Our neighborhood council education committee meetings are always a wonderful meeting of the minds especially these day when public education is clearly on the ropes and needing both ideas and solutions to pull it out of the academic gutter it is in. The neighborhood council and separately the WPEF were instrumental in thrusting forward school reform in our community this last spring.
On August 28th the education committee was privileged to have Steve Barr speak to us about schools and his Green Dot Public Schools that have challenged the political and educational establishments and provided us with a public school alternative to our LAUSD public schools.
Almost as an aside, Barr made an interesting if not provocative comment that evening when he spoke on education and described Democrats as the party that always wants more money and Republicans as the party that wants to privatize public schools.
Barr had it half right. True enough, the political machines such as the CTA and the UTLA behind many of the Democratic campaigns and Democrats themselves often blame the poor state of education on schools not getting enough money but they don’t go far enough to address the real problem. Always missing from their message is that our schools are getting enough money but the money isn’t getting to the classrooms. There is an incredible amount of money lost, skimmed or wasted by the district once the check has been cut by Sacramento and before it finally gets to the classroom.
The incorrect generalization Barr made was that Republicans want to privatize public schools. He couldn’t be further from the truth as most Republicans that I know are simply interested in academics and making schools accountable. They want discipline and standards and they will take any kind of school system that delivers. Few want to privatize public schools that I am aware of. Most just want good schools that are accountable to parents and taxpayers.
Accountability
Accountability in California began with SBX1 1 (Alpert – 1999), the bill that started the Academic Performance Index (API). The test requirement was later cemented by the Bush administrations No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) which offered some federal funding for schools that meet their own state standards.
Barr’s own Green Dot schools take advantage of NCLB by enabling him to start up new charters and take over troubled schools such as Locke High School. NCLB forces districts to provide parents with better performing schools when they fall below certain thresholds.
At a press conference that followed a vote by Locke teachers to go charter with Green Dot schools, Barr specifically said at the conference that he had enough teacher signatures to invoke No Child Left behind. It’s notable that this event was preceded only days before by a visit to Green Dot schools from U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.
Joel Rubin wrote in a May 4th Los Angeles Times article (Locke High principal rips L.A. Unified),
“His (Well’s) words took on particular significance because U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings was also visiting the Green Dot school and listened intently as Wells spoke in a room full of parents and teachers. Afterward, she introduced herself to Wells and reiterated her request to legislators to toughen the language of the federal No Child Left Behind Act to make it easier to overhaul chronically low-performing schools.
Wells said he had accepted Barr’s invitation in order to see one of the Green Dot schools that has had success in raising student performance. He expressed deep frustration over what he said is the unwillingness or inability of district leaders to push through meaningful reforms. “
An unbroken line
As Barr continued to speak at our neighborhood council committee meeting, his comments on political party proclivities jolted me into thinking about the top to bottom influence that Democrats have had in California’s public education over the last thirty years.
Under their management there has been a serious downturn in the academic performance and dropout rates in the state. The last three decades have been the period of the greatest discord among parents by the loss of academic achievement of their children ever in California.
I began by recalling from the top, former and current State Superintendents of Education such as Bill Honig, Delain Easton, and today’s Jack O’Connell, all Democrats. It was under Honig’s tenure that whole word programs and fuzzy math were introduced.
From there I drew a line straight down to the local school superintendents such as Roy Romer, Ramon Cortines, Ruben Zacharias, Sid Thompson. All Democrats none of them where able to raise the academic performance of our high school students or cut down the dropout rate.
Continuing to following that line led me to think about the three decades of LAUSD school board members, many (far too many to list here) who left an indelible stain on our once highly regarded school district.
Following that I thought of former UTLA union bosses such as Helen Berstein, Day Higuchi, John Perez, and AJ Duffy who micromanaged the curriculum. Once again all Democrats.
Are we finally beginning to see a trend? It’s the fatal triangle of negative influences. An embrace of political, education, and labor leaders whose policies have failed to address the resources starting at the neighborhood level. Failing to provide textbooks and supplies for students or building any new schools since the mid 70′s.
When district leaders finally realized they didn’t have enough seats, they began to build exceptionally expensive schools such as the $240 million Belmont High School complete with low income housing and retail as well as the more recent High School for the Visual & Performing Arts at $171 million dollars. Most California high schools cost less that $50 million.
During the 80′s and 90′s the board also experimented with failed state programs such as bi-lingual education, whole word reading, fuzzy math and other experiments in educating our kids. Programs that continue to haunt us today.
