Dear Editor, The recent threat to cancel the Morgan Hill Charter
School is a searing condemnation of the Morgan Hill School Board of
Trustees and the California Teacher’s Union. The students are
achieving higher scores than those who attend CTA controlled
schools. The perceived problem? Not enough diversity.
Dear Editor,
The recent threat to cancel the Morgan Hill Charter School is a searing condemnation of the Morgan Hill School Board of Trustees and the California Teacher’s Union. The students are achieving higher scores than those who attend CTA controlled schools. The perceived problem? Not enough diversity.
The Morgan Hill School Board has systematically harassed and hampered the dedicated teachers who created this bastion of learning. They used every possible excuse to prevent the Charter School from starting, by forcing the Charter School staff to jump through seemingly endless bureaucratic hoops. After all this harassment, the School Board was forced to approve the Charter School so assigned them to an abandoned storefront on Dunne Avenue and Monterey.
After 3 years, the Charter School was suddenly moved 11 miles out to the abandoned school at Bailey Avenue on County property. Do you suppose that this might have been because the Charter School Students outperformed the shoddy performance of the CTA controlled schools and because the in-town location meant the “diversity” requirement was being met?
None of the students live within walking distance of this boondocks location and no school bus service is provided by the MH School Board. These facts ensure that it is difficult to meet the arbitrary diversity rules set up by CTA pressure, because few low-income families can afford to drop off and retrieve their children at that distant and isolated location. Our family drives 260 miles and spends 10 hours per week to allow our child to attend the Charter School. This is a significant drain on our daily lives, but it is worth the time and expense.
The selection process for Charter School students has always been by a drawing of names from a list of parents who have signed up for the school. This drawing is announced in local newspapers every year. The only qualification to apply is to reside in Morgan Hill. Parents, who are prepared to participate in helping in the classrooms, are the ones who enter their children in the drawing. Parents’ participation is very likely one reason why students do well in the Charter School, compared to a CTA run school. The obvious inference of the school Board that the students are rich white kids is incorrect and insulting. If the racial makeup of the area served by a school is important, people living area around Monterey and Bailey should be used as the standard, instead of downtown Morgan Hill.
Recently, scores for Morgan Hill students on the California Achievement Tests were reported in the Morgan Hill Times. Only 43 percent of Morgan Hill students in the CTA-driven schools achieved the minimum passing grade. That means that 57 percent of our children FAILED this standard test. The School Board and CTA hailed these grades as a great success. They are the people who say diversity is more important than achieving the minimum grade for success in life.
The Charter School has consistently produced higher scores than the CTA run schools. The school board wants to disband their most successful school because of racial profiling. That is not acceptable. Do you hear any complaints about local schools that have too much diversity? Of course not. The CTA political agenda only allows numbers to be interpreted in a way that supports their policy.
The racial profiling supported by the school board is as valid as the asinine “Self-Esteem” program championed by legislator John Vasconcellos during the 1980’s. He squandered hundreds of thousand of dollars to convince students that “Grades don’t count as long as you feel good about yourself.” It took California legislators several years to realize how counterproductive that program was and cancel it.
The most successful schools in the USA (Business education) teach to a standard of performance, not some feel-good dream. Would you like to fly to Chicago with a pilot who scored all “D’s” on his pilot’s exam? How about a brain surgeon with those grades? These schools don’t consider who sits next to the pilots or doctors in school to be part of their performance evaluation. The USA needs people who know how to achieve success and this only comes from knowing about this complex and challenging world we live in. Having 57 percent of our children fail to meet minimum requirements will not maintain America as the leader of the free world.
A school must teach children to:
Develop a curiosity about how things work.
Realize that it is fun to learn new things.
Discern the core items of a subject from distractions.
Recognize the difference between truth and lies.
Encourage children to strive to improve their knowledge.
Understand that success is the result of personal effort.
The Morgan Hill Charter School is accomplishing these objectives. The School Board should be ashamed for this obvious and egregious attempt to cancel the best public school in the city to achieve Political Correctness.
Don Luke
Morgan Hill
