Schools or prisons?

Created 05/19/2010 - 1:33pm

Jakada Imani
The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights
The California State Department of Education recently released student performance rankings based on standardized tests. In the suburban Pleasanton school district, every single school scored in the top 20 percent statewide.  In the city of Oakland, however, 50% of our schools received the lowest possible rank.
On the heel of these new rankings, the California budget was released- cutting school budgets to the bone. Additionally the Governor is championing Senate Bill 955 which would attack the rights of school employees to have a due process in firings and would disregard seniority in layoffs. Though SB955 is being portrayed as good for low income communities of color, in truth it's just a divide-and-conquer strategy to attack unions and shift the debate away from the schools' lack of resources as the root of our educational problems.
While it is true that other factors besides seniority should be considered in teacher layoffs, SB 955 is NOT the answer.  This bill would gut teachers’ right to an impartial dismissal hearing and change the timeline for notification for teacher layoffs.  This bill will make it harder not easier to recruit qualified teachers and would not save the state or local governments a single dime.
If we want educational equity, we need to revise our budget priorities. Consider the following:
--California spends over $436 million annually on the Division of Juvenile Justice (”DJJ”) to lock-up 1400 youth. DJJ is a costly system with a 72% failure rate—meaning 72 percent of youth will be rearrested shortly after release.
--California is on track to spend over $300,000 per youth, per year for lock up in the failed DJJ system. In comparison, a young person in a California public school only merits a $7,088 per youth, per year investment. California ranks 48th in the country when it comes to investing in K-12 education.

The Governor just proposed more cuts to our local schools, but wants to maintain decrepit youth prisons.  What the Ella Baker Center and our allies have long advised is to close the DJJ youth prisons– and reallocate a third of that budget to public schools, a third to counties for youth rehabilitation, and a third back to the crippled budget.
Over the last several months, Gov. Schwarzenegger and the state Legislature could have found time to work out a plan that set priorities, cut back on bureaucracy, and limited the damage to struggling schools.  Instead Senator Huff and the Governor offer our most experienced teachers up for budgetary sacrifice.
Racial and economic organizations like the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights support community investment first and foremost, including the Quality Education Investment Act (QEIA). QIEA moves us in the right direction by funding the reduction of student-to-counselor ratios and class size in low-income schools. Unfortunately, it is not a state-wide program.  Only a few schools have been chosen by lottery--we need QEIA statewide. One way to fund it would be through shifting resources from the failing youth prisons to schools.
We can't divide and conquer our way to school reform.  Pitting teachers against students and making it easier to fire senior teachers won’t do the trick. Neither will continuing to adopt budgets whose priorities are way out of whack. Educational equity will be achieved only if it is shaped by a powerful vision for what our schools should look like and are given the financial and human resources needed to achieve that vision.
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Jakada Imani is the Executive Director of The Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, a non-profit strategy and action center working for justice, opportunity and peace in urban America.
From: the California Progress Report 

Sacramento Black Parallel School Board

Letter from the Chair

The African American youth in Sacramento are at a state of heightened emergency in relation to their academic pursuit yet, we are not truly outraged about this. With education being one of the fundamental keys to success we must make every effort to ensure the academic key fits correctly once its placed into the hands of our African American youth.


On Saturday, September 5, 2009, the Black Parallel School Board held its monthly meeting at the Oak Park United Methodist Church in Sacramento. The meeting started promptly at 10 am and adjourned at 12 pm. One of the key items we covered was standardized testing. Readers are you aware that within the Sacramento City Unified School District during the past school year of all the African American students they are serving only 8 children of African descent are in geometry and there are only 9 African Descent youth in Algebra II. African American students overall have made little to none standardized test improvements and the same is occurring with the high school exit exam test results. Our children's ability to articulate themselves in written form is declining astronomically too.

