I’ve taught high school seniors for two years through two
different programs offered at Loyola Marymount University, Street Read and
Street Write. In my experiences at both Westchester High and Culver City High-I
have witnessed the results of gerrymandering and have witnessed how our
political environment severely effects the students in their everyday
classrooms and lives.
One semester my partner Miquel and I wrote an investigate
piece on Westchester High, in which we highlighted how although a magnet
school-required by law to have a 70% minority ratio- fixed their CAHSEE scores
to appeal to prospective students. All the while, in our class of 45 seniors,
only 7 applied to college and most, if not all, were either illiterate or still
reading at a 7th grade to an “advanced” freshman level. It was heart breaking.
As the numbers show, under performance is an issue facing many
schools in LAUSD, but for magnet schools something else plays a very
distinctive role. Joanne Bernstein, our supervising instructor, recalls working
as the Magnet Coordinator for Westchester High, a job in where she
sarcastically claimed that she, “was replaced for a younger, newer model.” At
that time, she received a call from the then superintendent Ramon Cortines who
she reported as saying,
“Why the hell am I sending these kids to you to fail, when
they can just fail at home?”
We came into the classroom every day, and I still do, with
the high hope of reaching out to these students, and if we managed to help a
handful, we would call that in of itself a blessing. These students came from
backgrounds unfamiliar to most of the privileged LMU community. One student,
for example, Ryan, is 17 years-old and he is homeless. He doesn’t know where to
sleep at night, or what he will eat.
These students have no positive reinforcement. No one to
tell them they could be greater than what society tells them to be-gangsters,
drug dealers, laborers, prostitutes-they have no aspirations because they are
systemically taught to not have any.
With this being said, one would think that their unfortunate
circumstances would motivate teachers to do everything in their will-power to
positively enhance these students’ lives. Though, this issue of racialized
educational inequality predominately stems from America’s long history of
racism and slavery targeted towards most, if not all, minorities.
For example, did you know that the liberation from Spanish
rule in 1821 and the US conquest of territories beginning in 1845 did not allow
Chicanos the time required to stabilize cultural, legal and economic
boundaries. Acknowledging the Chicano
people’s vulnerability, the newly American states fully imposed its social
hierarchy on them; blatantly disregarding The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. With
this, legal forms of disenfranchisement began to implement into Chicano
culture.
Subsequently the American states, founded on a social
hierarchy on the premise of color, “proposed that only free whites would
receive the full benefits of citizenship; leaving those of color with limited
civil rights” (Menchaca, 584). The Anglo’s blatant disregard of Chicano people
and culture perpetuated segregation, racism and disenfranchisement; further
fragmenting the relationship between the two cultures to this day.
Continuously, writer and activist Virgilo Elizondo reflects
upon his experiences in the American school system as a Chicano American
student and he describes how:
“The schools had done a good job of convincing [them] that
[they] were different…all the courses indicated this by pointing to the
Anglo-American models of existence as the only normal existence of intelligent,
civilized human beings” (Elizondo, 18).
The imperialistic ideology that the white man is the ideal
human being has been embedded within the education system. Teachers
regurgitated these ideologies onto Chicano-American students, obstructing the
quality of education they receive. Elizondo’s academic accounts aid in
depicting that “policymakers and educators are failing Mexican-American
students and cementing their low status in American society” (127); again
highlighting educational inequality as a continual systemic issue.
It is so depressing to know and witness these drastic levels
of educational inequality in 2017. We live in a time of consciousness, where we
have information at the tips of our fingertips. If only actual effort, at the
state and federal level, was implemented into helping these students. However,
any social movement begins with word of mouth, and information.
Ideally, the white American population needs to begin a
dialogue in regards to the continual marginalization of minorities in the
education system; acknowledging the personal accounts of these students, their
cultures and histories. As the dialogue progresses, the understanding of
educational inequality will reach policy makers, who will be in a federal
position to mend current racist and derogatory policies; resulting in the
positive enhancement of minority lives.