How many chances of getting it right are we willing to give them before we decide it’s time to change direction?
All Politics aside
At a later point during Steve Barr’s discussion with us, he was interrupted by the ring of a cell phone and out of his pocket he pulled out his new iPhone to turn it off and then apologized to the group. He was however quite amazed of the new technology and briefly showed it off to the group demonstrating some of the phones amazing features.
Holding out the iPhone, Steve veered away from schools for a moment and told us about his growing up in the silicon valley region along side people who would later turn out to be the giants of technology. People like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak who learned electronics at Cupertino High School and built the first personal computers and started Apple. Later Steve Jobs would introduce other technological marvels like the ipod and iPhone and a new business model for selling music called iTunes.
While Barr reminisced, I thought of the 30,000 LAUSD high school students who have been dropping out each year and our own Westchester High School and its 2 API. I couldn’t help but to begin comparing those earlier successes Barr described to today’s failures.
I thought back to the high schools in the 60′s and 70′s that had industrial arts programs that offered students a look into the days technologies. Technologies such as electronics, machine shop, printing, drafting and other courses that led to yesterday’s and today’s high tech frontier.
Few schools today offer such courses or their more modern variants and that prompted me to wonder just how many of today’s students will become the inventors and visionaries tomorrow that Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak’s or Bill Gates represent today. Today there is nothing in between earn your to college requirements or drop out.
Filling the void
Today Steve Barr has a herculean task. More kids than ever are finding little relevance in high school today and simply dropping out. The majority of them are boys.
So far Green Dot has had the luxury of motivated families seeking a way out of their poorly performing schools assigned to them by the LAUSD or Inglewood schools. Green Dot test scores will reflect that. However the challenge for Barr will be scaling up Green Dot to meet the additional students enrolling in its schools since many of them will not come from families as motivated as current enrollment. Locke will be Green Dot’s first real test.
No new ideas
The unfortunate thing about education in the last couple of decades has been the lack of debate and negotiations in what has become a one party system as voters fashionably favor Democrats over Republicans. Ironically Green Dot, led by Barr who admits to be “one of those goofy liberals” has stepped in to fill the empty seat left by Republicans at the negotiation table and because of that, once again the debate began again.
Barr has been extremely effective in challenging poor performing LA area school districts but is it enough to stem the dropout rate? Barr is not likely to stray too far from the current educational doctrine that insists that all kids should go to college and because of that, huge numbers of students will continually feel disaffected and leave before they receive a diploma.
Over the years I’ve come to a number of conclusions:
- A one size curriculum that assumes every student is going to college isn’t realistic.
- High school students need multiple paths towards their vision of the future.
- Many won’t choose college and we must provide options that still results in diploma for them.
- When we don’t provide alternatives, school becomes irrelevant and they leave.
- Adult schools and junior colleges aren’t the answer.
The state of California must re-evaluate and retool it’s curriculum. As Green Dot scales up, it won’t find itself anymore immune to these realities any more than our regular public schools.
Posted on September 29th, 2007 by westchester dad
Tags: OUR SCHOOLS
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As the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power seeks a hefty taxpayer rate hike, a Daily News review of salary data shows the average utility worker makes $76,949 a year – or nearly 20 percent more than the average civilian city worker.
The project is interesting because it is not a terminal in the traditional sense. It’s not a huge pier that ships tie up to and offload dangerous LNG. It’s not an oil drilling like platform sitting off our coast that visible to the eye or is susceptible to foul weather. 
First there is a transfer of LNG from overseas tankers to a special ”gasification” ship 35 miles off of the coast and well over the horizon, out of sight from the shore. After the transfer is complete, the gasification ship then moves to submersible buoys and connections that are located about 21 miles from shore. During this time the liquefied natural gas is warmed on the gasification ship to the safer gaseous state that is familiar to us all. This all occurs before the second transfer towards shore. 
Given that we may also soon have ordinances that limit our use of water, maybe people should consider living in Spokan or Brownsville.
Gloria Ohland, vice president for communications with 
The drop out rate in our high schools are unacceptable and Mr. Elias is correct that CAHSEE is often the tipping point for most students on whether they continue to get their diploma or quietly leave. I think there is a better solution than the use of alternative certificates – instead we should simply remove the Algebra requirement from CAHSEE and the states A-G requirements that’s linked to the assumption that every student receiving a diploma is headed off to college.
At least one policymaker is seeing the contradictory efforts between city and state imposed water conservation and new developments.
