EDUCATION POLITICS--Does Steve Jobs’ widow Lauren Powell Jobs really need to spend $50 million to reinvent our public schools? Maybe we should just eliminate the endemic corruption in public education that puts corporate profit and gimmickry ahead of tried and true pedagogic methods – methods that have systematically been removed or sabotaged in order to keep poor students of color in their place.
One only need look at the LAUSD of the 50s and 60s to find a successful model of academic and trade-oriented public education that was subsequently and systematically dismantled.
So now, rather than address what was done to create the dropout failure factories that most LAUSD schools have become, we are told to concentrate on the effects of this programmed failure – as if this will somehow make a better public education system.
While smaller classes might be nice, successful LAUSD public schools in the past and many public schools around the world today have large class sizes. This in and of itself is not the problem. The real problem is the lack of homogeneity of the 40 students sitting in the class who do not have the requisite grade-level standards necessary to learn.
Referring to teachers teaching as "droning lectures" or attacking "dry textbooks" uses pejorative language to cover up the real impediment to student learning: the vast majority of students have been deliberately socially promoted and lack the sufficient literacy in any subject to allow them to be meaningfully engaged.
Bringing in more college counselors will do nothing to improve the success of students who are being set up to fail. It’s sad to consider that 75 percent of students going to junior colleges must take remedial courses and ultimately become so disheartened that they quit school, blaming themselves instead of the criminal class who is running our schools.
As for removing school police from LAUSD campuses, this would not be a good idea, unless the schools brought in parents or other community groups to keep militant students in check. LAUSD never used to need its own private police force when the majority of students were literate enough to be engaged.
Yes, it could all be turned around in a relatively short period of time, if it were not for platitudes and grandiose plans that ignore the quantifiable and verifiable causes of why LAUSD schools are failing. But the real causes are not being addressed. And woe to anybody who tries to do that.
The old adage that “the idle mind is the devil's playground” explains the main reason why students who are profoundly behind grade level prefer to disrupt school rather than be humiliated by being asked to do things they cannot accomplish – academic tasks that are beyond their subjective ability. Good teachers who are allowed to pragmatically address these students at actual grade level would get many of them engaged and ready to achieve in a rather short period of time. But this hasn't been part of LAUSD's fantasy game plan.
All human beings are naturally curious. Failed entities like LAUSD have had to work awfully hard to frustrate this. But the good news is that natural curiosity is not dead. In one of my continuation school classes, made up of students who had gotten themselves thrown out of every other school (fearing the humiliation of appearing stupid,) I remember one student who seemed to want to learn. He turned to another and said, "Shut the f... up, I want to hear what he is saying." Yes, it seems that I got him back. By embedding information in areas that coincided with my students’ interests, I revitalized someone who had previously given up on himself.
I have some reservations about including student and community voices in the process of fixing schools. While this seems as popular as supporting motherhood and apple pie, in reality those who have been behind the privatization of public education for their own financial gain and power have used naive and uneducated community members to support ideas that are against that community’s best interests.
Being part of a community gives one a vested interest, but it doesn’t necessarily equip everyone with the ability to stand up to those trying to use them for their own self-interest.
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I am told that the ex-Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights, Russlynn Ali, is to be the CEO of the Jobs XQ Institute which will be in search for a better public education system. My first response is something less than enthusiastic. During her tenure in office at the US Department of Education and before that, when she practiced law in Los Angeles, rampant corruption in public education has been the norm at LAUSD and at other under-achieving, predominantly minority de facto segregated public school districts like it in the country.
At LAUSD, incident after incident has revealed corrupt business practices. The iPad roll-out, MISIS, conflict of interest scandals and attacks on high seniority teachers using clearly fabricated charges, were not addressed by Ali, the Department of Education nor any other regulatory, enforcement, or oversight entity. Something should be done to hold corrupt administrators accountable. I’m not sure I believe that things will be better as a result of this new institute.
One of the great ironies here is that there is continued support for endemically racist public education in the United States among all ethnicities – the ones who pull in six-figure salaries while advancing their own careers -- at the cost of minority students who remain trapped in failed public school districts like LAUSD.
(Leonard Isenberg is a Los Angeles observer and a contributor to CityWatch. He’s a second generation teacher at LAUSD and blogs at perdaily.com. Leonard can be reached at [email protected]) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue 76
Pub: Sep 18, 2015
