“Beverly Hills to Boot Non-District K-8 Pupils.” I don’t know which disturbs me more: the headline or the “under-informed” (as opposed to “uninformed”) comments justifying the headline.
Briefly: “the Beverly Hills Unified School District (BHUSD) approved a controversial proposal Tuesday to boot out more than 400 out-of-district students.” (Edweek, 1/13/10).
I understand the pressures of budgeting in poor economic times (though I do not accept it). Is it worth displacing more than 400 children for the sake of water polo?
I agree with former Beverly Hills Mayor Tanenbaum and the 2600 residents who signed his petition asking that the non-district students be allowed to stay – “The children are not expendable. They are not financial assets.” Sadly, Beverly Hills Unified and those that support expelling the non-district children were unmoved.
But perhaps even more offense than the district’s decision are the “misinformed” opinions of those supporting the decision to expel the children:
“This is a community trying to take care of its own, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” Genevieve Peters said.
Resident Lee Lewis said the argument that forcing students to switch schools would be harmful is baseless because children change schools all the time, for all sorts of reasons.
“Resident Lee Lewis” is only partially correct. Children do change schools for all sorts of reasons. However, it is not a harmless act. There are multiple studies confirming the negative effects of a forced change in schools on children. Red Orbit and Better Homes and Gardens present approachable summaries of the negative impact on children.
Decisions to displace a child from an environment where he or she feels nurtured and engaged are always made under great duress. It is always preferable to keep the child where he or she is when he or she is thriving.
To further illustrate the point, consider the fact that children’s bones heal faster than those of the elderly. However, knowing this doesn’t mean we knowingly break our children’s arms simply because we know their bones will heal. It is preferably the bone remain unbroken.
More insulting than Lee Lewis’ comment is Genevieve Peters’ comment that there is nothing wrong with “a community trying to take care of its own.” Like Lee, Genevieve’s comment demonstrates a dangerously limited and superficial understanding of the situation. While the overall idea of a community “taking care of its own” is not wrong, her understanding of community (as implied by the article) is overly simple (bordering on xenophobic).
The online Encyclopedia of Informal Education provides these three interacting definitions of community (by “interacting” I mean these definitions are not singular but often overlap):
Place… where people have something in common, and this shared element is understood geographically. Another way of naming this is as ‘locality’.
Interest… people share a common characteristic other than place. They are linked together by factors such as religious belief, sexual orientation, occupation or ethnic origin.
Communion… In its weakest form we can approach this as a sense of attachment to a place, group or idea (in other words, whether there is a ‘spirit of community’). In its strongest form ‘communion’ entails a profound meeting or encounter – not just with other people, but also with God and creation.
A school district by definition is not a true “place.” It only considers geography in its most simplified context. It is a set of arbitrarily drawn lines in the sand. However, a school district can become a community by carefully nurturing shared interests and communion.
BHUSD is not “taking care of its own” by ignoring its 2600 residents and expelling 400 plus students. The isolationist views expressed by those who supported its decision to displace the students are direct threats to the spirit of democracy we as educators and parents endeavor to impart to our students/children.
Personally, I am hoping the quotes included in the article were off the cuff and spoken out of frustration. I am hoping that they are not a deeper seated biased belief accidentally revealed in the heat of the argument.
Not sure how much the author of “9021No” knows about the background to the BHUSD’s decision, but like former Beverly Hills mayor Will Rogers, it seems perhaps that “all you know is what you read in the newspapers.” That is unfortunate, as the newspapers seem to have a field day picking on “rich” Beverly Hills (with 53% of the residents being renters and 5.5% of the population living under the federal poverty line). They can’t even get the number of kids affected right (it would be far below the 400 figure quoted, as, in a generous compromise, all high school students would be permitted to graduate and 7th graders could complete middle school).
The real issues are much more nuanced, with essential questions being touched upon such as fairness and what sort of responsibility in our society parents should take for their own children. Furthermore, while your definition of “community” is certainly one way of looking at things (and could expand the city of Beverly Hills to greater Los Angeles, then to California, then to the US, the world, the universe…) the right of self-definition should also be extended to the residents of Beverly Hills, most of whom feel their “community” is their city. This is a conscious choice and there is nothing nefarious about their wanting their “community” to be the City of Beverly Hills; far from putting up a fence around the city, they actively welcome those who want to make the city their home (board member Lisa Korbatov verily begged permit families to move into the city). Boundaries may seem arbitrary to some, as nationality and religion seem arbitrary to others, but people make conscious choices about where they live and all that implies, and that extends to their own definition of “community” — not a dictionary’s.
