Liberty Hill Blog: News from the Frontlines

What's Up in Education?

Byline: Joseph Bernardo

The fight for social justice, many believe, begins and ends in schools. On August 22, an influential group of academic experts, community organizers, teachers, and administrators convened at the Liberty Hill offices to discuss the current state and landscape of education in Los Angeles. I had the privilege to attend this special event and witness first-hand reports from key leaders and changemakers on the frontlines of education reform.

 Professor John Rogers of UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and Director of UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access (IDEA) began the convening with a history of the U.S. education system in the 20^th century. Central to his discussion was the reality that the state of education it is inextricably tethered to the nation’s economy.

With the slow death of New Deal liberalism beginning the 1970s and 1980s and the increased corporatization of the economy since, education has suffered like no other national institution. As a result, many education advocates and legislators have opted for more privatization of schools, much to the detriment of the public good.

California’s educational system especially felt this economic shift. During the 1950s and 1960s, California had one of the best school systems in the country. Today, the state is among the lowest in public school funding. California also consistently ranks last or second to last in terms of ratio of teachers/administrators to students.

Given the link between education and economics, attacking administrators and/or teachers for the problems of schools through programs such as No Child Left Behind and other philanthro-capitalist based strategies is misguided and flawed, suggests former LAUSD School Board member and Assembly member Jackie Goldberg. Accountability should not be dismissed, of course, but the “blame game” should not run amuck as it so clearly is at the present time. Instead, she contends, we need an overhaul in the state and federal tax structures towards a more equitable system. However, she warns that such a shift would necessitate a simultaneous legislative change in the two-thirds voting rule for taxes in the State of California, which mandates a two-thirds majority for passing tax revenue increases. That’s why the need to leverage campaigns such as California Calls/ReFund California for education funding is more urgent now than ever.

While the current charter school movement has swept through Los Angeles, many experts and activists agree that charter schools, in numerous ways, exacerbate student inequality despite their intention to minimize administration bureaucracy. More importantly, the increased decentralization of governance of schools has unfortunately resulted in the fragmentation of education activism. Yet, despite this relatively recent trend, many groups implement local campaigns through coalitions to improve education one school at a time.

For example, Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE)'s efforts to organize members of the United Teachers of Los Angeles and SEIU 99 with parents and students to improve accountability at the Accelerated School in South Los Angeles proved that shared collaboration of all stakeholders in the larger community is not only needed but can be accomplished. Likewise, InnerCity Struggle’s campaign to reform schools in Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles as well as Californians for Justice’s work in education in Long Beach are other examples that highlight the need for and successes of widespread grassroots community organizing despite a decentralized power structure.

A vital issue that participants discussed and urged more attention to was the alarming rate of incarceration among youth of color and its many roots in the current public school system. The Los Angeles School Police Department, for example, is largest in the nation with a $40-50 million budget. With its zero tolerance policy, many students are raised in a police-state environment and are prone to fall into the school-to-prison pipeline. Organizations including Community Asset Development Re-Defining Education (CADRE) and the Labor Community Strategy Center prioritize their education agenda around this issue. They organize stakeholders to advocate for more positive and productive alternatives to school suspensions and punitive discipline such as truancy and tardy ticketing. Likewise, the Youth Justice Coalition, understanding the negative impact of gang criminalization on all students, mobilizes communities in South Los Angeles to campaign to reform current legislation and enforcement of gang injunctions. Finally, strategies such as Liberty Hill’s collaborative initiative, Brothers Sons Selves, have brought attention to the increasingly targeted criminalization of young males of color and recently we have seen this issue on the legislative agenda among policy makers in the state of California. 

Education is more important for social mobility today than ever in this global economy. Yet disinvestment, decentralization, and criminalization of youth seem to be the order of the day. While grassroots efforts from organizations that convened at Liberty Hill seem humble in comparison to the immense problems within the educational system, they are nonetheless important steps in the fight for quality education for all students in Los Angeles. 

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Mobile Moviemakers

Byline: Melissa Montalvo

If you're ready to enjoy a heartwarming video, like I was on a recent afternoon during my internship at Liberty Hill, go to this blog and click on the picture. At first, you'll see small children enthusiastically dancing to mariachi music on a beautiful southern California day. 

