By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 8, 2006 12:42 PM

I began visiting La Jolla High School because my friends Sam Popkin and Susan Shirk, professors at the University of California-San Diego and enthusiastic La Jolla High School parents, told me I should.

You know those lines from my favorite Beach Boys song, "Be True to Your School"? -- "Now what's the matter, buddy, ain't you heard of my school? It's number one in the state." That was how Profs. Popkin and Shirk spoke of La Jolla High.

But unlike the Beach Boys, they weren't talking about the football team. What they liked about La Jolla High was its remarkable success in keeping its academic standards high while welcoming hundreds of students from low-income neighborhoods of south San Diego.

I started visiting the school in 1995. I was impressed by its values, its teachers and its Falstaffian principal, J.M. Tarvin. There is a chapter in my 1998 book "Class Struggle" about how well Hispanic students bused in under San Diego's Voluntary Ethnic Enrollment Program did at this high school in very upper income La Jolla. When I started rating high schools for Newsweek based on college-level test participation, I wasn't surprised to see La Jolla High ranked very high. It is number 143 in the country on the latest list.

So I was interested when I began getting e-mails this year from another La Jolla High parent, Madelyn Bennett, who said her son was being mistreated. Clashes between parents and schools interest me, and this particular spat, I think, illustrates two sad truths. First, school leaders often think their successes mean they are always right and complaints from parents or students can be ignored. Second, schools feel no obligation to explain decisions to the wider world, particularly when they are dealing with parents. Even worse, they say district rules keep them from doing so.

I have sent three long messages during the past several months to Tarvin's successor, La Jolla principal Dana Shelburne, whom I have met and like, asking for his side of the story. He did not respond to the first two. His only response to the third message, which included a draft of this column, came through San Diego school district spokeswoman Ursula Kroemer. She said, "Principal Shelburne believes much of the information provided to you by Mrs. Bennett is inaccurate." As I expected, since it is a standard response whenever I write of parental complaints about schools, Kroemer also said that "some of the circumstances surrounding this student's discipline are best kept a private, confidential matter, and I cannot comment on those."

The more I hear this refrain, the more I wonder if the clever lawyers who drew up the rules that make such matters confidential might be able to find a way around them if they really wanted to. It is particularly irritating and puzzling for school district officials to insist on confidentiality in cases like this, where the family involved is speaking out.

Bennett's story began when her son John, then a junior at La Jolla, got into trouble with the law last March. She won't let me say exactly what he did or why he did it, but she said nobody was hurt and there was no property damage. The charge was "charring concrete." He was sent to juvenile hall. Three days later there was a hearing before a juvenile court judge to determine if he could be released until his case could be heard.

The attorney Bennett and her husband had hired advised them to get letters of recommendation that would impress the judge. This seemed an easy task, since John had very good grades, played with the San Diego Youth Symphony and was a star pole vaulter. But, Bennett said, Shelburne refused to write a letter. She said he told her he did not know John well enough, even though, Bennett said, John and the principal's son have been friends since elementary school and John has been at Shelburne's house several times. This is the only statement Bennett made that Shelburne, through Kroemer, specifically denied. She said he believes it is inaccurate to say "that the student has visited his home."

Bennett said the principal told his teachers they should not write letters to the judge either. When Bennett asked Shelburne to release John's disciplinary record, which would have shown his only crime was talking in Latin class, the principal refused that request also, Bennett said. She said he told her he did not want to get the school involved. She said the student government adviser told the junior class president that she would be suspended for three days if she tried to circulate a petition in support of John on school property.

Bennett said the judge decided, because of the lack of a disciplinary record or a letter from the administration, that John must be a problem kid and left him for two more weeks in the maximum security wing of the juvenile detention center. He told his mother he spent the time helping other locked up teens study for their GEDs. He was eventually freed on probation, but jail had not extinguished his taste for mischief. The fight between his family and Shelburne headed into round two.

John sailed through four Advanced Placement exams. He got the top score in English language and in U.S. history. He took the SAT, getting a 2240. He took three SAT subject tests and five final exams in his school courses. On the ACT he got 34 out of a possible 36 points on the main test and 12 out of 12 in writing. He represented San Diego County in a state track meet. But when it was time to take the California state tests used to assess schools under the federal No Child Left Behind law, John decided enough was enough.

He asked to be excused from the tests so he could use that school time to catch up on his class work. He was told no. So he filled in the spaces on his state test answer sheet so that they read "TESTS SUCK." Then he took a picture of his handiwork with his cell phone camera and posted it on his MySpace page. Bennett said 14 other La Jolla High students did the same, and Shelburne was not happy.

The principal said that because of their stunt, John and the other protesting students would not be allowed to take any AP courses the following school year and no school personnel would write college recommendations for them. Bennett said Shelburne told her that John was one of the students the school counted on to raise the school's average on the state test and that he needed a high score for the school to maintain its special agreement with the school district giving it unusual autonomy. She said he told her the students had been warned of the consequences if they did not take the exams. One counselor told her that the students were clearly out of line, because they could have opted out of the test simply by signing a simple form.

Bennett said she checked with other parents and students and discovered that no school officials ever said what the consequences of not taking the tests were, nor did anyone say anything about an opt-out form. Bennett said she told Shelburne that he was violating district policy by keeping John out of AP courses and could not legally prevent any faculty member from writing a recommendation. But, she said, he stuck with his decision and did not budge when she threatened to sue.

Bennett has been candid with me about her feelings and actions, even though I don't agree with many of them. She is in the midst of a fight that makes no sense to me over Shelburne's insistence that John spend a free period tutoring some of those low-income students at La Jolla. I do not share John's initial view that his protest of the California state test was a high-minded act of civil disobedience. (Both mother and son now say they think what he did was stupid.) I think Bennett is too involved in her son's dealings with the school and should let him handle more of this on his own.

But at least she is open about what is going on and what she thinks about it, while the school makes no attempt to explain a series of seemingly brainless, and in some cases heartless, decisions. Shelburne is well within his rights to refuse to write a letter to the juvenile court judge, but blocking release of John's disciplinary record and telling teachers they may not send letters looks like pure spite. (Bennett said she later discovered it was also illegal to block the disciplinary record. Also, some teachers wrote letters despite the principal telling them not to.)

Forbidding enrollment in AP courses as a disciplinary measure is one of the worst ideas I have ever heard. Will we next tell teenage car thieves that, sorry, that means no more reading classes? Cutting off recommendations to colleges also appears to me to be mindless -- why not give counselors and teachers a chance to explain this kid and his penchant for trouble?

San Diego's smart new superintendent Carl Cohn apparently agrees with me. After Bennett wrote to him and the school board complaining about the AP course and recommendation punishment, John was told by counselors that he would be able to take AP courses and get teacher recommendations. Kroemer told me that the district is reexamining the autonomy granted La Jolla High several years ago to see if changes might improve relations between the school, parents and the community.

That makes sense, but I wish there was some way to find out why Shelburne thought he had to make such a battle royal out of a prank. It would be a major step forward for schools if they could more clear about their odder decisions, and save parents and students, as well as many others who care about schools, a lot of needless frustration.