A FORUM FOR COMMUNITY ISSUES : Testimony / ONE TEACHER’S EXPERIENCE

I teach in a school district that, according to the U.S. Department of Education, has the lowest dropout rate in the nation (2.8%). My wife, Jessica Puma, teaches in Santa Ana, 10 minutes away, which has the country’s highest dropout rate (36.7%), according to census data. When I recently received a national award for social-science teaching, I thought about what it is that I do and whether I could do it in Santa Ana.

I try to teach kids to think. My approach is, here is the question and here are a lot of ways to think about it. So the kids begin to learn to analyze things as a matter of course, rather than regurgitate quick answers. It’s not aimed at boosting test scores but because of their background they get the high scores anyway.

Usually the test scores reflect socioeconomic privilege more than academic excellence. Not a lot of articles are written about how well kids think, and how they debate issues, and how many books they read, and do they enjoy their subjects.

Most students who live in an upper-middle class environment will go on to succeed in monetary terms. But I hope that I have given people some joy in learning and exposed them to questions and academic pursuits that they wouldn’t have found elsewhere. Maybe what I’ve done to some of them is to convince them that they ought to pursue careers in which they won’t be as monetarily advantaged. So maybe I’ve ruined their incomes later on in life. But I do think it sort of contributes to a better society. And it also contributes to a better life for them.

I think that there are hundreds of teachers who have the same take on how to teach that I do. But I work in a system that is supportive. And I work in a community where the kids have enough advantages so they come to school ready to learn. And so I don’t have to deal with a lot of the social problems that a lot of other teachers have to deal with. And that gives me a huge advantage right there.

My wife, Jess, works at Century High School in Santa Ana. I’ve driven her to work, and in Irvine they must have a tree every 10 feet. Some kind of regulation, I think. As soon as you hit the Irvine-Santa Ana border, there are no trees. And you begin to encounter potholes.

Jess’ school, which is a wonderful school filled with incredibly dedicated teachers, is in the middle of an industrial park. There are factories on both sides. My school is constructed next to a city park that includes 20 tennis courts and an Olympic-sized pool complex owned by the city, all of which we use.

Jess spends four or five hours a week talking on the phone with parents, 99% of which is in Spanish. And these parents care about their kids as much as any of the parents that I have. And a lot of them have two and three jobs. And some of them have their kids help them do the jobs at night, which is often custodial work.

In general, the schools are financed equally. You have the 1971 Serrano-Priest decision that says they have to be financed equally. But the problems are not in any sense equal.

In my school, with all of the normal problems it has, and it has normal problems--these kids are going through puberty--I don’t have a school that’s in the middle of a war zone.

We have the same budget cuts as they do in Santa Ana. But they’ve got other things they’ve got to take care of. I remember one night visiting at the home of Gerardo Mouet, who was on the Santa Ana school board, and he was talking about a discussion at the school board that if they didn’t close off the street in front of Santa Ana High, the drive-by shooting drivers would have a clear shot into the campus, so they needed to build a wall. Now that’s an absurd conversation, except I was having it. No one talks about getting a clear shot into Irvine High School.

We ought to put a lot more money into war zones than we do into privileged areas. But it’s not like I’m asking to cut money out of Irvine. Why take from one school to aid another as if this is the only possible source of funding?

We have a society that never questions the countless billions of dollars they can put into war toys. Not a moment’s hesitation--we just have to do this. And it can be for wars 10,000 miles away or 6,000 miles away. Half the population doesn’t know where the country we are worried about is on the map. And yet at the same time and in the same breath, they tell you, “Well, we just don’t have any money to pay for schools.”

Cutting funds in Irvine or any other school is just crazy. I’ve got, right now, 35 students in five classes--175 students. I’m told I’m supposed to have them write. Now just assuming I have them write and I spend 10 minutes on each essay, you’ve just taken up my entire weekend. And then you have people saying, “Hey, you don’t make them write enough.” What do you mean, write enough? I’m lucky I know who their names are sometimes. You also have an advisement group, 27 kids. So I see about 200 kids a day just in my classes. And they just come through on an assembly line. Five minutes between them. And I’m pretty good at this. But by the end of the day, I feel like I’ve been beaten. So to remove money from the California schools when we have the second-largest class sizes in the United States is nonsense.

Critics will quote statistics saying, “Well, we’ve put as much per capita into education as Japan does or Germany does.” We have a different situation than Japan does. Japan has a homogenous population. We’ve got something like 80 languages just in Irvine and we’re a privileged district. In Santa Ana, something like 50% of the parents are not fluent yet in English. You’ve got costs that just don’t exist in Japan and Germany. I think schools like Irvine need more money and in Santa Ana they need a lot more.