And don’t bother bringing Californians another four lords-a-leaping or eight swans-a-swimming, St. Nick. What we need this year are nearly 5.9 million tutors—one for each and every one of our public school students.

Because you could fill a giant sack with all the research showing that one-on-one tutoring is students’ best bet for playing academic catch-up, which is needed more than ever right now.

St. Nick: Most of our kids, both the nice and the naughty, would need a team of flying reindeer to get back to grade level after two long, pandemic-disrupted years. In testing last spring, more than half of California students failed to meet state standards in English. In math, two-thirds of all students fell short; four out of five Black, Latino, and low-income students couldn’t make those same standards. California eighth graders now test at a fifth-grade level in math.

Tutoring is the best gift you could give these kids right now, and not just because it’s been shown to be the best way for students to make rapid advances in achievement. California children, after years of isolation, desperately need both the instruction and connection that tutors can provide.

Of course, just having a tutor isn’t enough. You need to gift us tutors who know what they are doing—retired teachers, paraprofessionals, older students with real training—and in turn give them sufficient time with students, ideally three sessions a week, adding up to 50 hours per semester.

None of this information is a secret. But no one likes to talk about it much. Teachers’ unions have been reluctant to acknowledge all the learning loss. And elected leaders have too often tried to spin the problem; the office of Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a press release emphasizing that the drops in California test results were less than in other states.

Which is why we need your intervention, Santa.

You always get us what we need, while California, for all the good intentions of its adults, can’t manage to deliver the resources kids need to thrive. Despite recent increases in school funding, this state fails to get kids high-quality teachers, counseling, and classes. Despite massive expansion of health programs to cover kids, California children aren’t that healthy, and struggle to access care. Despite promises of universal child care and pre-school, parents must scramble to find options for young kids.

Instead of creating one efficient system to solve any of these problems, California ends up placating different interest groups by creating smaller piecemeal programs that don’t really fit together.

The same thing is happening with tutoring.

Instead of focusing on a comprehensive tutoring effort to reach every child, the state has decided to spread educational recovery funds around the state to smaller and sometimes targeted programs. California sent nearly $5 billion in federal stimulus funds for learning loss to local school districts, with little oversight or accountability. We don’t know how much was spent on tutoring, or how much that tutoring helped students.

A second, more recent grant, the nearly $8 billion Learning Recovery Emergency Block Grant, is more promising because it has more restrictions. Intensive tutoring is one of the few things school districts can spend this money on, along with literacy intervention, counseling, and additional learning time. But it’s not clear how much money will be devoted to tutoring.

Why not?

There are many reasons. One is that our volatile state budget, in surplus last year, now faces projected shortfalls with recession looming; it’s conceivable that some of that money might be clawed back to fill budget holes. Another is that our school districts, like employers everywhere, report not being able to hire or train enough people to be tutors. Still another: Teachers, exhausted from the pandemic (among other things), are leaving the profession, not clamoring to add tutoring duties.

As a result, we are building a piecemeal system of tutoring and academic support.

Some of those pieces are quite useful. The state just invested $250 million in hiring literacy coaches in low-income elementary schools over the next five years. The California State Library is providing free online homework assistance for California K-12 students, available through HelpNow, a 24-hour live, real-time platform with qualified tutors answering questions. Gov. Newsom recently launched the College Corps, a California version of AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps. Half of its first class of 3,250 California community college and university students are working as tutors and mentors in school districts and after-school programs.

There is no shortage of ideas about expanding tutoring, inside and outside of government, for California to draw upon. The founder of Khan Academy is trying to create an online tutoring marketplace. An MIT professor is pitching a way to use artificial intelligence for tutoring aimed at academic recovery. And at the federal level, there are proposals in Congress to expand AmeriCorps’ national community service network to make tutoring a priority.

But none of these amount to what is needed: dedicated tutors, who can teach one-on-one multiple times a week, win our kids’ trust, and get our students caught up.

Perhaps, in a different state and country, in a different time, a moment like this might be seen as an opportunity to remake public education into a more personalized and effective system.

But that’s not happening. Because in 21^st century California, providing what is necessary would take a miracle.

So, it’s up to you Santa. Just how many tutors can you fit in your sleigh?

The post All California Kids Want for Christmas Is a Tutor appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Californians may think we have a system of public education. But what we really have is a state system for rationing public education.

