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Defying history to fix our schools

BY Jeannie Oaks

Last June, the Los Angeles Unified School District adopted a policy that makes the “a-g” courses required for UC and California State University admissions the standard curriculum for all high school students. The policy is not meant to force every LAUSD student to attend college, but it does aim to give every high school graduate that choice. It also seeks to make concrete today’s “no child left behind” reform rhetoric.

Education officials did not push for this policy; many view it as naive or worse. The campaign was led by a grassroots coalition of parents and activists from the city’s poorest neighborhoods. They were angry because, despite all the reform talk, their high schools still have shockingly high dropout and exit exam failure rates. They were also highly offended by the conventional idea that requiring students to take challenging academic courses would make matters worse for them.

Of course, implementing the new policy won’t be easy. It flies in the face of a century of educational stratification wherein disproportionately more advantaged students were provided challenging college preparation courses. Lower-level academic and vocational classes were reserved for others, often students of color and those from disproportionately low-income backgrounds.

This system of “curriculum tracking” was designed to meet an array of social needs generated by industrialization, urbanization and immigration. Factories needed trained workers, and new immigrants needed to learn English and American ways. Meanwhile, the children of the elite still required college preparation and a high status. At the time, “democratic” urban schooling meant separating students along racial and class lines because of the prevailing belief that the intelligence of students was innate and fixed — immigrants, “Negroes” and “Mexicans” had less of it than the children of white Protestant families.

Today, some of the surface features of curriculum tracking have changed, but the deep structure of inequality remains. So do beliefs about opportunity and presumptions about the intellectual deficits of low-income youth of color.

Students not taking college preparatory classes have less challenging content, less engaging instruction, and their classroom environments are less likely to support learning. Low-income students of color are placed more often into low-level classes in racially isolated schools. Unsurprisingly, the result is the same as that at the turn of the 20th century: inequality in achievement, graduation rates, college going and more.

Our educational system has witnessed few events that require the radical changes in practices and beliefs that the LAUSD’s new policy envisions. Advocates can point to ample research showing that students — even those who have struggled academically — tend to learn more and stay in school longer when they are provided challenging course work and high-quality teaching. But research usually takes a back seat to tradition and deep-seated beliefs — particularly when race and social class are factors.

The LAUSD’s policy can succeed. But that would require the continued political activism of parents and grassroots groups determined to change history for the city’s most disadvantaged students.

Oakes, Presidential Professor in Education Equity at the Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, is the author of “Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality.”