This post is part of August's themed carnival of the Yahoo! Mother Board.
The beleaguered and dysfunctional Los Angeles Unified School District shared some rare good news last week: High school drop-out rates for the last year had actually gone DOWN 17% and graduation rates had gone up.
The district is still ranked near the bottom of the state (only Oakland is worse) -- but it's an improvement, and in LAUSD circles, any positive development is a reason for crowing.
Eight years ago, I was an anxious mess while trying to find a kindergarten for my daughter. We all want the best for our kids, and in the circles we traveled, that meant enrolling them in private school.
This was not an option for us, so we settled for "second best" -- a public elementary school with an accelerated program for gifted students. I didn't actually think of my child as "gifted" -- I just felt that enrolling her in a program like that would make up for the fact that we couldn't pay for a "good" education.
I've never regretted that decision. Our little neighborhood elementary school was a friendly, comfortable oasis in a big, bad impersonal city. Megan had wonderful teachers and she was happy.
But I still felt guilty that I wasn't providing her with the "best."
Back then, I would arrange play dates with her friends attending private school and we would insist they do their homework before they got to play. I would glance at the work her friends were assigned and reassure myself that it was remarkably similar (not more advanced, as I had believed it would be).
The private school kids had more resources: art and music programs, a theater, modern science labs. But our teachers did a bang-up job of making a little go a long way, and I think they helped our kids gain some insights into the world around them that they wouldn't have otherwise.
One of LAUSD's challenges is the diversity of the student population; 88 different languages are spoken by the district's 708,000 students. There were about 12 languages spoken in the homes of some of the 500 kids at our elementary school. My daughter had friends who hailed from Latin America, Asia, Europe and the good ol' USA. Classroom pot lucks were not to be missed. We all learned a lot about other cultures and places, which was priceless.
But still, I felt guilty that her education might not be the "best."
LAUSD has a magnet school program, and our community boasts a gifted magnet that is consistently ranked #1 or #2 for all the public schools in the state. I started applying for Megan to transfer there when she was in kindergarten. Admission is through a combination of a point system and a lottery; from first through third grades, a lot of her friends made the transfer. But never my daughter, even though she eventually tested and achieved the designation of "gifted."
I learned to accept our "second best" school and even grew to believe that what we had was indeed the best option for us. After all, she was thriving - she was learning - and the little gymnastics class she tried out in second grade had grown into a 20-hour a week commitment. I stopped worrying about rigorous academic standards and focused instead on her homework load.
We sailed through to fifth grade... and then my anxiety started all over again: it was time to choose a middle school.
Our elementary was located on the border between three different secondary schools. One of them is just a couple of blocks from our home, and it offers a continuation of the same program Megan had enjoyed in elementary school. But none of her close friends were going to attend our school. Once again, I went "shopping" for magnets. We ended up wait-listed for the school in her best friend's neighborhood... and at the last minute, we got in.
I've been mostly happy with her middle school experience. The only sore spot has been the district's unwillingness to make allowances for my daughter's gymnastics commitment. I tried -- in vain -- to allow her to substitute a study hall for physical education, which I felt was unnecessary on top of the 20 hours per week she trained at the gym. However, when I thought her homework load was too high, I conferenced with her teachers, and they actually listened to my concerns and made some adjustments.
So I can't complain - especially now that gymnastics is no longer a factor in my daughter's life. She's doing well. She finished 7th grade with a 3.8 average, including a B in algebra. She's one of the few in her class who will be moving on to 8th grade geometry.
But I will have a new hurdle to jump this year: Selecting a high school. And that brings us back full circle. Much of the positive trending statistics LAUSD announced this week were due to programs that will likely be cut, thanks to California's record-breaking budget deficit. Good teachers have been laid off. Class sizes will be larger. There will be fewer hours of instruction.
And once again, I will be worried that my daughter isn't receiving the kind of education that is best.
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