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Oct. 24, 2023 - Epoch Times
38:18
Why Some California Schools Have 70 Percent Failing Rates | Gloria Romero
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Time Text
In California, we have over 30 schools that are named for Dr.
King.
And if you ever check when a school is named for a civil rights icon like Dr.
King, it's a big fanfare.
They bring out, you know, the press, the elected officials stand there.
But if you look at these schools, Virtually everyone is failing in the state of California.
70% of African American students are not reading at proficiency levels.
It's higher in math.
It's about 80%.
So essentially these are failing because we are not doing anything about it.
Exactly.
And that's a choice.
We basically have a system that says we don't even want to look at it because the system has so been compromised.
My guest today is Gloria Romero, former state senator and first female senate majority leader in California's history.
She was one of the rising stars of the Democratic Party in California and has sacrificed her political career to help reform education in our state.
People knew why I fought.
And it makes me emotional because this is the way to change America.
You change our schools.
You make them better.
Is there any impact if we don't fix the education system and leave it as it is?
What most parents don't understand and most adults don't even see is it's not a public education system.
I call it it's a public works system because our education system is more designed for the adults in the system than it is for the children.
I'm Semi Korami.
Welcome to California Insider.
Gloria, it's great to have you back on.
Welcome back.
Thank you.
Good to be here.
You wrote an article for California Globe about schools that are failing, but they're getting like these names of presidents.
Can you tell us more about this?
I'm so glad you asked, because this is an article that I write every year, and I've been writing it for several years.
And part of it is to show that nothing ever changes.
Failure perpetuates itself in California schools.
But in this particular case, the article that I wrote in the California Globe, it focuses on, you know, Black History Month, we celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday.
Okay, so we have a major civil rights leader, Dr.
King, who we celebrate at the federal, the state, the local level, schools are closed, banks close, etc.
In California, we have over 30 schools that are named for Dr.
King.
And if you ever check when a school is named for a civil rights icon like Dr.
King, it's a big fanfare.
They bring out, you know, the press, the elected officials stand there.
They talk about...
Ribbon cutting, they shake hands, everything.
You know, there's cake and everything.
We are so woke.
We are so powerful.
We're honoring Dr.
King.
And they put the name of Dr.
King on the school.
If you look at California schools, we have a lot of civil rights icons.
So we have at this point over 30 schools that are named for Dr.
Martin Luther King.
But once the party's over and the press is gone and the ribbon cutting's over, you look at the schools.
And I look at them, and it is a shame.
It is an embarrassment.
And I point out to my fellow Democrats and Republicans and Independents to say, look at the schools.
This is a school that's named for a national treasure, an icon.
You would think if we put the name Martin Luther King Jr.
onto a school that we should have high expectations, that this should be something where we honor the leader.
But if you look at these schools, virtually everyone is failing in the state of California.
On average, you can find that at these schools, first of all in California, some 70% of African American students are not reading at proficiency levels.
It's higher in math.
It's about 80%.
And so you look at the schools for Dr.
King and they are way up there where you find the proficiency levels are basically beyond failure.
It's a shame.
So those are the Dr.
King schools.
But then I go on.
We have schools named for Rosa Parks, for Harriet Tubman, for Michelle Obama, and then my favorites are President Barack Obama.
We've got three schools in California named for President Obama.
It is an embarrassment.
Now think about it.
This was the President of the United States of America.
He's often been labeled the most admired man in America.
So you would think if we're going to put the name Barack Obama onto a school that, I mean, my God, have some pride.
Make sure it is a succeeding school.
Make sure that the kids are really learning.
It is shocking.
When you look at the three schools in California named for President Barack Obama, there's not one of these schools that scores over 5% proficiency in mathematics.
Wow.
So that means 95% of the kids are failing in mathematics.
So out of each class, if there's too many people in the class, there's one that can...
Yeah, and you think, but what happens then is people go home, they celebrate, oh, we have a school name for the president, but they walk away from the kids.
So they get their virtue signaling.
We have civil rights icons in California.
We named the school for Michelle and Barack Obama and Martin Luther King Jr.
And later in March, I write the same article for Cesar Chavez as a civil rights leader.
And you find failure at every stop.
