11188 Laurel Ave
Bloomington, CA 92316

I enjoyed my time at Bloomington High. Great students and teachers.

I was an eighth grade English teacher at Harris Middle School a few years ago. I immediately found out that the students were working at the fifth/sixth grade level and did the best I could to help close that huge achievement gap. Students at the school are not used to a quality instruction with high expectations. I found the other teachers thinking that low achievement was normal and did not use differentiation that much to push students to achieve at grade level. One long time teacher at the school blamed the students for not doing well instead of himself and other teachers. That is not how it works; it is the teacher that makes students achieve. The administration was accepting of low achievement and that all was fine with them and the counselors were ineffective to say the least. I see since I had left that it has even went down in achievement. A total change needs to occur and get some administrators and teachers with high quality training and high expectations to change this school. I suspected the low expectations start at the district office with low quality administrators there and them hiring low quality friends to fill administrative positions. I could not wait for the school year to end and leave the Colton district and to move on to a high quality district where high achievement and student support is the highest priority.

Our daughter attended for the 14-15 school year in the 5th grade and her grades actually went down. Sycamore implemented Common Core this year and my child was confused to say the least. She didn't get the "Visual" Approach to math. Things are too "abstract" and "vague". My wife has her Masters Degree and I was a Navy Engineer and parts of my daughters math homework (which was minimal, 3 problems ) we could not figure out what they wanted her to do. The concept of "draw the model" ( even if the answer is not right ) is not the way to learn math. My daughters teacher did not seem give positive feedback, it was all negative.