Close to Home: A top-down mandate will fail

The Santa Rosa school board meeting on April 11 all but sealed the deal: Beginning with next year's ninth-graders, all students will be required to pass college prep (A-G) classes in order to earn a high school diploma.

Teachers are profoundly divided on this issue. Some point to the large number of students who simply aren't prepared for the rigor of college-prep courses and whom they fear are being set up for failure, while others insist that “tracking” and “unconscious bias” have created these disparities.

Regardless, it was clear at this meeting that any attempts at real and honest debate on this contentious plan would be next to impossible. Instead, we got shameless political theater. Ardent A-G supporters filled the room with earnest members of the Latino community who shared stories of (perceived) racism, stereotyping and promise unfulfilled due to persistent and pernicious low expectations. With the deck so stacked, as it were, how could any non-Latino person dare speak against this plan without fear of being labeled an elitist or, even worse, a racist?

As a veteran teacher who has profound philosophical concerns about this plan, I deeply regret that so complex an issue was distilled and packaged as a purely racial or ethnic one. While it's impossible to overlook the daunting numbers that speak to black, Latino and Pacific Islander students lagging significantly behind their white counterparts, I believe that the goal of preparing all students for college is laden with abundant flaws that transcend issues of race and ethnicity. After all, there is a high percentage of white students who haven't graduated from college either. And the fact that we're the only developed country in the world that perpetuates this one-size-fits-all system is very troubling to me.

Let me be clear: I want to see historically disadvantaged students rise to the ranks of the college educated. Given that Latinos now are the majority of the population here in California, no one wins if we as educators don't do everything in our power to address what has been an unacceptable reality for far too long. But I don't believe that mandating college-prep courses for every high school student is the answer.

High school is too late in a child's development to try to address the problems that have led to students of all races being placed into non-college-prep classes - which no longer will be offered in the era of A-G for all. As a high school teacher, there's very little I can do in one hour per day to ameliorate the deficiencies and gaps from the other 18-23 hours in a student's day, and there's even less I can do to counteract the 14 or 15 years of home/neighborhood issues that preceded that student's arrival in my class.

Instead, it's in our elementary schools where the most important and immediate changes need to happen. Our youngest students, especially those in majority non-white schools, need aggressive tutoring programs, more counselors, smaller classes and robust elective programs, just to name a few things. Instrumental music, for example, has proven to be a powerful impetus to academic achievement and overall school buy-in. Every child deserves access to a broad range of so-called enrichment opportunities. Sadly, we have wide variances in the availability and viability of these kinds of programs within our own school district.

I only wish that teachers and students from across the spectrum of our high schools had been given an opportunity to weigh in on a policy change as significant as this one. Both of the board meetings devoted to this topic were conducted in supercharged and emotional atmospheres that provided nothing in the way of a safe space for candor. This is yet another example of the types of top-down mandates that have become all too common in public education.

Mark Wardlaw is a teacher at Santa Rosa High School.