So my commentary in that article that I wrote was sending a message to the governor of the state of California saying, stop bloviating about reparations.
If you really want to do something for African American families and children...
Close that achievement gap.
Start with the schools that we name for civil rights leaders.
It really should be all of the schools, because they're all in similar backgrounds.
But start with the King schools.
Start with the Obama schools.
Harriet Tubman.
I mean, Rosa Parks, the mother of the civil rights movement.
Don't leave these as failing schools.
And I write this article every year, and I've been doing it for years.
Nothing has changed.
In fact, It has changed.
It's gotten worse.
Wow.
So that's the point of the article, and I hope people go and read it, available on the California Globe website.
So I have a lot of questions for you, especially about why this happens.
But before we get into that, you have your career in education, right?
You started as a professor, and you witnessed a lot of this firsthand, right?
Absolutely.
You know, I'll start off by saying my mother was a strong influence on me.
She had a sixth grade level of education, but she always made sure that her dream was to make sure that all of the kids, there were six of us, would graduate from high school.
That was her dream.
So she would oversee us doing homework at the kitchen table while she was preparing dinner, etc.
I have very fond memories of that.
And she could read and she could write.
And she wanted to make sure we appreciated reading.
Fast forward, all of us graduated from high school.
I went on...
So six kids.
Six kids.
And she actually made sure you guys are doing your homework.
And so parent involvement, very, very important.
You always hear, oh, parents don't care.
No, that's not the truth.
Parents want to have...
A better opportunity for their children and they will see that happen for their children.
So fast forward I ended up going to graduate school.
I have a PhD.
I earned that and I became a college professor.
As a college professor I was I was teaching at Cal State Los Angeles.
This is a major urban university.
It's celebrated nationally as a Hispanic-serving institution.
And so I was teaching there, and I noticed that many of the Eastside schools, because this is in East Los Angeles, some of the most famous schools, Roosevelt, Garfield, Wilson, notice they're all named for presidents, right?
These are the pathways.
They basically come to, they cross the 10 freeway to get to Cal State L.A., And the ones that come to Cal State LA, these are the ones that have done everything right.
They've graduated.
They're going to university now.
Exactly!
They got accepted, they got their GPA, etc.
But I would find as a professor, they get into my classroom, they can't write.
And so many of them have to then be, given the policies of the CSU, the California State University system at the time, they would have to be in certain, like, you know, reparations kind of classes, remedy classes to basically get their grades up.
And so in the meantime, they're using their financial aid to stay in college to basically do remedial work that doesn't count towards college graduation.
A lot of them would drop out.
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Now let's go back to the interview.
So when you say they can't write, you mean like the basics?
Like is it what kind of level?
It was horrendous.
I was shocked, because I would see it.
And then you have sympathy for the student, but I thought, I don't believe in social promotion.
So I flunked people.
I oftentimes saw this with the basketball players, you know, who would make money for the school.
And oftentimes their coaches and their counselors would come in saying, Professor Romero, we need this student, you know, blah, blah, blah.
And I knew what they were saying, basically.
Move them along so they can play basketball.
And I would say, okay, I want them to, but we need to work together to make sure they can read and they can write because it is not doing them a service to move them forward.
Just because they're playing basketball for the university and they make money.
So I would see this everywhere.
But literally, you can't do a composition.
You can't basically write.
And writing is critical to any type of collegiate success and later in life as well.
You have to learn to write.
I taught psychology.
I was teaching psychology, many of the courses I sometimes taught in other departments, but I would see this, and I taught the lower division, the entry students, as well as the upper divisions and masters level students as well.
So you could see the whole picture.
Absolutely.
And so the money would, you mentioned the money would run out, and then what would happen?
Oftentimes then the kids, I call them the kids, the students would basically drop out because none of it was applied towards education.
We oftentimes think that college education, to earn a bachelor's degree should maybe four years.
Nothing like it.
Look at some of the statistics in the Cal State system.
You'll find maybe it's running seven years.
Some of it is because of part-time.
They go to college part-time.
They have to work.
But so much of it as well is because of the Failure to advance, to move forward because of having to do the remedial education to just catch up.
And mind you, these were the students that did everything right.
They were often shocked.
You get to the university and they're failing, they're getting F's, but they've been socially promoted.
