Joe Guzzardi
August 3, 2003

To no ones surprise, nearly 70% of the California schools tested were able to meet the performance standards required by the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act.

The results were even more dismal in the six-county San Joaquin Valley were 80% had scores below minimum. Up and down the valley, the performance was poor or worse: Tulare County, 17.4 percent met minimum requirements, Merced County; 6 %, Kings County; 12.2 % and Fresno County, something of a star, 21.8%.

The scores from tests taken in 2002 were released last week in California’s Adequate Yearly Progress report.

According to the No Child Left Behind legislation heavily promoted by President George W. Bush, public school students must be 100% proficient in language and math by 2014. A new A.Y.P. report using scores from tests taken in 2003 will be released in mid-August.

Each school must continue to show steady progress. The pressure will be particularly intense on Title I schools. If those schools, which are located in high poverty districts and receive federal funding to help low-performing students, remain substandard, teachers and principals could lose their jobs.  Though every school must improve, only Title I campuses could face stiff corrective action, such as replacing school leaders or hiring an outside agency to oversee the campus.

Of the 8,000 schools in the state, about half are designated Title I.

Local educators know what causes the problem although they speak about it only in hushed words

Over-immigration is at the heart of the problem. But the solution is out of the hands of school administrators.

In an interview with the Fresno Bee, Pete Mehas, Fresno County schools Superintendent, said the scores in Fresno reflect the statewide standards.

Mehas said that the performance is low because the student body of schools in the San Joaquin Valley is made up of poor families where English is a second language.

Of course, teachers and school administrators must put up a strong front. “We can do it,” is the common mantra. But with the borders wide-open and more and more non-English speaking students arriving every day, it is hard to imagine how 100% proficiency can ever be attained.

That brings me to the unavoidable and obvious question: Can’t we help the desperately needy kids who are already here before we take in more?

Overcrowded classrooms are not conducive to good education. And the overcrowding is directly attributable to high immigration. According to the U.S Department of Education and the U.S. Bureau of the Census:

• School enrollment has increased over the past decade exclusively because of school-age immigrants and the children of immigrants. Without that factor, school enrollment in the U.S would be flat or slightly declining.
• Of current enrollment, 25% of children were born outside the U.S. One in five has a foreign-born parent.
• Over the next 50 years, immigration will account for 96% of the future increase of the school-age population over the next 50 years.

 “All of this means a lot of scrambling by communities to come up with more schools, teachers and the services that our needed.”

Here are some other grim facts. The California State Department of Education calculates that 16 new classrooms will need to be built every day, seven days a week for the next five years. And that is just to catch up! Remember that California’s education needs grow every day.

Not only will California need the physical plant but more than 300,000 new teachers will have to be hired within the decade. 

How much can California be expected to do? And why should we be expected to take on the education burdens of the entire world.

The time has come to put American needs first.