The video depicts the Watts community coming together for its 20th Annual Watts Multi-Cultural Cinco de Mayo Fiesta at the Watts Towers Amphitheater. And while any local news station could have covered the event, Madelou Gonzalez, Mobile Voices filmmaker, gives her report a uniquely personal insight.

Despite being a native Spanish-speaker, she confidently interviews attendees in English and Spanish. Furthermore, she does not hesitate to bluntly ask her interviewees their thoughts on African American and Latino children coming together to dance on stage; her question elicits unanimously tender responses.

The Institute of Popular Education of Southern California (IDEPSCA), a Liberty Hill grantee, is one of the leading partners in the Mobile Voices program, a project that allows low-wage, immigrant workers in Los Angeles to express and share their feelings, experiences, and culture through videos, pictures, and audio made using simple cell-phone technology.

“We are not about commercial things, we are about community…families, voices, and hearts,” explains IDEPSCA’s Executive Director, Marlom Portillo. Which community, exactly? Their immediate families? Their neighborhoods? Their zip codes? Perhaps the entire community of the city of Los Angeles.

To put things into perspective, a word about my own community. During my first semester at the University of Southern California, I was shocked by the large number of students enrolled in the film school, all of them hoping to one day be the George Lucas of our generation. I quickly realized, however, that this should come as no surprise—I’m in Los Angeles! The city of Hollywood, blockbusters, and celebrity-home tours. What better place to pursue a career in film? In the School of Cinematic Arts, these USC students are learning the techniques and practices that will empower them as filmmakers.

Like the USC film students, the Mobile Voices participants train to improve their filmmaking, in their case through weekly meetings in which the participants gather to offer constructive criticism for each other’s pieces. As described in this report shown on Univisión in October 2011, these weekly meetings walk the filmmakers through the process of development as filmmakers and reporters.

 

Just as you’d expect to find in any film school, Marlom Portillo explains, participants “learn how to edit. They become more focused, more organized. They are able to cover any event. They become photographers, producers, audio specialists. They have a better understanding of media.” Through these weekly workshops, IDEPSCA members—many of whom hold jobs as day laborers or household workers—are empowered to create a variety of different types of media for various reasons, be they political, aesthetic, or journalistic.

In a city synonymous with film, it comes as no surprise that making movies is part of life for many Angelenos, whether equipped with professional equipment or with a simple cell-phone. Mobile Voices participants are able to give insightful depictions of their lives and communities, sharing movies that the mainstream media will oftentimes miss. I invite you to explore the Mobile Voices website, a platform where participants upload their media on a continuous basis. The home page features the newest stories and active reporters have their own personal blogs.

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Liberty Hill Campaigns in Sacramento

Byline: Vincent Jones, 

An important legislative hearing took place last week in Sacramento to emphasize the urgency of returning to commonsense discipline in our schools and on our streets and to help ensure that our young men have the opportunity to thrive. Here is the account of Vincent Jones, the Senior Program Officer in charge of Liberty HIll's Brothers, Sons, Selves campaign on last week's trip to Sacramento with more than a dozen young L.A. leaders. 

My first time outside of Los Angeles County was on a school trip to Sacramento and San Francisco.  I have vivid memories of being in the Capital, walking the halls, and meeting legislators.  I’m sure that helped shape my outlook as a young man and played a role in me being where I am today.  I share this story because I feel that several of our youth leaders had a similar experience.  In fact, one remarked to me that he had no idea elected officials were like him or had similar life experiences.  This young man had gone on lobby visits before but never got a chance to hear them sharing their personal story.  We made sure that our folks had that opportunity and it seems to have planted a few seeds.

The adventure began with the bus picking up our comrades in Long Beach at 5am while Liberty Hill staffer Anthony Foster, me, and the chaperones – Damien, Numa, and Crystal – gathered at our offices to pick up the breakfast from the Garden Café, ensure we had ample snacks, and prepare to welcome the troops.  When the bus departed around 6:15am, we had 30 BSS Coalition members, including 19 youth leaders.