I got a personal taste of this in the spring, when I took my five-year-old son to our local school district offices to determine his educational future. This being California, the determination was made not by a test of his abilities or an assessment of his educational needs. Instead, it was a lottery. A school administrator pulled names out of the hat to determine whether he would get one of 24 coveted spots in our elementary school’s new Mandarin language program.

The month of September, early in a fresh academic calendar, is the time of year when we hear fine speeches and noble promises about how our state and its school districts are committed to doing the very best for every child. School superintendents and politicians often point to our state constitution’s commitment to universal education, which includes a funding requirement to deliver on that commitment. But when you experience how our schools operate, you learn quickly that such lofty, sweet sentiments and guarantees are so much Fang pi (a Mandarin approximation for cow dung).

In California, when it comes down to who gets precious educational resources, schools as a matter of policy and law leave much to chance.

We do this for two reasons: scarcity and avoidance. Educational resources here are scarce—there is simply more demand for schooling than the state’s wobbly budget system can accommodate. And so we’ve come to use lotteries and formulas, so that our officials can avoid the work of deciding who deserves resources, and so that the rest of us Californians can avoid reckoning with our collective failure to support public education.

Yes, it’s true that K-12 (and community college) education is the top spending item in the state budget, but there is no area in which our school spending—which remains below the national average despite recent increases—meets education needs.

By all reliable accounts, there aren’t nearly enough good, experienced teachers in our schools. The state offers only 180 days of instruction (when research suggests there should be more than 200 days and more hours of instruction), and only provides half-day kindergarten. And the inadequacy of newer programs and schools offered by some districts in the name of educational choice only underscore the ongoing scarcity. There are simply not enough Advanced Placement classes, career-readiness programs, charters, magnets, or language immersions to meet the demand for high-quality options.

There’s little hope of trying to do more to meet those needs. California long ago decoupled school funding from educational needs. Our school funding formulas, known collectively as Prop 98, are baked into the state constitution, and are driven by tax revenues, the budget, and income growth, not academic needs. Effectively, Prop 98 guarantees only a portion—you might say a ration—of the state budget to schools. (Tellingly, that money is supplemented by a small amount—usually $1 billion or less than 2 percent of annual education funding—from the state lottery).

So in the absence of funds to meet all our students’ needs, we turn to education’s version of lotteries to allot scarce resources. State law (mirroring federal guidance) directs school districts to use a lottery system for charter school admissions once the number of pupils who want to enroll exceeds the number of spaces. Districts with magnet programs do the same. Many of these lotteries have complicated rules and exclusions, often to help kids go to schools in their own neighborhoods, keep siblings together in the same school, or to make sure campuses are diverse. L.A. Unified has a system of points to govern its lottery for magnet school placement so complicated that a cottage industry (check out “Ask a Magnet Yenta” ) has sprung up to help parents navigate it.

Of course, such lotteries are not all that fair. The winners in lotteries are more likely to be the children of parents who have the time and resources to investigate their local educational possibilities, sign their children up for the lotteries and, in some cases, write letters or pursue strategies to help their chances.

And the lotteries raise a bigger question, now being debated in California’s courts. Does “random” allocation of educational resources really represent justice?

Earlier this summer, the California Supreme Court showed itself to be divided on the question. A 4-3 majority of justices refused to hear challenges to the state’s systems of hiring and firing public schoolteachers and funding schools. The challengers said that those systems were violating the rights of students, because they didn’t produce enough money and qualified teachers to meet the state constitution’s guarantees of education for all. But the Supreme Court majority, in declining to hear the challenges, endorsed the position that while there might be problems with funding and teachers, these weren’t constitutional problems—because the impact of bad policies was random and arbitrary, and not felt by any particular group of students.

Mariano-Florentino “Tino” Cuellar, a young associate justice of the Supreme Court, dissented powerfully from that logic. Curtailing access to educational opportunity, the justice argued, doesn’t become justifiable simply because it’s done arbitrarily.

“Arbitrary selection has at times been considered a means of rendering a governmental decision legitimate,” he wrote. “But where an appreciable burden results—thereby infringing a fundamental right [like the right to an education]—arbitrariness seems a poor foundation on which to buttress the argument that the resulting situation is one that should not substantially concern us.”

The brilliantly cynical filmmaker Orson Welles once said, “Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck.” He wasn’t wrong—our parents, where and when we were born, the people we happen to meet, all influence the direction our lives take, through no fault or deed of our own.