So that was a backdrop for me to really take a look at it.
By the time you get to the college system, I knew there's a problem In the pipeline, what's happening here?
So you have to start looking at what's happening from the schools that they come to.
And so I started taking this on.
Eventually I ran for the California State Legislature.
Was this the main reason you ran?
Education.
I became known as the Dr.
Romero, the university professor, and really emphasized education is the pathway to the American dream.
And so the voters in the district, it was the 24th Senate District, they really gravitated.
Is that what it did for you?
Because you got your PhD and Yes, yes, very much so because parents want to have their children succeed in life.
They want access to a college education.
Parents, like my mother did, they understood that for their children to succeed, you have to have a pathway and education is the key.
But what most parents don't understand and most adults don't even see is you have the schools that are failing.
It's a system that fails the children and there's many reasons for that.
But once I got into the California State Legislature, I started running bills, I started proposing legislation, I started holding hearings, really looking at the data that most parents will never see that would come from the California Department of Education that would clearly show that the students were underperforming.
I'd say no, they're not underperforming, they're Failing in this system.
But it would just keep going on and on, repeating the cycle.
Parents didn't know.
Districts wouldn't change.
You have basically the incentive for a district to be quiet because they felt it was shameful to them if they got identified We're good to go.
I'm a Democrat.
In fact, I became the first woman to actually achieve the role of the majority leader of the California State Senate, which is basically the number two in the California State Senate.
And so I was there.
I was running it.
But as a Democrat from East Los Angeles, seeing all of this, I was simultaneously running I was running the hearings on education, working in education, but I also had the prison committee.
Nobody wanted to touch the prison, so I had the prison committee.
That means I've been in virtually every prison in California, for nothing that I've done, but I've been virtually in every prison.
And what I soon saw was the high Percentages of inmates without a high school diploma.
And so you look at it, and I believe in personal responsibility, but if we don't educate, we incarcerate.
And so I would see that, and I oftentimes would talk to many of the inmates, and they would talk about their lack of education and the need to have done, to make better choices as they went forward.
So that's why I very much supported a correctional approach in prison, as well as again to its punishment, but its corrections.
So I saw this and I started then really flourishing writing at school choice, looking at the need to end that school to prison pipeline that's so important.
But I got pushback.
The number one resistance was the teachers representatives, the California Teachers Union, which is the number one most powerful political force in Sacramento.
They have a political war chest because they collect mandatory union dues from their members.
And so they have a huge war chest.
And no other political entity, tobacco, oil, pharma, the big pharmacy, we always say, oh, those are the bad ones.
Yeah, we think that the big corporations are playing the lobbyists in there.
They're nothing compared to the Teachers Association.
And so, the Teachers Union collects this and they will use it to back the candidates as long as you tow the party line.
Basically, no change, no reform.
Teacher contracts, teacher tenure.
How dare me?
This senator from East LA pointing out that we should give kids an opportunity and if the schools are failing, the kids have a right, I believe, to go somewhere else.
So I'm a Democrat that believes in, yeah, you fix your local schools, but how long do you wait?
How did that opposition come to you?
Was there a moment where you kind of realized that these people are trying to stop you from doing what you need to do?
Well, I think I always saw it, but I never thought I would become a senator.
I don't need a title to be who I am.
I understand the power of education, what it did in my life, the changes it made.
I grew up at the end of a dead-end road in the middle of the desert.
You know, my high school counselor had told me college was not for me.
Basically, I would become the perfect secretary.
And I did type my own dissertation, by the way.
So there were no expectations for me to go anywhere.
I was just this Mexican-American kid from the middle of the desert with a Mother who had a sixth grade level of education and a father who worked the railroads.
I mean, there was real classism in those days.
And I think it still continues.
But I was written off, you know, a working class kid.
And so I always felt like this is the right thing to do.
And so I took on the teachers' union.
I was not afraid of them.
I thought it valued me.
It worked for me.
I want all these other kids coming from not only the Eastside schools, but you could go up and down the state of California and you find the same statistics.
So I believe in education.
And I thought, you know, I could either be quiet and I will get politically promoted by the unions because, you know, I have a good profile and I would stand and do their...
What so many Democratic elected officials do.
