Disturbing signs in California’s schools

By Dan Walters

After an exhaustive study of California’s troubled public school system was unveiled last year, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state legislators declared that 2008 would be the “year of education” in which deficiencies would be frontally addressed.

Never mind. The governor and lawmakers are wrangling, as usual, over school finances because the state faces, as usual, a budget deficit. And that, as usual, masks what should be the real debate over how well 6 million kids are being schooled.

The fundamental goal of public education, one assumes, is to educate kids well enough to earn high school diplomas that signify readiness to enter the work force, secure additional vocational training and/or pursue a college-level education.

For many years, the state Department of Education, relying on unverified reports from individual school districts, maintained the fiction that close to 90 percent of high schoolers were earning diplomas, even though outside researchers concluded that nearly a third of those who entered the ninth grade never made it through — not even counting those who didn’t get to the ninth grade.

No justification

Eventually, it became impossible for the education bureaucracy to justify that fiction. Last year, the department officially calculated that just 67 percent of the state’s high schoolers won diplomas in 2006, down sharply from 71 percent the previous year.

Why the drop, which amounted to about 21,000 fewer graduates? Evidently, it was the effect of the often-delayed high school exit exam — a test, by the way, that measures competence scarcely at junior high school levels and whose official pass rate of 90 percent doesn’t count kids who failed the test before their senior years and then dropped out. This year’s data release (for 2007) has been delayed, leading critics to complain that education officials are trying to bury the results.

A new study by the Public Policy Institute of California, meanwhile, concludes that it would be relatively easy for educators to spot kids in danger of failing the exit exam long before their high school years and intervene by putting additional resources into their schooling.

Dropout rates are extraordinarily high for African American and Latino youngsters, especially those in big urban school districts such as Los Angeles Unified, where fewer than half of ninth-graders earn diplomas. And new data show that California is falling behind other states when post-high school data are examined.

A study by the Chicago-based Council for Adult and Experiential Learning (CAEL), based on census data, found that 18.6 percent of Californians ages 25-64 lack high school diplomas, second only to the 19.4 percent in Texas. North Dakota had the nation’s highest rate of high school graduation, with just 5.7 percent of adults lacking diplomas. But even among Californians who do obtain high school diplomas, further education is scant. The state has the nation’s highest percentage of 25- to 64-year-olds with only high school diplomas at 22.7 percent, the CAEL study found.

On Tuesday, the California Charter Schools Association released comparisons of academic performance in traditional public and charter schools in Los Angeles, showing the latter do better and bolstering the organization’s complaints that Los Angeles Unified officials are arbitrarily thwarting efforts to organize new charter schools. This is the same Los Angeles Unified in which more than half of ninth-graders never earn diplomas.

These are just a few of the disturbing points that politicians should be discussing. Instead, they’re regurgitating the same dreary arguments over money, as if that’s the only factor affecting how well California’s kids are learning what they and we need them to learn.

Scripps Howard