My own son was lucky. His name was pulled 16th out of the hat, giving him a place he now enjoys in that Mandarin immersion kindergarten. His own luck will transfer to his younger brother, who is automatically eligible to join the program when he reaches kindergarten age.

But California is not as fortunate in leaning its educational system so heavily on luck. Our schools are supposed to be equalizers, helping counter the lottery of life. Instead, they are emulating it.

The post California’s Bad Bet on School Finance Leaves Too Much to Chance appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I took his words to heart, and have never let them go.

I have never let South L.A. go either. I grew up in the middle of the Crenshaw-Baldwin Hills-Jefferson Park area, otherwise known as Black Los Angeles, a place that punched way above its weight as a center of black life in the United States at the time. Often when whites write (sometimes to great critical success) about Black L.A., they describe it as the sum total of its self-inflicted pathologies, rarely seeing the beauty of the particularity of life there or the complex intersection of class and intraracial conflict.

Sure, I got my ass kicked, and occasionally guns we’re pointed in my direction, but that could happen anywhere in the city of angels. The Black L.A. I grew up in is a moveable feast of memory.

My memories of growing up in Black L.A. are trips to Playa Del Rey beach and Griffith Park. My dad worked nights at the post office, and so he would take me and the neighborhood boys and girls all about the city on a regular basis. It was a one-man Boys and Girls Club. I’ve written many stories about Googie and Onla and the other knuckleheads I hung out with. I still think about the polite criminality and comic mayhem before rock cocaine came to town like an ill wind that kind of ethnically cleansed black folks who fled to the high desert or back to Texas, Louisiana, or Mississippi.

I remember going shopping with my mom at the Boy’s Market on Crenshaw when Crenshaw was still Japanese. And I remember hanging out in the magazine and book section and being terrified by Alfred Hitchcock short stories. Later I discovered that Japanese magazines had naked women in them but no one seemed to notice my 10-year-old self panting with excitement.

The nearby Holiday Bowl bowling alley was probably the only place in the world where you could get sashimi, hot links, grits, and donburi under the same roof. I was lucky to live on the edge of everything—the shining affluence of Baldwin Hills and close enough to the heat of working class neighborhoods. In 1964 we moved to a neighborhood of New Orleans expatriates, and I attended Holy Name of Jesus Christ Catholic Church on Jefferson. I attended their elementary school for just one year because a nun there decided that I was mildly retarded. My mother threatened to rip the veil off of the nun and I was sent to a public school to study with the heathens.

Jervey Tervalon, left, with a friend.

Long before Beyoncé, we were ensconced in celebrity culture in that South L.A. sightings of Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Richard Pryor weren’t uncommon, and Jim Brown was known to crash a party. Who didn’t know someone who danced on Soul Train? Marvin Gaye was shot to death by his father on Fourth Avenue, walking distance from my house. And Jim Kelly, of Enter the Dragon fame, courted a lady on my block, though my friends and I would barely look in his direction because we thought he might round house kick our little pootbutts.

If you hung around long enough you’d end up in a movie, like my older brother who had a moment of fleeting fame in The Spook Who Sat by the Door. A casting director found him and his buddy in the unemployment line and needed some “high yellow niggers” for a few scenes for an important and complicated plot point involving passing as white and a bank robbery. My mom even sewed my brother’s dashiki for authenticity’s sake.

I had my distinctly out-to-lunch buddies; we carried staffs and wore flowers in our hair and, like Kwai Chang Caine meets afro hippies, we walked barefoot—and talked about science fiction and the horror fiction of H.P. Lovecraft incessantly. Perhaps not everyone is up on Afro-Futurism—that school of thought that values black speculative fiction as a necessary means to understand our current and past situations (though I think we thought of it as Afro-Presentism). Understanding white privilege in its myriad forms should be something you can get a Ph.D. in.

I had a great liberal arts education once I got to college, studying with the literary critic Marvin Mudrick—who understood that being raised in a real neighborhood meant you sometimes got beat up. My formal education meshed well with the idiosyncratic education I had before. Mudrick’s love of Chaucer became mine, and my love of Richard Pryor became his admiration. It’s the crazy complicated formula of one’s birth culture and its intersection with whiteness/European-ness and all the variations plus the breadth of one’s reading and interests. That’s how I thought of myself growing up weird ass Jervey, that dude who reads a lot and writes.