After the delegation ate and rested, the bus got lively. We did icebreakers to faciitate team building, engaged in jeopardy-like game to refresh people’s memory about the work we’ve done as a coalition over the past year, and watched a few movies.  In short, the ride, while long, truly got us off to the right start.

When we arrived in Sacramento, we immediately joined youth leaders and staff organizers from across the state for lunch and to prepare for legislative visits.  Our Coalition members have had a few opportunities to learn how to harness the power of their personal story as an organizing tool.  The training reemphasized this important skill and provided key message points intended to educate legislators about the key issues impacting young men of color in California.

Students United at Roosevelt

Byline: Esthefanie Solano

I’m a Site Organizer with Liberty Hill grantee organization InnerCity Struggle and I have been working with members of the Roosevelt High chapter of ICS’s United Students on a campaign to have the school change the “zero tolerance” policies that were making school attendance and behavior problems worse, not better. In June, students won a victory when the school administration signed a pledge to support the first steps of implementing a new policy.

Figuring out an effective way to discipline students is not an easy task. For many years, schools used “zero tolerance" policies that basically meant if you broke a rule you were punished— no “what-ifs,” no “whys?” and no  “buts.” This led to the overuse of suspensions and expulsions. Removing students from classrooms once was only used as a last resort. Overuse pushed many students out of schools to the streets and many times into prisons.

L.A. Unified School District first took notice of this in 2007 when it passed a resolution stating that all LAUSD schools were to develop a discipline plan that followed “Restorative Justice.” This approach to discipline is designed to help empower students and support positive behavior.

End of story? Unfortunately not. Although the resolution passed, it was not implemented at many schools. Among others, Roosevelt High School continued to push many of their students out of the classroom for behavior issues. This is what led to United Students’ “College Prep NOT Prison Prep” campaign.

When the campaign started, students were being fined $250 dollars for being late. They were suspended left and right for “defiance,” and expelled for tagging, fighting or drug possession, without any chance of counseling or intervention that could actually deal with the problem. In one school year, Roosevelt made an unacceptable 277 suspensions. Those suspensions certainly didn’t help deal with any of the real problems. Without counseling, the issues students had when they were suspended came back with them when it was time to return to school. On top of that, most suspended students were labeled as “troublemakers” by their peer and school adults.

Although the District had passed the resolution calling for School-Wide Positive Behavior Supports System (SWPBS), if you asked anyone at Roosevelt—principals, deans, school police officers, counselors, educators and students—what that was, you would receive puzzled looks. I certainly wouldn’t have had an answer for you. How could I, if the idea of it had never been introduced to any of us?

It wasn’t until we as United Students started to look for solutions for our broken discipline policy that we came across SWPBS, along with the idea of restorative justice. Restorative justice is based on the belief that providing a student support to get to the root cause of their problem and helping them restore the damage they made, will in the long run create a more positive effect on the student than just punishing them and never addressing any of the reasons why the student might be acting out. 

To me and most of my peers, this way of dealing with discipline made perfect sense, but unfortunately that wasn’t the case for many of the adults. When we began to push for the policy reform we experienced a lot of resistance, especially from some of the principals and veteran teachers. To me, their resistance meant they didn’t really understand the beliefs behind restorative justice or maybe had been conditioned into thinking that using "zero tolerance" policies was the only way to deal with discipline since many of them probably attended schools with similar policies.

We knew that it was going to take more than petitions. We began to do classrooms presentations and to meet with teachers, bringing with us examples from schools all over the world as reassurance to them that this wasn’t some crazy idea but instead a model that was changing many school cultures and supporting students to feel welcomed and safe in their schools. We explained that it led to retention and higher graduation rates.

Convincing them into being open to the idea definitely was not an easy task. It took us two years, countless meetings, classroom presentations, lunchtime outreaches (pictured here), a teach-in, petitions, voice cards and a rally to get us to where now all the different schools within Roosevelt are ready to implement SWPBS as the new discipline policy. We know our work isn’t over yet. Now more than ever, we, as United Students, and especially myself as the new organizer, need to make sure we are there to help with problems that may surface but also to hold the adults accountable to carry the policy through.

Esthefanie Solano is a 2012 Liberty Hill Leader to Watch. Find out more about her story here.

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