VantagePoint: A fight for schools is a fight for the future
By:
CSBA President Frank Pugh
Published: March 1, 2010
“I been down so long, seems like up to me.” —Furry Lewis
Furry Lewis was a blues guitarist from Tennessee, but given the above quote, one could be forgiven for thinking that he was a school board member from California.
You don’t need me to tell you that these are not easy times for governance teams in the Golden State. All anyone needs to do to see how bad things have gotten is to take a quick look at the newspaper articles posted every day on CSBA’s Web site. There, you’ll see headlines like the following:
Yes, things are awful. But now is not the time to start feeling sorry for ourselves.
Rather, now is the time to show the leaders, the citizens and most importantly the children of this state exactly what we’re made of. We need, as a group, to push ourselves out of our comfort zones, and fight for the public schools as if the future of this state depended on it. Because there is no question in my mind that it does.
Where to start? Well, for one thing, we need to start speaking up for ourselves. We need to start publicly asking the question: What is it going to take for California to start having an honest and realistic conversation about the needs of its public schools? Because from what I’ve seen and heard in the meetings I’ve had as CSBA president, no one—aside from us, that is—is having that conversation. Those precious few who are trying to help us out are doing little more than tinkering around the margins. And there’s a fair number of people who think that this is all our fault, or who at least are comfortable allowing us to take the blame.
Think about the board meetings you’ve had lately, the ones where you’ve been forced to make painful and heartbreaking decisions along the lines of whether a school’s band program is more important than its spring sports. Think of the parents and the kids who have stood before you to plead their case. When you made that decision, who were those parents and kids mad at? They’re not mad at the folks tinkering around the margins in Sacramento, that’s for sure. They’re mad at you.
So what we need to do is channel that anger and direct it toward the people who most deserve it. We need to correct our elected leaders when they say something that’s wrong. When candidates for governor proudly proclaim their goal to “fix education,” we need to question whether they know what they’re talking about. And if we’re not comfortable enough with our knowledge of the facts to do that, we need to hunker down and get comfortable with those facts.
Basically, what I am trying to say here is that we need to quit taking all this … stuff our lawmakers are throwing at us—and just say heck no! (I’d put that in stronger terms, but I think you know what I really mean.)
Speaking up won’t be easy. And who knows, it may actually cost some of us our jobs. But that’s what we were elected to do.