California is not only standing firm on the state standardized exam, but beginning to crack the whip on local elementary schools:
Antelope Valley High School and Wilsona Elementary School are among the first six schools in California to face more serious sanctions because their standardized test scores failed to improve consistently. The two schools each will be visited by a state Department of Education team this month to help state officials decide among four possible sanctions to be imposed, the most draconian of which is closure...State law requires the state schools superintendent to do at least one of the following:
Require that the school district ensure that 100 percent of the teachers at the school are highly qualified.
Require the school to contract with an outside organization to provide supplemental instruction to high-priority pupils and assign to the school a management team, trustee, or SAIT team with demonstrated success at other state-monitored schools.
Allow parents to apply to the state Board of Education to establish a charter school.
Close the school.
It sounds like everyone involved is still negotiating to avoid sanctions, however.
The Antelope Valley, by the way, was the California suburban wasteland profiled by William Finnegan in his bleak 1998 book, Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country. One book reviewer summarizes the unfriendly educational landscape of the Antelope Valley as seen by Finnegan:
The final section of the book describes the Antelope Valley in Southern California, which underwent a sudden transformation from desert to modern suburbia in the 1980s. By far the largest employer in the area was the Lockheed plant in Palmdale. At that time, a skilled aerospace worker (even without a college degree) could make $60,000 to $80,000 a year.Then in the 1990s the Southern California economy entered a deep recession because of cutbacks in the aerospace and defense industries. Los Angeles County alone lost more than half a million jobs and USA Today called Palmdale "the foreclosure capital of California." As property values plunged, more blacks and Latinos could afford to buy or rent a house in the valley, and there was a lot of racial friction between the old and newer residents.
Finnegan described the area: "Navigating the teen world of the Antelope Valley felt, at times, like wading through the sucking bogs of my own generation's crash site. Everyone close to my age seemed to have been divorced twice, had their mortgage foreclosed, maxed out their credit cards, lost custody of their kids, or been addicted to drugs or alcohol or gambling or sex or born-again religion."
Here he finds youth involved in neo-Nazi skinhead gangs..
Each area Finnegan visited is very different from the other, but alike in many ways--wracked by structural unemployment and undereducation in public schools...
The primary theme of Finnegan's book was the downward mobility faced by today's teenagers, and the apathetic (except about race) and immature AV teenagers he interviewed were headed pretty quickly towards the bottom rungs. Very few of those that he interviewed cared the least bit about education; those who did were often forced to to walk a gauntlet of gangs and racist thugs in order to stay alive and unharassed at school. Granted, I was sheltered in my rural SC public school, but I don't remember emergency drills such as the “Active Shooter Response Training Scenarios,” mandatory anti-drug classes, and trained gang investigators at my school.
Sounds like things have gotten more frightening since Frank Zappa was a student there. One wonders what an honest solution would be.
Posted by kswygert at January 8, 2006 07:01 PM