The ethnic, linguistic, aptitudinal, cultural and economic diversity of California's 6 million public school kids has expanded greatly over the past few decades, but the school system itself has become more centralized, more politicized and more rigid in its pedagogy.
Many educators and analysts believe that anomaly may largely explain why California fares so poorly in academic comparisons with other states and why it suffers from such educational maladies as a horrendously high dropout rate.
One aspect of the situation has been the sharp increase in "economically disadvantaged" students – i.e., those from relatively poor families – to roughly 50 percent of the total.
Every study of California's school dilemma, including the 1,700-page opus produced by a Stanford University team, has pointed out the correlation between socioeconomic status and academic success.
A new monograph by the Legislature's budget analyst points out that the state has more than 45 programs spending more than $9 billion in state and federal funds to help the 3 million "ED" kids to overcome academic problems. But as the report, released Tuesday, concludes, "We believe California's existing approach for helping these students fails on virtually every score."
The report cites a "hodgepodge of disconnected programs," no links between actual barriers to education and the costs of overcoming them, and no useful information about program outcomes among the specific problems. But it concentrates on what should be obvious – the money and the programs are largely remedial, rather than concentrating on the "underlying barriers to academic success."
"For instance," the report says, "students from ED families may lack health care, be in single-parent homes living on public assistance, have absent parents or parents with little formal education, have parents in jail or addicted to drugs, be parents themselves, live in unsafe neighborhoods, lack nurturing relationships with adults, speak a primary language other than English, be influenced by gang pressures, and/or need to work long hours outside of school."
"Without identifying and focusing on these underlying causes," the report continues, "neither the state nor school districts can act strategically to mitigate them."
The analyst's report proposes an overhaul of ED mitigation programs that would simplify them and redirect resources into those underlying reasons ED students do so poorly in school and concentrating them on the students truly at risk of failure.
"For example," the report says, "a school district might receive significantly less funding for a student who is an English learner from an educated two-parent household living in a relatively safe suburb than a school district would receive for an English learner student living in a dangerous neighborhood who has one parent absent and one parent with a low level of education."
It makes a lot of sense. Why aren't we doing it?
Call The Bee's Dan Walters, (916) 321-1195. Back columns, www.sacbee.com/walters.
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