Dollars for tamales: poor schools can’t get by on home cooking
For weeks, I haven’t been able to open my refrigerator without getting attacked by a bag of tamales. Our fridge is stuffed with bags of them. Two of the bags are ours. The rest were purchased by family and friends all over the Bay Area. The proceeds go to our daughter’s Spanish immersion elementary school in Oakland Unified.
Like schools all over California, her school faces a massive deficit – in this case over $200,000. After hearing the news, a group of mothers worked for days to prepare over a thousand tamales for sale. In the end, their efforts raised $1,000 – a drop in the bucket compared to the size of the deficit.
A few miles to the south, an affluent district in the middle of Silicon Valley also faced a deficit. There, in a few short weeks, parents raised over $2,000,000. According to the news reports, the dollars they raised saved over 100 teaching jobs and maintained 20:1 class sizes.
Here, in Oakland, the $1,000 and other donations raised over the past months might help keep the copier running for part of another year. What won’t be saved is far more critical – after-school programs and other supports for students who have fallen behind academically. Nor will the money prevent any additional cuts that will happen if the governor proposes deeper budget reductions.
We’re not as worried as some parents about the impact of these cuts on our daughter. We’re both educators and our kids have been in dual immersion since preschool. The cuts, like all the cuts in Oakland Unified, will hurt those students most in need of basic supports. Our school is mostly African American and Latino, and the vast majority of its students are low income. Without these supports, they are less likely to catch up with their more advantaged peers – the kind whose parents can raise $2,000,000 in a couple of weeks.
Two years ago, when I ran student services for San Diego Unified, I often saw the impact of this cruel equation close up. One year, after the governor released his May budget, I walked into a room of over fifty caseworkers serving pregnant and parenting teens throughout San Diego County to tell them that three quarters of them would likely lose their jobs. This wasn’t a cut to the education budget, but it might as well have been. It was the job of these caseworkers to keep young pregnant women and mothers in school; to help them manage the dual responsibilities of being both a student and a mother. The program was highly successful in keeping them on track to graduate from high school, training them on how to build their children’s social and emotional skills, and preventing future pregnancies.
When I left the room, I nearly threw up. What kind of state, I wondered, cuts these types of services? Who would deny that there is a legitimate government interest in underwriting the cost of this support – if not for humanitarian reasons then at least from a simple financial calculus? Healthy mothers who graduate from high school are less likely to need state assistance in the future. Children who received prenatal care and early socio-emotional supports are less likely to need government services in the future. These are the types of savings a state can bank on to prevent future budget crises.
But long-term thinking isn’t incentivized among the political class in Sacramento. In good times, they handed out tax cuts to one side of the political aisle, and unsustainable pensions and benefits to the other. In bad times, our leaders like to talk about making cuts with scalpels instead of axes. But when they cut, it doesn’t matter what instrument they use – their cuts strike the programs least likely to cause them political damage. I haven’t seen the voting percentages, but I imagine that pregnant teenagers and children in high-poverty schools are pretty low on the political totem pole. School districts in the poorest parts of our state – the very districts least able to afford it – are hammered with the same cuts as those in wealthier areas. Longtime programs designed to provide funding to support low-income students are made “flexible” so the funding can be used to shore up salaries, benefits, and pensions instead of providing summer school and additional education supports. Then, as the cuts are shredding the safety net, those who have the ability to pay more in taxes, whether they are corporations or individuals, are protected from paying more by their lobbyists and political friends.
Caught in the middle are the children in our poorest communities – the very children who happen to be the majority of our state’s student population. Their parents work just as hard. They care just as much. They just don’t have enough tamales to buy friends in high places.
Arun Ramanathan is executive director of The Education Trust—West, a statewide education advocacy organization. He has served as a district administrator, research director, teacher, paraprofessional, and VISTA volunteer in California, New England, and Appalachia. He has a doctorate in educational administration and policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. His wife is a teacher and reading specialist and they have a child in preschool and another in a Spanish immersion elementary school in Oakland Unified.
Very well stated, Arun. This has always been a huge issue in the education of children in poverty and is a contributor to the opportunity gap for students of color. It is greatly exacerbated in lean times such as now. I’d go as far as to stay that it’s structural racism/classism designed to maintain the gap that many of us are fighting to eliminate.
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Arun’s story about his daughter’s school in Oakland could be written by thousands of California’s parents about their neighborhood school. The parents from the more affluent school district to Oakland’s south are lucky enough to have the disposable wealth needed to aid their childrens’ school, which is desperately needed in thousands of schools in less affluent areas throughout California.
It is unfortunate that politicians of every ilk and political persuasion continue to ignore the fact that education is the purest form of economic development, with the highest potential return on investment that any government could ever possibly make. Our children are our future, and our society’s future.
Keith Griffith
I agree that these are programs that play big didvidends long range and should be maintained. The issue is that something has to give and (knowing that I sound like a broken record) when you are 40% of the budget you are going to get it. So, tell me the programs within education that you would like to see go instead. This is a sytemic problem that needs to be addressed through the political process by normalizing the tax structure to avoid these kinds of issues. There are many proposals out there that both sides of the aisle have problems with, mainly because they have an adverse effect on both sides. My general rule of thumb is that if both sides don’t like it, it is probably pretty fair. Graduated Flat Tax would go a long way towards alleviating this constantly recurring problem. Barring that, hunker down, prepare for the worst and …get used to it.
