Putting Schools in a Very Bad Fix

As the outgoing president of the Irvine Unified School District Board of Education, I offer my thoughts on Proposition 8 (the Permanent Class Size Reduction and Educational Accountability Act of 1998). It is an affront to the basic principles of democracy and would hurt the education of California’s children.

Today, a parent or voter who is upset with the curriculum can go to the principal and, if that fails, to the school board. In either case, a parent can take action at the ballot box.

Under Proposition 8, there would be no governing body in charge of any school district’s overall curriculum. Curriculum would be determined for each school by its local school-site council. Two-thirds of each council would be elected by the parents, and one-third would be teachers. The council would be answerable only to the parents of the local school. There would be no entity to ensure that the curriculum of any individual school would be coordinated with any other school in the district. Proposition 8 therefore provides the very real possibility that curriculum will not be consistent from elementary school to middle school or middle school to high school.

Picture a school district with four elementary schools teaching one methodology to read and three others teaching another. Picture parents decreeing that only one method of teaching English is permitted in “their” middle school. Picture middle schools offering languages that high schools subsequently determine not to teach. Picture 8,000 individual battles over how to teach health/sex education.

Under Proposition 8, there would be no legislative manner in which a voter can participate in changing curriculum. The local school-site council would be responsible only to the parents of the local school. The school board, which voters elect, would have no legislative power over the council.

Under Proposition 8, the 75% of California voters who do not have children in school would be frozen out of curriculum decisions. These voters would not be eligible to participate in local council elections. Interestingly, individuals ineligible to vote in California elections would be eligible to vote in school-site council elections. This is because the only eligibility criteria for voting would be being a parent. As a result, the following groups that are not eligible to vote in California elections would be eligible to elect school-site councils: convicted felons, non-California residents, illegal and legal immigrants and unregistered voters. It is a simple affront to democracy to place these groups of individuals in a more influential position than registered voters.

While felons and illegal immigrants would be eligible for election to school-site councils, in Irvine, only two of the current five school board members are eligible to be members of any school-site council under Proposition 8. Precious dollars would be taken out of the classroom to pay teachers that are not teaching and to pay for the additional staff time necessary to administer effectively 8,000 new mini-school districts.

Proposition 8 would give each principal the right to remove teachers from their schools and give the school district the responsibility of reassigning personnel that have been removed from each school. However, even if there is no school that would accept the removed teacher, the school district would not have the right to fire a tenured teacher. What would happen? School districts would be paying thousand of school teachers not to teach.

There is no extra money in any California school district to pay teachers for not teaching. What would each school district do to deal with this problem? They would be forced to increase class size. If we remove teachers without replacing them, class size will increase. How can this be good for California children?

The average elementary school has an administrative staff of a principal and a part-time or full-time clerk. With such limited personnel, these schools are simply not equipped to operate as independent entities.

If the task of curriculum development and approval is assigned to the individual school, we would expect and demand that the job be performed on a professional basis. This means many, many meetings, research and significant clerical resources. Proposition 8 provides no funds for these activities. Proposition 8 also would require that each school-site counsel attend training sessions provided by the district. This also would obviously cost a great deal of money. Proposition 8 provides no funds for these activities.

Finally, each governing counsel would have to be elected in a process that is more formal than the selection of a PTA counsel. Each council also would be subject to the Brown Act. (It certainly would be unseemly for a curriculum to be developed behind closed doors.)

Proposition 8 would not help educate one kid any better than he or she is educated today. But it would cost a small fortune, disenfranchise many California voters and increase class size in every California school.