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Why Not MORE Charters?

“Why 20 new charter schools in Santa Clara County? A better question: Why not more?”
Opinion
by Julia Hover-Smoot and Craig Mann
Mecury News
December 10, 2011

“You see things, and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were, and I say, ‘Why not?’ ” — Robert Kennedy

There are at least 40,000 students performing below grade level in Santa Clara County, as well as 97 elementary schools that are underperforming. Of these schools, 52 are scoring 100 API points below California’s mark for proficiency, leaving students at least two years behind their grade level.

The city of San Jose and the Santa Clara County Office of Education together declared that we would eliminate this achievement gap by 2020, launching the SJ2020 initiative two years ago.

To quote SJ2020: “Do we stand by as 40,000 students fail to succeed in our schools and in our community, or do we declare that we will no longer stand for this and will instead work to fix the problem? There can be only one choice: We must focus our efforts on eliminating the achievement gap.”

We are capable of closing this achievement gap, with the partnership of successful and scalable charter systems like Rocketship Education, one of the most successful public charter school systems in our county and the nation.

To that end, not willing to stand by idly, this past summer parents and teachers petitioned the Santa Clara County Board of Education for 20 additional Rocketship countywide-benefit charter schools. The board will vote on these petitions Wednesday.

Rocketship has dedicated itself and its schools to audacious academic goals, holding itself accountable if high academic standards are not met. We need this type of courage and leadership if we are going to realize the goals of SJ2020. Yet, in response, some have asked, “Why 20 schools? Why now?”

None of the 40,000 families suffering under this achievement gap is crying out these questions.

During the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King Jr. declared in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail: “One of the basic points in your statement is that our acts are untimely. Some have asked, ‘Why didn’t you give the new administration time to act?’ ” More time to act is the constant cry of those in power who continue to sustain systems of inequity. Change is never convenient. Nor is justice.

As Dr. King so eloquently declared, “History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals. We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

We cannot afford to wait as the children of Santa Clara County, tens of thousands of children, continue to be left behind. The hopes and dreams of future generations must not be dashed under the rhetoric of adults invested in sustaining underperforming schools due to their own discomfort with change. However painful this may be for the existing system, our children cannot wait another generation for a college preparatory education. We must push organizations like Rocketship and all of our school districts to help more and help now.

The issue at hand is the urgency of “now.” The question is not, “Why 20 schools and why now?” but instead, “Why not 97 schools and why not right now? Today.”