| Yesterday the California Department of Education released its list of "persistently lowest-achieving" schools - schools whose test scores have been low for several years and, unless improved, will be closed. The Tier I list makes it clear where these schools are concentrated - in California's low-income communities and communities of color.
Let's take two counties. First, my home county of Orange. You'll note that Tustin Unified, where I spent all 13 years of my K-12 education, has no schools listed. The only schools listed in all of Orange County are three in Santa Ana Unified - Century High, Valley High, and Willard Intermediate. 80% of Santa Ana residents are Latino and the median family income is $41,000 (statewide the median family income is $76,000).
Here in Monterey County, where I currently live, ten schools are listed. 8 of them are in the Salinas Valley, another two in Seaside. The Salinas Valley is 70-80% Latino and has median incomes in the $35,000 range. But you won't see Carmel or Pacific Grove schools listed here. In fact, Carmel schools rate among the best-performing in the entire state.
Santa Ana and the Salinas Valley are the type of communities whose schools are going to be closed under No Child Left Behind rules. Just as the entire teaching staff at a high school in Rhode Island's poorest community was fired last month. And when this happens in California's low-income communities of color, President Obama's Education Secretary Arne Duncan will applaud it the way he applauded the firings in Rhode Island.
The impact on these communities could be devastating. In Chicago after one of Arne Duncan's mass firings of teachers, described as "hitting the reset button," the results were an increase in student crime and no discernible improvement in student achievement. As schools closed and experienced teachers were fired, one of the only stable institutions in a community that generally lacked such places was destroyed, and the community suffered.
Over the weekend at Open Left, Paul Rosenberg made a very good analogy regarding Arne Duncan's slash-and-burn tactics. Applying the logic of Duncan's reforms to crime, Rosenberg asked why not fire the entire Oakland Police Department? Unemployment is high in California; perhaps we should fire the entire Employment Development Department. We were just in a drought; perhaps we should fire all the state hydrologists and water district managers.
That doesn't happen because those workers aren't the target of a deliberate effort to destroy their careers, as Attorney at Arms has so brilliantly explained. But it does demonstrate the ridiculousness of the concept of closing a school because it isn't performing well.
With the publication of the list of schools that could be closed in California in a few years, we can start to see just what kind of damage those ridiculous ideological dogmas are about to produce - and we can see exactly who will be hurt by it. It's not going to be California's prosperous population, and it's not going to be the white suburbs. Yet again, the poor and communities of color are going to be the targets of right-wing policy.
We have time to stop this. But it requires repealing the "reforms" made in the service of right-wing doctrine. Let's hope Sacramento is up to the task. |
