This article originally appeared in the January-February 2001 issue of the Children's Advocate newsmagazine, published by Action Alliance for Children.
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Schools that "shock the conscience" |
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When American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawyers asked 17-year-old Lluliana Alonso about problems at Jefferson High School in South Central Los Angeles, the first thing she told them about was the bathrooms.
"They don't have the basic supplies, like toilet paper, running water, and soap," she says. "They're dirty and they stink. The toilets are always backed up or overflowing. And there's water all over the floor. It makes you sick just to walk in."
But there was more to tell. Classrooms at Jefferson were not furnished with desks for every student. "In my chemistry class, my friend Lisa had to sit on the counter," Alonso says.
Teachers did not have enough books for their students to take home to study. "In my Spanish class there was only a class set of books. The teacher used one set for six classes."
"Teachers missed a lot of days," Alonso says. And substitutes were heavily relied upon as long-term teachers. The teacher in Alonso's advanced placement English class left mid-semester, and Alonzo and her classmates were left with a string of substitutes. When they finally got a full-time teacher, he didn't read their papers. "He had five other classes to teach," Alonso says. "Usually, teachers have a free period to grade papers."
"People think that in South Central L.A., we're all gangbangers," she says. "They don't think we need the same opportunities. They don't offer very many AP classes because they don't think we can pass the test."
Last spring Alonso joined the ACLU's class-action lawsuit charging that the state of California has failed to provide even a basic education to low-income students of color in 46 public schools.
The 48-page legal brief filed by ACLU lawyers, in conjunction with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) and other civil rights organizations, describes conditions that they say "shock the conscience." They charge that the state has not met its responsibility to provide equal access to public education regardless of race, color, or national origin.
The lawsuit, Williams v. State of California, filed on May 17, 2000—the 46th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education—cites problems such as:
"Most of the schools around my neighborhood are the same way," Alonso says, echoing a major point made by the lawsuit.
"The failures this lawsuit addresses are not randomly distributed," says Julie Su of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, another organization participating in the lawsuit. "They are concentrated in communities of color, in economically struggling communities, and in immigrant communities. The state's neglect has a clearly discriminatory impact."
The California Department of Education responds to the suit by saying that the problems it describes are the responsibility of local school districts. "Nobody [at the state level] monitors to make sure that books are up to date. There's nobody here that monitors that school facilities are kept up," says Michael Hersher, deputy general counsel at the California Department of Education. "We just don't think that the issues of the case constitute a deprivation of right."
"Things get done," Hersher adds, "when local people decide to hold their local school boards accountable."
But, prompted by the ACLU suit, the department announced December 13 that it was suing 18 school districts, including Los Angeles and Long Beach, for failing to provide adequate textbooks, proper buildings, and credentialed teachers for their students.
Civil rights advocates say the state Department of Education shouldn't have to sue school districts to enforce fairness. They say the department should set up systems for holding districts accountable and ending the gross inequities that continue for low-income students and students of color.
The Williams case is one of several lawsuits charging racial inequities in public education since the dismantling of affirmative action under California's Proposition 209. The lawsuits are asking the Department of Education to "govern the schools in a responsible manner," says Christopher Calhoun, press representative for the ACLU of Southern California.
Several previous suits have already forced changes in schools with predominately African American and/or Latino students:
"The strategy is to look at all the elements of quality and equal educational opportunity and demand they be provided to every student in the state," says Calhoun.
"People, on a number of fronts, are starting to shine a light on policy. Up to this point, inequity has been the policy," said Marqueece Harris-Dawson of the Community Coalition, one of the organizations involved in the school construction lawsuit.
Calhoun adds that the recent lawsuits are the newest stage in a legal campaign for equity in education that has been going on for many decades. In the 1950s, lawsuits led to desegregation, which "didn't turn out to be the answer that people thought it would be." More recently, lawsuits have challenged inequalities in public school finance. In the California Supreme Court's Serrano decision (see box p. 4), the state was ordered to equalize school spending across districts.
In the current strategy, Calhoun says, "we saw what we needed to do was to look at all the tools students need to learn."
How could the state change this pattern of racial inequity?
Calhoun says the ACLU doesn't want the state to send monitors to every school, but "there are a lot of creative ways" the Department of Education could enforce equity. For example, the state could use the strategy it uses to enforce gender equity—do unannounced visits to a sample of schools and create an office to take complaints.
