Protecting Schools, or Stifling Them?

Once, change came one house at a time, and then tract by tract. Slowly, then suddenly, the big bad city made its way up Interstate 14 to the desert. Even so, the Antelope Valley still prides itself as a place for pioneers, from the early miners to the test pilots to the young suburbanites who’ve now come to stake their claim.

That flinty spirit, Bobby Loughridge says, abounded in the birth of Highland High, a school that began in trailers in 1988 and now boasts a handsome campus in west Lancaster. The teachers “thought they could make a difference,” says Loughridge. The staff, the students and parents, he says, “sure built a good school.”

He’s biased. Loughridge was Highland’s founding principal before retiring in 1992. Still, Highland’s reputation was such that many people were puzzled when, early this year, the school board, by a 3-2 vote, rejected Highland’s bid to become a charter school. After all, the charter concept provides parents, teachers and staff with greater authority in campus affairs. “It’s the epitome of local control,” Loughridge says.

And pioneers love that, don’t they?

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Looking back, Highland’s rejection was the first skirmish in an education battle that has now attracted the interest of national groups of both conservative and liberal persuasions. Under the leadership of board President Billy Pricer, the Antelope Valley Union High School District is in the vanguard of a movement that bills itself as “back to basics” but is criticized as a retrograde cause of the “religious right.”

The district is most famous for its flat-out refusal to administer the California Learning Assessment System, claiming that the test constitutes an invasion of privacy. Other districts reacted to the CLAS controversy by offering parents the choice of opting out of the exam. By its actions, the Antelope Valley board effectively denied parents the choice of opting in. The board also provoked a lawsuit from the state Department of Education.

To better understand the Antelope Valley school board, consider its rejection in March of a proposed “mission statement” conceived by administrators and teachers. To quote the headline from the Antelope Valley Press: “District Scraps ‘Socialist Bent.’ ”

The board rejected, for example, a phrase suggesting that graduates should be able to succeed in “a changing global society.” (The word global , you see, is pinko code.) Likewise, the board rejected the notion that graduates “know how to function in a culturally and ethnically diverse society” and “demonstrate higher-level thinking skills.” And God forbid that the schools “provide a forum for discussion regarding moral and ethical questions.”

Now, it would be a cheap shot to conclude that the board wants its schools to produce simpletons who keep to their own kind and avoid moral and ethical questions. But still. . .

“I’ve been accused of not wanting children to think,” says Pricer. “Well, I’ve got a news flash. Children are born thinking. I just don’t want the state to dictate how to think or what to think.”

Pricer, a former sheriff’s deputy who now runs a youth counseling agency, is a member and a former pastor at Antelope Valley Springs of Life Ministries, best known for its creation of “The Gay Agenda,” a videotape widely circulated in efforts to prevent legal protections of homosexuality. He is unfazed by critics who portray him as a soldier of the religious right who desires to impose its own intolerant, authoritarian ideas. “I just smile,” he says, “and figure I’m winning the debate.”

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Perhaps. It was reassuring, however, to find that stimulating curricula still are allowed in the Antelope Valley. Glen Horst, an English teacher who worked hard in favor of Highland High’s charter bid, is having his students read “Huckleberry Finn,” for example. It’s hard to read about Huck without encountering racial diversity and moral dilemmas.

Pricer and Horst have radically different perceptions of the community’s attitude, both on the CLAS issue and the charter proposal.

Pricer says the Highland charter initiative was poorly prepared, and that 97% of the reaction to the board’s CLAS stand has been positive. Horst, meanwhile, says many parents don’t like how the board’s stance on both issues usurped their opportunity to have a greater voice.

Bobby Loughridge takes the long view. He remembers how, as a young Antelope Valley teacher in the ‘60s, he employed widely used lessons conceived by Science Research Associates. The so-called SRA reading labs, not unlike CLAS, became a hot controversy--”a Commie trick,” critics said.

These days, those lessons have been co-opted by capitalists. You know those ads for “Hooked on Phonics”? That’s where the SRA reading lab is today.