Children of African descent are not doing well when it comes to mathematics and language arts this is a fact. Together as a community, we have a job to do. This job goes beyond the band-aid approach. When the Black Parallel School Board meets monthly we are not there in large numbers along with our children, nieces, nephews, siblings, aunts, uncles, parents and the like, yet we wonder why our children are doing poorly.

We will come together in large numbers to support concerts, ball games, and other extra circular activities; however, we neglect to use the same energy and efforts to bring about constant change when it comes to our children’s academic minds in fear of rattling the chains.

We must call ourselves to a higher place of accountability by riding ourselves of the lackadaisical attitude and by not selfishly assuming that this doesn’t impact you. Our ancestors did not bleed, die, and be dehumanized for generations for us to stop fighting.

The battle doesn’t end until we are call home. This battle is not just an African American battle it is a battle that every race is responsible for fighting for their culture individually and for other cultures too. When one is not adequately educated they will lack the tenacity needed to be positive community contributors causing the cycle of poverty to continue to perpetuate from generation-to-generation. This in and of itself is one of the key ingredients that continues to feed racism.

STAR test results are our business even if it means holding all night tutoring sessions- so well be it. Being on a unified forefront is so essential. When we come to the table to discuss education we should be on one accord regardless of our level of achievements and the accolades associated with our name(s). Our skin color is also not an item that we should constantly focus our attention, but that isn’t to say it isn’t a vital area. Our primary focal point should always be those children who are not performing at their “True Potential” even if they aren’t in our neighborhoods. We are truly living in a world where we are constantly producing lost generations who are wondering around hopelessly looking and waiting for us to take charge of them- we appear to be asleep.

Most people are quick to play the, “race card” not too many of those same individuals are willing to come into a room and set aside differences to bring about true change. Politicians want you to hear them so they can be elected yet, when elections occur, you don't see them until its election time again. The fact that there is no funding truly doesn’t matter, what matters is that we all want the best for Sacramento children; that in and of itself is enough for us to work until we can see the change verses just thinking change is going to plop out of the sky into our laps- we have to go and get it.

Those who caused things to truly happen took care of business and they did it with so much passion where they didn’t even care if that meant that they lost their lives in the mist of the fight. Our children are doing poorly in Sacramento in terms of education; I asked when wills The Next Generations Academic Failures Be Truly Televised. Years ago, survival occurred academically, physically, and financially because there was a unified effort for everyone to, “Be There Brothers/Sisters Keeper At All Cost.”

Here is a link to the Black Parallel School Board Site-www.blackparallelschoolboard.com

(please see this site for the charts covered at our most recent meeting check and it in a couple of days you can visit it now for other information)

STAR test result site-
http://star.cde.ca.gov/

I am writing as a concerned citizen who is on the battlefield for our youth regardless of their ethnicity, social economic status, religion, and/or sexual orientation.