I also flew model rockets, studied martial arts, and loved science. I worshiped fan-boy culture: Dracula above all else, science fiction and Lord of the Rings, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Ishmael Reed’s “I Am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra,” Canterbury Tales, and millions of comics.

Later, when I did more traditional study of literature, my love for reading everything served me well. The canon couldn’t harm me or make me feel like an alien in my own skin—I took what was useful to me and ignored the rest.

I became a writer and teacher. Now, after teaching for over 30 years at almost every level of schooling, at some of the poorest and some of the most prestigious colleges and universities in Southern California, I’ve learned this: every teacher who ever meant something to me was passionate about his or her area of expertise, was generous of spirit, was honest, and made things.

It is hard to quantify these things, the metrics of creativity, but creativity and creative schooling can happen anywhere. Good, enthusiastic instruction. Decently paid, respected teachers. Students who feel respected and challenged. And a reasonable school environment. These are the essentials, but one can make do.

When I go back to South L.A., I teach junior high and high school students at USC’s Neighborhood Academic Initiative Saturday Academy. The academy is one of the enhancements NAI offers the kids in its seven-year program to prepare low-income students for college. (Those who meet USC’s admissions requirements get a full financial aid package). These are kids of color who can get into elite schools because NAI creates the kind of advantages an affluent kid has.

I’m glad for my uneven and even perilous inner city education—it made a reader and writer out of me. And so I do my best to entice NAI students to be passionate writers and readers. I flatter the ones who rise to the challenge and admonish the ones who don’t, even if they’re killing it in STEM courses. NAI and my organization, Literature For Life, give a $1,000 prize to the ninth grader who writes the best short story at a USC community school; we want to expand it to all public schools in L.A.

Too often these days we test kids like lab rats and torture teachers to achieve results that justify their jobs. I think of Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” and the power of saying “I would prefer not to.” I will not participate in a process that makes it impossible for a teacher to generate passion in students for reading, that values teaching to a test over the possibility of working to engage students in creative construction. STEM is necessary but so is reading widely and deeply. I want these kids to know the pleasure of reading Kafka and then being shocked that when they’re in biology, they remember The Metamorphosis and wonder about the nature of existence.

These Latino and African-American kids remind me of myself when I was in school, which happens to be the same school—Foshay—that I attended back when Foshay was a junior high and a tough place to be a student. Now Foshay is a K-12 school that produces students who get into USC, the UCs, Stanford, and Harvard. Many of them are the first generation in their families that will go on to college, and they look like me, and many of them are confident in their intelligence and wit.

They are their own weird-ass selves.

The post A South L.A. Novelist on Why He Teaches Kids It’s OK to Be Weird appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

When a police commander like me says something like this, sometimes skeptics will dismiss it as just political correctness or public relations or confusion about the difference between policing and social work. Those skeptics are wrong. Relationship building is an essential ingredient in the historic reductions in crime we’ve seen across the city, and especially in parts of South L.A. with longer histories of violence. As of mid-May, Watts, where I’ve spent years working with the community through the Watts Gang Task Force, had had only one homicide so far this year, and we had a recent stretch of almost two years without a homicide in any of the three public housing developments; Jordan Downs has had only one homicide in nearly six years.

There are many reasons why crime and violence have been reduced in South L.A. One important one is that the police have the credibility to enforce the laws because they have the trust of the community.

Building that trust has been the focus of our work. The LAPD has tried to create ways for officers to get to know members of the community in settings that don’t involve the enforcement of the laws. We have police participate in community programs (football, baseball, running clubs, Girl Scouts, tutoring—anything that reaches kids) and even raise money for local charities. We have police visit schools, and we bring community members in to talk to officers at roll calls and orientations for new officers assigned to the station. My wife, who is a police lieutenant, and I make a point of supporting local charities and community-based organizations as partners, particularly children’s organizations that focus on the mental health of kids who are affected by trauma and violence that is all too common in their neighborhoods and homes. I’ve seen that traumatized kids and families become the sources of future crime and violence.

One reason I appreciate the value of relationship building involves my own personal relationship to South L.A. I was born at St. Francis Hospital in Lynwood and grew up in South L.A. and east L.A. County. My parents were both from the neighborhood—my dad grew up at 110th and Vermont, my mom at 98th and LaSalle—and both graduated from Washington High in the early 1950s. When I was born, my parents were living at 85th and Hoover. We moved to Whittier when I was in grade school, but I spent summers with my grandfather, who lived in Baldwin Hills and owned a meat market at 23rd and San Pedro. And if you go to 74th and Hoover today, you’ll find a little pink church that used to be the Greek Orthodox Church where we worshiped.

