Criticism assumes too much about public schools

The essence of the Daily Pilot’s Feb. 12 editorial is that the school board is a failure (“It’s time for the school board to take a new tack”). The reasons given are, to paraphrase: the Newport-Mesa Unified School District board of trustees doesn’t make major policy moves; it never seriously questions itself or the staff; and too many schools did not meet the mandated performance progress last year even though Newport-Mesa is a “rich” area.

The paper asserts that new blood is needed to fix the board, and call for serious opposition candidates to challenge the incumbents, forcing them to at least justify themselves.

As an elected representative ? a member of the board of trustees ? I take the paper’s criticisms and suggestions seriously and appreciate the paper’s concern for the community. While education culture ordinarily prefers not to confront critics publicly ? unlike, say, city politics ? the disparaging and dismissive tone of the editorial hints at important frustrations and anger that I should try to address.

I believe there are at least three major dynamics beyond the familiar religious and ideological ones that help explain why people can go over the top when critiquing public kindergarten through 12th-grade education. These dynamics usually aren’t talked about in public. Consequently, this letter will necessarily be quite candid about some uncomfortable truths, both on the education side and the public side.

Two of these dynamics are so embedded in national culture that few people are aware they exist, and fewer still are aware of their importance. The third dynamic is a politically incorrect one and is usually talked about only in private.

The first major dynamic is gross over-promising by those in public education. Since at least the end of World War II, educators have promised more than they could deliver. It started out innocently enough when America was flush with newfound wealth and confidence after winning the war.

Public education did not hold back from its dreams. For example, before the war, it was OK in America for only half of high school students to graduate. After the war, that changed. The new can-do attitude said all kids should finish high school.

This optimistic attitude has escalated to the point that now California’s education establishment holds that every high school student should also be academically qualified to enter the University of California system.

This is a far cry from pre-WWII experience, when only 20% of high school graduates actually entered higher education.

Perhaps public education could have found a way to deliver on its promises if the funding had kept pace. But, as the economy soured in the 1970s, money started to flow to other priorities. Unfortunately, public education didn’t shrink its aspirations to the new budgetary realities.

Sad to say, public education is still over-promising. Prudence dictates that public education should promise only the opportunity to succeed. There is a big difference between that and “every child will succeed!” All we can reliably deliver is opportunity; it is a fool’s errand to guarantee that no child will fail.

Another dangerous over-promise is any support for the notion that teachers should be superstars who walk on water. This encourages people to conclude the converse, that any teacher who is not a superstar must therefore be a slacker and deserves to be fired.

These are not realistic expectations.

They can only lead to frustration and anger, not a better education system.

School boards can do something about the dynamic of over-promising. Since this is a nationwide problem, trustees throughout the country should be taking the lead in righting expectations. Our credibility will improve when we actually deliver what we promise.

Our school board has progressed at this, but we should do more. Further, we should do it with a higher profile and not modestly hide our light under a bushel. Trustees and constituents must be frank with one another and agree on which promises are realistic.

The second major dynamic provoking over-the-top anger at public education is the number of soul-rattling social changes that occurred in just about one decade during the 1950s and 1960s.

Remember the Civil Rights marches? Brown vs. Board of Education? Women’s rights? Joe McCarthy? The Vietnam War? The Kent State massacre? How about the Warren Court’s revolution in criminal justice embodied in the Miranda Rule? Not to mention sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. The list goes on.

Any one of these changes to the status quo would have taken decades for America to digest. But all of them occurring in roughly one decade shattered our nation’s sense of stability and continuity and shook our confidence.

It was no coincidence that, in 1955 ? roughly the beginning of the upheaval ? conservative William F. Buckley Jr. famously promised in the first issue of his magazine, National Review, to “stand athwart history yelling ‘Stop.’ ” The conservatism identified initially with Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and Buckley drew much of its energy from the tremendous social upheavals of the time.

People wanted stability and order. People wanted certainties. People wanted to go back to the familiar life of pre-war America, to a time when children, women, and Negroes “knew their place.”

