A School Fire Sale

by Tony Chavira

A man named George W. Bush became president one day, and decided that an educational program that worked in neither theory nor practice would be implemented nationwide, to essentially determine which schools would get funding and support as well as which would not. Upon a quick look, laypeople liked some elements of this plan, rhetorically titled “No Child Left Behind”: it helped schools that were doing well by providing plenty of incentives, sought to standardize a high level of education across the board, and set out to reprimand teachers who weren’t putting their all into their jobs of rearing the leaders of tomorrow. But in the flurry of getting himself elected, Mr. Bush neglected to mention the full and menacing scope of a program where achieving schools were rewarded ... namely, that underachieving ones would be punished.

For an organization like the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), underachievement is a large and looming issue, but not necessarily because teachers and administrators aren’t putting in their best for the students. After years of budget and staff cuts, marches and sit-ins for teachers’ pay, negotiations and mayoral promises to the public regarding either the politicization or depoliticization of the school board, funding scrounged by cutting school programs as well as social ones, and a steadily widening ratio of students to teachers, the LAUSD became financially trapped with few options. Despite the rhetoric, underachievement on No Child Left Behind’s standardized testing wasn’t the direct fault of lazy or stupid kids. Underachievement also isn’t completely contingent on “bad apple” teachers. When you get right down to it, the make-or-break issue in education is support. Do the school board and superintendent have the ability to support their staff and the principals? Do the principals and school management have the ability to support the teachers? Do the teachers have the support of school aides and administrative staff when dealing with the students? The more efficiently a school works, the more time each person in the staff will have for your children. More money will be saved, more children will get one-on-one time and more teachers will feel that they can handle their workload (and not spend 50% of the class on disciplinary issues).

The moment this system of support breaks down, children will be affected negatively, and No Child Left Behind’s standardized testing will reveal it immediately. Worst of all, the very fact that standardized testing is the measure that determines how much money/support will go to a school means that teachers have no choice but to teach to a standardized test. It doesn’t matter at all if Student A learns in a completely different way from Student B. It doesn’t matter if Student C gets nervous during standardized testing and wets his pants. All that matters are the test scores, and they make or break your school.

So after eight years of underfunded struggling, “program improvement,” and failure to dramatically progress due to lack of support, the Los Angeles Unified School District is trapped with schools that receive little to no funding and students and teachers that desperately need staff assistance. And currently there are about 250 schools in the LAUSD failing by federal standards. But what are federal standards that would allow for practically every school in the LAUSD to fail (ahem, “improve their programs”) without providing any useful suggestions, funds, or assistance for actual improvements? If LAUSD schools have been on the federal naughty list this long, shouldn’t something have been done at the federal level to help? In fact, the very word “standard” implies that it should be easily and consistently met across the board. But when practically none of the schools in one of the largest cities in the United States can meet those standards, there’s clearly something wrong with their measurement.

Between Proposition 55 in 2004 and Proposition 1D in 2006, California schools have been allocated a ton of money for new buildings and school construction, with more to come from other measures. In fact—billions of dollars worth of new construction later—something like 50 new schools have been built using these and other municipal funds since the money’s been approved and allocated (with more new schools to come). With this sort of windfall for the construction of new schools, teachers should be signing up like crazy for the use of these new, state-of-the-art facilities. Students living next to these schools should be ready to move in and start a top notch public education. Staff should be overflowing and new graduating teachers should be ready to jump right into the system and right into brand new schools. But despite this windfall, the LAUSD simply can’t afford to staff these new developments, and the unfortunate outcome of all of this new development is that while so much bond money went to the development of brand new facilities, so little money ultimately went into the renovation of hazardous, dilapidated schools.

Here then is our dilemma: LAUSD is broke, has a ton of schools and can barely afford to staff some of the old, dilapidated ones. So how did the LAUSD Board of Education decide to remedy their budget issue last week? With an overly simple, potentially insidious solution: privatize the schools.

In retrospect, it was absolutely transparent that we wouldn’t be able to staff 50 new schools when the existing ones were understaffed and underfunded. And the bond money only went for the construction of new and amazing facilities for LAUSD, not for operating costs. Which begs the question: did LAUSD School Board members and city officials plan to sell these brand new schools to private corporations all along? Had it, in fact, been the plan from the bond’s inception to build these facilities to sell them? It’s easy to simply assume that the answer is “no,” and that officials wanted to keep the new schools but just don’t have that option anymore. But I refuse to believe that city officials have so little foresight, so let’s assume that the answer is “yes.” They had planned to sell the new schools all along.

At first glance, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. LAUSD is—to re-emphasize the point—broke, and they wouldn’t have been able to use the bond money to repair most of their existing facilities or maintain staff at existing schools. The money that would come in from the sales of these brand new schools could go to the improvement and operation of existing ones (although it certainly cost more to build the facilities than they will make selling them). Either way, it’s money in LAUSD’s pocket that just wasn’t there before.

Possibly to make this more palatable to the public, the school board has voted to bid out over 250 schools throughout the district. Sure the new ones will sell first, but other, existing schools have been of interest to private education organization over the years as well ... Garfield High School, for example. To those more interested in money than in public education, the potential sale of these schools also has the not-so-hidden benefit of potentially breaking apart the teachers union (which vehemently opposes the sale of LAUSD schools). You never know which union leaders/teachers will essentially have their union membership invalidated once their school goes private. As more and more schools are sold off, the unity that comes with being in the teachers union will likewise be broken, dissolving the union from the inside.

I am all for competition as long as it leads to the improvement of facilities and services for both the school staff and the children. But is the outcome of this bill, very specifically titled the “School Choice” measure, an improvement? Mayor Antonio Villraigosa describes the program in his “Ask the Mayor” YouTube announcement [above] as something that will finally give parents access, provide accountability at schools with “metrics” and provide better control for teachers and administrators to adjust and change their curriculum. But how? By selling them off to private companies and forcing those companies to compete with each other? If this is really the case, the ultimate outcome would be that students that did not make the standardized testing cut would not be allowed into the schools. Students who cannot learn in a way that is conducive to achieving high scores on the No Child Left Behind tests would be given the boot. It simply wouldn’t be profitable to use up precious time and resources on slow learners.

How exactly are Mayor Villaraigosa’s promises for accountability and quality any different from promises made by any politician for any past school measure? Metrics, accountability ... there are already programs in place to determine these things for schools, administrators and teachers. What happened to them? Is LAUSD, in attempting to sell these schools, only admitting that it just doesn’t have the money? Or worse: is it openly admitting that it is bad at its job of maintaining a budget while balancing the needs of each of its stakeholders? Can private companies even compete with the services and budget that a government agency can provide? Shouldn’t we be a bit more wary of private organizations before we unceremoniously hand our schools over to them?

Look, the LAUSD certainly needs the money, children certainly need a great public education, schools certainly need the funds for staff and renovation, and teachers certainly need jobs. But have all of our other options been exhausted? Is this the beginning of a competitive new educational paradigm or the end of publicly-funded and publicly-representative education?

I guess Mr. Bush really got what he wanted in the end: private-sector control over traditionally public-sector services, and all without a public vote ... just a 6-to-1 vote at the LAUSD Board of Education meeting last week.

Comments

No comments.

Comments closed.