I have very vivid memories of the 1965 riots. I was 8 and I remember standing at Century and Western near my grandparents’ home, and my grandmother trying to explain what was going on. I remember the fear between white and black people, the discomfort people had then because they were very ignorant of each other. And I draw on those memories and experiences today, in trying to get people together so they can better know each other.

My return to South L.A. as a police commander was improbable. After high school, I spent years in the military, from Germany to Key West, before joining the LAPD in 1980. I worked in the Southeast Division my first year and a half, but I got moved around a bit. I ended up back in Southeast while working in the Metropolitan Division in the late ‘80s during Chief Gates’ Operation Hammer, which was a response to gang shootings that involved putting people in jail for any violation that the officer had a constitutional right to address. I was torn—many people in Southeast thanked us for addressing the problem and we were genuinely trying to do the right thing and protect the community. But I’ve learned in policing that “it’s not just what we do, it’s how we do it.” We were aggressively detaining people for any legal cause, and our tone made it appear we were looking down on people and the community.

In 2006 I made captain, far beyond anything I expected to do at LAPD (my original dreams had stopped at lieutenant), and 10 months later I found myself assigned to South L.A.—the Southeast Division, where there was a lot of hatred between the community and the department. A small number of officers were responsible for a good part of the controversy.

A heart-of-gold commander named Rick Jacobs took me to the Watts Gang Task Force, which brought together law enforcement, various agencies and leaders, and community stakeholders. For two hours every Monday I attended those meetings, and for the first two years, I got yelled and screamed at about the conduct of our officers. It took some time to get those officers moved out of the division, and longer to open up communication.

After some time, I began to push back and make the point that the community—not just the police—has obligations to counter crime by taking responsibility for the neighborhood, which means partnering with law enforcement to fight crime.

We did everything we could to get officers, particularly new officers, in situations where they could just talk with people from the community, and understand that South L.A. residents were just regular citizens like themselves. That’s how we started bringing community people to the station for roll calls and to talk to new officers. (Twenty years ago, that would have pissed off a number of cops). We had officers work and develop partnerships with a wide variety of community organizations.

One of our most important early partnerships was with 99th Street Elementary School and its innovative principal, Sherri Williams. At her invitation, we had officers who visited the school and read to kids. It allowed the kids to see the officers in a different light, and it allowed officers to see these were normal kids who wanted to achieve. Each year, we would make an appearance at the school; one time I wore a chicken suit, another time I let the kids spray my hair pink and shave it off, and a third year we rode into the school on horseback with Buffalo Soldiers.

Now, 10 years later, that, and many other things have changed. Officers who worked Southeast a decade ago come back and the first time they walk into Nickerson Gardens, they’re shocked that people are saying hi and kids are running up to the police car, not away from it.

We continue to be aggressive about talking with everybody, and that means engaging schools, parks and recreation, business groups, and all manner of officials. And sometimes our message is quite tough.

I’ve had serious discussions with school officials about their tendency to suspend so many kids, instead of working to keep them engaged in school. Gompers Junior High was the worst offender for a while—kids would act up and they’d just suspend them. It wasn’t entirely the school’s fault—they had very few staff and huge numbers of special education kids. But they wouldn’t even require the parents to pick the kids up. In many meetings, we’ve convinced Gompers and other schools to keep nonviolent kids on campus and supervised.

When the police are deeply engaged in the community, we can speak and advocate for its needs. As police, we see that South L.A. needs much more programming for kids; such programming has made a big impact in the housing developments, where much of it is focused. South L.A. also needs the schools to bring back music and the arts in a much bigger way. The area is totally ripe for children’s diversion programs, and not just for offenders but also for kids who haven’t offended but may be at risk of doing so.

But South L.A.’s biggest need, by far, is jobs and businesses right here in the community. Education levels have risen and job training has improved; there are plenty of people ready to work, and not enough work for them.

One reason we don’t see more business is that people don’t understand the gains in South L.A. For doubters, I’d encourage them to check out all the housing being built in South L.A. I see people buying lots and subdividing them to create a couple of homes. Or you could check out Chef Roy Choi’s new restaurant in Watts, LocoL, where you’ll often find me. LocoL is a symbol of where this community is going—new business and local hiring. When I was last there, I was glad to see a few people working there who I know didn’t used to be pillars of the community. We all change.

