SCHOOL MATTERS: Blacks Lose Faith in Education

SAN FRANCISCO -- Velma Sykes worked hard to ensure that her children received a quality education at their public high schools in Sacramento.

"I was very involved, and I'm not talking about just helping with home work or weekly meetings with their teachers. I mean sending emails to their teachers every single day," she says. Sykes saw firsthand what happened to the African American children in her school district who didn't have this kind of parental involvement. "They were ignored." Sykes says that she has completely lost faith in the public school system's ability to serve African-American children like her own.

This lack of faith among African-American parents is a theme that runs through a statewide survey on education released last week by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC). In the survey, 63 percent of African Americans surveyed said they disapproved of the California legislature's handling of the K-12 public education system, compared to 52 percent of whites, 36 percent of Latinos, and 30 percent of Asians.

"I was really struck by the degree of concern in the African-American community", says Mark Baldassare, the CEO and President of PPIC. "In contrast, we see a very optimistic assessment among Latinos of the direction that public education is going in California."

It is no secret that both African-American and Latino students are among those in California with the highest dropout rates and those most likely to attend a poorly resourced school. Yet the survey reveals that while all Californians are concerned with the severity of these problems, there is a stark difference in the attitudes held by Latino and African-American respondents towards the state's education system.

Patricia Gandara, professor of education at UCLA, says that two major factors contribute to this difference. The first is immigrant optimism. "Things look a lot better here than they did at home. Many of the Latinos in California are immigrants, so their comparison is to the situation in Mexico, which they left because it was so bad. You see that with the Asians as well, there is a little bit more optimism. The African Americans have lived with the under-funding and under-education for so long, but the immigrants haven't yet."

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