An interview with...

Delaine Eastin
Superintendent of Public Instruction

If we were to give the Central Valley a "progress report" on education, how would we do?

Well, I think we're improving, but I think you could probably say, "Overall needs to improve." First we have some of the really high-flyer districts in the state in terms of student achievement. You do have the Davis, Clovis, some of the Granite Bay. Roseville and Rocklin are doing well, but on the other hand you have some of the Sacramento City, Stockton City, Fresno City that are not doing very well. You have some of the high-flyers and you have some of the lowest achieving schools. But overall I think the Valley is moving forward.

Are there challenges unique to the Valley that contribute to that gap between the high achievers and the low achieving schools? Is it a cultural issue, is it a language issue, a financial issue?

I think all three. First you have a very large number of migrant students in the Valley. And these students pose significant additional challenges to educators because their families move. And a child that moves up and down the Valley with the parents for the crops, or the child that goes home to Mexico for six weeks in the middle of December and doesn't come back until the end of January, that child has special risks. Second, there is an enormous growth occurring in this Valley right now. Some of it is driven by, "It's a wonderful place to live," and by the fact that you have high-tech corporations actually moving to the Valley and expanding here. But beyond that you have an awful lot of people who can't afford to live in places like the Bay Area, so they're moving to the Valley and commuting back to the Bay Area. That makes it devilishly hard if you are a parent to go and help out at your child's school if you've got a two hour commute each way; you're not likely. And this is not an exaggeration; I know many people in Tracy, in Patterson, in Lathrup, up in Sacramento, who are going back to work in the Bay Area. We all do. And so this pattern has been well documented, that's a big challenge. And last but not least, a lot of the growth in this Valley has occurred during a period of educational disinvestment. Now for the last 3 or 4 years we have been doing a little bit better but before that we had 25 years of disinvestment. So you've got some older dilapidated schools and you haven't really had the wherewithal -- until the passage of this most recent proposition -- to fix them with anything under a two-thirds vote. And even though we usually get a majority to fix our schools in the Valley, we don't always or even often get a two-thirds majority.

One of the things I have read about the Central Valley, is that the digital divide is greater in this region, in terms of the kids at home who actually have computers, and whose parents log on. Does that make the learning challenge that much more daunting?

Absolutely. The digital divide is real and it's especially serious in this Valley. I would suggest one of the reasons is that, overall on balance, we actually have fewer university and college campuses, so you don't even get some of the spillover that you get when you have a real strong higher education community. So there's really not a big digital divide in Davis because UC Davis is there, but as you go down the Valley it gets worse. I think the presence of UC Merced is really going to help us on several different levels but one of them will be with the digital divide. Another will be for more kids to see what a university looks like and to imagine themselves going there. This area of our state and the inland empire has the lowest college attendance rates.

And what are we doing to try to help meet those needs?

Well, in some ways it looks like the rest of the state and in other ways it's a little bit different. First, we've really tried to do a lot more to focus on students with special needs associated with language difficulties. And there's been additional money put in to afterschool programs, summer school programs, as well as additional resources to help students have materials and textbooks that are aligned to standards. We worked hard to recruit more teachers into the profession, although you know you do find there is still a serious shortage in California getting, some would say, worse. I think that it's in some ways a little bit easier to recruit a teacher into the Central Valley because you can still afford to live here. But having said that, it remains a problem in some of our Central Valley schools, right here in Sacramento and in other parts of the state; we have teachers that are not fully credentialed that are in the classroom. That's bad. Of all the things we could be doing for students, we know from numerous studies -- some done right here in our state -- that the most powerful thing we need to give our children, after their parents engagement and involvement, is in fact a well qualified teacher who feels supported in the classroom. That's now a national study that RAND has done. The other thing the RAND study showed that, not only did you need teachers who were well supported and well trained, that the areas of the country that do the best are the areas of the country with pre-kindergarten. The Central Valley has one of the lowest rates of preschool attendance and of child development programs that are really developmental. We have a lot of babysitting that gets done in the Valley that calls itself childcare but it doesn't necessarily mean it's a developmental program. So one of the other big pushes we have is to expand the opportunities for pre-kindergarten, preschool in this Valley.

In the next ten years, as we develop and try to manage smart growth in the Valley what should we as a community be doing in terms of our vision for education in the Central Valley?

