If you were running a business and a substantial number of new customers wanted to buy your product instead of your competitor’s, would you turn them away?

Yes — if you’re a public school system in California.

The Los Angeles Times has a story today on a movement by residents of Ladera Heights, an unincorporated area of Los Angeles County, to shift their children from Inglewood city schools to ones in neighboring — and higher-achieving — Culver City.

Inglewood, of course, doesn’t want them to leave. But Culver City bureaucrats quake at the thought of change, and don’t want the new students and the ~$5,000 per head they will bring. “Along with the additional ADA funds that accompany each new student come additional expenses for teachers, books, chairs, desks, maintenance, etc.,” they whine on their website.

If they were a business, or even a private school, they would be ecstatic, and find a way to make the change work. But the educrat mindset only sees more work.
Ladera Heights is 70%+ black (zip code 90056) and solidly middle class, with a median household income of $72k (source) — more than 2x that of adjacent Inglewood zip codes.

Ladera Heights parents have had to take their children’s education into their own hands. A survey by the Ladera Heights Civic Association found that of 547 children in the neighborhood, only about 80 attend Inglewood schools, with the balance attending private school or, via special permit, public schools in other districts. As the parent’s website says:

“The IUSD is plagued with serious behavioral problems, which not only creates an unsafe environment, but also one that is not conducive to achieving excellence in education. In this kind of environment, it is impossible for students to academically excel, much less learn the basics. For the last 15 years, most schools in the IUSD have been below California’s average for state mandated test scores. … District-wide, thirty-five percent of the teachers in classrooms are teaching with Emergency credentials. Residents in the Ladera Heights community no longer have an acceptable public school system available for their children. Our property taxes are being used to fund a district incapable of resolving our concerns.”

Good reasons for advocating change. Inglewood’s counter: not so compelling. According to the LAT, Inglewood has written that:

“the move would be harmful because it would remove the highest socioeconomic group of its students and create “a ’stigma’ on the balance of Inglewood students. …. The loss of Ladera Heights students “could create a situation where many of our most promising academically gifted students from upper middle-class families will leave the district, further separating students on the basis of socioeconomic and racial status,” the report said.”

Inglewood’s education establishment may not be able to educate the neighborhood’s children, but at least it seems to understand that retaining them would be good for the bottom line. Give them an “A” and Culver City a “F” in Economics.
But let’s fail Inglewood in Rhetoric class. The IUSD is obviously so unused to justifying itself that it can’t craft a coherent case for why it should be allowed to educate these children. If that’s the best Inglewood can do, we fully understand why the Ladera Heights parents want to leave.

—
We are ignoring the comic charges of racism: Inglewood School Board Vice President Johnny J. Young said in a letter that the proposed transfer was “racism at its worst … an attack on the African American male.” This despite Ladera Heights being 70%+ African American, a population that includes — as the LAT notes — leaders of the transfer movement.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 3rd, 2006 at 12:55 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under California Schemin', (Un)education, Your Tax Dollars In Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.