Kunal Patel: California needs to address gap in education opportunity

When I was a first-year, I covered the Occupy protests that shut down Wilshire Boulevard.

One of the prevailing themes of those protests was the disparity in the opportunities accessible to different socio-economic classes.

I’m reminded of the heated rhetoric of the Occupy protests by information that’s been compiled by the nonpartisan organization Children Now, which shows a correlation between public education and mean family income in California counties.

Essentially, the study shows that wealthy counties have great public schools while poorer counties have worse public schools. And overall, California students are falling through the cracks more so than those in other states.

With increasingly rigorous admissions policies for public higher education in California, it is becoming increasingly difficult for students in lower-income areas to remain competitive for the UC system. In order for California to meet the needs of its students, it needs to adopt policies that target students from low-income families.

California should systematically change its education policy to a bottom-up policy that focuses the state’s education resources on the lowest-performing schools. Currently, the education policies favor high-performing public schools at the expense of low-performing public schools.

By fundamentally changing that framework, the state can ensure that everyone has access to higher education and equal opportunity to succeed.

Currently the California’s Public Schools Accountability Act is largely responsible for the education philosophy that is creating such a large discrepancy among schools in different socioeconomic regions.

 

The PSAA started off with great intentions: rewards for high-preforming schools, programs to help low-performing schools and implementation of an Academic Performance Index to rank schools.

The Academic Performance Index is a tool used to aggregate standardized test scores of schools and rank them from best to worst. Schools that perform well can apply for additional funding through special programs, while schools that perform poorly are under pressure to improve performance or they risk closure.

But the law eventually devolved into a way to strip funding from poor-performing schools and reward high-performing schools. According to an ABC News report in 2011, Oakland schools that had low Academic Performance Index scores were targets for shutdown, leading to overcrowding at other local schools. This eventually results in a diminished education quality for all schools in the area.

 

A large disparity in the quality of public education, ranging from excellent to poor, is unacceptable.

Some of the most striking data compiled by Children Now compares Marin County, which has a mean family income of $116,781, to Imperial County, which has a mean family income of $45,044. Approximately 66 percent of third-graders read at grade level in the affluent Marin County, while only 36 percent of third-graders read at grade level in Imperial County. State-wide, 46 percent of California third-graders read at a third-grade reading level.

According to a 2011 study conducted by a professor at Hunter College, students who cannot read at a third-grade level are four times less likely to graduate high school by the age of 19 than those who can read at a third-grade level. Because third-grade reading level is an early indicator of success in high school, and because success in high school largely determines a student’s readiness for college, these red flags need to be addressed.

By continuing to allow children to fall through the cracks, California perpetuates a cycle of poverty by impeding access to higher education for students in low-income areas.

While recent efforts, such as Proposition 30, have been made to increase funding for California public schools, most of the measures have been stopgaps. Efforts like Proposition 30, which temporarily raised the sales tax to provide additional funding for education, are only makeshift solutions, and throwing money at a problem is never a permanent solution.

If California truly wants to improve its public school system, California needs to rethink its education philosophy and improve the PSAA.

As I approach graduation this academic year, public education issues brought up during the Occupy movement in 2011 have gone largely unanswered.

The question that California needs to answer is whether we want an excellent public education for a few counties or a good education for the entire state.