But another reason for the lack of business is a problem police are too familiar with: property crimes. California law doesn’t really take property crime seriously—it’s been more focused on violence, understandably. We’ve seen gangs move into theft and we’re seeing more so-called “knock-knock” residential burglaries because the criminal justice system currently doesn’t address property crimes with meaningful consequences.

I also don’t want to minimize violent crime and gang activity; it’s less visible, but it’s still there, just different. Gangs used to wear bright colors and be about turf and drugs. But increased penalties related to gang involvement curbed that. Today, social media can be the cause of shootings, and shootings can be more dangerous for people not involved in gangs when members don’t necessarily know each other by face. We recently had an arrest on a homicide at 55th and Vermont where a battle started on the Internet, and the guy went to the neighborhood of the other person and just opened up on people standing there, as if he was retaliating against the neighborhood.

When I think about the future of South L.A. and the policing of it, I’m hopeful that we can continue to build relationships and the momentum that comes with them. But I’m also fearful about a reversal of gains. South L.A. needs more resources of all kinds—more mental health care options, services for families, and new answers to address the growing homeless population. And while schools have gotten better at teaching science and math, they need more funding for staff and services that support students and their parents. It is hard to work with dysfunctional parents and families, but there are ways to bring them into school. Our friends at 99th Street Elementary used to hold exercise classes for the moms with the goal of bringing in parents.

We also need more police officers to keep building more of the relationships that provide a wall against gangs and crime. Relationships are fragile, and personal connections can endure in ways that are surprising.

About four years ago, I went to my grandparents’ old house at 98th and LaSalle. I saw an African-American lady on the front lawn, and so I introduced myself as a kid who used to play in her front yard.

“Oh, you must be Maxine’s grandson,” she immediately said.

She explained that her family had bought the house from mine. And she told me how nice my grandparents were, how they reassured her it was a good place to raise kids, and how they lowered the price and gave them their washer-dryer and even their kitchen table, because it was bigger than my grandparents needed.

I was flabbergasted—it had been 45 years. But a long-ago personal connection, a bit of conversation and generosity, still had not been forgotten.

The post In South L.A., a More Approachable Police Force Has Led to a Safer Community appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I grew up in Lennox, a poor area near LAX Airport that has many of the same obstacles as South L.A., but I grew up thinking, like too many other people, that South Los Angeles was a place to fear. So coming to work quickly proved to be a revelation. I fell in love with the children and families of South L.A. I’ve been working here ever since, most recently as principal at Dolores Huerta Elementary.

Part of the connection I feel to the school is personal; I see myself both in the students and teachers, and I don’t want them to feel the way I did in schools. I was put in an English as a Second Language (ESL) class until sixth grade because my last name is Gutierrez, even though English is my first language. Teachers told me that I would not go to college; I even heard teachers talking about other options for kids like me. When I was growing up, I had no idea that I was part of a failing system.

But in an eighth grade science class, my perspective shifted after I saw Ms. Luz Castillo at the head of the classroom. She was the first Hispanic female teacher I ever had. I thought for sure her parents must be rich. How could she be a teacher? But as the year progressed, I got to know Ms. Castillo better and realized that she had a similar upbringing as my own. She was by no means rich, her parents spoke Spanish, and they were “normal.”

She told me that I was smart. She even gave me an award that year for best science student. It was the first time in my life that I truly believed I could go to college. It turns out it was her first year as a teacher, yet she helped to change my personal reality.

When I became a teacher, I vowed to be just like Ms. Castillo. I was going to tell my students about my journey and convince them that they were just as capable because I was just like them. And I certainly tried to instill that belief in my students.

In 2009, I received my first Reduction in Force (RIF) letter—that’s the name for the notice letting you know that you’ve been laid off. That was the teeth of the Great Recession and the state budget crisis, and thousands of teachers, many of them younger teachers like me with less seniority, received similar letters.

I spent the entire summer applying to various schools but I was hoping to be called back to my teaching position at Stevenson—I loved my job and I loved my students. About a week before school started, I was notified that I made it back on the hire list and I could return to my school. But two years later, I wasn’t that lucky. I was RIFed again and I was unable to return to my position.

So I decided to apply for an administrative position. It was a moment of sadness but also of excitement. As much as I didn’t want to leave the classroom and my position as the school’s intervention coordinator (which means working with students who get off-track), I was excited to begin a new chapter where I would have greater impact and influence on our educational system and our students.

