A couple of years ago, just a few miles to the southeast of Los Angeles International Airport, in the city of Lawndale, Leuzinger High School was making plans to cope with an influx of 200 new students. What it received was about 400 more students than it expected.
That overflow caused enormous problems. To accommodate the additional students, the school in the Centinela Valley Union High School District would need 13 new classrooms and teachers, and an additional $2.25 million that wasn’t in the budget. To further complicate matters, at least a third of the new students were what’s known as “English learners,” or EL, meaning they weren’t proficient in English for their grade level. EL students are more expensive to teach than students with fluency in English; they require faculty who are trained to teach English as a second language, special textbooks and other course materials, and translators to help the school communicate with their families.
“It’s like a big, growing ball held together with just a thin string,” says Frank Divinagracia ’96, M.Ed. ’97, a math teacher at Leuzinger. “You keep adding new people and it puts more pressure on that string. We’re all working longer and harder hours. It wears teachers thin.”
If population and demographic trends continue as anticipated, that ball is going to grow bigger and that string is going to cut tighter. The United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs projects that the population of the United States, fueled by the combination of births and immigration, will over the next half-century grow at a rate faster than that of China and nearly as fast as India’s. And California leads the nation with a population that is projected to grow at a faster clip than the rest of the country, doubling within the next 50 years, according to the California Department of Social Services.
Most of that gain will come from immigration. This year, as well as in the years to come, more than a million people will legally move to the United States, government statistics indicate — and nobody has any real idea of how many undocumented immigrants also will enter the country. If the trends of the past 20 years stay the same, the largest percentage will settle in California. And into the foreseeable future, almost all of the baby-making in the United States that accounts for birthrate figures above the zero-population-growth level will take place within those immigrant communities, according to U.N. population studies and state projections.
Heavily multicultural school districts like those in Los Angeles County are feeling the impact. In the sprawling, 746,800-student Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), for example, at least 92 different native languages are spoken. There are more than half-a-million students who are more fluent in Spanish than in English, nearly 12,000 who speak primarily Armenian and another 47,000 or so who speak Korean, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Mandarin, Tagalog, Japanese, Arabic, Russian, Persian, Thai or Urdu. There were even six students in the 2000 school year whose native tongue was Khmu, an unwritten language from northern Laos.
Historically, immigration and the idea of the melting pot have been responsible for the success of this country. It has been the driving force behind our economic, scientific and technological innovation, arts and culture, and even our democratic institutions. But historically, it also has presented problems — racism, discrimination, displacement of existing communities, undercutting wages and a lot of just plain miscommunication — and it costs money.
Jeannie Oakes Ph.D. ’80, UCLA’s Presidential Professor of Education in the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, suggests that today’s multicultural population growth and its impact on the schools is analogous to what was experienced in the 1950s, when the baby boomers started flooding into California schools.
“People were dazzled by the challenge, but the state swung into gear, built schools fast, believed education was important, had confidence in the new generation, trained new teachers and by the 1960s had all sorts of programs in place,” she says. “We pulled out all the stops and created something wonderful that led to a pretty well-educated generation.”
She doesn’t see it as being so different today.
“The issues and challenges [raised by the diverse nature of the state’s population growth] are not exactly the same as we had before,” Oakes says. “But we can turn it around and say that in California, more than anywhere else in the U.S., we have the potential for creating a truly bilingual, globally oriented, educated population. That is one of the things this country and the world needs most.”
Rosa Furumoto Ed.D. ’01, a graduate of UCLA’s Educational Leadership Program and a professor of Chicano studies at California State University, Northridge, would agree.
“Schools just reflect society,” she says. Classroom diversity can be a tremendous educational opportunity for schools with appropriate resources. Or it can be the source of terrible headaches for schools that don’t have those resources.
In Santa Monica, where cool ocean breezes rustle the palm trees and wash over expensive real estate, the school district in 2001–’02 spent $8,035 per student per year, according to the California Department of Education. That’s nearly 15.5 percent above the state average for similarly sized districts. Thirty-two miles to the east, in the smoggy, industrial, working-class, largely Hispanic neighborhood of Pico Rivera, the same-sized El Rancho Unified School District (with about two-and-a-half times as many EL students as Santa Monica) spent $6,528 per student, a little more than 6 percent below the state average. Between the two districts, there’s a disparity of nearly 22 percent in the amount they spend on each student annually.
Both school districts also have to cope with a chronic shortage of fully credentialed teachers. But El Rancho loses out there, too; nearly 30 percent of its teachers do not have full credentials, compared with a little less than 15 percent in the Santa Monica district.
Unfortunately, the ability of schools to take advantage of their increasing diversity falls almost exclusively along economic lines. Schools in higher-income areas have a lot of advantages over schools in less-affluent communities. In most of the country, public schools are at least half-funded by local property taxes. More expensive houses and upscale businesses mean more money for schools, better resources and a greater ability to attract highly qualified teachers.
There are some exceptions. “We have made tremendous strides in attracting credentialed teachers to lower-income districts by thinking outside of the box,” says Sylvia Rousseau, superintendent of LAUSD’s Local District I, which works closely with the faculty of UCLA’s Center X in the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies to provide highly qualified teachers to what are traditionally underserved schools.
