California’s scholastic caliber lags nationally

The California Educational Opportunity Report of 2007, published last week by two University of California organizations, shows that the state lags behind the rest of the nation in school quality. The report also indicates that black and Latino students have less access to quality education.

The annual study focused on the experience of Blacks and Latinos in the public education system after Jack O’Connell, the California Superintendent of Public Instruction, pointed out a “racial achievement gap” last August.

At the time, commentators went to task analyzing the cultural reasons to which they attributed this difference in graduation rates and other measures of achievement.

This discussion of cultural attitudes toward achievement was too narrow, said John Rogers, co-director of UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access (IDEA).

Rogers argued that before focusing on cultural issues, the state should take a close look at how its educational system affects student achievement.

“We should put our own house in order before we start looking closely at cultural issues,” he said.

So when IDEA, in partnership with the UC All-Campus Consortium on Research for Diversity, or UC ACCORD, produced the annual Educational Opportunity Report, the two organizations looked further into the conditions and resources in the California public school system that could lead to that achievement gap.

The report points out five key findings which show that the current focus on test scores has not led California to its achievement goals, said Jeannie Oakes, co-director of IDEA and director of UC ACCORD.

According to the report, there are two main “opportunity gaps” that account for students’ low performance.

First, there is an opportunity gap between California students and those of most other states. California ranks 48th among the states in percentage of high school graduates who register at a four-year college the year after graduation.

Also according to the study, California’s white middle class students perform much lower than similar students from other states.

California schools are also larger and more crowded than in almost any other state, and students lack sufficient access to counselors, said Rogers.

These facts are especially important because they show that there is a system-wide problem, which cannot be explained by cultural differences. The second opportunity gap is a “racial gap,” meaning that though there are systemic problems within the California public school system, those problems are much more pronounced in schools attended by black or Latino students than in schools predominantly white or Asian.

“Racial gaps occur in concert with racial isolation,” said Oakes. “Half of all African American students are in 107 of the more than 1000 California schools.”

The study points out that most black and Latino students attend schools that are not integrated with whites and Asians and that “a sizeable portion of these students attend intensely segregated minority schools.”

There are “inadequate and unequal” learning opportunities in these different communities, according to the report.

63 percent of high schools with very high minority enrollment are overcrowded, considerably more than the 16 percent of schools where black and Latino students make up less than half of the student body. Underrepresented students, the report read, also have less access to counselors, qualified teachers and high-quality college preparatory courses.

Cinthia Flores, a third-year political science and Latin American studies student said she believes that there are institutional barriers that stand in the way of lower-income students of every color.

Specifically in the Chicana and Chicano communities, she said, there is a lack of appropriate resources, such as outreach to parents and translators.

“The schools don’t provide the resources for our parents to be engaged in our education,” Flores, who is the access coordinator for MEChA, a Latino student group.

She said schools need more teachers and counselors who are from the communities they serve, but the university graduation rate for Latino students is very low.

“How can you have teachers of your own community, when you can’t even graduate high school?” she said.

As Oakes sees it, this is an investment problem.

“Opportunity problems are primarily a result of insufficient spending on education infrastructure,” she said.

The study concludes on a similar note.

“Truly closing the gaps that divide California’s students will require directing new resources to those students who are most deprived of fundamental learning conclusions,” the study read.