Because you're a Latina woman.
Exactly.
And that's what sadly so many elected officials do.
They go along to get along, to get basically politically promoted and not take down any of the powers that be.
I just said, look, you know what?
I'm going to do the right thing.
I want to be able to...
Have a clear conscience.
At the end of the day, to go to bed knowing I'm fighting for what I think is the right thing for kids.
To put kids first.
I believe in parent choice.
I believe in opportunity.
And I believe in our public schools.
But if they're failing, you know what?
Then those kids, they have a right to go somewhere else.
Anywhere that works for that family and those children to close the gaps and move them forward in a way in which they can succeed.
Because those numbers are horrible.
How did you become the majority lead at that point?
Were they kind of letting you get there, or did you kind of surprise them by getting to that position?
Well, I think people already knew my politics at that point.
They knew my fight on education.
I was also dealing with the prison guards union as well, which is also very powerful.
Because if you're really going to make a change in education in prisons, You have to take on status quo interest.
There's just no other way around it.
Otherwise, it just keeps going and going and going.
It's a runaway escalator in failure.
So people knew, but I worked very closely with the new president, the pro tem.
We had a reform agenda.
And education was a big part of it.
So we kind of came as a team and both of us were elected.
So my colleagues did respect that because they knew the work that I was doing.
They knew the authenticity.
But people would get afraid about saying, well, I don't want to take on the teachers union.
And the only way I got some of the reforms through was there was not a one-party state at that time.
Remember, that's when Arnold Schwarzenegger had already won the governorship.
So I knew strategically there's a pathway to get parent choice, school choice, school reform legislation to the governor's desk, work across the aisle, People knew that I did that.
I worked with the Republican caucus.
Then Senator Bob Huff was the minority leader in California.
We worked on so many issues together on education reform.
Find a handful of brave Democrats who would say, I'm willing to stand up for these kids that are locked out in East L.A. and South Central especially.
And to get a coalition of votes, the bare minimum, and that's always what I got, to at least get it through both houses to the governor's desk where a Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was willing to sign.
If there had been a Democratic governor, I don't think, quite frankly...
These bills would have been signed.
The Parent Trigger Law.
The Romero Open Enrollment Act.
All of these pieces of legislation that really give parents rights.
And sadly today most parents don't even know about the laws on the book because The Department of Education hardly ever promotes them.
And when the parents have tried to use some of these laws, like the Parent Trigger Act, you get this avalanche of opposition from the districts, the unions, to try to basically silence the parents.
And scared the parents and at times even having threatened to deport some parents for daring to sign a petition to say, we want a change in this failing school to transform it to a charter school or to retain new staff management.
It really has become a very, you know, a strong resistance to using some of the laws that I wrote.
But the thing that is shocking to me, you know, you mentioned you had a handful of brave Democrats that were willing to stand up for the kids in East L.A. But isn't this the value of Democrats that they want to help the low-income communities and this is the message that they're sending us?
Are they kind of Are they controlled in a sense?
Is that the right way or are they under a lot of pressure that they can't do what they want to do because there's this big special interest telling them what to do?
Well, I think what you've hit on is what's happened to, in my opinion, the Democratic Party today.
You know, I'm still a Democrat, but I don't recognize this Democratic Party any longer.
It's gone full woke.
We talk about, we virtue signal.
It's become very much a party that has abandoned working class issues.
We say the names like, you know, Viva Cesar Chavez, and we have those ribbon cuttings for the Barack Obama schools and the Martin Luther King schools, and then we walk away and we let them fail, but we can check it off.
So it's become a party of coastal elites, of identity politics, because we don't want to look to see what's happening.
People know what's happening.
We know that these inner city schools and suburban schools, really schools in California, are failing.
They're struggling.
Because of the dominance of the teachers' unions and special interests that put the interests of the adults first.
And so many of the legislators then and Democrats today, we oppose these.
President Biden, again, to take a look at...
Some of the rules that are coming out from the Department of Education today, they are more so trying to stifle the growth of charter schools rather than to facilitate them.
The Mayor of New York also too, not really assisting some of the highest quality charter schools that are serving especially African-American youth in the Bronx and other places.
Because it's going up against the New York Teachers Union.