As an administrator, I’ve tried to better understand the many needs of students in South L.A. Our students need to focus on their studies every day, but many of them have experienced things— related to violence, health, poverty and trauma—that most adults have not lived through.

I’ve responded to those needs in two ways. The first is by making sure that we have the highest academic expectations for students, so that they don’t fall behind. Those expectations give focus to us and to our students. At the same time, we must provide a very loving and safe environment.

The key to providing such an environment is getting all stakeholders on the same page. Every person who steps foot on campus needs to live and breathe the belief that all children can achieve. I’ve heard people say many times that parents do not want to be involved in their child’s education, but that is far from the truth. Parents here want the best for their children and they want to be involved and support their kids—they just don’t always know how. It really takes a strong school community to bring in parents and provide them with tools to support their children—academically, socially, and emotionally.

At Dolores Huerta Elementary, we do this by hosting a variety of workshops, events, and social gatherings as well as a Parent College led by the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools. Our parents are welcomed to our community as partners—they share the decision making through committees, classroom walks, and open forums. This year we even worked together to better the surrounding community by conducting a day of cleaning in the community, as well as walk-to-school events and some advocacy for safer streets.

Every morning, I personally open the school gate and say, “Hello” and ask, “How are you doing?” to every child. We have 470 students. When I see in their eyes that they’re not having a good morning, it’s my job to pull them aside and ask them if they would like to talk. I reassure them that we all care about them and believe in them and if there is anything they need they can come to us.

On Monday mornings we have an assembly and we always recite our vision, which includes three powerful words: Scholars, leaders, and proactive citizens. It is my goal that all the children are reminded at least once a day that they are scholars, leaders, and proactive citizens, that we believe in them, and that they can achieve personal excellence. I know that this must sound like just rhetoric to most bystanders, but the reality is that those words have to become our truth in every essence of our work to truly reach educational equality.

One of many examples from this year involved a student who had a difficult time the previous year. He was falling behind in his academics and was getting into trouble. This year, we made it a goal to help this student lift his confidence and get back on track. So the parent volunteers in his teacher’s classroom and our out-of-classroom staff made it a point to encourage him all year long. He joined my Google Club (through which I teach coding after school on Fridays through a Google curriculum called CS First) and became a leader on campus. He ended up getting two awards at the end of the school year, one for attendance and another for academics. I am so excited to see what he becomes in the future.

Recently, I hosted my principal’s monthly coffee for all school stakeholders. Since it was the last meeting of the year, we decided to run our meeting a little differently. We ran what we call a Restorative Justice Circle that included parents and staff members; we also held a separate restorative circle with teachers. We reflected on the school year and our work together and our efforts to invite all stakeholders in our journey to student academic achievement. As we went around the circle sharing our funniest, most memorable, and most challenging moments, I became a bit emotional because I felt so proud of our community and how much we have grown.

This year we received our first SBAC scores (Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium—tests that are aligned with the Common Core), and we scored above the district average in mathematics. We have also just received our literacy scores in the district assessments that we take each year, and on average our students increased by three reading levels.

Most importantly, we made progress in our shared goal this year to give students a voice and produce richer discussions and collaborations. When you walk into our classrooms, your hear students discussing their reasoning around their math work and debating the best way to model their solutions. You hear them presenting on the solar system and the significance of the literature they just read. You see the excitement for learning.

Staff, parents, teachers, and community members have stood together for a long time in order for us to be able to say that.

Yet, our children deserve more. They deserve all of us to fight for them, to fight for social justice and educational equality in the school and in South Los Angeles. In the words of Cesar Chavez and our school’s namesake Dolores Huerta, “Si Se Puede!”

The post Teaching South L.A.’s Kids to Believe That They Are Scholars, Leaders, and Good Citizens appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the 2013-14 school year, the state suspended the Academic Performance Index, or API, the chief tool Californians had for seeing how their kids’ schools stacked up among schools across the state. API wasn’t a perfect measure, but it offered a clear and consistent language for judging schools that could be understood by anyone in your neighborhood—from parents to real estate agents. And, for the many communities and schools that hung API banners boasting of school improvement in the rankings, the index provided a point of pride.

At the time the API was first suspended, our state’s leaders said they would give us a better, more useful index of schools. Three years later, they haven’t given us anything at all—except a promise that a new index will be in place for the 2017-18 school year. And there are reasons to doubt whether a useful index will ever be produced.

