EDUCATION POLITICS - What’s wrong with the state of education in our city? Our country?
Some children are permitted more privilege than others.
Is yours a privileged one? Not a privileged one? Who decides who is which? What decides … money? Yup. Private money. Public money allocated in ways that give certain schools more privileges than others. Public money used to codify haves and have-nots.
There are myriad sources of inequity. So many it is hard to keep track. There is a flurry of confusion about what is going on – Education “reform”, common core requirements, class size mandates (imposed on some at the expense of others), charter co-locations, pilot schools, professional unions and professional administrators, high profile and otherwise; it is hard to follow.
But the bottom line is: Some children wind up in classrooms with 47 pupils per teacher. Some children wind up in schools with no library or librarian. Some children wind up in schools with no electronic equipment. Some children wind up in schools with filthy, disgusting bathrooms – sometimes an insufficiency of even these. Some children wind up in schools with no nurse at all.
Some children wind up in schools with no counselors. Some children wind up in schools with practically no support staff. Some children wind up in schools with no art, no music, no industrial arts, no graphic design, no extracurricular clubs or activities or field trips, ever. Or, all of the above.
Does yours?
Would you send your child to a secondary school with 40-something students per class? Would you send your child to a school with windows so filthy they cannot be seen out of? Would you send your child to a school with insufficient support staff to help in an emergency? Or teachers so harried they cannot teach? Would you send your child to a school with no access to the tools of learning? Would you send your child to a school with none of the lightness of art and music and the refinement that education is supposed to bring?
I think not.
Why, then, would you send your neighbor’s child there?
Do not support policies of “Educational Reform” that force some privileged few to have more at the expense of others forced to do with less. School co-locations, high-stakes testing, resource deprivation, bare-bones curricular programming – these policies force a tiered system of fierce inequity. If you would never countenance such harsh conditions for your own kin, you must object to their imposition on anyone else’s.
It is because we do all live in a Village, a society, that this is your moral imperative.
(Sara Roos is a politically active resident of Mar Vista, a biostatistician, the parent of two teenaged LAUSD students and a CityWatch contributor.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 11 Issue 28
Pub: Apr 5, 2013
