CCA/CTA seek legislative action to re-direct education resources.
Anyone who teachers in a community college in California is all too aware of the impact of educating the state's students at low-performing schools - those students attending schools that have been ranked in the lowest 20 percent of the state's Academic Performance Index.
"We know the impact because these students come to us," said Mary Ann Pacheco, an instructor at Rio Hondo Community College and the Community College Association's ABC Director. "When they do go to higher education, they come to our campuses."
Rio Hondo English instructor Mary Ann Pacheco,(right) who is also on the CCA Board, talks to student Carla Gonzalez about her work in the Puente Project, part of a statewide program aimed at identifying high potential Latino students who may be interested in furthering their education at the university.
Pacheco and her colleagues know too well the difficulties of trying to help students from low-performing schools, because their problems often get passed on to instructors and professors in community colleges and the CSU system. Remedial classes for these students are bulging at the seams and are taxing both institutions. Pacheco and others have known this for a long time. Community college faculty have worked long and hard providing students with the basic skills, academics and counseling services they should have received a long time ago as children in school. While the community colleges, in particular, attract students from many different segments of life, they are inundated with high-need students who have largely been passed through and passed over in the system.
Focus resources
In an effort to change the system, the members of the Community College Association have joined CTA in a campaign to focus resources on these schools of greatest needs.
A recent study by CTA comparing lower-performing schools to higher-performing schools found some startling data. Not insignificantly:
- 94 percent of the elementary students in those low-performing schools are poor, while only 7 percent in the highest performing schools are economically disadvantaged.
- Nearly 25 percent of the teachers in those low-performing/high need schools are on emergency credentials, while only 4 percent are on emergency credentials in the highest performing schools.
- Fifty-eight percent of the lowest performing elementary schools are overcrowded year-round schools while only 3 percent of the highest performing schools are year-round.
- A much higher percentage of the students in lower performing schools are minority students. For example, 78.8 percent of the students in the lowest performing schools are Latino, compared to only 7.5 percent in the highest performing schools.
"This is the kind of thing that was addressed in the Kerner Commission, some 30 years ago. That report concluded that the United States has two societies, separate and unequal," said CCA President Dian Hasson. "Our society cannot continue to 'discover' there is a problem every 30 years. It's about time for action!"
CTA/CCA will be working with its legislative advocates on a number of bills targeted toward improving these so-called low-performing schools. Among those areas that will be emphasized are improving facilities; lower class sizes in under-performing schools; attracting and retaining experienced teachers for under-performing schools; and improving parental participation.
Experienced teachers
"If we know that it's better to have experienced teachers in the classroom, then we need to see that more experienced teachers are in the classrooms of these high-need schools. We have to look at policies that will entice teachers to work in these schools. Perhaps more would choose to go if they were given more preparation time during the day, Hasson suggested.
"As it is, teachers are practically stigmatized if they are considering teaching in these so-called low-performing schools," Hasson said. Among the higher education bills focusing on low-performing schools is AB 1241 by Assemblymember Robert Pacheco, R-City of Industry, (and no relation to Mary Ann Pacheco) that will establish a pre-education program for community college students wishing to become teachers.
"If we are going to recruit quality people to our profession, we must start that process early. By working with students at the community college level before they get their degree, we can provide support and point them in the right direction," Hasson said. "It's even more important to increase the number of minority teachers, since so many of the students in these high-need schools are from diverse backgrounds. We want our teaching force to reflect the students in our schools," Pacheco said.