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| English and AVID teacher Lynda Campfield at San Leandro High School talks about the ethnic diversity of her district. |
Eduardo Ochoa is bursting with happiness as he greets ninth-graders at Lincoln High School in San Diego. He has just received e-mails that some of his former students, now high school juniors, have received acceptance letters from UC Berkeley, Stanford University and CSU Stanislaus.
“That could be you in a few years,” he says to students enrolled in AVID (Advancement Via Individual Determination), a program designed to help midlevel students succeed in a rigorous curriculum and enroll in a four-year college. “I can’t wait to get e-mails telling me which colleges you’ll be going to.”
“You are the cream of the crop for showing up at 7 a.m., a full hour before school starts,” Ochoa tells his students. “You have so much potential.”
He often reminds them that free public education for everyone should never be taken for granted. To make his point, he has taken students to meet immigrant workers. The workers tell his students that in Mexico, compulsory education does not include high school, and only students who have enough money can attend.
“My students are surprised. It grounds them.”
In an age when so many forces seem to be working against public education, perhaps society needs a reminder — just like Ochoa’s students — about the true value of public schools.
Education is always in the news — typically about so-called failing schools or budget cuts — with little emphasis on the most important fact of all: Public education is the most important investment that a state — or a country — can make. It is both the foundation and the future of our country.
Success stories happen on a daily basis in public schools. And Ochoa himself is one such success story. He was one of five children raised by a single mother in a trailer park. His father died when he was 8. An older brother was a gang member. Nobody in his family had graduated from high school. He came close to dropping out while attending Southwest High School in San Diego.
“In my senior year, I had good teachers that I was fortunate enough to bump into,” recalls the San Diego Education Association member. “They showed genuine care. And I had a counselor who called me into her office every single week until I put in an application to Southwestern College. I think I applied just to get her off my back. I am lucky that all of these people helped to motivate me.”
Today, Ochoa is motivating at-risk, low-income students. In addition to AVID, he teaches social justice classes. Last year he was honored as one of the Teachers of the Year in San Diego County.
“Please, please, please don’t give up,” he urges his students. “Adversity is an opportunity. When you are clashing with a teacher or have a class you don’t like, look at it as an opportunity to grow. Look at it as a challenge. Don’t mess it up. What you do now affects your future. When you empower yourself through your studies, it’s a life-changer. It changed my life and it’s the reason I’m teaching you here today.”
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| San Diego Education Association member Eduardo Ochoa teaches AVID and social justice at Lincoln High School. |
Education is a basic right
Dixie Johansen, a fourth-grade teacher at Green Oaks Elementary School in East Palo Alto, firmly believes that public education is the backbone of democracy.
“Without public education there is no chance for students to excel, live their dreams or fulfill their potential. Without it, the world would be very bleak, and only the rich and middle class would be educated. Without public education, the only way out of poverty would be a miracle, and poverty would be much worse than it is today.”
Johansen, a member of the Ravenswood Teachers Association, also believes that society would be much more segregated without public schools. “All of my students are diverse,” she says. “I have students from Mexico, Tonga and Samoa. And I think it’s great that American public education can bring so many different students together.”
“Great public schools are an obligation that society owes all children,” says Noah Lippe-Klein, a member of United Teachers Los Angeles who teaches history at Dorsey High School. “Unfortunately, there are many communities which historically have not gotten access to good schools.”
Every year, Lippe-Klein holds an “Immigration Day” where his English learners create an “imaginary country” for English-speaking students to visit. His students assume roles such as customs inspector, police, bankers, teachers and employment counselors and speak in their native language, which is mostly Spanish. English-speaking students face the challenge of going through customs, exchanging money in an unfamiliar denomination and making their way through a foreign society.
The annual schoolwide event teaches students about immigration, but also increases their understanding about people from different backgrounds.
“It builds a sense of community and builds an understanding that all students deserve good schools,” says Lippe-Klein. “From this event, my students understand that if a society has a commitment to equality and justice, public schools are the only way to level the playing field.”
Public schools are melting pots
Lynda Campfield, who teaches English and AVID at San Leandro High School, believes that public schools provide a melting pot that probably wouldn’t exist if schools were privatized. Her district, once mostly white, is now very diverse and a place where 52 languages are spoken.
“Our school has done a lot to bring people together,” she says. “Last year we did the musical Grease, and the cast was huge. Danny and Rizzo were African Americans. Sandy was a Caucasian girl. It looked just like what our school looks like. It made me feel proud.”
But she is even more proud of the school’s many success stories. “We are just graduating our first AVID class and all of our kids got into college,” she says. “Every single one of them. It’s extraordinary to have so many first-generation college students.”
For Campfield, public education is also a human rights issue. “Maybe it’s because of who my parents are,” she muses. “They come from the South. They met at the Tuskegee Institute, which is a black college, at a time when a lot of African American people didn’t go to college. They always told me that school was good for me and that college was available for me. They were right.”
