve education.

Donald A. Myers, an ODU education professor who runs the group, summed up its mood on the curriculum standards, also known as SOLs: ``For most people here, they range from a major annoyance to a minor annoyance. Hardly anyone thinks they're desirable or will improve the education of most children in Virginia.''

Lindsay Porzio, a fifth-grade teacher at Chesapeake's Treakle Elementary, once assigned novels to delve into subjects beyond English. She used a Benjamin Franklin book to teach about history and electricity. No longer. ``Now I'm teaching the SOLs. I have a big poster up that says we're teaching SOL 5.2.''

Iris Trusso-Relis, a second-grade teacher at Portsmouth's Lake-view Elementary, was more upbeat. She applauded the standards for ``moving skills down'' to lower grades. ``We underestimate what children can do,'' she said.

But she feared that the standards would be upended with the next shift in political winds, leaving teachers in the lurch.

When asked, a slight majority said their schools might now be in danger of missing the 70 percent pass rate. Under the accreditation standards, approved by the state Board of Education in September, schools have a decade to hit the mark before losing accreditation.

``I've talked to school principals and they say if 50 percent of your kids are passing, your school is doing better than the national average,'' said Jerome Williams, a physics teacher at Norfolk's Booker T. Washington High.

Williams, a former NASA scientist, said the problem often rests at home: ``You can be teaching them glorious lessons, but if you don't have reinforcement at home, they're going to lose it.''

Rita Lopane, a sixth-grade teacher at Chesapeake's Oscar Smith Middle School, made the same point: ``A student who's not doing well in my classroom will not do any better in a private school. If education is not valued in the home, it's not going to make a heck of a lot of difference.''

Williams asked guest speaker Jamie Chapman, a director of the Virginia Beach Education Association, whether he thought massive failure to meet the accreditation rule could lead the state to approve vouchers for private school.

Chapman said it was possible. ``If you have such a wretched (public) school,'' the thinking might go, ``why make people attend it?'' Chapman said he was voicing his own views, not those of the teachers' group.

But Trusso-Relis said vouchers shouldn't be seen as a bugaboo. ``Public education is an enormous corporation,'' she said, ``and corporations benefit from competition. We should think of this not as the death of public education, but as an opportunity to grow.'' ILLUSTRATION: White Oaks Elementary teacher Shelley Deneau says

innovation will be stifled under the new guidelines.

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