When a teacher’s strike against the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) erupted in January 2019, Elizabeth Chamberlain, Ed.D., the dean of the School of Education at Pacific Oaks College, wasn’t surprised. What the teachers were striking for wasn’t anything she hadn’t seen before. Dr. Chamberlain started her career as a LAUSD teacher in July of 1989, right after the last teachers strike in California 30 years ago.
“I’ve been in classrooms where a child is screaming at the top of his lungs, biting, kicking, hitting his teacher… children throwing up in class…yet there were no counselors or nurses on school grounds to help,” Dr. Chamberlain says. “Teachers end up being nurses, social workers, custodians, disciplinarians, and everything else. When you don’t have adequate resources, the teacher loses out, and the children lose out.”
An article from The New York Times published in May 1989 referenced “a badly underfinanced school system that suffers from a 40 percent dropout rate, overcrowded classrooms and shortages of school books and other supplies.” It’s eerily reminiscent of the struggles that teachers continue to face in the classroom today.
Public education in America was created to serve the public good, an equalizer for the betterment of future society. Like any system built nearly 200 years ago, change has been necessary—though the system remains imperfect. Instead of trying to fix it, some people responded by creating a new system, that ostensibly sits on top of the current system: the charter school network.
The dramatic expansion of charter schools is also the one differentiating factor between the 1989 strike and the one in 2019. According to the California Department of Education, about one in every 10 students attends a charter school. And in the last 10 years, California charter school enrollment has increased by 150 percent overall. This nationwide trend has left the entire American education system divided. Instead of working together, these two systems are regularly pitted against each other in a battle for funding and resources, and students are suffering the consequences.
“The end goal is the same: we’re trying to impact students and provide high-quality instruction,” says Jerell Hill, Ed.D., a faculty member at Pacific Oaks College. “If we can find a way to work together instead of a kind of negative competition, I think that would change the climate.”
The question is, who will lead that charge toward unity?
Charter schools weren’t meant to drain the public school system. They were developed to coexist with public schools; a progressive approach to education and a way for educators to bypass the red tape often associated with public school systems.
“I think people who created charter schools just wanted to do something different because they saw that the educational system was not working the way it should,” Dr. Chamberlain says. “As a teacher, I sometimes thought a charter school would be great, where you wouldn’t have to worry about the constraints of a bell. Those teachers have that control.”
Yet charters have contributed to a major loss of funding for public schools. Charters are partially funded by local property taxes, revenue that is stripped away from public schools when district children leave to go to charters. The Los Angeles Unified School District experienced a $600 million decrease in year-over-year funding for its public education system in 2018, partly due to this issue.
But charters aren’t immune to funding issues either. In some cases, they are even locked out of additional funding, like in Pasadena, where a newly enacted sales tax will solely go to the public schools in the area. Like public schools, they suffer shrinking budgets with lower enrollments.
A dangerous cycle now exists. A loss of dollars leads to cut programs; cut programs lead to a loss of students; and a loss of students means less funding. The result: more strikes, little lasting results. The cycle continues.
The problem plaguing both systems is how funding is tied to enrollment.
A set amount of property tax dollars is allotted to each student. When you put a monetary value on a student, cost-effective decisions become more of a priority over investing in public education. If so few students are involved, why push money into it?
There has been growing rhetoric about running education as a business. But when education is run as a business, students are treated as consumers, resources are treated as luxuries instead of necessities, and anything that doesn’t help the bottom line is ignored. Policymakers and the leaders of public schools and of charter networks are making huge decisions while the teachers and students are in the trenches, expected to deal with the consequences without being part of the discussion.
Oftentimes, these leaders even lack the educational expertise they need to make informed decisions. Take America’s current education leaders. The Secretary of Education has a business background. In Los Angeles, the school district superintendent, who started his term in 2018, is a former investment banker. Ultimately this has led to an education system that is more divided than ever. The battle over school choice distracts from the main issue: fixing the system from the ground up to best support students.
“To create cohesion across the education system, there needs to be different policies and financial structures,” Dr. Chamberlain says. “Some kids need additional services, such as one-on-one special education. That’s not their fault. Everybody is fighting for services because there’s such limited resources. The real question it raises is, do we value our children enough to adequately support them?”
When you assign a monetary value to a student, it’s easy for leaders to forget that they’re a child, that they’re in their most vulnerable, formative stage of their lives. Yet teachers, the people that know this the most, often have their voices left out of the conversation.
If education is meant to serve the public good, the entire system needs to unify to ensure society is changing for the better. Charter schools and public schools can work together to do this. Yet the narrative surrounding charter schools is part of the problem.
“I think the challenge is that there’s a lot of opportunities for people to work together and for people to partner, but you can’t force partnership,” says Lauren O’Neill, the executive director of the Odyssey Charter Network and a Human Development alumna from Pacific Oaks. “It’s challenging because there’s a lot of misunderstanding. Charter schools were designed to be creators of innovation and to share best practices. But you can’t share best practices if nobody else wants to come to the table.”
Yet no one is helping these two systems see eye-to-eye.
“The problem in our country right now is we don’t have the kind of leadership guiding education from a federal and state level,” Dr. Chamberlain says. “It’s a complex issue. Teachers need to be leading in this space, but theirs are not the voices guiding us right now. The teacher’s, and ultimately the student’s, voice is lost.”
To Julie Kammerer, a teacher in the Los Angeles Unified School District and an adjunct faculty member at Pacific Oaks, teachers can act as the bridge and be the true equalizer. They need to be able to step up and lead—AND also be heard.
“We need to pay more attention and get people who’ve taught and who know what needs to be done in the classrooms of our country into leadership positions,” Kammerer says.
Dr. Hill, who has worked in various public schools across Los Angeles County as a teacher and administrator, knows the power in cultivating strong leadership in the education movement.
“A big part of my leadership as an administrator was creating the space for teachers to lead and do what they’re capable of doing,” Dr. Hill says. “They had incredible results, and it was all teacher-driven. Creating that safe space for them to give their honest feedback was critical. Teachers felt heard, and respected.”
Dr. Hill left positions working in public school districts to further his impact. Wanting to revolutionize the school system for the better, he saw higher education as where the changes happens: an opportunity to create educators of tomorrow.
At Pacific Oaks, he sees how the college seeks to train leaders to have a holistic view of the classroom and the education system, and to empower students to have a voice. Pacific Oaks engages students with leadership-based curriculum, ensuring that wherever they go, they are equipped with skills to create change. Dr. Hill knows the power one teacher can have to make all the difference.
“That’s how you really impact change: one teacher at a time, one parent at a time, one student at a time, one community at a time,” Dr. Hill says. “It’s a ripple effect when you empower people to stand up for what they believe in and make a difference.”
Read articles from the Summer 2019 issue of Voices:
Out with the new, in with the old
Per-spec-tive: A word from President Dr. Jack Paduntin
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