I am trying not to take this personally. The oldest of my three sons started kindergarten in our local elementary school in 2014. Under the current schedule for the new index, he’ll be heading into fourth grade—and his two younger brothers will be enrolled as well—before I can see how the school stacks up.

To be fair, state education officials had plenty of reasons for creating a new method for measuring schools and their progress. The old index was far too dependent on test scores. The federal government is transitioning out of its No Child Left Behind regime for a new accountability system. Charter schools, many of them founded by parents, are spreading. And California schools are adopting the new Common Core standards and adapting to the state’s new Local Control Funding Formula and its accompanying Local Control and Accountability Plans—which give parents and communities the new bureaucratic burden of developing school goals and monitoring school progress

Given all these changes, our leaders asked, shouldn’t there be a new index aligned with this new education universe?

Of course, there should be. So where the hell is it?

The state’s answer: these things take time and we’re making progress. Last week, the State Board of Education approved new metrics that it wants to include in the new system—including test scores, graduation and suspension rates, college and career readiness, and school improvement.

Which is great. But no changes and no process justify three years—and counting—of keeping Californians in the dark about their schools.

The state had better options than having no index at all. It could have kept the old index alive until it was ready to switch to a new one. Or, even better, the state could have used the previous years to experiment by compiling and releasing to the public a new draft index each year.

This public development of an index—a real-time, rolling rollout, if you will—would have drawn broad feedback each year, and kept parents and communities in the loop. Instead, the state chose to stay dark—keeping the conversation about any new index for school accountability contained in the usual silos of education insiders.

Which is why the darkest, most cynical view of this transition is almost certainly the right one. Is the real goal of state leaders less accountability for themselves and for California’s public schools?

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson used the suspension of the old index as justification for his failure to publish a legally required list of the state’s 1,000 lowest-achieving schools last year (he finally did so this January under threat of lawsuit, but built his list from 2013 data). And state officials have eliminated half of the standardized tests students are taking; they also have suspended the High School Exit Exam. Such steps have been taken in the name of leaving more time for actual instruction. But that’s hard to take at face value, given how low a priority instructional time has been in California schools. The number of school days was cut during the budget crisis and the state hasn’t added to the length of the school year since, even as charter and private schools, following research showing the benefits of more instructional time, do just that.

Then there’s the California Teachers Association, the state’s most powerful teachers’ union, which has been arguing against having any index that can be used to rank schools (and, they fear, punish laggards). In a recent letter to the state, CTA president Eric Heins protested against “a single one-size fits all numeric goal”—an API-style index simple enough for parents to understand—and argued in favor of a “locally based, iterative process of district review, reflection and improvement.”

What would the local iterative process look like? CTA has cited the Local Control and Accountability Plans—which were supposed to include meaningful input from communities and produce useful documents for the public—as models for what a new accountability system could be. But an index that looks like those accountability plans is exactly what we don’t need—those plans are monstrously long and confusing documents that run hundreds of pages.

The union’s “statewide ignorance is bliss” logic looks even uglier in light of Governor Jerry Brown’s recent comments that Californians shouldn’t expect the state’s work to close the achievement gap between black and Latino students and other students. “The gap has been pretty persistent,” Brown told CALmatters, so his educational reforms shouldn’t be judged on closing it.

Such educational fatalism isn’t just dispiriting—it’s at odds with California’s own record of educational progress. In 2013, more than 80 percent of schools scored above 700 on the API; only 31 percent had scored that high a decade earlier. The same decade saw big declines statewide in the dropout rate, big advances in the number of students taking challenging courses (especially math and science), and significant increases in the school performance of English-language learners, migrants, special education students and kids from low-income families.

Some of the children’s and educational groups who pushed for that progress are now putting forward legislation—AB 2548—to guarantee that the current process produces a coherent index that parents and communities can understand. But the teachers’ union and some politicians are dismissing this legislation as premature. Their strategy seems to be delay—and then try to get away with producing an index so complicated it isn’t really an index at all.

State officials will object that this assessment is terribly unfair. But after three years, they’ve lost the benefit of the doubt. If they want to restore their credibility, the state should take on a make-up assignment: Produce an index of all California schools for each of the past two years—the academic year now ending, and for 2014-15. The state has testing and the other data to do it. And we parents sure could use the information, even belatedly.

But I bet they won’t. They’re too busy coming up with excuses for keeping Californians in the dark.

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