California

Amid Backlash, Will California Pursue Race To The Top?

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You wouldn’t know it from Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who continues to tout his “Race to the Top” program that is designed to leverage states into implementing untested right-wing school reforms by holding out an apparently illusory promise of money, but there is a backlash growing to both school budget cuts and the radical reforms Duncan touts.

Here at Calitics you’ve been following Ellinorianne’s excellent series of posts on the teacher strike in the Capistrano Unified School District in Orange County and how it is related to a right-wing effort to use CUSD as a testing ground for their plans to privatize public education.

In Florida, a statewide movement put together at the last minute succeeded in getting Governor Charlie Crist to veto SB 6, a bill that would have implemented a wide range of far-right education “reforms” such as eliminating tenure and implementing forms of merit pay. It is the same kind of agenda Meg Whitman plans to bring to California, and similar to the reforms Arne Duncan has championed across America.

As more Californians and Americans begin to reject Arne Duncan’s effort to impose untested and unpopular reforms on our schools, the state is debating whether to try again for “Race to the Top” funds, despite the fact that the last time the state did so, they were way down on the list of possible recipients:

The judges in the Race to the Top dinged California for a lack of union support for the application. It was also denied points for failing to provide a longitudinal data system to measure student achievement and teacher or principal performance. It also was deficient in its focus on science, technology and math education….

The California Teachers Association, the state’s largest teachers union, declined to sign on to the last application and didn’t appear enthusiastic about another go.

“I think California has got to ask some serious questions about what’s best for the students of California and for education reform in this state … and stop chasing federal dollars,” said CTA spokeswoman Becky Zoglman. “Education reform works best when teachers, parents and principals and community members come together and decide what’s best for that neighborhood school and the kids in that school.”

CTA is absolutely right to refuse to go along. The rejection of California’s earlier grant seems designed to leverage CTA into backing the right-wing reform agenda, so it’s good to see CTA being totally unwilling to play the chump.

Instead, CTA should take notice of what has happened in Florida and in south Orange County and begin to organize a statewide backlash designed to both reverse these right-wing “reforms” and to restore the budget cuts.

Californians do not want to see their schools weakened by cuts or their kids turned into guinea pigs for the latest right-wing ideological concoction. The public is ripe for a backlash. Time to start organizing it.

2 thoughts on “Amid Backlash, Will California Pursue Race To The Top?”

  1. Our district was told that if California had gotten first round funding, we could see maybe $6,000.

    Now, we would certainly love to have an extra $6k fall from the sky, but it’s not enough to pay for new processes or mandates. We should make reforms that make sense for our kids and our schools, not just because there’s a morsel of cheese at the end of a maze.

  2. http://www.thisamericanlife.or…

    This was a very thorough discussion of Poizner’s account of teaching at Mt. Pleasant High in San Jose, and comparing it to the actual situation. It was a seriously good listen.

    It is a very odd chapter, all about Poizner’s first days teaching a class at Mt. Pleasant. There’s scene after scene where he’s floundering, standing in front of the class asking big, abstract questions – “would you want to live in a country where the leader didn’t want to lead? If the money issued by the government wasn’t any good, or people were treated unfairly?” None of the students respond. He’s a rookie teacher; he doesn’t know how to engage them yet. Nothing unusual there.

    But here was the strange thing: the conclusion Poizner comes to – again and again during these scenes – isn’t that he’s doing anything wrong or has anything to learn as a teacher. Instead, he blames the kids. They’re tough, they’re unmotivated, they lack ambition, they’re wired differently. The students, meanwhile, in every scene in the book (I read the whole book), seem utterly lovely. Polite, they don’t interrupt, they don’t talk back, they just seem a little bored. His very worst student is a graduating senior who’s hoping to go into the Marines.

    Checking school records I learned that Poizner’s unmotivated, unambitious class included one of the school valedictorians, Charles Rudy, who graduated and went to college.

    Could he be getting this so completely wrong? I wondered. Could he have written an entire book misperceiving so thoroughly what was happening right in front of his eyes, and now is trying to use that book to run for governor?

    In his book, Poizner also talks about how dangerous the high school and the neighborhood around it are. On page 39, he writes:

    The school’s neighborhood is rough, even when seen through the eyes of someone who’s not wealthy and white. Drive-by shootings happen. Kids learn to avoid bumping into strangers at the local convenience stores. Recently, the San Jose Police Department received nearly fifteen times more calls for suspicious vehicles around Mount Pleasant High than in a more affluent San Jose neighborhood. More specifically, in a year’s time, police stopped one thousand vehicles in the area. Over that same time frame, the neighborhood generated nearly 850 calls to SJPD dispatchers for disturbances, and 15 for violation by registered sex offenders.

    San Jose Police Department spokesman Officer Jose Garcia told us that calls for service were not an indicator of higher crime. He said the number of vehicles stopped had more to do with whether a neighborhood is close to a highway or shopping mall than with criminal activity.

    Garcia said, “the area surrounding Mt. Pleasant High School is not an area that stands out in terms of crime, compared to other parts of the city.” San Jose might have a reputation in the richer suburbs around it for being unsafe, and it was more dangerous in the 1970s and ’80s than it is today. But the view of the city as ridden with crime is outdated. In fact, the city is one of the safest of its size in the country. As Ira Glass put it in his story, according to FBI statistics:

    There were 371 violent crimes per 100,000 people in San Jose in 2003, the year Poizner was there. You’d be more likely to be a victim of violent crime in Austin Texas … and twice as likely to be a victim in Seattle or Phoenix or Columbus or San Francisco. When it came to property crime that year, you were more than twice as likely to have something stolen from you in Honolulu, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco or nearly any big city you can name.

    The raw data from the FBI is available here: http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm

    A handy chart, sorting cities by population, and calculating crimes-per-100,000, is here for you to download. Note that you have to scroll to the right to see the per-100,000 data. San Jose: pretty safe!

    In his interview with This American Life, Poizner stuck by the conclusions in his book, referring to the neighborhood as “rough-and-tumble.”

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