In Dangerously Irrelevant: Urban school decay posts images of Detroit’s text book depository as a metaphor for the decay of many of our urban schools.

In California, it’s the anniversary of implementation of the Williams settlement. This brought settlement to a suit from the ACLU and others regarding conditions in schools serving the poorest students in our state. There were three areas covered in the suit/settlement:

• Physical plant: What are the conditions of the school sites themselves? Many of these schools are in urban centers and so they date back to before World War II.
• Texts and materials: Students should have access to text or other appropriate materials in the core instructional areas (basically, if they are tested on it, they better get materials). This means that they have to have 100 minutes of P.E. a week in Elementary because there is a P.E. test in 5th grade.
• Teacher qualifications: No surprise, the poorest schools have the least senior teachers and more teachers with “alternative” credentialing or teaching out of subject area.

The article above sites the many advances made under the settlement most notably in the area of physical plant, and texts and materials. My own experience teaching in Williams schools is this, I’ve gotten lots of repairs done that used to fester the todo list of the District’s plant operations. The schools were I now teach in Sacramento, are newer than the WPA era buildings I started at in Oakland. Also, there was a whole stream of building improvement bonds that went into effect as I began teaching, so from my perspective this has been getting better. I know that Los Angeles has had a number of problems, issues, etc. with regards to school building, improvement, and bonds for those goals, someone from the south of the state will have to comment on that aspect.

I know that textbooks are not in good odor with edubloggers, but let me put it this way, we know that the electronic replacements for texts are not all ready to go, so if the rest of the state’s kids have a text, shouldn’t these kids? BTW, if you had a reading program based on trade books, those would take the place of texts, but schools doing that are few and far between, especially those teaching in these schools. It was not uncommon to be short a handful of texts in a class prior to the settlement. I’ve heard tales from secondary educators of only having half the needed texts for a class. Also, we were regularly told that students could not bring texts home (for fear of them being lost). Williams specifically says that you must allow students to take texts home as needed to do work.

The one where schools still struggle with compliance is teacher qualifications. The school I’m coming into is in a similar situation. There is a very dynamic and charismatic principal that the staff seems very fond of, but they have had a large turnover historically, and even with this particular leader are still losing teachers each year (out 17 positions, two of us are replacing teachers who left, and one new position has been created). This is not as bad as some schools, but even at this rate, it’s not as consistent as schools teaching more affluent students.

So this is one policy option, often thought of as the nuclear one, because the courts are a cudgel, not a fine tool for fixing things. There are blanket policies, and enforcement is rather black-and-white. I think it works well for issues physical plant, and texts, but it just can’t fix a complex problem like teacher seniority and quality. That will require something more subtle, more complex, and more time.