Reading, Religion and Reelection

It’s 3 in the morning and I’m still wide awake. I’ve counted sheep, closed my eyes and pretended to sleep, twiddled my thumbs. . . . An insomniac I’m not; a concerned citizen and worried parent I am.

I used to believe that “with liberty and justice for all” were the words most Americans lived by. Then I grew up and learned that Americans can be just as brutally exploitative as even the most vilified foreign leader.

I became a realist in a culturally and racially insensitive America where Jesus is white and blue-eyed, Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker falling from grace is not the exception and the Christian Coalition, with its 1.6 million members, has a white-supremacy, conformist bent that is offensive to minorities and freethinking individuals. But there are still things I have difficulty understanding, and these ambiguities keep me awake.

To start off, I think it’s great that Gov. Pete Wilson has embarked on a $971-million statewide campaign to improve reading and math scores by shrinking classes in grades K-3 to 20 students. No one can argue with the notion that our children need to be given a solid foundation when they are taking that first educational step. But everyone seems to forget that on the high school level, class sizes in some districts are at the 40-student mark in critical subject areas like math and English. It seems as if Wilson’s plan writes off those already in the system, perhaps because it’s too difficult to come up with realistic solutions to a myriad of devastating educational problems.

Even on the national level, education has become such a political animal that I’m certain the dumbing down of our children will continue at record pace.

Bob Dole let it be known during his nomination acceptance speech in San Diego that he has a hang-up with teachers’ unions--but not the teachers, of course.

And President Clinton’s newest $2.45-billion idea called America Reads promotes literacy, something I thought the federal government and public school system had been promoting all along. I can only assume that with a national price tag for public education close to the $250-billion mark, another $2.45 billion won’t hurt.

Maybe it’s a case of Clinton pretending that the problems with public education are the result of insufficient money spent, not with how those dollars are used. Then again, I’ve always wondered what Clinton really thinks of public education when it certainly wasn’t a viable choice for his daughter.

Then there’s the issue of mixing religion and education. In the Antelope Valley, the newest educational endeavor seems to be about strengthening the notion of abstinence, as opposed to improving Johnny’s reading and math abilities.

Antelope Valley Union High School District trustee Sue Stokka has proposed a voluntary alternative course that would teach the “special and extraordinary nature of the gift of chastity one can bring to the marriage bed.” But is that where a school board should devote its time and resources when a more pressing problem is that the district’s students can’t read?

A few months back, the district’s superintendent of schools acknowledged that a remedial reading program was being implemented because a large percentage of ninth- and tenth-grade students weren’t reading at grade level. And then we learned that districtwide average scores on the verbal section of the Scholastic Assessment Test for 1996 rose only one point to 482, while math scores remained at 481. For many colleges, SAT scores are a major factor in admissions, and AVUHSD scores continue to fall below statewide averages of 495 verbal and 511 math. It’s mind-boggling that a trustee is concerned with abstinence, something parents should teach at home, when kids can’t read.

But these types of issues are nothing new for Antelope Valley. It’s that “morals thing” again, where the basics are nice but, oh well, let’s slip in a little “values” education for the road.

Last year, seven conservative Christians vying for seats on four Antelope Valley school boards decided that the Republicans’ 1994 “contract with America” was a nifty idea worthy of duplicating locally. The nine-point “contract with Antelope Valley families” read like an attack on the rights and liberties of any resident who is not conservative and does not support the contention that a “moment of silence” before the start of school will cure society’s most profound ills. Some viewed it as an assault on homosexuals, minorities and those who believe in individual freedoms. One point even discouraged the teaching of race- or gender-based “revisionist” American and world history. It was as if including the accomplishments and contributions of blacks, Latinos, Native Americans and Asians in what has been a sterile, pro-European version of history is inappropriate under a Christian Coalition school board regime.

So I stay awake wondering how to separate politics and religion from basic education. Maybe I have to accept that education is a political hot potato that Clinton, Dole, Wilson and local leaders will conveniently toss around. And maybe I should accept that education and religion are becoming inseparable as the line between church and state blurs. Or was that potatoe? What the heck--I know how to spell “abstinence,” and maybe that’s what counts.