By GUEST COMMENTARY BY DAVID SIRKIN
In order to be able to control and fund their local schools, a group of Malibu residents would like to split Malibu off from the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District.
I protested in a previous letter (Aug. 30) that this would be an unfortunate and regressive step. I had not realized then that one of the aims of this group, which is to allow individuals to make donations to Malibu schools without any of the money being siphoned off to spread the wealth to other schools in the district, practically has been achieved already. The Daily Press reported on Sept. 1 that the district has a pending policy, under which an individual school would get all but 15 percent of a donation made to it. Because of opposition, much of it from “wealthy schools in Malibu,” to even that small percentage being siphoned off, the school board was set to approve Thursday night an amended policy, under which the percentage would be progressively diminished with each $100,000 raised by a school. Apparently, the wealthy schools, or those who donate to them, considered 15 percent for the district to be an “unfair tax that would quell the enthusiasm of many generous donors.”
Oh, my goodness. How can one use the word “generous” to describe people who would begrudge even 15 percent of their donations being used by the district to help the schools that need it most, the schools where most of the economically disadvantaged children of the district are enrolled? I would have thought 50 percent would have been a reasonable compromise between funneling money where it is most needed and exciting donors with the prospect of being able to earmark part of their donation for their favorite school (for example, the one their child attends). Consider another viewpoint.
Because equality of educational opportunity is one of the most important principles underlying the organization of our public school system, contributions to individual schools, or even individual school districts, should be strictly forbidden. Anyone who wishes to be an educational philanthropist should be allowed to donate only to the state or federal departments of education, for those agencies to send the gifts where they are most needed.
From this viewpoint, allowing the wealthy to earmark 50 percent of their donations for their own children’s schools is already quite indulgent, let alone 85 percent or more.
I made a couple of phone calls to school district offices and discovered two more disturbing things about how our school system works. These are additional aspects of the system that make Malibu already almost a de facto separate district. First of all, children can only attend a school that is not the closest one to them if there is space available. This rule may be appropriate for elementary school children, but it is definitely wrong, wrong, wrong for high school students. All high school students must have equal access to all the high schools in the district. If the demand for one high school is too high, then enrollment should be determined by lottery without regard for where the students live. This is especially important if parents or others are allowed to earmark financial donations to particular schools.
Most of the time, students will choose to attend the school nearest them, but if one school begins to be much more luxurious or better than another, students will be willing to travel significant distances to attend the better school. Allowing students throughout the district equal access is an important check that must be put in place to prevent one school from becoming a good, upper-class school, and the other a bad, lower-class school.
The district also could make each of the high schools be, to some extent, a magnet school. For example, it deliberately could make one of the schools a bit stronger in the arts, and the other a bit stronger in languages or sciences. This would encourage mixing of students from different parts of the district. Public schools could and should help knit the fabric of our society together. Too often we have allowed them to help tear it apart, as locally controlled schools have motivated the well-off to flee urban areas and turn the landscape of our nation into a patchwork of isolated, segregated communities.
The other disturbing thing is that the district seems to be unable to transfer teachers from one school to another according to the needs of the schools. The only time a teacher is transferred is when the teacher requests it. Worse than that, each school does its own hiring, and two schools in the district may even compete with each other for an applicant. This practice could lead to an unequal and unfair distribution of good teachers among the schools. The least desirable schools could expect to end up with a disproportionate number of the weakest teachers, those that are inexperienced, or lacking in talent or motivation. The unequal distribution of good teachers is one of the worst, and one of the least recognized, of the evils of separate local school districts, and it should not be allowed to occur within our larger, unified school district.
I urge the residents of Santa Monica to do what ever is necessary to hang on to the Malibu part of the unified school district. Doing so is very likely more important for your children and for your neighborhood than you have realized. I urge you further to demand of the board of education three things: ■ A generous percentage of all gifts to the schools must be distributed by the district to the schools that need them most, with the percentage staying the same or increasing, not decreasing, with every additional amount of gifts raised by a single school. ■ All students in the district, at least at the high school level, must have equal access to any school in the district. ■ The district must hire and reassign teachers as necessary among the schools to ensure that each school’s needs are equally met.
To the residents of Malibu: Try to stretch your heart to generate in it a feeling of community that extends beyond your immediate neighborhood to the whole Los Angeles area, to the whole state of California, to the whole nation, and even to the whole world, but at the very least to Santa Monica.
Recognize that it is right for all children to have the same educational opportunities, that it is essential for the improvement of our society, for the further evolution of our civilization. If you consider the distribution of your gift money by the district to be a tax, consider it a fair tax rather than an unfair one. Recognize that the wealthy in America are among the most under-taxed groups of people in the world. In other industrialized countries, people have a broader feeling of community and a greater acceptance of taxes as the most effective and fair means of getting the wealthy to support programs and services that benefit all.
Because of our greater ethnic and racial diversity, we have a more difficult time seeing even our relatively close neighbors as members of our community. We must remind ourselves of the reason for our difficulty.
The situation that exists in the school district now, namely extra funding for certain schools, teachers who can choose their schools and students who cannot, is a blueprint for educational inequality.
It is a situation that must be remedied. We cannot hope to eliminate entirely the inequalities in environment and learning opportunities among children.
But if we have a public school system that is itself unequal and unfair, then shame on us. We can and must do better. (David Sirkin lives in Santa Monica. He is a former New Jersey high school science teacher).
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on September 10, 2004. Read the original PDF.