Testimony / ONE PERSON’S STORY ABOUT EDUCATION : ‘It’s Crucial to Redefine What Making It Is’

I am the principal of a school which draws 45% of its children from the families of enlisted personnel at the Tustin Marine Corps Air Station and 15% from a community with HUD housing. This has given us the opportunity of dealing with a student body far more diverse as to ethnicity and economic class than is typical in Orange County. The results have been exciting and I regret that such educational opportunities for people of different backgrounds will be diminshed by closing the bases.

Most people have no idea how strapped many of these folks are and how little pay they get. It’s ironic that despite everything we say about the necessity of having military service, a ready military, that in fact we don’t give these folks a living wage. Many times the father works a second job and the mother works. When someone is deployed overseas, their allowances are cut, so it’s even harder on the family.

What I like about this community is that the upper-middle-class Irvine community that surrounds the school has become very supportive. I’m proud of how our school-site parent council and our PTA function to support everyone here. Most schools in our district, when they send children on long field trips, charge $200 a year for sixth-graders. Then they have a little scholarship fund for those folks that can’t make it. At our school, our PTA does fund-raisers to pay half of all the cost of everyone’s outdoor education. I believe that because school situations can be so different from one place to the next, the state guidelines mandating site-based decision-making and decentralization, which Bill Honig put in place, are very positive. Schools have to be able to make decisions that respond directly to the communities they serve. A couple of years ago, we went to our parent communities and asked, “What is it that you want schools to do for your kids?” They did want the student to have a strong academic foundation and be able to critically and creatively solve problems. But we also had an agreement toward other outcomes. For instance, Los Naranjos students will become contributing members of the local and global society. Our students will have the knowledge of their community and world in order to understand and respect self and others. They will be inquisitive, self-reliant and motivated, and know how to set goals.

Sometimes in the push for accelerated academic achievement what you miss is the purpose. Is being good at math an end in itself? Is being a good writer, being literate, an end in itself? Or do you want to keep in mind an outcome greater than those discrete bits of knowledge. In most schools, having kids that are contributing members of society, having kids respect themselves and other people, having kids being accountable for their decisions, kind of happen through osmosis.

Most schools still operate on the factory model, to produce workers for an industrialized society. If you don’t have larger goals in your school--learning as a value in itself--if kids don’t believe in them, then you’ve got a problem, because the reality is that many children growing up in Irvine are not going to reach the level of affluence of their parents.

If that’s the implicit goal of your school, simply greater monetary affluence, then many children are going to fail. If your goal is to get this strong academic foundation and the only other goal beyond that is to, in fact, create financial wealth and prosperity for yourself, then you’ve really subverted a lot of kids. You’ve set them up to think something was going to happen that may not. Then you have all kinds of behavioral problems, dissatisfaction, weird sociopathic stuff that starts happening, because kids feel like, “Hey, I’ve been sold out. I’m not going to be the top doctor or lawyer, so if I can’t make it then what’s the point?” The goal should be to raise responsible and decent people, the kind of folks we want to live next door.

It’s becomes crucial to redefine what “making it” is. That’s what we’re about. Making it is becoming a good person, it’s figuring out a way to contribute to other people, it’s having communication skills so that if you don’t like what’s going on around you, you can write well enough and speak well enough to change it.

What parents hear all the time from educators is that “I treat all the kids equally.” Well, are they all the same, do you have these robots that will all respond to the same thing? The idea is equity, and the idea is, “Are you meeting my child’s needs with the same energy you’re meeting every other child’s needs?”

Our teachers believe that all of our kids should have the same meaningful outcomes, but kids are going to reach those outcomes differently. It’s our job and also our challenge.

The national average for public schools is $5,629 per student; California’s is $4,660 per student. If you were to take the 10 largest industrial states, we rank at the bottom of all of them. What we, as teachers, have done in California is continue to cover, and we cover more and more and more. We do all these little private fund-raisers. My concern is that as long as a parent can take care of part of the problem at their local school, to cover the lack of proper funding, so that their own child doesn’t suffer, we can squeak by--as long as teachers keep working longer and longer hours--because we don’t want children to suffer. But we can’t for long postpone the children’s feeling the bite of inadequate funding.