By Gloria Romero and Richard Polanco
(From Sacramento Bee, March 30th, 2012)
In California, we have an affinity for naming schools after civil rights legends: Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, to name a few. These individuals stood for civil justice and equal access to opportunity. However, too many schools that bear their names are also among our chronically lowest performing schools.
As we celebrate the birthday – and state holiday – of Cesar Chavez, we issue a call for this to change. We can no longer tolerate sinking schools anywhere in California, but particularly not for a school named for a leader honored with a state holiday. Last year the U.S. Navy named a new ship for Cesar Chavez. What reaction would there be if that ship sank on its maiden voyage – and then continued to sink? Would we tolerate the sailors on board drowning? Absolutely not. There would be an immediate call for a blue ribbon panel to get to the roots of the tragedy.
Yet, we allow some schools named after heroic leaders to sink year after year. Our students have been “drowning” in chronically underperforming schools, but there have been no inquiries.
There are 30 schools in California named after King. Twenty-one of those schools appear on the Program Improvement list, which is a bureaucratic label meaning failing. Tens of thousands of students are drowning in these chronically underperforming schools. No whistles are blown. We just step back and watch the sinking. Oh – we also seem to blame the students for the equivalent of not knowing how to swim.
These struggling schools named for heroic leaders are sprinkled across the state. There are 35 K-12 Cesar Chavez schools, 66 percent of which have a majority of Latino students. Twenty-nine of them have been identified as PI schools.
One Chavez school is in Santa Ana in Orange County – just down the road from the birthplace of the historic Mendez et al. v. Westminster et al. 1946 federal court case that challenged racial segregation. This was the precursor to Brown v. Board of Education. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that the segregation of Mexican and Mexican-American students into separate “Mexican schools” was unconstitutional. What parents need to understand is that history was made in this region. Now, a school named for a hero of that civil rights movement continues to fail – and has been allowed to fail year after year.