Here in California, Gavin Newsom, have you seen him stand up for charter schools?
No.
When Kamala Harris was the Attorney General for California, basically she sided with the Teachers Union in opposition to...
Students stepping forward, remember that was the Vergara lawsuit that challenged the state on basically the distribution and quality of teachers in California.
And Kamala Harris was right there standing side by side with the teachers union to defeat Kids in high school bringing about a real legitimate fight to transform California education.
But she did that because, quite frankly, she wouldn't have been politically promoted if she had gone up against the teachers union.
So you see all of this, and it really does take a few strong people to say, I know I am risking my political career, but it's the right thing to do.
And we need more of that.
And that's the part where if we could get that to change, so much of California would change.
But under a one-party rule state, it is so hard to do.
And under the power of a very powerful, dominating special interest with all the money in the world to take people out, It's frightening for people.
And so you have to have a few sacrificial lambs like me to say, I'll be a canary in the mine, but we should do this on behalf of children because we're never going to make a change.
So what's going to be the impact if there's no fix of the education system?
If the status quo, what does it mean for average Californians?
Well, imagine if you couldn't read.
Imagine if you couldn't write.
And I don't care what kind of a job you take today, you need to be able to read.
You need to be able to communicate.
You need to be able to write.
So whatever job you seek, you need skills.
So you start looking at the Barack Obama School where only 5% are at proficiency in mathematics.
How do you calculate?
How do you compute?
How do you add up numbers and figure out solutions?
So what does it mean?
You are going to be relegated to this underclass In the labor force, how do you aspire to become a doctor or an architect or really move up into the middle class and beyond?
But it really means lost livelihoods, lost dreams, lost hope, and a perpetuation of an underclass that's relegated to work basically the lowest positions to maybe turn to drugs, to turn to something, illicit behavior, gang membership, because the education arena has really been locked out for them.
Now, for you, this must be very challenging, right?
You've been really passionate about this, to go through all this.
How does it feel?
Well, it feels like you're on that treadmill, and it doesn't ever change, and you feel like, okay, we've got to go faster, and it's going uphill now, and you're breathing heavy.
But you know that you have to do it, because if California is ever to change, you've got to reform the schools.
You've got to start with education.
Education consumes almost half of the entire California state budget.
Think about the billions of dollars that go into a system that's not a public education system.
I call it, it's a public works system because our education system is more designed for the adults in the system Is it because the unions are looking out for their members?
That's good.
That's great.
They should do that.
But they're not going to succeed either if the schools fail.
And more and more, that's where we're beginning to find a bit of apparent revolt.
The drawing away.
The popularity of charter schools.
If districts would commit themselves and work in partnership with their teachers' unions to say, You know, let's just admit it.
We haven't done well here, especially with very marginalized groups.
Let's do better.
Let's have the courage to bring about testing, to show us where children are, and to begin to close those gaps that are manifested by the scores that come out in testing, to evaluate teachers.
Do you know that teachers in California, this oftentimes surprises parents, Teachers in California will get a job for life, tenure, based essentially on 18 months of teaching.
Exactly.
Wow.
It's really two years, but in order, you have to have certain regulations.
So if you do it 18 months, then you're good?
The district has to notify you that you now have tenure.
And so basically you show up and you can just breathe.
Now, on paper, you can fire a teacher even when they have tenure.
In reality, go to most school districts, they run what they call the rubber room, and basically they put teachers there who have a problem, maybe they've assaulted somebody, they sit there, they're paid, and the district It takes like thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars and several years to basically eventually fire them.
Oftentimes they just go back into the classroom or they get moved around to a different location.
The Dance of the Lemons, we oftentimes call that.
And so you find that.
But check this out too.
You have K through 12 teachers who get tenure, two years on the books.
College professor.
Seven years for a college professor.
I have tenure.
It was a brutal process.
The first time that I went up for tenure, I was denied.
But you know what?
You go back and you try again.
I got it on the second round.
But seven years.
So you look at it.
And the college system of tenure, it's very difficult in terms of your community service.
Your research, your teaching proficiency.
I mean, there's a lot of factors there.
In education, it's basically, you know, 18 months.
How do you evaluate a teacher?
How do you see them grow?
