Our Children, Left Behind – Michael Seifert
Last spring, the
mother of an eighth grader living in a community just outside of Brownsville,
Texas, went to the offices of her daughter’s school. A tall, strong and stern
looking woman, the mother is a respectful, patient, and kind person. After
three trips to the office, the mother finally got an appointment with the
school’s guidance counselor.
During the meeting,
the mother told the counselor that she was concerned that her daughter would
not be able to get into a university upon high school graduation, and, to that
end, that she wanted to be sure that her girl would be enrolled in an Algebra
II class. “If she doesn’t take Algebra II, she can’t enroll in the university.”
According to the
mother, the guidance counselor chuckled and said, “My dear, there are only 62
seats in the Algebra II course, and those are reserved for the very special
students. You know that not all students are college material.”
Fortunately for her
daughter, this mother was a member of a “Comunitario”, a community-based,
family leadership group that leverages the collective wisdom of its members to
create change in their children’s schools. The mother, like the others in the
Comunitario, knew that her child had a right to equal treatment under the law.
Her participation in the Comunitario, however, had helped the mom to understand
that achieving equal treatment for her child would not happen magically.
Indeed, getting her daughter “college ready” would require an extraordinary
amount of effort that she was all too willing to do.
“The thing that
concerns me more than anything, more than my job, more than even my health, is
that my daughter get the best education there is,” commented the mother after
having shared her story.
Ever since its 2008
Equal Voice for America’s Families Campaign, members of the Rio Grande Valley
Equal Voice Network have continued to select education as a policy priority.
Unfortunately for our region’s school children, the State of Texas has not been
a willing partner in this effort. In 2011, Texas cut billions of dollars from
public education programs, and, then in 2013, Texas Governor Rick Perry signed
into law HB5, a mandate that exponentially cheapened high school graduation
requirements, leaving many graduates unable to enter a university. With HB5, eighth
graders (13 year olds) were expected to choose a career path, a decision that,
if uninformed, could easily cripple any chance for them to escape poverty.
School districts in
Texas have accommodated themselves in different ways to HB5. The bill’s requirement
are so complicated that whether or not a child could enroll in an Algebra II
course before graduation became the litmus test for the quality of her high
school diploma. Offering Algebra II to all students is the expensive option, as
it requires the school districts to hire the appropriate personnel. Most
districts, in the end, made nice with the new tracking system.
One school
superintendent told me that he thought it was great that the state was finally
encouraging “shop” classes. “You know, so many of these kids have no business
preparing for college. Being a welder is a great job, and brings in good
money,” he told me.
I asked him, “Well,
that may be the case, but how on earth can an 8th grader make that decision?”
“That’s the job of the
parents!” he shot back.
Equal Voice leaders,
however, were not so sure that parents were even aware of the choices that
their 8th graders were being asked to make. With the help of the Intercultural
Development Research Association (IDRA) out of San Antonio and with the deep
collaboration of RGV-EV core organizations, a survey instrument was designed to
measure just how much parents knew about the consequences of HB5. Throughout
the spring of 2015, over 1,600 parents from across the region were questioned
about HB5.
The results were
disturbing.
https://magic.piktochart.com/output/5884973-equal-voice-rgv-hb5-community-survey-infographic-english
nada en absoluto85% of
those surveyed said they had little or no knowledge about the changes in Texas’
graduation plans. 80% said that they had little or no sense of the impact of
HB5 on their children’s future. Two-thirds of the parents with children in
middle school or high school said that they did not know which track their
children were in.
The members of the
Equal Voice comunitarios reflected on the results. One question that came up,
again and again, was whether or not school officials were aware of just how far
ranging the ignorance around HB5 was. The group decided to invite school superintendents,
and local university and college officials to a regional round-table in August.
A regional collective-impact group (RGV-Focus) offered their support, and plans
were made.
03 Mesa Comunitaria
Aug 201531The meeting was successful beyond expectations. Parents shared
stories and school administrators shared frustrations. Both parents and school
district officials talked about their personal dreams for the children of the
region. At the end of the long morning, the stakeholders gathered with their peers
and drew up a set of action plans designed to address, at least to a manageable
degree, the great gap between what parents knew, and what they needed to know
with regard to the children’s education.
The bigger issue is of
course, school funding. The simple fact that there is a huge lack of school
counselors will doom many of our children to a stunted educational career,
simply because there was no one there to help them navigate this new way of
creating a future.
In the light of this
new future, there is no lack of Texans working on behalf of the children that
will be left behind. A couple of weeks ago I was invited to Austin to share
this experience with a group of researchers who were focused in on how to make
the best out of HB5. I had gone up a day earlier to meet with a young woman who
had grown up in Brownsville and was presently studying linguistics at the
University of Texas. At the end of our breakfast together, I had asked her if
there was anything that had happened recently that had caused her joy. She
smiled, and said, “Yes! My counselor told me that my linguistics coursework
could be set so that I could choose any language that I wanted. I choose Urdu!”
It is a very long way
from Brownsville to the lands where Urdu is spoken, and it is a complicated
path to negotiate. This young Texan, however, had had the advantage of someone
helping her chart that route. What I have learned from our Comunitarios, is
that some of the best navigators for children are often their
parents—especially when they know the lay of the land.
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