Lailah Ameerah Muwwakkil

Chair
Black Parallel School Board

Stealing from the Youth

Stealing From the Youth

by Joseph Palermo
There’s an ancient saying that we do not inherit our society from our ancestors, but borrow it from our children. On July 21, the California State University Board of Trustees approved a fee increase requiring undergraduate students this fall to pay $4,026 a year, an increase of about $1,000 over the previous year (and this fee hike came after years of previous increases). The fee hikes, the denial of enrollment to 40,000 students, the layoffs of faculty and staff, the budget cuts and furloughs, the stuffing of more students into fewer classes, etc. are all sacrificing California’s future for a short-term “fix” that in reality is not a “fix” at all. The 2010-2011 year will likely bring more bleak budgetary news. By blocking any new revenue streams to fund higher education, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Senate Republican minority are not only taxing California’s young people and their families, they are crippling the state’s future.
The degrees from CSU awarded during these furlough years might lead future employers to look upon them as suspect, perhaps even as inferior. The teachers, nurses, technicians, journalists, criminal justice professionals, and others we teach could have the quality of their training questioned. It’s not fair to the students and their families to be forced into buying an inferior product for grossly inflated prices. Students are paying more than ever for a CSU education even though they’ll be spending less time with professors, have fewer course offerings, and be crammed in overcrowded classrooms.
These budget cuts and student fee increases have gone on for years now, but 2009-2010 will be the cruelest year of all. In past budget cycles, CSU Chancellor Charles Reed and the Board of Trustees have responded with a shrug, saying simply: “We’ll manage.” Reed recently told the press that CSU is still a “bargain” compared to other institutions.
Really? A “bargain?” Or is it a bargain basement sell-off? Some students are transferring to other colleges that are more prestigious and only cost a little more in tuition.
There has been a profound lack of leadership among our elected officials in the state Capitol and in Long Beach, where the Chancellor and Trustees preside. Now the CSU administration has been finally forced to acknowledge that the latest round of devastating cuts will adversely affect the quality of education: “Cuts of this magnitude will naturally have consequences for the quality of the education we can provide,” a side letter to the furlough agreement states.
The California Faculty Association has stood and will continue to stand with students and their families. The record is clear. CFA has opposed every single increase in student fees whenever the issue has been raised in the Legislature. As a faculty organization we have consistently lobbied state legislators and the governor’s office to invest in California’s higher education. To that end we have voiced our strong support of Assembly Bill 656, sponsored by Assembly Majority Leader Alberto Torrico (D-Fremont), because it is a sensible and fair effort to secure funding for the CSU. The Republican minority in the State Senate and our Republican governor squashed it, and by doing so they denied the necessary funding for the CSU system that would have helped us avoid what we are seeing today — cuts, furloughs, and fee hikes. (It’s a tax on CSU students and their families. The pay cut is also a tax on faculty and staff.)
In order NOT to tax ExxonMobile, Shell Oil, and other oil conglomerates that have made record profits in the tens of billions of dollars off California consumers in recent years, the Republicans blocked Torrico’s oil severance tax proposal that would have provided a billion dollars for higher education. They also blocked a tax on cigarettes that would have adverted cuts as well. And they did so for blind ideological reasons with a total disregard for what is in the best interest of the state of California. They sided with Big Oil and Big Tobacco to penalize college students who are just trying to increase their skill and knowledge levels to be productive members of the state’s workforce and to make California’s future as bright as its past.
Somebody should ask Governor Schwarzenegger and the Republicans in the Legislature why they insist on taxing students instead of oil and tobacco corporations. That’s why students were chanting outside the Chancellor’s office when he approved the fee hike: “TAX OIL, NOT STUDENTS!”
At his annual convocation to college staff and faculty, the president of CSU, Chico, Paul Zingg, pointed out that over the past 10 years state revenues have gone up while the percentage of the state general fund for higher education has gone down. Over the same time period general fund spending for prisons has gone from $5 billion to $11 billion. California spends about $50,000 per prisoner, and less than one-tenth of that to support a student in the CSU system. How can a state that spends more on prisons each year than on higher education create a better future for its citizens? President Zingg called it a “rejection of history and common sense.” “Education is as fundamental to our state as waterways, railroads, highways and the Internet,” he said.
It won’t be easy, but CSU professors can absorb these pay cuts and we will absorb them. We’ll manage. We’ll get by. We can take the hit as our faculty union voted in favor of doing so in the name of protecting higher education in California. CFA approved a 9.23 percent cut in our remuneration that will be reflected in a 9.23 percent reduction in our teaching activities. We’ve done our part.
The professors will endure. But the students and their families are the true victims here. They’re getting ripped off. CSU students are taking on extra jobs and piling on extra units to get through faster just to make ends meet. The quality of their education is suffering even while they go into debt, work long hours, and stretch themselves thin with heavy unit loads to obtain a degree. If it is true that we do not inherit our society from our ancestors, but borrow it from our children, then the current downsizing of the CSU system represents a wholesale larceny against our children and our future.
Joseph Palermo is Associate Professor of American History at CSU, Sacramento. He’s the author of two books on Robert F. Kennedy: In His Own Right (2001) and RFK (2008).

Posted with permission.