Before becoming a teacher, she volunteered to teach literacy at San Quentin prison, where she was surprised to find inmates as old as 35 unable to read. “Anyone can see that people who aren’t educated often end up in prison, because it’s hard to find a regular job if you can’t read and write.”
“Everybody should be educated,” continues Campfield, a San Leandro Teachers Association member. “It should be free and for everybody — even people in prison. We need people to be educated, productive and informed about what’s going on, so they can have a say about what’s going on. But a lot of people don’t want that, which is why public education is under attack.”
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“Classified staff and aides in public school classrooms provide extra assistance to children. In private schools, you don’t have those services unless you pay for them.”
— Linda Metzger, Newhall Elementary School |
Offering a level playing field
For Linda Metzger, an office assistant at Newhall Elementary School, the most important thing about public education is that it does not discriminate against any student.
“I see public education providing services that advance our students in so many ways,” says Metzger, co-president of Newhall Education Support Professionals. “Technology is a perfect example. Children whose families may not be able to afford computers have the opportunity, even at the kindergarten level, to acquire knowledge of computers so they will be more successful when they grow up. We have come a long way, even if education is not at the level it should be in California.”
Metzger has seen many parents take their children out of public school, then re-enroll students at her site because they found private schools did not provide the same level of services for every child.
“Classified staff and aides in public school classrooms provide extra assistance to children,” says Metzger. “There are bilingual aides and aides for children with special needs. In private schools, you don’t have those services unless you pay for them. In fact, you get very little unless you pay.”
Special education teacher Vicki Pilling has visited many private schools, and has found few that satisfy the needs of students with learning disabilities.
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| Joycelyn Gee, Catherine Casuat and Minna Li have fun analyzing a poem. |
“I went to one school site that advertises individualized instruction, and every single child had the same spelling list. Private schools often don’t have a school psychologist, occupational therapist, adaptive physical education teacher or speech therapist to help special ed students.”
Pilling, a member of the CTA Solana Beach Chapter, was Teacher of the Year in San Diego County in 2007. She sees miracles every day, and says she never fails to be profoundly moved at the progress she sees in her struggling students thanks to public education.
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| Ron Norton Reel, president of the Community College Association |
“One of my students, John, came to Room 18 a shattered spirit suffering from severe anxiety,” she recalls. “Our work together enabled John to develop a repertoire of coping mechanisms he could use for support. One day he confided to me, ‘You are like my guardian angel. Without you, I do not know who I would be today.’ By the end of John’s three years with me, he was significantly healed and was beginning general education classes at a college preparatory middle school.”
Pilling describes her philosophy as being very simple. “All children have the right to learn. It is often with deep admiration that I observe my students learn despite their disabilities. My teaching philosophy is reinforced every day as I watch my students consistently engaged in learning and being excited about their academic progress.
”Media coverage about success stories in public schools is something that doesn’t happen often enough, says Ron Norton Reel, president of the Community College Association. He notes that community colleges in this state make up the largest higher education system in the world with a whopping 2.6 million students.
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Noah Lippe-Klein,
United Teachers Los Angeles |
“We need to hear success stories, and we, as educators, don’t do a good enough job of that,” says Reel, who teaches speech and public speaking.
His students at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut have included Anthony E. Zuiker, creator of the television shows CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, CSI: Miami and CSI: NY. Jimmy Nguyen, named one of the top Asian attorneys in Los Angeles last year, was also a student. So was U.S. Rep. Gary Miller (R-California).
And then, there’s another success story — himself.
“My mother was a Cherokee Indian and my father was Irish, and they were itinerant farm workers. I have 11 brothers and sisters. We traveled the crops, picking cotton, potatoes and tomatoes. I was born in the government camp John Steinbeck writes about in Grapes of Wrath.”
He credits dedicated teachers with changing his future. In sixth grade, when he had rheumatic fever and missed school for several months, a teacher tutored him at home several nights a week so he didn’t fall behind. In high school, a teacher decided to place him in a high-level English class, even though no one from a labor camp had ever been placed in such a class. Another teacher gave him a monetary grant to learn speed reading, even though he was considered a bit too young for the award.
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| Special education teacher Vicki Pilling works with a student at Solana Santa Fe Elementary School |
“She told me the reason she was doing it was that if I went to college, I’d have a rough time supporting myself. I went from reading 100 words a minute to reading 1,600 words a minute. And at the end of the year, I had 90 percent comprehension. I could read an entire textbook in just a few hours. So I was able to keep up, even if I was working day and night to support myself.”
Reel worries that public education, our country’s most important resource, may be fighting for its very survival.
“There is a group of people who certainly would benefit if public education went away, because there would be more class distinctions and the ability to level the playing field would vanish,” says Reel. “Those on the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder would stay there, and the success stories wouldn’t keep happening. Education would become elitist rather than an opportunity for everyone.
“We can’t let that happen — ever.”