Partnerships with local colleges and universities, such as that between Rousseau’s District I and UCLA, are one way that some school districts have attempted to overcome their limitations. Rousseau, who taught as an adjunct in the UCLA education school, also has set up a credentialing center in partnership with Cal State Dominguez Hills.
Still, many school districts are not within proximity to local colleges or universities and don’t have the advantage of such a connection. The pressure keeps growing to provide equal educational opportunities for all students and standardized testing by which schools can be held accountable for the performance of their students. But the attempts to equalize the educational experience for all students and to standardize testing are often among the roadblocks that prevent schools from making good use of their diversity.
Professor Furumoto cites the Open Court reading program, a highly scripted program with heavy emphasis on phonics and recitation exercises, as an example of how curricula sometimes are freighted with good intentions that lead to bad results. The program has been adapted by LAUSD and many other school districts around the country for use in elementary classrooms.
“The argument in favor of Open Court is that it treats all students identically. It doesn’t permit any cultural bias or discrimination to rear its head,” Furumoto says. “The problem is that it deters academic freedom and flexibility. It prevents teachers from tailoring their lessons to the needs of their particular pupils. For instance, in a classroom that is largely composed of immigrants and the children of immigrants, it makes sense to structure lessons to take advantage of that for studying cultures, society, history, geography, economy, etc. It can also help to bring the family and community into the classroom. But Open Court doesn’t allow for that sort of thing.”
What programs like Open Court seem to do best is raise test scores. But many educators question whether or not it really means much in terms of education. Testing and accountability, says John Rogers, associate director of UCLA's Institute for Democracy, Education & Access, “need to be implemented in a way that leaves breathing space for creativity” to achieve positive outcomes.
That breathing space is hard to come by. If a school has consistently good test results, it’s given more freedom to teach how it wants. But directed curriculum such as Open Court narrowly targets the specific knowledge students need to pass the tests.
“It’s a hard cycle to break out of,” says Furumoto. “And it’s also a problem because the ability to adapt the curriculum to the needs of students is necessary to encourage thinking and learning in poor-performing schools.”
Naoya Imanishi ’98, M.Ed. ’01 teaches third grade at Loreto Street Elementary School in the Highland Park area of Los Angeles. Like most well-trained younger and still-enthusiastic teachers, he struggles to take a creative approach to his lessons. “The curriculum,” he says, “especially with younger kids, can make good use of a diverse classroom.” In January, for example, he used the Western New Year and the Asian Lunar New Year as an entry to teach about different cultures, incorporating into the lessons elements of math (the children learned about measurement while cooking a variety of unusual foods) and language development (they wrote stories about their experiences in the classroom).
But with prescribed time periods for getting through set lesson plans, teachers like Imanishi only have so much leeway. Expanding the curriculum in a way that opens classrooms to the outside world by bringing families and communities into the act is one way that almost everyone agrees will make good use of the increasing diversity in the schools without requiring more money.
“There should be community-oriented assignments,” says Rogers. “Not a library research project on early Californians, but something that combines the library and classroom with home and community work on, say, immigration to California.”
Creative approaches to education, however, require well-trained and highly motivated teachers, and that costs more money. “The tasks of teachers have been dumbed down by economics at the very time that teachers need to be more skilled than ever,” says Rogers.
Economics also gets in the way of involving parents and families in the schools. “We encourage parents to help out whenever possible,” says Imanishi. “But a lot of my students come from homes where there is only one parent. When the child gets back from school, that mother or father often is still out working and may not even get home until after the child is already asleep. I know that they want to support their children at home, but it is very hard for them to find the time.”
Thus, many of the schools that could most benefit from family and community involvement, that need it to help make up for shortfalls in fully credentialed teachers and poor facilities, can’t get it. The families are too busy simply trying to make a living. The communities have too many other, more urgent problems.
In America, people dislike the word “class” as it applies to the nation’s social strata. Unfortunately, class is at the heart of many education issues. The schools with the best-trained teachers, the best facilities, the greatest resources, parents with the time to get involved in the educational process, supportive communities and the ability to take advantage of the opportunities inherent in diverse student bodies are, with few exceptions, in higher-income neighborhoods where the schools don’t usually need as much help.
Education, says Walter Allen, a UCLA professor of sociology, is a basic commodity, and the mess that’s being made of its distribution is affecting all of society for the worse. Fixing the problem will require more than simple changes in curriculum. It will take political and social solutions.
“What we’ve got now is a terrible waste of resources and of potential,” says Allen. “We need a societal sense of education as generating long-term profits, not short term.”
Some people see those changes happening and, despite the difficulties, are optimistic about the future of education, even in cash-strapped California.
Oakes is one. “We’re so caught up in some traditions and beliefs, and with some very erroneous stereotypes about families that don’t care, that we feel hopeless,” she says.
“We need to reframe the problem to help us not feel hopeless, pull out the can-do ingenuity, say to ourselves that we created the greatest public-education system in the world and we can make it work.”