Unfortunately, the passage of time hasn’t helped much. America still feels adrift to many people, and our social fabric is still being rent. In this environment, public education is an easy target for criticism because its culture says, “Don’t fight back,” and, by its very nature needs to straddle the old and the new. It needs to respect the old and promote the new.

But the shell-shocked public is leery of any more new. Some want much more of the familiar little red schoolhouse, three Rs and hickory stick.

Fifty years of chaos is too long, they say. Give us what we know has worked in the past, and stop wasting time on every new “hot” idea that ivory-tower academics dream up.

They have a good point.

There is much of value in pre-1950s education: vocational courses for students who do not plan to attend college; classic academics beyond the three Rs; classroom discipline; respect for teachers as professionals by students and parents; and appropriate attire for students and teachers.

The district can help reduce local social instability by adding some pre-1950s rigor to our education system. For this to happen, though, parents and educators must be prepared to give and take.

The third dynamic is the immense energy that parents spend on getting the very best for their children.

Though that is good, it can have a bad side effect: It can figuratively drop a dead hippo into the living room that everyone just tiptoes around, but no one acknowledges, because it is not politically correct to do so.

Parents look for good teachers and a good academic environment, of course. But they also look for challenging competition for their children and good social interaction for their children and themselves. And therein lies the rub for some of our schools.

The school in my neighborhood can illustrate this.

I live about four blocks from a kindergarten through third-grade public school. It’s a great school by most standards. Thirty-five out of 37 (95%) teachers are fully credentialed. All 31 of the classes are small (20 or fewer), and they qualify for state funds to help pay for this class-size reduction. There are plenty of books and materials for school and home use. The school regularly gets grants from state and federal agencies, as well as private foundations, to augment the district’s even-handed general fund allocations. A properly prepared student can get a first-class primary education at this school.

Yet, virtually all of the families in my tract and the neighboring gated community ? neighborhoods filled with middle class and higher socioeconomic-level, English-speaking families ? shun this school when their young children reach school age. They send them to private or parochial schools, get intra-district transfers to schools miles away, home-school them, or move across town or to neighboring cities such as Irvine and Huntington Beach.

Why would families turn up their noses at such a sound school? It’s the demographics.

At this school, 79% of the students are classified as English learners. A majority of the students qualify for the free or reduced-price lunch program, indicating that they come from low-income families.

Children in any neighborhood should be able to attend their nearby school. Yet it’s difficult, if not impossible, to achieve a walk-to school that meets the needs of English-speaking children, when the non-English-speaking population exceeds the tipping point of about 40% of the total enrollment. (National experience with racial integration shows that the percentage of minority residents at which a diverse neighborhood “tips over” and rapidly becomes a wholly minority one is approximately 40%.) With this tipping comes a profound shift in social characteristics, such as language, culture and socioeconomic status.

The academic part of my neighborhood school is fine because it has good teachers, small classes and adequate funding. Competition falls short, though, for the typical English-speaking child when a large majority of the students are classified as English learners.

Since it takes from five to seven years for non-English speakers, on average, to become fluent in English, probably none of the English learners in this school will reach fluency while they are there. In addition, each September brings a fresh class of kindergarteners who are not fluent in English. These two facts dictate that it is mathematically impossible for this school to ever reach the federal and state mandated performance goals.

This puts the typical English-speaking child at the school into the position of being a large frog in a small pond, instead of the desired small frog in a big pond.

These differences in language, culture and socioeconomic status are important enough to cause English-speaking families to shun the school. I simply don’t believe there are any significant ethnic or racial prejudices contributing to this.

There is little the district can do about the third dynamic, demographics. The district’s marching orders from the U.S. Supreme Court are to educate every child who lives in our district, whether rich or poor, English-speaking or not, legal resident or otherwise. And we do it. Though we may be able to marginally improve the attractiveness of schools that are beyond the tipping point, it’s beyond our scope to do more than educate. The storms of language, culture, and class differences must rage outside the schoolhouse, not in it.

I hope the community at large, the Daily Pilot and the school district will collaborate in improving our already world-class public education system by addressing these three troublesome dynamics.