I'd make education the number one priority of every community. You want to make your community safer, more valuable in terms of your property, a better place to raise a family and to live overall: focus on education. It's like magic. You improve the schools of a city or an area and you'll see property values skyrocket, you'll see crime go down, you'll see unemployment and welfare diminish. It is magic and that means everybody has got to get in the game. Cities have got to do more to cooperate with school districts. For too often in this Valley and in other parts of our state we've had people go, "Well I'm the city." "Well, I'm the schools" -- and never the twain shall meet. And yet these are all our children so why don't we build more schools on city park grounds, co-maintain them? Bring the city police on; don't have a separate school district police. Why wouldn't the city police -- these are our children during the day as well as in the evening -- why wouldn't we use common policing facilities? Get the children to know their police officers on campus but also have the police know when something's shaking down in the community, so they can help to sort through those problems when Monday morning comes and there's been some gang problems over the weekend. Help to do more generally though to promote education, more afterschool programs, more summer school programs, more Saturday school programs. I'm for a longer school year; I probably wouldn't do six weeks in middle schools only as the governor's proposed. I'd probably do four weeks, seventh to twelfth grade or three weeks, fourth to twelfth grade or give districts a choice of either doing smaller class sizes or a longer school year. Help to free up some more of the state's resources to invest in children's education. We are not the highest spending state in terms of per pupil spending -- by a lot. We're not even at the national average; we should be at the average of the ten largest states. And in these fast growing parts of California, like the Central Valley, where we're adding the equivalent of a small state every year, the truth is we really need to do more to build the new schools and equip them and to staff them and to celebrate them as centers of the community.

What can those of us in the private sector or even corporations do as a community to support our schools and the educational effort? Is it all of our responsibility?

Oh, yes in a democracy! You know, those wonderful people that founded this country in the Preamble said that we did all these things to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, and I think every community member needs to know that this is about their posterity. I need many more businesses, for example, not only to donate used computers -- it's wonderful when they do, and desks and other things -- but more important than that make sure that the parents of the children are able to leave work a couple of hours a week to return to their child's classroom. But they feel supported in doing that and there is a way to work this out, and almost any business in California can tell parents to maybe start the day in their child's classroom one day a week for two hours. Help us by giving us mentors out of your business. Help us to build programs so that our students can in fact learn what the expectations are in the private sector. A good example is the motor car dealers of California. This state has funded very little in the way of vocational education. There are no positions in this department that are funded by the state of California. There are 55 people that work here; 54 of them are funded by the United States government and one is funded by the Motor Car Dealers Association of America. And they've been helping us to build more programs, and God bless General Motors, and Ford, and Chrysler and all of the companies that have been part of this initiative. The actual car manufacturers and their dealers have been helping us to create new programs where we can teach our students at a high school exactly what's required to fix a car, not just the math you'd need and the science you'd need but they've helped us to buy lifts. Snap On Tools has helped us to buy tool kits; we've got teachers that are now trained in helping our students on how to fix a car. And honest to goodness, for many students this tactile, hands-on learning -- all of a sudden a kid who doesn't like math at all will say, "But I've always loved to fix things and now that I know what it's for..." So more businesses need to help us by thinking through: is there an internship you could give us? Is there a partnership we could work out where our kids could come at least and visit you? I mean, I would say every student that has ever been on a field trip probably remembers it pretty well. As a child I went to the Leslie Salt Pond to see the Stanford Linear Accelerator. Well, most kids have never been to a television station; they haven't been to see how we actually make food. This is the great Central Valley where we produce most of the food in the country or more than any other single place. Why don't we bring the kids down and show them what it is that we do at the food manufacturers - or at NEC, or Hewlett-Packard, or at Intel? Let's do more in that area to show our kids most of us are having a pretty good time. Most grown-ups I know have pretty good jobs that are really pretty interesting. For some reason, we've conveyed to the kids that we have 8 hours of misery that we go through everyday called work. Some of us work 10 or 12 hours and have a good time the whole time. And we have to do more to show our kids that, and the people of the Central Valley could do more to make that bridge over to our students.

What's ultimately at stake here?

The fate of the republic. I kid you not. This is, according to Theodore White, the only multiracial , multiethnic, multi-religious country on earth that lives in relative peace and harmony. We have Jews and Catholics and people of the Islamic faith and every other religion imaginable here in the Central Valley. We have blacks and browns and Asians and whites and every other shade in between. In fact last year 14% of the births in this state were mixed race children. Why do we believe that we can in fact maintain the great harmony if we do not have an appreciation and a respect of each other's similarities and each other's differences? In our democracy, I don't think you can prevail if you don't have a well-educated citizenry. In our economy, I know you can't prevail if you don't have a well-educated workforce. It's only about the democracy and the economy -- other than that, no pressure!

Is there anything else that you would like to add?

Well, in some ways I think the Central Valley is a very exciting frontier for California. It is a place where we're trying to balance jobs and housing; a place where we're trying to protect the environment and yet still support the mouths of America, and the world. I think if we can master the educational challenges this will truly be a place which will celebrate living for many years to come. If we don't, then we'll notice it gets very hot here in the summer, very cold here in the winter, and it won't be so much of an enjoyable place. I do think though, living in the Central Valley is a wonderful thing and the bugs aren't as big or as many as in some places in the country, and the people are awfully nice the way they are in the best parts of the country -- I think friendlier than you find in the urban areas. It's just that we've got to support that friendliness and that development with a really well educated work force.

Presentation also made possible by a grant from
the Great Valley Center