Schooled

In honor of our Education Today issue, behold the things I learned in public school: how to get in a straight line; how to shut my mouth; how to sort-of-learn in 50-minute increments then switch to another topic; how to raise my hand; how to retain and regurgitate information on a short-term basis. Ta-da! Conformed and assimilated.

Is it any wonder that so many think so poorly of public education? Public education is an enormous undertaking and requires various sprawling and overlapping bureaucracies, not to mention a lot of money to teach and test students. Systems this large naturally fall into one-size-fits-all-isms. We can talk all day about how we understand different kids learn in different ways and require different teaching methods, but when the eraser meets the white board, most teachers must teach 30 kids the same way.

So when you hear about school programs that are working hard to be the caulk in the cracks that some students fall through, it warms the heart. Teachers really do care despite their workload and shitty pay. But when you also hear about how the system these programs operate in doesn’t know how to effectively assess their efficacy, the heart grows cold again. Wah.

Such is the case for students enrolled in SLO Juvenile Court School and Loma Vista Community School who are required to take the same Smarter Balanced assessment test required of all California students. It’s simply not fair to assess the kids in these kinds of programs with this standardized test. These aren’t standard kids.

“Our students come from situations of high levels of trauma, high rates of poverty, multiple years of school failure and not attending school,” county Director of Alternative Education Chris Balogh said.

Of course they’re going to test poorly, and poor performance has funding consequences for the county Office of Education. Talk about counterintuitive! If a program is struggling to educate its students, stripping it of funding isn’t going to improve the situation.

Money always seems to be a point of contention in public education, especially for programs like One Cool Earth, a SLO County nonprofit that builds and sustains outdoor learning environments in more than half of our schools to teach kids about agriculture, nutrition, and nature-focused education. This important and inspiring programing is at risk as federal funding from an American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 grant is set to expire, leaving an $80,000 a year shortfall.

Don’t hold your breath that the federal government is going to step up to help this program: tRump signed an Executive Order to close the Department of Education. Anyway, learning to grow your own food and eat healthy is way too woke, amirite?

Speaking of woke, the Paso Robles Joint Unified School District (PRJUSD) and the Diversity Coalition of San Luis Obispo are really asking for it from tRump. They’re trying to teach kids empathy. Empathy! So. Not. MAGA.

According to Paso’s District Superintendent Jennifer Loftus, kids as young as second graders were increasingly using the “N-word.”

“Our students and our parent community have expressed over the last couple of years a great deal of distress about how casually that word is used in our school environment, and so we took a stance in the last school year that that kind of language is not appropriate at school,” Loftus said.

Is it appropriate anywhere?

“A key indicator of empathy is you understand that how you act, how you treat others, has an impact on them. That you can empathize with how they’re feeling,” Loftus added. “We just have to remind ourselves and remind our students that our words have power, right?”

This type of diversity training is exactly what tRump is trying to get rid of in his quest to Make America Hate Again, so be careful, Paso. You wouldn’t want to want to raise the Orange Fascist’s ire.

Speaking of standing up to fascism, Biden-appointed Federal Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong ruled in lieu of a pending lawsuit that ICE must stop “indiscriminate arrests based on race alone” because she believes the plaintiffs will prevail in proving ICE is acting “without reasonable suspicion and denying access to lawyers.”

But don’t worry, SLO County District Attorney Dan Dow knows better. He cemented his reputation as a right-wing partisan when he spoke to Martha MacCallum on the Fox show The Story.

Know-it-all Dow told MacCallum, “I think the plaintiffs in this lawsuit have an uphill battle. They have to prove that the decision of the law enforcement officer was based solely on race, and I think that there’s no way that can be proven unless an officer would admit that.”

It’s almost like Dow doesn’t care if ICE agents base arrest and detention on race alone, as long as they don’t admit it.

And unlike education, the federal government is all too happy to fund law enforcement. The SLO County Board of Supervisors just unanimously approved accepting a $316,482 grant for the Sheriff’s Office, which some local residents argued might open the door to local law enforcement aiding ICE.

Don’t fret! Conservative 1st District Supervisor John Peschong says there’s nothing to worry about: “I do trust our District Attorney Dan Dow; I do trust our Sheriff Ian Parkinson.”

See? Everything’s going to be fine. Just fine. Δ

The Shredder is not fine. Assuage its fears at shredder@newtimesslo.com.

This article appears in Education Today 2025.