Education is the great equalizer, yet its inequitable distribution of money and resources is horrific. The way schools are funded in California perpetuates a racial and poverty divide.
As a beginning teacher at Santa Clara County’s Juvenile Hall, I was taken aback by the fact that 70 percent of incarcerated youth read at three or more years below grade level. Most of my students could not read a typical restaurant menu, let alone a novel.
It did not take an Einstein brain to decipher the issue and conclude that juvenile crime can be ameliorated if we can address the gap in reading. School success and failure are inextricably related to life’s pathways.
Experts agree that reading on grade level by end of third grade and math readiness by kindergarten are predictors of school success. The school to prison pipeline is real, too often forged by suspensions and expulsions due to lack of school success.
Forty-five years after I stepped into juvenile hall’s locked classrooms, we continue to struggle with the insanity of an ever-increasing state education budget failing a huge percentage of our children, especially those that are poor and of color.
The achievement gap in San Jose, based on state tests in 2018 (Smarter Balanced data at cde.org), shows a consistently disturbing gap between white and Asian and their Hispanic and African American cohort. This gap, perhaps gulf, exceeds 40 percentage points in math and reading.
The evidence of the achievement gap has been discussed in research journals for the last 50 years. In a new published article “The Achievement Gap Fails To Close” (Eric Hanushek et.al. Summer 2019) the authors assert that the “achievement gap between the haves and have-nots in the U.S. remains as large as it was in 1966.”
When I first was campaigning for a seat on the Santa Clara County Board of Education I made the issue of the achievement gap a prime topic of my community coffees and fundraisers. I knew that if we reduce the achievement gap juvenile crime would decrease and high school graduation rates increase.
Solutions are evident: We must pay teachers significantly more to attract college graduates who go into law, engineering, and medicine into the teaching profession while retaining the best. We must use the state’s wealth to fund education at the highest of state levels, (CA is about 41st out of 50 states in per pupil finding) to hire more counselors, reading specialists, and lower class size.
When I was elected in 2008 I was immersed into the political minefield of charter schools, publicly funded alternatives to the traditional public school system. In 2009 this paper wrote an editorial about a tsunami of charter schools coming to Santa Clara County. My colleague, Trustee Anna Song, and I co-authored a response to it: “Charter Schools Might Create Second Class Neighborhood Schools” published on April 23, 2009.
In the last decade we have learned that charters were never the sole answer to the bold solutions we need to address the achievement gaps. At best they are a short-term fix to education by zip code, providing parents with their desired publicly funded school choice.
A two-year dosage of high quality early learning programs is an essential variable in the achievement gap solution set. The research indicates that the return on investment is enormous, at least $8 for each $1 invested.
Funding pubic education with adequacy, attracting the top quartile of college graduates to teaching, and investing in high quality early learning will significantly reduce the racial achievement gap and create a brighter future for all of us. With a clarion voice, Gov. Gavin Newsom must lead the way.
Joseph Di Salvo represents Area 4 on the Santa Clara County Office of Education Board of Education.