And so even that you look at, if we can do it in higher education where it's seven years, why can't we at the K-12 level, even if we don't get to seven years, maybe three years at least, or maybe four years, Of success, where you can take a look at what are the student metrics?
Where are their proficiency levels?
Are you closing the gaps?
There's some KPI. Exactly.
We don't have that.
I tried introducing legislation on that.
There they were, fighting it.
We still do not have something like that in California.
So how was it, how did you get through this when you were in the legislature and you have your own party members come after you, or the unions come after you, how did you get through this?
Well, I'm not in public office anymore, so how did I get to after you get...
So you had a choice to get elected, you had a choice to stay, kind of go with the flow, get re-elected, have a really high political position, or kind of fight the system.
And die on the cross, basically.
When I ran for Superintendent of Public Instruction many years ago, the Teachers Union put together millions of dollars to defeat me and to basically have the whole campaign, etc.
But it was a choice that I made, and I don't regret it, because I thought this is the right thing to do.
I wish, though, that we could get elected officials who will stand up and do the right thing.
And little by little, people are at least coming out of the shell and supporting charter schools.
They won't support opportunity scholarships at this point.
No way.
We have to have it.
The change has got to come from the bottom.
The change has got to come from a broad parents' rights movement that we've seen across the country.
And even in California, in some areas, you see parents stepping up once they begin to learn And see the documentation of the academic proficiency or lack of proficiency of their children.
So how do I feel?
Like I said, honestly, I never believed I would become a senator.
And I'm proud of that.
But I'm proud of how I used my time.
And that makes more of a difference to me.
I made a difference.
I fought for kids.
I wrote laws that mattered.
And in office or out of office, I still get called senator because you always get to keep your title, although it's former senator, but you know what?
I think I commanded the respect Because people knew why I fought.
And it makes me emotional because I want more people to feel that.
This is the way to change America.
You change our schools.
You make them better.
You know, we have a state here.
We have probably really good leaders in this state.
This is a very innovative state and people that go into politics.
We probably have some really good people sitting in the legislature right now.
What do you tell them?
Do the right thing.
Come with me.
Let's go visit some of the schools that I see and that are in their districts too.
But come with me.
Let's look at the numbers.
Let's have the courage to talk to parents.
Let's walk a mile in their shoes and see what their opportunities are.
And then let's do the right thing to bring about the choice.
All we're asking for is, you know, it's not even a mandate.
We're asking for a choice.
Give parents who are trapped by five numbers zip code, because that's how they get allocated to a school.
And even when that school is failing, They're still stuck there because it's very difficult to get out.
It's like Hotel California in the education system.
Once you get in, you can't get out.
It's like, that's your zip code.
And so I invite them, come with me.
Let's go look at them.
Let's go to the Barack Obama school.
Let's go to Michelle Obama school.
Let's go to Harriet Tubman school.
Let's go to all of the Martin Luther King Jr.
schools and the Cesar Chavez schools and the Frederick Douglass schools and all the heroes.
That we admire in this country.
Let's go to schools named for presidents.
Jefferson and Roosevelt and Wilson and Kennedy.
And we're going to find the same situation.
And none of us should be proud.
And I do believe they want to do the right thing.
So let's hold hands and have the courage to make that change.
Because if we don't do it, we are abandoning mostly black and brown Poverty children to basically a future without education and all of the opportunities that that key unlocks.
It's the American dream we're fighting for.
And so I invite them, come with me, you know, and let's look.
And once we do, once you look at it, how do you then go back and just pretend that everything's okay?
You know, the kids are not okay.
The union knows this, and they know that they can maintain hegemony by basically fearing, you know, causing fear.
But what if we all stood up together so that we support each other?
And in supporting children, we're turning around the golden state so that it is a more vibrant state.
So, you know, if you don't want to do it for the kids, do it for the state to have lower crime, stronger employment records, better opportunities, but really, ultimately, It is about the opportunity that we claim we stand for.
We're supposed to be the party of the working class.
This Democratic Party, sadly, has sold out.
And I would start with schools as the number one exhibit where we've sold out the American Dream in exchange for powerful interests and campaign coffers to perpetuate political careers.
Gloria Romero, former state senator and majority leader, it was great to have you on California Insider.
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