How Much Does California Hate Its Black & Brown Students? Ask Its State Legislature
A bill snaking its way through the California Assembly raises more alarms about policymakers' lack of commitment to Black and Latino K-12 student progress
Publisher’s Riff
On its face, the recently introduced AB 1316 seems innocent and necessary. For most, it's invisible: it's another of many ghost-like Assembly Bills passing through the California state legislature, gone unnoticed for the most part. But, what makes this particular bill stand out is how it unleashes a virtually inexplicable direct attack on Black and Brown children and their families - and for, simply, wanting an alternative K-12 education environment and model that's not so focused on systematically brutalizing them.
Instead, AB 1316 continues to fully weaponize the war waged on Black and Latino education aspirations and outcomes by seeking to obliterate charter school institutions that have, in recent years, shown promise. The catalyst for the bill is based on one highly visible and egregious charter school scandal already prosecuted and being resolved by local San Diego courts. California legislators then pursued AB 1316 as an "accountability" law. However, elements of the law severely restrict further charter school growth. Which is strange to single out charters like that considering a Stanford University study released in February revealed that …
… at current rates (as measured through 2018) the Black-White academic achievement gap in San Diego Unified would double by 2026. In Long Beach Unified it would double by 2031, and in Los Angeles Unified it would take much longer, until 2094.
That’s way more destructive, criminal and costly in terms of lost learning, lost economic productivity and mounting social costs, so why not introduce an accountability bill in response to the waste and equity lapses committed by those schools?
The push for AB 1316 comes at a very sensitive and highly inconvenient time for the state’s Black students disproportionately trapped in vicious cycles between a pandemic that’s only exacerbated the dysfunctional school system they were already trapped in. They find themselves at the bottom of all academic performance indicators, yet have discovered publicly-funded non-profit schools as a haven for reversing those trends. As a result, Black enrollment in those schools has gone up because they understand this is the most immediately viable option for acadmic recovery …
While accountability is essential, that scandal involves just one charter school out of over 1,300 statewide - yet, AB 1316 seeks to meticulously dismantle them all. That now becomes an existential threat to nearly 13 percent of the entire California K-12 student population (more than 791,000 young people) relying on charter schools, pushing them deeper into decades of achievement gaps, bad curriculum, underperforming teachers and a lifetime of either incarceration or lack of social mobility.
Nearly 500,000 of those charter school students - or 63 percent of the entire charter school population - consists of Black and Latino students. With the original author of AB 1316 being the (White male) Chair of the California General Assembly's Education Committee Patrick O’Donnell (D-Long Beach), it's difficult to assess this latest legislative effort as anything but a rather misguided and ill-informed attempt at diminishing Black and Brown student performance.
As opposed to pushing legislation that can 1) prevent future regulatory lapses while simultaneously 2) encouraging or preserving the future academic success of Black and Brown students, California legislators are obsessed with pulling the rug of support from underneath them. Ultimately, it completely rejects the data: We're actually seeing firm evidence of Black and Brown progress in California's charter schools, with those students performing better than their counterparts in California public schools. This is in terms of academic performance, reduced suspensions and college readiness as data samples show from 2017 to 2020 for Black students …
We see similar patterns of progress for Latino students, as well …
These are public schools, too. Again: It's not like California lawmakers are penalizing the state's traditional public school systems for years of abusive, systemically inequitable, underperforming educational systems that have opened up some of the country's largest school-to-prison pipelines. This would then be an opportunity to re-imagine the state’s outdated education models in favor of new best practice models that offer a more personalized and trauma-informed approach. Instead, they've chosen to penalize an entire publicly-funded ecosystem of schools that are not only showing clear evidence of progress, but are also reducing high suspension rates among Black and Brown students. How much do California lawmakers hate Black and Brown K-12 students? How much do they not want them to succeed? The answer to these questions rests with whether or not AB 1316 passes.