Back to school and back to the drawing board
08/26/2010
As thousands of area parents dropped their children off for the first day of school this week, the office of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction was preparing a press release, stating California was not selected as a winner in the federal Race to the Top (K-12) grant competition. The state has lost the first two phases of the competition, which began in 2009.
In order to win this grant, any given state has to demonstrate that it is creating the condition for education innovation and reform and is implementing ambitious plans in four core education reform areas. The areas include adopting internationally-benchmarked standards and assessments that prepare students for success in college and the workplace; recruiting, developing, retaining and rewarding effective teachers and principals; building data systems that measure student success and inform teachers and principals how they can improve their practices; and turning around its lowest-performing schools.
To our state’s credit, there weren’t a lot of winners in general, i.e., highly competitive. Nine states and the District of Columbia were the winners of Phase 2. Only Delaware and Tennessee were the winners of Phase 1. Given our diverse population, our dire economic straights and the fact we have more students in our system compared to any other state, it was a stretch to think we would win. To be able to implement new programs within a year that could improve our chances of winning that grant by consequently improving our education system was out of reach. With constant stalemates in trying to pass a budget each year and shifting focus onto other social services, it isn’t any wonder education suffers. It is, however, unfortunate that this is where we are today. Known to be the one of the most progressive states in the country, education still seems to be ranking low on our list of priorities.
It becomes easy to drown out the same old rhetoric everyone hears, day by day: “Education is key”; “Education is the solution to society’s ills”; “Education should be our No. 1 priority.”
But when we look 20 years into our future, when we look at what kind of adults our children will become, what do we see? Will we be proud or will we be ashamed? Will the lack of focus on improving education be to our detriment or is our system just fine as is?
Last year, the nonprofit, Children Now, published a report showing exactly how California was doing compared to other states. While sad, they weren’t surprising.
The report said that the state trails behind most others on measures of academic performance, including ranking lowest on test scores for fourth grade reading and third lowest on eighth grade math. California’s achievement gap is constant and pervasive, with Latino and African American children continuing to trail behind their white peers. If current trends persist, California is predicted to have a shortfall of 1 million college graduates by 2025, when 41 percent of all California jobs will likely require a bachelor’s degree but only 35 percent of Californians will have one.
While it is easy to implicate a scapegoat, such as undocumented workers and their children, placing blame isn’t going to fix California’s shortcomings. It isn’t going to change our current landscape or our bleak future. It is time to start getting engaged, be it at our schools or in our communities, nevertheless, reaching out to our own children to ensure they won’t become just another statistic.
We can continue to gripe and complain, but it takes forward thinking and action to create the kind of state and education system we want to have.
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