Citizens consistently tell pollsters and surveyors that the quality of K-12 education is among their highest concerns. In the last three surveys from the Public Policy Institute of California, participants said that education was the second most important issue facing the state, trailing only the economy. Nationally, education frequently appears as one of the top issues that the public wants Washington to deal with – even though the federal government has only a limited roll in setting policy for our schools and federal investments in education are, at best, modest. In California, K-12 education is, by far, the largest category in the state’s budget, with the state planning to spend over $55 billion on our schools in fiscal year 2008-2009.
The public’s concern for how we are educating our kids and the sheer size of the investments taxpayers are making in the K-12 system is one of the reasons why mayors and cities throughout the country are getting involved in education. Some, like Mayor Daley of Chicago, Adrian Fenty of Washington D.C., and Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles have been so concerned that they have moved to exert greater control over schools in their cities. Each concluded that without direct control over local schools, they would be unable to succeed in their efforts to crack down on crime, encourage more investment into the urban core, and halt the migration of middle-class families to suburban communities.
Those kinds of actions are dramatic and would be ill-suited to our region. For the most part, school districts in San Diego are not facing the crises that confront schools in L.A., Washington and parts of Chicago.
That should not mean, however, that city leaders should stay solely unengaged from the affairs of local school districts. Locally, districts like Poway Unified School District (PUSD) have shown that there are benefits to keeping lines of communication open between those parts of government charged with educating our kids and those responsible for mitigating the traffic around schools, operating libraries, or carrying out recreation programs after the school day ends. PUSD consistently is among the region’s highest performing districts on test scores and the high quality of education in PUSD has increased property values in the communities the district serves and has strengthened the competitiveness of local employers.
The City of San Francisco and the San Francisco Unified School District have taken the next step and crafted a plan for how City Hall and school districts can work together. In April last year the City and the District inked an MOU that committed each jurisdiction to increase investments in various enrichment programs, augment after-school programs, and expand the number of playgrounds open to community use when school is not in session. This initiative respects the different core responsibilities of the City and the School District, but also recognizes that they serve one community, and that closer cooperation between City Hall and the school district can benefit San Francisco’s children.
San Diego’s own City Heights Urban Village shows the importance of local schools in creating better communities and more vibrant neighborhoods. One of the key cornerstones of that project is the synergy between Rosa Parks Elementary School and the adjacent branch library, community park, and recreation center. This has created a real vibrancy in the Mid-City neighborhood. Economic activity has greatly improved and quality-of-life crime is down. Rosa Parks’ latest test scores show that, while it continues to have challenges, it is in the 80th percentile of elementary schools serving students from a similar socio-economic background.
Increasingly, the path to quality education requires lawmakers to break down fiefdoms. We should expect our local political leaders to throw off the constraints of their institutional silos, moving beyond the excuse that “education isn’t my job” to asking the question “what can I do to benefit the next generation.”
Reader Feedback
There are no comments yet for this article. Be the first to post!
Post a Comment
Feedback Rules:
Users may post more than one comment, but should not pose as multiple users. Multiple posts from the same IP address but with a different user name on each will be reviewed to determine whether abuse has occurred.
Posts with personal attacks or unsubstantiated allegations may be edited or deleted.
If you have not posted before, you will be required to verify your email address before your post is displayed.