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“Healthy mothers who graduate from high school are less likely to need state assistance in the future. Children who received prenatal care and early socio-emotional supports are less likely to need government services in the future. These are the types of savings a state can bank on to prevent future budget crises.” I’m going to say: ‘No it’s not.
All of this points again, to the implied necessity of the ‘Nanny State’. First 5, Headstart and numerous other pre-school programs, because it ‘takes a village to raise a child’! Here in Los Angeles County, Sheriff Lee Baca advocates these programs, because we will save the cost of incarceration later. Meanwhile, the Taxpayer is on the hook for CALWORKS, WIC, TANF and numerous other programs. CALWORKS is the state paying for babysitting somebody else’s kid, out of my pocket, because they can’t afford it, or the Nanny State say’s they need it to obtain employment.
Keith’s comments on Education might work, if the demographics were changed. “It is unfortunate that politicians of every ilk and political persuasion continue to ignore the fact that education is the purest form of economic development, with the highest potential return on investment that any government could ever possibly make. Our children are our future, and our society’s future.”
The state of California is broke, because you have a huge population of people, taking more out than they are putting in. The ‘Achievement Gap’ has been a decades long problem and no matter how much money you throw at it, you still get results like a 50% dropout rate at the LAUSD and their huge deficit. Obviously, more money is not the answer.
Allow me to add, that I find ‘Spanish Immersion’ offensive. How about ‘American Immersion’? I am a French Canadian immigrant, who came here in 1964 as a young child, speaking only french. I grew up in Downtown Los Angeles, going to Logan Elementary, then Union Ave Elementary. Nobody had a ’second language’ class for us. We had to strive and learn our new language and also adopt it’s customs. We assimilated and need no hyphenation of our nationality. I am not ‘French Canadian American, but American, plain and simple.
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This is a great commentary.
I think that you’re not understanding how this kind of language immersion functions, Regis.
Two-way language immersion (which is how most of the immersion programs here in San Francisco operate) enrolls 50 percent native English speakers and 50 percent native speakers of the “target language.” The program begins 100% in the target language in kindergarten and then shifts increasingly into English as well, until both sets of students are conversant in both languages.
It’s usually harder to attract the immigrant families whose kids are native speakers of the “target language” to these two-way programs, because they tend to want their kids immersed in English right away. But in reality, the kids do learn English, while during their classroom time they have the empowering experience of being the ones who understand everything at first and helping the native English speakers. It’s the native English speakers whose parents wanted them to become fluent in a second language who benefit the most from the target-language speakers. So the harsh, coldhearted notion that kids from non-English-speaking homes should get no help doesn’t really apply here anyway, because those kids from non-English-speaking homes are benefiting the kids from native-English-speaking home by helping them learn a second language.
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Caroline,
I read your post carefully, but allow me to further the discussion. California’s generous entitlement programs have allowed the huge growth of a third world underclass. Many of the ‘immigrant’ students that don’t speak english are the direct output of ‘immigrant’ parents that come from a country, that imports it’s poverty directly to us. Unfortunately, the sheer number of this particular demographic portion of the population, is no longer required to speak the English language. Their numbers are now big enough to ensure that they can be marketed to in their own language, English not needed.
Look at the numerous Spanish TV channels, radio, newspapers, advertising and the State Government and business’s that cater to this demographic. So it is no wonder to me, that you’ll never close the achievement gap because of this. Secondly, in the wave of immigration from the south, you’re not exactly getting the cream of the crop either. It takes a huge amount of money (taxpayer subsidized) to support this cheap labor. Approximately 78% of the Los Angeles County Budget is dedicated to supporting this. 25% or nearly $6 billion dollars goes to ‘Public Assistance’. 26% or $6.2 billion goes to ‘Health’ and 27% or $6.4 billion dollars goes to ‘Public Protection.
The role of Government as it is now, and what it was before the entitlement mentality are two different things. I haven’t seen a solution the $25 billion in debt that the State of California is in. You can no longer ‘tax the rich’ as the top 15% already pay 85% of the income tax. The oil extraction tax or any tax on business is pretty stupid, as it will be guaranteed to be passed right on to the consumer. So what’s next?
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We’re coming from such totally different sets of moral values and worldviews that there’s not much point in discussing it here, Regis. I just wanted to correct your misunderstanding of what language immersion education is.
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I wholeheartedly agree, Robert. The lack of political sophistication and power by this population is a result of inherent classicism/racism in our education system. The least powerful are the greatest impacted. I know this from my student teaching days on San Jose’s East side. It is a thorny and difficult problem, with no easy solutions.
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Do you really want to know what is wrong with the American education system? It’s the parents, and the conditions which exist in the homes of the children. The parents have roughly 5-6 years to mold the values, curiosity, personalities, and attitudes of the children. More parents are disillusioned, have more economic difficulties to address personally, and thus do not have as much energy or time as parents in the past to deal with the issues affecting their children.
People change when they are sufficiently motivated to change. With so many unmotivated parents out there, why should we expect the kids to be motivated? By the time they reach grade school, they are complicated human beings and the education professionals are faced with major challenges.
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