LET’S FIX OUR SCHOOLS! 
- PART I

Paul Cummins
Mirror contributing writer

   Good afternoon. 
   I want to begin today with a quote from Jonathan Kozol’s wonderful book, Savage Inequalities.
   “Standing here by the Ohio River, watching it drift west into the edge of the horizon, picturing it as it flows onward to the place three hundred miles from here where it will pour into the Mississippi, one is struck by the sheer beauty of this country, of its goodness and unrealized goodness, of the limitless potential that it holds to render life rewarding and the spirit clean. Surely there is enough for everyone within this country. It is a tragedy that these good things are not more widely shared. All our children ought to be allowed a stake in the enormous richness of America. Whether they were born to poor white Appalachians or to wealthy Texans, to poor black people in the Bronx or to rich people in Manhasset or Winnetka, they are all quite wonderful and innocent when they are small. We soil them needlessly.”
   I am not here, however, to try to afix blame. I especially am not here to blame the public schools. Our education mess is partially one of accretion. And much of the mess is the neighborhood surroundings — schools are a reflection of social ills: drugs, unemployment, gross disparities of wealth, rundown facilities, crime ridden surroundings. The third world isn’t just Bangladesh or Rawanda; it’s here in Los Angeles. We allow children to grow up in disgraceful neighborhoods, allow them to walk to school past men, women, and other children living on the streets in TV boxes. They arrive at their schools — ugly buildings and ugly playgrounds. They go indoors to overcrowded classes with chronically underpaid teachers often teaching classes that weren’t their major, and they receive watered down and diminished curricula.
   While across town — for example, here in the westside — at Crossroads, we spend over $17K per child, and along with their five solids, they have arts, environmental education, human development, and community service; at LAUSD, they spend approximately $7K per child — over $10,000 per pupil less! Please don’t tell me we spend enough and that money isn’t the issue. It’s a huge issue.
   My daughters received a Crossroads’ education, and then private college, music, ballet, and fencing lessons, trips to Europe, conversations at home with college graduate parents, a comfortable home with books, their own bedrooms, computer and stereo, etc. But large numbers of children all across Los Angeles and the nation get none of this, and I believe it just isn’t fair!!
   Children should not be treated as expendable trash; a child shouldn’t be doomed at birth because of geography or economics.
   The sad truth is that we don’t have to accept these conditions — we could change them. I was asked for a title for my remarks today, so I suggested “Let’s Fix Our Schools.” The “let us” implies just what I want it to — that the problems in our schools are the responsibility of all of us. The problems were not — for the most part — created by the schools; instead, they are societal problems and, hence, they can be fixed only if we all participate.
   There is, admittedly, a lot of energy spent, I believe — wasted on assigning blame — liberals call conservatives greedy and selfish; conservatives call liberals spend-crazy and union-bound. Some blame bureaucracy and others administrative incompetence, but the blaming is useless. What we need to do is realize that our schools are the mirrors in which we see the greater social problems:
   • a lack of sense of national purpose
   • drugs, violence, alienation
   • unemployment, homelessness, increasing rates of foster children
   • increasing rates of children — in the USA — living in poverty.
   These are not school- created problems. And they can’t be fixed just at the level of the schools. So what do we need to do? Well, I would suggest a variety of actions:
   1. Create more public/private partnerships: For example, a McArthur Park Church (Pueblo Nuevo), a Santa Monica charter development non-profit company, ExEd, and my foundation, the New Visions Foundation (NVF), have partnered to create four charter school campuses in 24 months. In none of our four sites did we displace or condemn homes; we used our creativity and imagination to remodel an abandoned mini-mall and warehouse, and to rent school-friendly facilities. What I would like to see is LAUSD acknowledging that private sector organizations like ExEd and NVF can help, and for LAUSD to reach out to us — ask us for advice, help, and partnerships with them;
   2. A Marshall plan for our inner cities: we spent the equivalent of 100 billion dollars in 1948-51. Why not make an even greater commitment to our own inner city schools now?
   3. Creative and new financing ideas: if we can put men on the moon, we can figure out how to fund our schools. If we can contemplate spending billions of dollars on the Star Wars idea, then surely we can rebuild and restructure our schools. 
   There are just a few ideas. In my next column, I will suggest a few more.