The bottom line, says Hector Villagra, a lawyer for MALDEF, is that "[the state] has a duty to provide all districts with the resources necessary to provide students with an education, to monitor the quality of education being provided by its districts, and to take action when districts are failing their students."
In 1972, the California Supreme Court's Serrano decision ordered the state to equalize funds across school districts. But there are still discrepancies. Why?
Tammy Johnson, of the ERASE (Expose Racism and Advance School Excellence) Initiative at the Applied Research Center in Oakland, points out that equal distribution of state education resources can sometimes worsen existing inequities. She points to class-size reduction in California.
Johnson says schools got the same amount of money for reducing class size, regardless of how much money they already had. Poorer schools could not afford to pay as much as wealthier schools, so they were forced to hire less experienced teachers. In addition, "teachers left minority schools because there were new jobs in wealthier districts," says Lori Olsen of California Tomorrow.
In contrast, Johnson points to class-size reduction in Wisconsin, where it is part of a comprehensive effort to increase the academic achievement of children living in poverty. The Student Achievement Guarantee in Education (SAGE) program distributes resources to schools according to need, with funds going to schools and districts with many students below the poverty level. In addition to class-size reduction, SAGE requires that schools provide a rigorous academic curriculum, improve professional development, and collaborate with community organizations to provide after-school programs and school-based services.
African American second graders in SAGE schools scored significantly higher on achievement tests than African American students in other schools. According to the program evaluation conducted by the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, between first and second grade "SAGE African American students did close the achievement gap."
When student members of the South Central Youth Empowerment Through Action (SCYEA) program read in the newspaper about a plan for spending Los Angeles Unified School District school repair funds, they felt something was wrong.
"The distribution would have given the monster's portion to the Westside and Southwest Valley [relatively better-off areas]," says Marqueece Harris-Dawson, director of youth programs for the Community Coalition, of which SCYEA is part. Substantially less repair money was to go to the older, more crowded schools in South Central Los Angeles, he says.
Proposition BB, a bond measure for building repairs in Los Angeles Unified School District, had passed in 1997. In November of that year, SYCEA organized 100 students in a protest at the district headquarters. The oversight committee agreed to consider geographic equity in their distribution of funds and ultimately changed their plan so that $153 million dollars went to South Central for school repairs.
At Jefferson High School, BB funds have been used for repairs to deteriorated facilities, such as replacing the roof on the arts building and repiping the hot and cold water systems. Construction is under way for safety repair to classrooms and for replacing rotten bracing in the school's bleachers. n
Goldie Buchanan, always a strong advocate for her children, began organizing other African American parents in 1994 when the principal of her son's high school left. Under school-based management, Westchester High in Los Angeles was supposed to include the input of all stakeholders in hiring a new principal. But the school was closed for the summer, and parents weren't notified that a new principal was being hired.
When they learned that the hiring process was going on, Buchanan and other parents felt they had not been adequately consulted. In a school that was then 70 percent African American, there was only one African American woman and her son on the hiring committee, Buchanan says.
"Fifty African American parents showed up to the council meeting where they were going to recommend their principal," says Buchanan. "She was waiting upstairs for them to introduce her. She never came downstairs because we said they weren't going to recommend anyone until we knew what was going on."
Eventually the district took over and appointed a principal, but included input from Buchanan and other parents. "[The new principal] was the first African American principal at the school," Buchanan says.
Once the parents had organized themselves, they began talking about other problems at Westchester. In 1995, they formed an organization called African American Parents/Community for Equity in Education (AAP/CEE) and began focusing on issues such as getting African American students into college prep and advanced placement classes.
"African Americans were very poorly represented in those classes," says Buchanan. "It was like a private school within a public school, because those classes were made up primarily of white kids."
"We got a lot of lip service," Buchanan says, "but it didn't fix the classes." She says that it was the ACLU's class-action suit on behalf of Inglewood High School students that finally got the school to pay attention to AAP/CEE issues.
"It took a while for us to be heard," she says. "It was only last year that African Americans were put in large numbers into AP and honors classes." She reports that this year, all of Westchester's ninth graders are taking core classes such as math and science, and nearly all are taking three or four college prep classes.
"I think it's important to say that there is a conversation now between the administration and AAP/CEE," Buchanan says. They are working together on the school's "Comets to College" Task Force to prepare students for college.
ERASE Initiative, The Applied Research Center, (510) 653-3415, www.arc.org
Justice Matters Institute, (415) 243-8113
Teaching for Change, (800) 763-9131, www.teachingforchange.org
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