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The Report Card on the Schools that Gets No Media Attention
When the American Society of Civil Engineers released its 2001 Report Card for America's Infrastructure, school buildings received the lowest mark, a D-. ASCE president Robert W. Bein, a civil engineer, noted, "When you've got...kids in Kansas City attending class in a former boys' restroom, something is desperately wrong."
Nationwide, more than 60 percent of schools need major repair of roofs, exterior walls, window, plumbing, and lighting. Our schools are in worse shape than our bridges, our transit systems, our hazardous waste disposal. Funny, isn't it, that the crumbling concrete we wouldn't stand for in a highway seems okay in a school? Not surprising, the largest number of schools reporting deficient conditions are in center cities serving 50 percent minority students or 70 percent poor students. Affluent suburban districts would not stand for the conditions that poor urban and rural populations have to put up with. Parents whose children go to Camarillo High School in the Oxnard Union High School District in California are up in arms. Their school has bathrooms without doors on some stalls, rusty lockers, and a leaky roof. In the same district, the new $60 million state-of-the-art Pacific High School has a $30,000 weight room and a gymnasium large enough to hold three full-court basketball games simultaneously.
California ranks 43rd in the nation on spending on public education; it ranks first on spending for prisons. San Francisco Chronicle staff writers Nanette Asimov and Lance Williams wrote searing articles about how for 24 days in the summer of 2001, high-priced attorneys grilled 13 witnesses, whose ages ranged from 8 to 17, "trying to topple their testimony that California students don't have enough textbooks and that many classrooms are vermin-infested, overcrowded, and with temperature either sweltering or freezing." Up to September 2001, the case had cost California taxpayers $2.5 million and it hadn't even gone to trial. The class-action lawsuit, filed by children and parents across the state, asks the state to set minimum standards for "basic educational necessities. . . The state's attorneys tried to prove that the problems weren't so bad, asking 17-year-old Alondra Jones, "Did the mouse droppings you saw on the floor affect your ability to learn U. S. history at all?" The law firm's attorneys charge $325 an hour to ask these questions and to browbeat children into crying. . .
In 1998, of the $17 billion spent nationally on school construction, the federal government contributed just 2.5 percent. It allocated $218 billion to address the needs of crumbling highways and bridges. But why quibble over whether freeways are more important than schools? By the estimate of the American Society of Civil Engineers 2001 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, the total investment needed to repair America’s infrastructure—the whole tamale—is $1.3 trillion. That would fix road, bridges, transit, aviation, drinkwater, wastewater, dams, solid waste, hazardous, waste, navigable waterways, energy, and have enough money left over for the schools.
Heads up! The tax-cut package approved by Congress in the spring of 2001 was $1.3 trillion. It is a staggering number. For the price of a tax boondoggle that rewarded the rich, gave a bare nod to the middle-class, and excluded the working class, we could have rebuilt America’s infrastructure, improving the lives of every American. Decades ago, famed U. S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis warned, “We can have democracy in this country or great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
from Chapter 4 "One Shoe in the Chicken Coop,"
in What Happened to Recess and Why Are Our Children Struggling in Kindergarten (2002) by Susan Ohanian.
If you want to read a chapter that includes information on how the standards for protecting chimps and maggots in Hollywood movies are higher than those protecting kindergartners and how Paul Vallas took a page from a National Guard training manual to restructure Chicago schools, you can read the book's opening chapter (for free) on Amazon.com. Vallas' insight on the standards teachers and children need gives the chapter its title: "Training the
National Guard Way."
— Susan Ohanian
What Happened to Recess and Why Are Our Children Struggling in Kindergarten?
2002
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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