California Public High School Education Report Reveals Falling Educational Opportunities

UCLA’s Institute for Democracy, Education and Access (IDEA) has just released its 2011 Educational Opportunity Report on the learning conditions and educational outcomes across California public schools and the results aren't good. 

The report, based on a summer 2010 survey, was compiled with  information gathered from 277 California public high school principals. According to the report, the principals represent 22 percent of all high school principals in the state. 

Each principal was questioned about the effect of the budget cuts on learning opportunities and an additional follow up interviews were held with 78 of those. principals.

Among some of the sobering results of the report are the following:

• California high schools are providing less time and attention and fewer quality programs. As a consequence, student engagement, achievement, and progress to graduation and college are suffering;

• School reform has all but sputtered to a halt due to staff cutbacks and the elimination of time for professional development;

• Even as high schools across the state are impacted by declining budgets, inequality is growing across and within schools;

• California’s high schools face growing demands from families experiencing economic crisis; these demands point to the inter-relationship of California’s education and social welfare budgets.

 The report comes at a time when local teachers are receiving layoff notices and LAUSD officials and school principals are holding meetings urging parents to write letters to their state legislators in an effort to get them to support Gov. Jerry Brown’s Revenue Initiative on the June ballot that would help stem the educational cuts.

A full copy of the UCLA IDEA report is in the PDF file to the right.

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