By Nancy M. Rene, Education Team Co-chair
As part of my responsibilities as co-chair of the Education Team, I decided to do a little research on the Los Angeles Unified School District. I looked at various websites and thought about conversations I’d had with teachers and parents on my team.
If you look at LAUSD’s website you’ll find a rosy picture, healthy lunches being served and Academic Decathlon winners from a school in the valley. But talk to parents and read recent headlines you’ll come away with a different story.
The COVID pandemic and the necessity for remote learning has crippled the educational progress of our children. It forced them to try to learn without a teacher, trying to use a computer screen to help them concepts and reinforce ideas. Big surprise…that didn’t work. Now as students have returned to the classroom, parents are finding their children have fallen way behind, forgetting material they once knew and anxious about even setting foot in the classroom.
We see that there is a huge teacher shortage and find that LAUSD has hired 1700 teachers without credentials to fill classroom slots, slots that often occur in our South Los Angeles schools.
Don’t be mistaken. These issues didn’t begin with the pandemic, it only exacerbated them.
For years California schools have been underfunded. I found a good article in PACE, Policy Analysis for California Education. The article asks, “Why is education funding so low in California, despite its wealth and comparatively high tax revenues?”
It goes on to identify 12 problems in school funding. The first is this:
State Spending on Education Has Grown at a Slower Rate Than Spending on Other Program Areas
“Over the past four decades, California K–12 education spending has increased by 1.5 times and higher education spending has increased by 1.7 times. In comparison, spending on police and corrections has nearly tripled and spending on health and hospitals and public welfare has more than quadruple.”
Let’s stop right there, spending of police and prisons has tripled and hospitals and public welfare have grown by 400% in the last four decades.
That’s backwards. No wonder we’re in trouble. I believe that the PACE research left out a very important point. As schools lost funding, parents with means sent their children to private schools. Public schools and their funding issues were no longer on anyone’s radar. You may have heard of a new magnet school or a special school for the arts or aerospace, but that’s just robbing Peter to pay Paul. Charter schools are public schools and are funded from the same inadequate source. Unless we push our legislators to adequately fund schools we will continue to spend money on programs that do not help our children to get the education they need for a fulfilling, satisfying life.
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