Closing Emerson May Put All Davis Tweens and Teens at Risk
By Jann Murray-Garcia and Jonathan London
This has been an incredibly difficult column for us to write. We feel there are a few things perhaps we can contribute to our collective dialogue in this critically important time in our children’s lives.
First, we want to be transparent: our children attend César Chávez Elementary. We both envisioned all four continuing on in Spanish Immersion at Emerson.
We both also strongly desire that our children attend a school where the labeling of students as “Gifted” or “GATE” is structurally de-emphasized. Emerson is the only junior high where there are accelerated classes, but no GATE-only classes wherein children are tracked and physically segregated from one another by this adult-initiated label. We know of no other school district that labels so many of its children as uneducable within a conventional classroom. Do you? Please name the communities for us.
Emerson has created a learning environment that doesn’t just “say” we expect all our children to be high-achieving. It is what the children live each day in the structure of the institution: Potential is fluid, the timing of cognitive development is variable, and we are not making a major academic and status-laden dividing line based on a 45 minute test when our children were 8 years old. Perhaps this type of less stratified learning environment is why Emerson enjoys a higher API than the other two schools.
This is not meant to be an attack on GATE or the other two schools, but a highlighting of what is at stake in closing Emerson with just a few weeks’ debate.
Emerson’s amazing garden program, junior high Spanish Immersion…programs like these might be transferable to other sites, but this will be the second very successful learning community that we have dismantled in less than 2 years.
This time of crisis requires that Davis re-envision what our core collective values are. We hope the Board would make their indescribably difficult decisions based on sound educational theory.
Please take all the time you can before you make the essentially irreversible decision to close Emerson Junior High. Our plea is not just about “my school” or “what I want,” or our individually-defined “utopias.” It will impact every present and future junior high or middle school age child in Davis.
Sound educational theory predicts that larger junior and senior high schools have their calculable and hidden costs. A summary of decades of research data predicts costly consequences, both financially and emotionally for our children. The educational policy institute WestEd links increases in secondary school size to:
increases in school violence, substance abuse, and classroom disorder;
decreases in student attendance (potentially impacting funding);
increases in student dropout rates;
decreases in achievement;
decreases in extra-curricular involvement, including school clubs
decrease in students’ sense of connectedness to their schools
In addition, WestEd emphasizes that poor students and “minority” students are most negatively impacted by increases in school size. This latter fact links the decisions in the next few weeks to years-long efforts to eliminate the achievement gap in Davis. Please specify how each budget decision will impact efforts to close the achievement and discipline gaps in Davis.
And yet, how can we get there from here? Our hardworking district staff are thinking way outside the box in offering our equally hardworking Board with solutions to this fiscal crisis. How about us as parents? How about us as California citizens?
Are we just rats in a cage, into which the Governor and State legislators have thrown a ridiculously small piece of cheese? Are we dumb enough to react only by fighting each other and our Board members for that cheese? Or can we redefine what our elected officials are supposed to be pursuing for us in this “government for the people?”
Resist, California! Help lead the way, Davis! We can’t wait for this “Education Governor” ! We can’t wait for Republicans and Democrats to voluntarily de-fund a lucrative prison industry that directly benefits in the form of future inmates from the de-funding of public education. We have to demand what we elected them to do.
In early February, the Napa Valley Register reported that the Napa Unified School Board adopted a resolution to “reject across-the-board cuts that would damage our public schools, and protect voter-approved, minimum school funding law, Proposition 98.”
On March 10th, over 100 administrators rallied at the State Capitol. Reminding legislators of tax decreases (i.e. drivers’ fees) that have exacerbated the fiscal crisis.
In Alameda this week, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that 100 garbage cans were lined up and either a child, a teacher, or a custodian were placed in each. The message reflects what we are throwing away, or “trashing” in looking at a “cuts-only” budget balancing strategy.
California’s wealth, wealth-creating creativity and innovation, and our hopeful return to that are partly built on our K-14 school system, including junior colleges, and our public universities. Especially we 30-, 40-, and 50-Somethings are dependent on these opportunities being available to not just our children, but to this entire generation of California young people.
And please don’t forget to remind your children that the consistently number #1 industry in California is the agricultural industry. It is built and dependent on the backs of farmworkers, whose legacy we celebrate by recognizing César Chávez’ birthday on March 31st.
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