Through two successive elections, the residents of Beverly Hills have made it clear that they want community-based schools, or, put another way, “Beverly Hills schools for Beverly Hills kids.” The past policy of letting in non-residents by former Boards, which were responsible for an undeniable record of academic mediocrity and a decline from the district’s glory days was clearly refuted by the electorate, which resoundingly changed the make-up of the school board majority. This was not a question of “using kids when Beverly Hills needed the money and then discarding them when it made no more sense to do so.” This was the electoral process and the decision not to renew permits is a policy decision stemming from wanting kids attending schools in the City to actually live there.
In point of fact, most of the kids in the BHUSD on permits come from well-heeled families living in such affluent areas as Bel Air, Holmby Hills, Westwood and Beverlywood. Many of them are homeowners and much better off than the actual Beverly Hills residents, many of whom are renters. Many of the actual residents of Beverly Hills made conscious trade-offs to live in Beverly Hills with the specific purpose of being able to send their kids to the district. They choose to put their children first and their choices should be honored. As such, if there is anybody who is treating the kids as “commodities,” it is some of the permit kids’ parents, who believe it is appropriate to place the responsibility for educating their own children on the BHUSD and the residents of Beverly Hills rather than taking the responsibility themselves, either by moving into the city, sending their kids to private school or — God forbid — sending their kids to their home schools and perhaps working to make them a bit better. Most of these permit families have the financial wherewithal to move into Beverly Hills, yet — in opposition to the residents — they feel entitled to send their kids to BH schools without actually living in the City. As has been stated on several websites, they don’t want the “inconvenience” of moving. In essence, they are looking to Beverly Hills to save them the $25,000+ it would cost them to send their kids to private school (ironically, many profess to “believe” in public education, yet completely rule out sending their own kids to their public home schools). This situation is perhaps best illustrated by the parent who heckled the BH school board at the last meeting and was seen driving away from a posh BH eatery in a $110,000 Porsche. And yet this individual felt his kids are entitled to the kind of guarantees that even Beverly Hills residents don’t have (if a resident is forced to move out of the city, their kids cannot continue at the district’s schools).
While some of the past school boards may have pursued a policy of admitting permit kids from wealthy neighboring areas — clearly, in opposition to the greater sensibilities of the City — and looked at the revenue brought in by some of the permit kids, the ADA funding only partially covered the cost of their educations. At best, these kids were always on partial-scholarships and these partial-scholarships were never need-based. Under basic aid, these partial-scholarships become full-scholarships. It is certainly legitimate for residents to ponder the question of whether providing rich kids with full scholarships should be the city’s priority (over $10.3 million each year is provided to the school district by the City of Beverly Hills from the city’s General Fund. This money could be used for police, fire or other services at a time the city has cut $18 million from its budget, reducing programs to seniors, CPR, etc. ).
However, just as much as for any questionable financial motives, the dirty little secret of past failed BHUSD boards is that white, non-Persian permit kids were admitted to the district to dilute the number of Persian kids in Beverly Hills schools, which the then-Board majority felt “drove away white, non-Persian Beverly Hills families to private schools.” Furthermore, previous boards attempted to cover up their own academic failures (with the bogus justification that Persian families were not interested in academic excellence) by bringing in “academic ringers” to raise API scores and cover up their own inability to teach to their constituents. That strategy didn’t really work, but to have these same former board members (or anybody for that matter) now call the current board majority “xenophobic” is nothing short of the height of hypocrisy. The current board is espousing the view taken by the majority of Beverly Hills residents and voters: we want our schools for our kids whether they be Persian, Austrian, Australian or Martian and we want to provide them with the best education possible.
The system will simply not work if everyone takes the view “I believe in public education, as long as it’s in Beverly Hills.” That isn’t practicable and it isn’t fair. Permit families always knew that their permits were issued on a year-to-year basis and as the political realities became clear, they had more than enough time to make plans for their children’s continued educations. Yet rather than do just that, they chose to publicly trash the City of Beverly Hills in an attempt to “guilt” the residents into giving their own children privileges that the resident children themselves do not enjoy. This is much worse than “not being cricket.” It is, in fact, a rather unsavory attempt to use their own children as pawns in the game of “let’s save private school tuition” rather than try to do the right thing. It is teaching their children that it’s OK to say “it’s all about me” and OK to try to move the goalposts if the game isn’t developing to their liking. Yet despite the self-entitlement of some of these permit parents, Beverly Hills has enough problems of its own and has a right to make the decision to get its own house in order in the way it sees fit. The best it can do is to set an example of how public education can work that can be repeated in other communities.
It’s easy to write off the concerns of residents and their desire to exercise the right of self-definition as “misinformed” opinions. Once again, Will Rogers is brought to mind. As the former Beverly Hills mayor once said: “An ignorant person is one who doesn’t know what you have just found out.”
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