California Schools Update - The Economist

The Economist has a look at the state of eduction in California:

In Belmont, a huge high school with 5,500 pupils, security guards at the door, gangs in the classrooms and a 40% graduation rate, it is hard to imagine how children could ever learn anything in such a forbidding place. Yet even the better schools seem overrun. Placencia Elementary School, for instance, is full of smiling pupils, but like many other schools it does not have proper terms; instead, it follows a �year-round� schedule, with the students being rotated through the classrooms (three groups in, one out). But at least the pupils are being taught close to home. Every day, 6,000 children from the Belmont area are bused out to other districts. �Can it be good,� Mr Alonzo asks, �for a five-year-old to be woken up at 6am to travel two hours for a half-day of education?�

District F demonstrates what one leading Democrat calls the �these-are-not-our-children� attitude of white voters. With their own children now either educated privately or safe in smaller suburban districts, they have not stumped up the cash to build the schools needed to educate the new browner-skinned arrivals. As Roy Romer, the head of the LAUSD, points out, the same community found the money to build the sparkling Disney Concert Hall and the Staples conference centre.

Posted by James Zellmer at April 29, 2004 8:35 PM
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