California's education leaders - AWOL again
Peter Schrag
Updated 11:41 am, Thursday, June 5, 2014
Johanna Paraiso is an English teacher at Fremont High School in Oakland, one of three Bay Area schools named in the lawsuit over the time poor and immigrant students spend learning. Photo: Michael Short, The Chronicle
There's no way to know how many California schools deny poor and immigrant children enough class time with competent teachers to give them the education that the California Constitution supposedly guarantees.
A major civil rights suit filed in Alameda County Superior Court last week names seven such schools - three of them in the Bay Area. But if Mark Rosenbaum of the ACLU, one of the lead lawyers in the case, is correct, there may be hundreds.
The suit was filed on behalf of 18 students at Castlemont and Fremont high schools in Oakland, Nystrom Elementary School in the West Contra Costa Unified School District, and two schools each in Los Angeles and Compton (Los Angeles County).
The case, Cruz vs. California, echoes the similar Williams case filed 14 years ago, but it focuses on an issue that Williams barely touched: the damaging denial of time for real instruction for some of California's academically neediest kids. But without saying so, it also casts serious doubt on Gov. Jerry Brown's effort to shift more control over schools from the state to the locals.
It's hard to believe that there are even seven Cruz schools in 21st century America, schools where:
-- Students are assigned endless hours of "inside work experience," cleaning classrooms, copying material, and doing other flunky work for teachers and administrators because there are no classes for them.
-- Students are "taught" week after week by a string of demoralized and inexperienced substitutes.
-- There are no mental health counselors - and often no counselors at all - to deal with the trauma of the shootings and other violence just outside the school door and where, for those and similar reasons, absenteeism and tardiness sometimes leave first-period classes with as few as five of the 25 students who are supposed to be there.
-- Because of the lack of support and miserable conditions, many teachers quit halfway through the school year, and sometimes sooner, and students' classes and courses are constantly shuffled to deal with the gaps.
But what may be even harder to believe is the pretense of state school officials, beginning with Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson, who's devoted much of his four years in office to campaigning for re-election, that they didn't know about any of this and California's education leaders - AWOL again - SFGate: